Loac Essentials

Edition excerpt from The Library of American Comics Essentials: The Gumps (2012): In the late 1910s, Sidney Smith developed a formula of the daily strip that would make The Gumps one of the most popular comics of the 1920s and himself one of the richest cartoonists of his day. By the end of the decade Sidney Smith's The Gumps had secured a huge and loyal audience with a decade of melodrama, adventure, mystery, and comedy. So devoted were his readers, in fact, that they regularly wrote in to offer advice for his characters' love lives and business decisions and they generally treated the characters as friends and family members. In 1928-29, with the launching of what would be his most famous story, 'The Saga of Mary Gold,' Smith's relationship to his readers would be tested as never before. Its heartbreaking conclusion would change comics forever. Here for the first time since the story made headlines across America in the spring of 1929 we reprint the saga that Hogan's Alley magazine called 'One of the Ten Biggest Events in Comics History'-a tale that has lost none of its power to captivate readers in the 21st Century.