Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner (original comic strip)

 

Martin Branner

 

1930  

ink drawing on paper 

5 11/16 x 19 13/16" image size 

ink signed in the final panel, lower right 

1 of 1 unique 

inked text throughout; pasted-down copyright and publisher's information in final panel before signature 

 

cream wove 

published 

The Chicago Tribune 

SARY103 

$450.00 

Martin Branner started out as a dancer who, along with his wife, Edith Fabbrini (who he married when he was just eighteen and she fifteen) entered Vaudeville as the "Martin and Fabbrini" dance team, to some success, working up to three shows a day. To earn extra cash Branner worked as an illustrator for Variety magazine. With the advent of World War I, the couple retired from the stage and Branner joined the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service.

On his return, he pursued a career as a comic strip artist, and in 1920, he debuted Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner with permission from publisher Joseph Medill Patterson, who originally conceived of Winnie Winkle. Branner modeled the main character on Edith, and some of the gags featured in the strip came from stunts the two of them developed in their stage acts.

Comics about working women were still new. Winnie Winkle was only the second, after Somebody's Stenog, to feature an unmarried working woman, in this case caring for her aging parents. It proved to be popular, and by the end of the 1930s it was syndicated in 125 American and European newspapers. Winnie Winkler would become a reflection of the changing sociopolitical landscape for women, becoming a pregnant war widow and, later, joining the Peace Corps.

Branner drew the comic until 1962, when he suffered a stroke. At that point it was taken over by his longtime assistant, Max Van Bibber. The strip continued until 1996, for a total of seventy-six years. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History holds twenty-eight volumes of Winnie Winkler proofs.