| Creator Ed Wheelan (1888-1966) |
| Profession Cartoonist |
| Total Entries 21 |
| Articles Edgar Wheelan – Lambiek Comiclopedia Ed Wheelan – Wikipedia Minute Movies: Ed Wheelan – Toonopedia |
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Many cartoonists have achieved good results by adapting cinema techniques to comics. Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon), Will Eisner (The Spirit), Carl Barks (Uncle Scrooge)… the list goes on and on. But Ed Wheelan, who predated them all, did more than just adapt a few techniques. In every way possible, he strove to make his comics look and feel just like movies. Edgar S. Wheelan’s Minute Movies grew out of a strip that ran in the sports pages of The New York American (a Hearst paper), during the mid-19-teens. At first, it didn’t even have a name. Wheelan took to parodying current movies and their stars; and that soon became the sole focus of the strip. On April 8, 1918, it received a name: Midget Movies. That day, it parodied a travelogue. The next day, and the one after, it ran a two-part story. Soon it was doing week-long continuities. In later years, Wheelan claimed to have introduced serious continued stories to the comics. Some latter-day commentators scoff, pointing out most of Wheelan’s stories weren’t all that serious, but there aren’t many other examples of continued stories among such early daily strips. A year or two later, Wheelan quit Hearst (and had few kind words to say about him afterward) and took his strip to The George Matthew Adams Service (Cap Stubbs & Tippie, Sky Masters). In court cases over The Yellow Kid, Buster Brown and The Katzenjammer Kids (all involving Hearst), the precedent had been set that a cartoonist could take his work to a new publisher, but the trademarked title stayed with the old one. As Minute Movies, the Adams syndicate launched it in 1921. Meanwhile, Hearst launched another continuity strip with a similar name — Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre, which in 1929 introduced Popeye. ~ Minute Movies: Ed Wheelan – Toonopedia
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