Leave it to the perky innocuousness of 80s TV mush to screw up a perfectly good comic strip. In recent years, I have been awestruck by the early newspaper comic strips and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie is no exception. Good, or at least interesting story lines, great art and unique characters were staples of the comics page at one time. If you get a chance to look past the red-afroed Annie and into the world originally created by Gray, you will be in for several welcome surprises.

(click here or on the image for a better look)

Lately, I have been captivated by one of those surprises: a Little Orphan Annie strip (featured in America's Great Comic-Strip Artists by Richard Marschall) in which Daddy Warbucks implements a type of retribution straight out of Death Wish (1974). I ran across this strip when the media was discussing torture bans and possible waivers for certain circumstances when torture could be deemed a justifiable act when defined in terms of national security. While not a pure allegory of current U.S. diplomatic and militaristic endeavors, this comic strip, when read by contemporary readers, calls to mind parallels between the vigilante justice of Daddy Warbucks (the name almost says it all, really) and what passes for Uncle Sam these days . And if you don’t want to read that much into the comic, that’s fine, at least we can admit that money equals power in Gray’s world and in most cases ours, too.

(click here or on the image for a better look)

Early on, according to Marschall, Annie was a true derelict. Gray often depicted her on the open road between homes. She wasn’t a permanent dweller in orphanages or houses. And after Daddy Warbucks found her, she was often sneaking out of the house and back onto the open road. A fixed address is not all that she went without, either--Annie never had eyes. These lacks have often been interpreted as sites where the reader can connect with the story. In other words, the empty eye sockets allow the reader to share a relationship with her somehow, by bringing their own feeling to the character, or in some way, letting the character express the reader’s own emotion. The lack of a home within the strip, allows the reader to accept her into his own, giving Annie the ability to express anyone’s emotion and live anywhere at the same time.

The reader doesn’t have the same connection with the other characters, despite not having pupils of their own, their names say it all. Daddy Warbucks is a munitions tycoon; Mrs. Bleeding Heart is an uber-liberal. With these Bunyanesque names, where does Annie fit in? She’s the main protagonist and title character and is like the Everyman, only here it’s more like the Everygirl. And the name Annie sounds like “any:” Any one, Any Little Orphan.

It is interesting to think about how an unstable character like Annie is the reader’s point of access into Gray’s world. While characters like Mrs. Bleeding Heart are particulars, Annie is an abstraction, like the notions of “love,” “joy,” or even a common idea associated with Annie and Uncle Sam, “freedom.” So, even though Annie could be seen as this point of abstraction that allows readers access to this particular creative world, Gray, as the author, can also redefine what these abstractions mean as he goes along. Does freedom mean torture? Does freedom champion vigilante justice? (I thought of some other questions as well, considering Daddy’s line of business: Did Daddy Warbucks sell them their weapons? Sell weapons to their enemies? Did he make the land mines that killed their children? Okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but not impossible.)

Gray, at least in this strip, doesn’t bother with the motivations of Snorty and his murderous gang, except for telling us that they are murderous, which is a bad thing, right? Maybe. That all depends on how you define it and how much money you have.