Skippy

Percy Crosby's Skippy is one of the great, and too often overlooked, achievements of the American comic strip. Its hero was a scruffy, philosophical city kid, perched on a curb or a stoop, dispensing observations that were by turns funny, wistful, and startlingly wise. Crosby drew with a loose, expressive line that gave the strip enormous vitality, and he used his child characters to comment slyly on the adult world, treating childhood not as cute filler but as a genuine vantage point on life. The strip was hugely popular and deeply influential. Its blend of humor and melancholy, its faith that small children on a sidewalk could carry real emotional and even philosophical weight, pointed directly toward later masterpieces of the form; Peanuts is unimaginable without the trail Skippy blazed. Here was proof that a kid strip could be art, that simplicity of subject could house depth of feeling. Crosby's own life ended in tragedy and his creation faded from memory, but Skippy's importance endures as a crucial bridge between the early gag strip and the reflective, character-driven comics that would define the medium's future.