August Daniel Carter was an American comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 cartoonist who created the long-running Just Kids strip. He was known as Ad Carter, the signature he used on his strips.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore

Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...

, Carter was 11 years old when his mother died, a situation which led him into the work force as a youth. While employed as a Brooklyn Eagle

Brooklyn Eagle

The Brooklyn Daily Bulletin began publishing when the original Eagle folded in 1955. In 1996 it merged with a newly revived Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and now publishes a morning paper five days a week under the Brooklyn Daily Eagle name...

reporter, he met the cartoonist Clare Briggs

Clare Briggs

Clare A. Briggs was an early American comic strip artist who rose to fame in 1904 with his strip A. Piker Clerk. Briggs was best known for his later comic strips "When a Feller Needs a Friend," "Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling?" and "The Days of Real Sport".-Early life:Born in Reedsburg,...

, who encouraged him to submit a comic strip to a syndicate. In 1916, Carter drew Our Friend Mush, a strip about a gang of kids.

Just Kids

In 1922, Carter was hired by William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...

 to create similar kid characters for a new strip, Just Kids. It was launched as a daily July 23, 1923, with the Sunday strip

Sunday strip

A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...

 following during the next month. Later that decade, Carter began another strip, Nicodemus O'Malley, which also featured kids as the main characters. In 1950, the title of Just Kids changed to Mush Stebbins and His Sister. Comics historian Don Markstein

Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Don Markstein's Toonopedia was a web encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation. Don D...

 described the Just Kids gang:

Mush Stebbins continued as part of an ensemble cast... Other regulars included Mush's pals, Fatso Dolan and Pat Chan, the latter adding a touch of racial diversity back before diversity was cool. The group functioned as a kid gang operating in and around a small town called Barnsville, sort of like the later Archie and his pals, but younger, did in Riverdale... His specific source of inspiration was Reg'lar Fellers, by Gene Byrnes

Gene Byrnes

Eugene Francis Byrnes created the long running comic strip Reg'lar Fellers, which he signed Gene Byrnes...

, of which Just Kids was a blatant copy. This was part of the same trend as Tillie Jones's similarity to Winnie Winkle

Winnie Winkle

Winnie Winkle was an American comic strip which appeared over a 76-year span . Created by Martin Branner, who wrote the strip for over 40 years, Winnie Winkle was one of the first comic strips about working women. It was titled Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner until 1943...

 and Annie Rooney's to that other Annie. When a comic proved popular for another syndicate, Hearst usually wanted his own version of it. Just Kids even looked like Reg'lar Fellers, as Carter imitated Byrnes' art style as well as his character set-up, especially in the early days. But while the imitation was never as popular as the original, it still carved out its own place in the public consciousness. In addition to pins, dolls, games and other merchandised products, it was the subject of a coloring book in 1928 and a 16-page comic book reprint in 1932. Starting in 1934, it was the subject of at least a half-dozen Big Little Books. In the late '30s, as modern-style comic books rose to prominence, Dell Comics

Dell Comics

Dell Comics was the comic book publishing arm of Dell Publishing, which got its start in pulp magazines. It published comics from 1929 to 1973. At its peak, it was the most prominent and successful American company in the medium...

 put it in the back pages of several of its comic strip reprints.

Books

The Adventures of Just Kids was published by Saalfield in 1934. Just Kids and Deep-Sea Dan was a 1940 Big Little Book published by Whitman.

An offshoot of the National Safety Council

National Safety Council

The National Safety Council is a 501 nonprofit, nongovernmental public service organization dedicated to protecting life and promoting health. Headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, NSC is a member organization, founded in 1913 and granted a congressional charter in 1953...

, the Just Kids Safety Club had 413,743 boys and girls as members.

Carter married Florence Hampton, and they had a daughter, Hope. His second wife, Hannah Carter, worked with him on his later strips in the 1950s. Carter died in New York in 1957.