Agatha Crumm is a newspaper 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....

 created by the cartoonist Bill Hoest

Bill Hoest

Bill Hoest was an American cartoonist best known as the creator of the gag panel series, The Lockhorns, distributed by King Features Syndicate to 500 newspapers in 23 countries, and Laugh Parade for Parade...

 (creator of The Lockhorns

The Lockhorns

The Lockhorns is a United States single-panel cartoon created in 1968 by Bill Hoest and distributed by King Features Syndicate to 500 newspapers in 23 countries. It is continued today by Bunny Hoest and John Reiner.-Characters and story:...

) and distributed by King Features Syndicate

King Features Syndicate

King Features Syndicate, a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation, distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5000 newspapers worldwide...

. Agatha Crumm was Hoest's third strip, following Bumper Snickers (1974), and it continued until 1996.

Characters and story

The strip's title character was the eccentric, elderly owner of a cookie company. Comics historian Don Markstein described the active and agile Crumm:

Agatha may not have been as wealthy as Scrooge McDuck

Scrooge McDuck

Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon character created in 1947 by Carl Barks and licensed by The Walt Disney Company. Scrooge is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet. He typically wears a red or blue frock coat, top hat, pince-nez glasses, and spats...

 or Richie Rich, and maybe not even Rich Uncle Pennybags. But as owner of the Crumm Cookie Company, she was probably in the range of Mr. Abernathy, and that's about as wealthy as most toons need to be—even when they're financing a lifestyle that includes a lot of corporate wheeling and dealing. The seven-day comic strip where Agatha was introduced debuted from King Features Syndicate (Hagar the Horrible

Hägar the Horrible

Hägar the Horrible is the title and main character of an American comic strip created by cartoonist Dik Browne , and syndicated by King Features Syndicate. It first appeared in February 1973, and was an immediate success. Since Browne's retirement in 1988 , his son Chris Browne has continued the...

) on Monday, October 24, 1977. (A report elsewhere, that she'd begun exactly two months earlier, is apparently in error, as August 24, 1977 was a Wednesday.) She was old enough to rival Uncle Elby

Napoleon and Uncle Elby

Napoleon and Uncle Elby was a syndicated newspaper comic strip by Clifford McBride.While drawing such features as McBride's Cartoon and Clifford McBride's Pantomime Comic , McBride introduced Elby, a character based on his uncle, Henry Elba Eastman...

or Grandma

Grandma (comic strip)

Grandma was a comic strip by Charles Kuhn that began April 14, 1947. It was originally distributed by Duke Richardson's Indianapolis-based syndicate, Richardson Feature Service....

, but spry, very active in the world of high-finance shenanigans.

Books

Between 1980 and 1983, Signet Books published three Agatha Crumm paperback collections, including The Return of Agatha Crumm (1982).