Edwina Dumm
Encyclopedia
Cap Stubbs and Tippie
Cap Stubbs and Tippie was a syndicated newspaper comic strip created by the cartoonist Edwina Dumm. At times the title changed to Tippie & Cap Stubbs or Tippie....
for six decades and is also notable as the nation’s first full-time female editorial cartoonist, She used her middle name for the signature on her comic strip, signed simply Edwina.
One of the earliest female syndicated cartoonists, Dumm was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio
Upper Sandusky, Ohio
As of the census of 2000, there were 6,533 people, 2,744 households, and 1,682 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,246.2 people per square mile . There were 2,910 housing units at an average density of 555.1 per square mile...
, where her father, Frank Edwin Dumm, was an actor-playwright turned newspaperman. In 1911, she graduated from Central High School in Columbus, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...
and then took the Cleveland-based Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course. Her name was later featured in Landon's advertisements.
She drew editorial cartoons for the Columbus Daily Monitor from its first edition (August 7, 1915) until the paper folded (July 1917). In the Monitor, her Spot-Light Sketches was a full-page feature of editorial cartoons, and some of these promoted women's issues. Elisabeth Israels Perry, in the introduction to Alice Sheppard's Cartooning for Suffrage (1994), wrote that artists such as Blanche Ames Ames
Blanche Ames Ames
Blanche Ames Ames was an artist, inventor, writer, and prominent supporter of women's suffrage and birth control. Born Blanche Ames in Lowell, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Civil War General and Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames and Blanche Butler Ames and the sister of Adelbert Ames...
, Lou Rogers and Edwina Dumm produced:
- ...a visual rhetoric that helped create a climate more favorable to change in America's gender relations... By the close of the suffrage campaignWomen's suffrageWomen's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
, women's art reflected the new values of feminism, broadened its targets, and attempted to restate the significance of the movement.
Ohio to New York
For the Monitor, Dumm also drew The Meanderings of Minnie, a semi-autobiographical strip about a tomboy and her dog. Moving to New York City, she continued her art studies at the Art Students LeagueArt Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
and created Cap Stubbs and Tippie, syndicated by the George Matthew Adams Service
George Matthew Adams
George Matthew Adams was a newspaper columnist and founder of the George Matthew Adams Newspaper Service, which syndicated comic strips and columns to newspapers for five decades...
. Dumm worked very fast; according to comics historian Martin Sheridan, she could pencil a daily strip in an hour.
Her love of dogs is evident in her strips as well as her illustrations for books and magazines, such as Sinbad, her weekly dog page which ran in both Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
and the London Tatler
Tatler
Tatler has been the name of several British journals and magazines, each of which has viewed itself as the successor of the original literary and society journal founded by Richard Steele in 1709. The current incarnation, founded in 1901, is a glossy magazine published by Condé Nast Publications...
.
She illustrated Alexander Woollcott
Alexander Woollcott
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Algonquin Round Table....
's Two Gentlemen and a Lady. For Sonnets from the Pekinese and Other Doggerel (Macmillan, 1936) by Burges Johnson (1877-1963), she illustrated "Losted" and other poems:
- Losted
- I feel so far from anywheres!
- Perhaps my family
- Has got so many other cares
- They've all forgotten me.
- I s'pose I'll starve to skin an' bone
- If I stay losted here alone.
- My little dog, he founded me,
- An' wagged his tail an' whined,
- But he can't lead me home, for he
- Is taught to walk behind.
- And so I'm crying yet, becuz
- I'm just as losted as I was.
From the 1930s into the 1960s, she drew another dog for the newspaper feature Alec the Great
Alec the Great
Alec the Great was a syndicated newspaper comic strip created by Edwina Dumm and featuring a dog character, as did her other comic strip, Cap Stubbs and Tippie.-Characters and story:...
, in which she illustrated verses written by her brother, Robert Dennis Dumm. Their collaboration was published as a book in 1946. In the late 1940s, she drew the covers for sheet music by her roommate, Helen Slater, who did both music and lyrics. During the 1940s, she also contributed features to the Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman is a DC Comics superheroine created by William Moulton Marston. She first appeared in All Star Comics #8 . The Wonder Woman title has been published by DC Comics almost continuously except for a brief hiatus in 1986....
comic book.
When the George Matthew Adams Service went out of business in the 1940s, Dumm's strip was picked up 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...
. Dumm continued to write and draw Tippie until her 1966 retirement (which brought the strip to an end).
Awards
She was a recipient of the National Cartoonists SocietyNational Cartoonists Society
The National Cartoonists Society is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops...
Gold Key Award in 1978. Dumm never married. After she retired from her comic strip, she remained active with watercolor paintings, photography and helping the elderly at her New York City apartment building when she was well into her eighties.