Flapper Fanny Says from Newspaper Enterprise Association

United Media

United Media is a large editorial column and comic strip newspaper syndication service based in the United States, owned by The E.W. Scripps Company. It syndicates 150 comics and editorial columns worldwide. Its core business is the United Feature Syndicate and the Newspaper Enterprise Association...

 was a single-panel daily cartoon series starting in about 1924, with a Sunday page following in 1928. Each episode featured a flapper

Flapper

Flapper in the 1920s was a term applied to a "new breed" of young Western women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior...

 illustration and a witticism. It continued into the 1940s as Flapper Fanny.

At the start, the panel was drawn by notable illustrator Ethel Hays

Ethel Hays

Ethel Hays was an American syndicated cartoonist specializing in flapper-themed comic strips in the 1920s and 1930s. She drew in an art deco style. In the later part of her career, during the 1940s and 1950s, she became one of the country's most accomplished children's book illustrators.-Early...

, who employed an Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

 style. Flapper Fanny Says was part of a wave of popular culture that focused on the flapper look and lifestyle. Through many films and the works of illustrators such as Hays and Russell Patterson

Russell Patterson

Russell Patterson was a celebrated and prolific American cartoonist, illustrator and scenic designer. Patterson’s art deco magazine illustrations helped promote the idea of the 1920s and 1930s fashion style known as the flapper.Patterson was born in Omaha, Nebraska...

, as well as the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

 and Anita Loos

Anita Loos

Anita Loos was an American screenwriter, playwright and author.-Early life:Born Corinne Anita Loos in Sisson, California , where her father, R. Beers Loos, had opened a tabloid newspaper for which her mother, Minerva "Minnie" Smith did most of the work of a newspaper publisher...

, flappers came to be seen as attractive, reckless and independent.

Because NEA often sold whole packages of features to individual newspapers, Flapper Fanny Says gained widespread distribution almost from the start, appearing daily in perhaps 500 papers within its first year.

Spin-offs and influence

Despite this immediate success, Hays—finding the daily workload too heavy after the birth of her second child—turned Flapper Fanny Says over to promising newcomer Gladys Parker

Gladys Parker

Gladys Parker was an American cartoonist for comic strips and a fashion designer in Hollywood. She is best known as the creator of the comic strip Mopsy which had a long run over three decades....

 around 1931. Parker gave it a "more cartoony style", and her flapper protagonists came to resemble the artist herself. Parker began drawing her own creation Mopsy in 1939 (also in her own image), but she seems to have relinquished Flapper Fanny Says to Sylvia Sneidman by 1937 or earlier. That artist, who signed her work only "Sylvia", added a kid sister and continued the strip into the 1940s. The title was eventually truncated to Flapper Fanny.

Flapper Fanny Says was imitated in the Jazz Age

Jazz Age

The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...

 by Faith Burrows

Faith Burrows

Faith Swank Burrows was a nationally syndicated cartoonist during the Jazz Age.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Burrows drew a daily comic panel called Flapper Filosofy for King Features Syndicate. Each panel exhibited a flapper attired in the current fashions with a humorous caption at the...

's similarly themed upstart Flapper Filosofy

Flapper Filosofy

Flapper Filosofy was a newspaper comic panel distributed by King Features Syndicate and the O'Dell Newspaper Service. It ran during the flapper era of the 1920s into the early 1930s. The art was by Faith Burrows....

panel from the rival 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...

.