Little Joe was a Western comic strip, created in the early 1930s by Ed Leffingwell and later continued by his brother, Robert Leffingwell. Distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, this 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...

 had a long run spanning four decades. It was never a daily strip.

Ed Leffingwell's cousin was Harold Gray, and he began in comics as Gray's assistant on Little Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie was a daily American comic strip created by Harold Gray and syndicated by Tribune Media Services. The strip took its name from the 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley, and made its debut on August 5, 1924 in the New York Daily News...

, which explains why the artwork on Little Joe curiously resembled Little Orphan Annie. Little Joe began October 1, 1933, but Ed Leffingwell worked on the strip for only three years. When he died in 1936, Bob Leffingwell (also a Gray assistant) stepped in, continuing the strip until its conclusion in 1972. The resemblance to Little Orphan Annie began to fade away during the 1950s.

Characters and story

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 storyline:

Joe Oak was 13 years old, though he looked younger, especially at first. He was an only child and his father had been murdered, leaving him and Mom to run the Oak Ranch by themselves. They were assisted by a white-moustached man named Utah, who had been a gunslinger in his youth. Utah was their foreman and, when times were rough, only employee. He assumed the paternal role when it came to teaching Joe proper behavior for a man, and the survival skills he'd need to become one. Other than that, the strip was populated by outlaws, corrupt businessmen and politicians, Indians both good and bad, and similar staples of the genre. Later on, an old friend of Utah's, a charming rogue known only as "Ze Gen'ral", joined the cast... helping the protagonists out of jams and occasionally (when opportunity permitted) cheating them.

Eventually, Ze Gen'ral became a topper

Topper (comic strip)

A topper in comic strip parlance is a small secondary strip seen along with a larger Sunday strip. In the 1920s and 1930s, leading cartoonists were given full pages in the Sunday comics sections, allowing them to add smaller strips and single-panel cartoons to their page.Toppers usually were drawn...

strip above Little Joe.

Bob Leffingwell continued to work on Little Orphan Annie as well as Little Joe, which was reprinted in Dell's Popular Comics, Super Comics and Dell's Four Color Comics series (1942). A CD-ROM reprinting early Little Joe strips was released in 2002.