When a cartoonist would set out to (or was commanded to) copy an existing hit strip, sometimes things went just a little awry. When Gene Carr decided to try his hand at a Buster Brown imitation with Dearie, for instance, things got a little out of hand.
Outcault's Buster Brown was hell on wheels behind an angelic facade, and Carr's Dearie took the idea and turned the control knobs up to eleven. Dearie goes right past rosy-cheeked cuteness into a kid who looks like he's auditioning for a drag show, and he's way past hell on wheels, he's a sadistic little freak who makes Alex from A Clockwork Orange seem positively well-adjusted. (In fairness to the strip, the example above is the most extreme of the short series).
The World syndicated this odd strip as the cover feature of their Sunday comics section from July 10 to August 28 1910*.
Thanks to Cole Johnson for the scan.
* Chicago Inter-Ocean
"Dearie" has his own gang, too. It's just wierd enough to have been part of a series, maybe as featured adversaries for Dick Tracy. In 1910 it was still okay for criminalaity to go unpunished if it was pulled off by boys.
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