Firsts and Lasts: The Final Flapping of Fanny

 

Flapper Fanny, an unassuming little one-column panel feature when it debuted in 1925, launched the careers of not one but two amazing cartoonists (I see no reason to put in the qualifier female cartoonists, because that would unfairly minimize their brilliance). 

The first was Ethel Hays, whose jaw-droppingly elegant artwork was wasted on the tiny feature. Luckily NEA, the syndicate that distributed Flapper Fanny, recognized her genius and assigned a larger panel titled simply Ethel, and also had her regularly contributing colour covers for their Everyweek magazine section. 

Hays passed the Flapper Fanny panel onto its second standout artist in 1930. Gladys Parker had already been published by Graphic Syndicate and United Feature, but both of those outfits were barely above the fly-by-night level in the 1920s. Parker put her own inimitable stamp on Flapper Fanny, and eventually also started her own NEA fashion panel, called Femininities. Her work was evidently received with some enthusiasm, and in 1932 Flapper Fanny added a Sunday strip version. 

Parker worked on the Flapper Fanny daily and Sunday until December 1935 before calling it quits. Faced with bringing on a new artist, NEA decided to cut the Flapper Fanny Sunday. The third and final artist on the Flapper Fanny daily panel was Sylvia Sneidman, whose work was very fine, too, but was enough of a copy of Parker's style that I can't honestly offer her the same accolades as Hays and Parker. 

Sylvia apparently did some lobbying and the Flapper Fanny panel was promoted to a 2-column affair, giving her a little more room to show off her artistic chops. But by 1936 the term 'flapper' was so far out of date that Sneidman might as well have been drawing the panel in a cell, patiently waiting for the firing squad. Why it didn't occur to NEA that a retitling of the series might be in order I cannot imagine. 

Flapper Fanny gamely continued four and a half years under Sneidman's control, but finally the inevitable happened. With no fanfare, the last Flapper Fanny panel, seen above, ran on June 29 1940.