Fanny Cory

"Fanny Corys specialty was drawing children, which she did for 60 years for a variety of magazines, newspapers and books. She also drew a newspaper panel and two comic strips, the most successful of which was Little Miss Muffet.

Cory had been a professional childrens illustrator for nearly 40 years by the time she got into the comic strip business. She sold her first drawing to St. Nicholas magazine in 1896, and her work thereafter appeared in Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribners. By the end of the century she had branched out into childrens book illustrations. In 1901, she did the pictures for The Master Key, the first of several L. Frank Baum books she illustrated. In 1904, Cory settled in Montana, where she married, and lived on an 1800-acre ranch near Helena. She continued to illustrate childrens books in a style influenced by Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, and Art Nouveau.

In the middle 1920s, she and her husband, with three children ready for college, found they needed something beyond ranching and book illustrating. Cory, whose brother was a political cartoonist, decided to try the newspaper syndicates. She sold a one-column panel, Sonnysayings, to the Philadelphia Ledger syndicate in 1928. The feature was popular and survived into the 1950s

In 1934, she completed her first newspaper strip, which was also done for the Ledger syndicate. It was entitled Babe Bunting. Babe was a curly-haired little tyke, clearly intended to grab the fans of movie moppet Shirley Temple. A seeming orphan, Babe was initially a salty little kid whose response to patronizing adults was usually "Shes just talking through her hat." The following year, Cory was lured away by William Randolph Hearst and went over to King Features.

There, she drew another little girl adventure strip, Little Miss Muffet, inspired by a nursery rhyme and the Shirley Temple movie of the year before, Little Miss Marker. The strip was a moderate success, but Cory never thought much of it. She had no hand in the writing, which she felt was too bland. "There are no gangsters, or divorces or anything like that in her adventures," she told an interviewer in the late 1930s, "so she must be a relief to mothers. But sometimes I think shes too pure." Despite her feelings, Cory stayed with the strip. Living alone on her Montana ranch, she continued with Miss Muffet until 1956. She was five years short of a century old when she died.

(Information on the biography above is based on writings from the book, "The Encyclopedia of American Comics", edited by Ron Goulart.)"

Accessed on 1/3/18 from Askart.com, http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Fanny_Young_Cooney_Cory/22940/Fanny_Young_Cooney_Cory.aspx