Henry, December 1, 1957

Henry is so ubiquitous when I’m searching through old newspapers for winter and Christmas themed comic strips that I was sure I had posted him in a previous December. After searching through my prior posts, however, I found that not to be the case.

Henry is often known as a pantomime strip, because the titular character doesn’t speak and neither do some of the other characters. This is not true of every character, though, as we see here with the candy shop man. The strip was created by Carl Thomas Anderson, and continued to be credited to him even after his death. Anderson died in 1948, and the Sunday version of the strip was taken over by his assistant, Don Trachte, who did the strip you see here.

It seems kids of every era were doing whatever they could to mimic adults and act more “grown-up.” Back in the days when cigarettes were advertised on television, if this strip is any indication, pretending to smoke was a popular thing to do. I sure hope they didn’t take up the real thing when they got older, though.

A comic strip that begins with a boy looking at a thermometer with a very low reading. The boy breathes out and he can see his breath. He runs to his wallet and dumps out some coins. He takes the coins to the candy shop and buys a candy smoking pipe. The man at the candy counter says to a policeman standing beside him, "Every time the temperature drops to freezing I get a run on candy cigars and cigarettes --- I don't understand it!" The policeman gestures that he should look outside. The boy and his friends are standing outside the candy shop pretending to smoke with their candies and their cold breath.