You learn something new every day. Here I am working on the first script of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, and Garen Ewing (the cartoonist responsible for The Rainbow Orchid) posts about a golden age comic strip, Ella Cinders.


On his Toonopedia, Don Markstein has this to say about the strip:

Everybody likes a good rags-to-riches tale, the exemplar of which is Charles Perrault's Cinderella — in fact, a common term for them is "Cinderella stories". Here's one whose authors didn't just admit where they got their inspiration. By the very title, they proclaimed it. And yet, during most of the strip's existence, the title was the only connection to the story it came from.

Those authors were writer Bill Conselman and artist Charlie Plumb, neither of whom is known for other work in comics. The strip was distributed by United Feature Syndicate, which also handled Peanuts, Gordo, Twin Earths and many others. The daily version began June 1, 1925, and a Sunday page was added two years later.

There's a digital archive of the first couple of years worth of daily strips at Barnacle Press, and from the little I've had a chance to read so far they appear to be not-a-million-miles from Little Orphan Annie, which interestingly didn't debut until two months after Ella Cinders, on August 5, 1925.


At Digital Funnies, there are a few samples of the later Sunday color strips, available from that site on CD and DVD. From this brief sampling, it looks like Ella Cinders later moved into something nearer to Tintin territory (and I can see what Ewing likes so much about the strip).


I've been a student of the history of comics (strips, books, etc) my whole life, and before this morning had never heard of this strip before. What else don't I know?!