'Tiny Tim' (from: Four Color Comics #42).
Stanley Link was an American newspaper cartoonist, who worked for the Chicago Tribune- New York News Syndicate. He is best remembered for creating the long-running daily one-panel cartoon 'Ching Chow' (1927-1971, 1976-1990), together with Sidney Smith, featuring a Chinese man providing wise sayings and observations. Link also created the children's fantasy comic 'Tiny Tim' (1931-1957) and the daily family gag comic 'The Dailys' (1948-1957). He additionally assisted Smith on his own family gag comic 'The Gumps'.
Early life and career
Stanley J. Link was born in 1894 in Chicago, Illinois. He took a correspondence course in cartooning as a teenager. At age 16, he got a job at an animated cartoon company in Chicago. During the First World War, he joined the U.S. Navy. As a sailor, he often created funny chalk drawings, while future famous radio comedian Jack Benny played the fiddle. Working as a freelance illustrator in the early 1920s, in 1926 Link was hired as an assistant on Sidney Smith's humorous newspaper family comic 'The Gumps'. He ghosted its Sunday pages.
Wise words of Ching Chow from 8 July 1928 and 7 January 1946.
Ching Chow
While Link assisted Sidney Smith on his signature comic 'The Gumps', the duo also launched a new newspaper feature, intended as a topper comic on the same page as 'The Gumps'. On 10 January 1927, Smith and Link's 'Ching Chow' first appeared in print. The one-panel cartoon centered on a stereotypically portrayed Chinese man, who told the readers a daily aphorism or wise saying. Contrary to most other one-panel cartoons, 'Ching Chow' wasn't intended to be comedic. While he could sometimes be seen in a humorous situation, most of his sayings were presented in a straightforward manner. Link sometimes made the drawings poetic, by, for instance, letting Ching Chow observe the starry sky. Between 31 October 1943 until the 1950s, Link also created a gag comic version of 'Ching Chow', presented as a topper to his children's series 'Tiny Tim'. In this spin-off, Ching Chow would express his aphorism after being subject to a slapstick situation with a punchline.
The authors never run out of ideas, because readers were encouraged to send in their own wise sayings, for which they were credited in print afterwards. Originally, however, the comic was only credited to Sidney Smith. After his death in 1935, Link continued the series on his own and signed it with his own name. When Link died, his assistant, Will Henry, took 'Ching Chow' over from 1957 until 1971. The series was seemingly terminated, only to make a comback in 1975, this time created by Rocco Lotto (writer) and Will Levinson (art). A year later, Henri Arnold took over both script and artwork in 1976, continuing the series until 4 June 1990. After that date, the format continued with a different kind of stereotype, namely an Irish leprechaun, under the title 'Mr. Luckey' (1990-2009).
'Ching Chow' was a mainstay in the newspapers of the News-Tribune group for almost a half century. It was typically not printed in the comics section, but in the sports supplement. This strange choice was motivated by the fact that several readers who gambled on horse races thought that the winning number would be revealed in the 'Ching Chow' drawing. By counting several details in the daily drawing (fingers, buttons, dotted lines,...), they believed the "secret" combination would become clear. To older U.S. newspaper comics, usually with a sports theme, these odd superstitions had also been attributed. But 'Ching Chow' had nothing to do with sports, making it unclear why it became so associated with predicting the outcome of races and games. Perhaps it could be attributed to the luck-deciding "powers" some people claim to find in Chinese fortune cookies, which 'Ching Chow''s quotes did resemble. Either way, Jerry Nachman, editor of the New York Post, remembered his mother and her friends actually trying to decipher the 'Ching Chow' cartoons in this manner. Novelist Nick Tosches also referred to it in his novel 'Cut Numbers' (1988).
These 'gambling' superstitions also explain why the undeniably stereotypical 'Ching Chow' continued for more than five decades. The title character walked around in traditional Chinese costume, complete with a long pigtail. He expressed mystical, pseudo-philosophical observations about life, presented in the style of a message found in fortune cookies when one visits a Chinese restaurant. He was drawn with exaggerated slitty eyes, an imbecilic grin and sometimes spoke in broken English, changing his "l" 's with his "r"'s. It wasn't until 1990 that more politically correct times eventually made editors decide to terminate the long-outdated racially offensive 'Ching Chow'. Since 2023, 'Ching Chow' has entered public domain.
'Tiny Tim' (1935).
Tiny Tim
On 4 October 1931 (some sources have mistakeningly claimed 23 July 1933) , Link launched a comic strip of his own, 'Tiny Tim', serialized every Sunday. Contrary to what the title suggests, it didn't focus on the sad handicapped boy from Charles Dickens' classic story 'A Christmas Carol', but on two children, Tim and Dotty Grunt, who are both only a few inches tall. Tim and Dotty are orphans, forcing them to survive in an - indeed - big and dangerous world. Luckily, they are adopted by a friendly farmer and his wife. The imaginative storylines feature the kids hiding away from bigger predators and spying on nefarious criminals, while using everyday objects as tools and vehicles. Over the course of the series, the little Grunts grew from two to six inches and were eventually transformed by a Roma magician to just small children. Link dropped Dotty from the series at a certain point, making Tim the sole protagonist. On 13 April 1941, the Roma magician gave Tim an amulet, so he could change size according to his own will.
'Tiny Tim' was a popular children's comic at the time. The stories were reprinted in two books by Big Little Books, 'The Adventures of Tiny Tim' (1935) and 'The Mechanical Men' (1937) and as a back-up feature in Western Publishing's Super Comics and Popular Comics from 1938 on, and in Dell Publishing's Four Color Comics during the 1940s. Tales about tiny people had fascinated young newspaper readers ever since Palmer Cox' 'The Brownies' (1881). The concept was also applied in William Donahey's 'Teenie Weenies' (1933) and Walt Scott's 'The Little People' (1952). In fact, Link was directly inspired by his own son's fascination with stories about little people.
Several episodes were assisted by Russell Stamm. Since Smith still had episodes prepared months beforehand, the series kept going evern after Smith's death in 1957, until the final episode was published on 2 March 1958. Since then, the comic has faded away in obscurity.
'Ching Chow' topper strip (1946)
Topper comics
Throughout the 1930s and 1950s, Link created several topper comics to accompany 'Tiny Tim'. The earliest, launched on 4 October 1931, was 'Snap Shot Sam', featuring a bumbling photographer. In February 1933, the format changed while the title didn't. Sam no longer took pictures. Instead, he was featured in interactive gags where readers had to connect the dots in the final panel, to see the punchline appear. The series, on which Link's cousin Russell Stamm, assisted, continued until 18 February 1934.
Next Link created 'Dill and Daffy' (1935-1943), about a tiny, bespectacled man, Dill, and a huge, brawny friend, Daffy. They appeared in straightforward gag situations. In 1943, Link created 'Dennis the Menace', a gag comic about a mischievous little boy. It had no relation to Hank Ketcham's similarly titled creation, nor David Law's version, though preceded them by 8 years. Afterwards, Link adapted his succesful 'Ching Chow' cartoon panel into a gag comic format and ran it from 31 October 1943 until the 1950s.
The Dailys
Stanley Link eventually followed in his former employer Sidney Smith's footsteps by creating a daily humorous family newspaper comic of his own, 'The Dailys'. It centered on the mustached husband Dan and his short-haired wife Doris. The series ran between 5 January 1948 and 14 September 1957.
Death
Stanley Link passed away in 1957, at age 63. While his daily comics had been or were discontinued almost instantly, Link's assistant Will Henry continued 'Ching Chow' for several years.
'The Dailys'.