Flapper Fanny Says



Flapper Fanny Says from Newspaper Enterprise Association was a single-panel daily cartoon series starting in about 1924, with a Sunday page following in 1928. Each episode featured a flapper illustration and a witticism. It continued into the 1940s as Flapper Fanny.

At the start, the panel was drawn by notable illustrator Ethel Hays, who employed an Art Deco style. Flapper Fanny Says was part of a wave of popular culture that focused on the flapper look and lifestyle. Through many films and the works of illustrators such as Hays and Russell Patterson, as well as the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anita Loos, flappers came to be seen as attractive, reckless and independent.

Because NEA often sold whole packages of features to individual newspapers, Flapper Fanny Says gained widespread distribution almost from the start, appearing daily in perhaps 500 papers within its first year.

Spin-offs and influence
Despite this immediate success, Hays&mdash;finding the daily workload too heavy after the birth of her second child&mdash;turned Flapper Fanny Says over to promising newcomer Gladys Parker around 1931. Parker gave it a "more cartoony style", and her flapper protagonists came to resemble the artist herself. Parker began drawing her own creation Mopsy in 1939 (also in her own image), but she seems to have relinquished Flapper Fanny Says to Sylvia Sneidman by 1937 or earlier. That artist, who signed her work only "Sylvia", added a kid sister and continued the strip into the 1940s. The title was eventually truncated to Flapper Fanny.

Flapper Fanny Says was imitated in the Jazz Age by Faith Burrows's similarly themed upstart Flapper Filosofy panel from the rival King Features Syndicate.