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| Edwina Dumm | |
|---|---|
 The magazineCartoons featured Edwina Dumm in its January 1917 issue. | |
| Born | 1893 (1893) Upper Sandusky, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | April 28, 1990(1990-04-28) (aged 96–97) New York, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist |
Notable works | Cap Stubbs and Tippie (1918–1966) Alec the Great (1931-1969) |
| Awards | National Cartoonists Society Gold Key Award, 1978 |
Frances Edwina Dumm (1893 – April 28, 1990) was a writer-artist who drew the comic stripCap Stubbs and Tippie for nearly five decades; she is also notable as America's first full-time female editorialcartoonist. She used her middle name for the signature on her comic strip, signed simplyEdwina.
One of the earliest female syndicated cartoonists, Dumm was born inUpper Sandusky, Ohio, and lived in Marion and Washington Courthouse, Ohio throughout her youth before the family settled down in Columbus.[1] Anna Gilmore Dennis was her mother, and her father, Frank Edwin Dumm, was a playwright-actor who later worked as a newspaper reporter. Dumm's paternal grandfather, Robert D. Dumm, owned a newspaper in Upper Sandusky which Frank Dumm later inherited. Her brother, Robert Dennis Dumm, was a reporter for theColumbusDispatch, and art editor for Cole Publishing Company'sFarm & Fireside magazine.
In 1911, she graduated from Central High School inColumbus, Ohio, and then took the Cleveland-basedLandon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course. Her name was later featured in Landon's advertisements. While enrolled in the correspondence course, she also took a business course and worked as a stenographer at theColumbus Board of Education.
In 1915, Dumm was hired by the short-lived Republican newspaper, the ColumbusMonitor, to be a full-time cartoonist.[2] Her first cartoon was published on August 7, 1915, in the debut issue of the paper. During her years at theMonitor she provided a variety of features including a comic strip calledThe Meanderings of Minnie about a young tomboy girl and her dog, Lillie Jane, and a full-page editorial cartoon feature,Spot-Light Sketches[3]. She drew editorial cartoons for theMonitor from its first edition (August 7, 1915) until the paper folded (July 1917). In theMonitor, herSpot-Light Sketches was a full-page feature of editorial cartoons, and some of these promoted women's issues. Elisabeth Israels Perry, in the introduction to Alice Sheppard'sCartooning for Suffrage (1994), wrote that artists such asBlanche Ames Ames,Lou Rogers and Edwina Dumm produced:
...a visual rhetoric that helped create a climate more favorable to change in America's gender relations... By the close of thesuffrage campaign, women's art reflected the new values of feminism, broadened its targets, and attempted to restate the significance of the movement.[4]
After theMonitor folded, Dumm moved to New York City, where she continued her art studies at theArt Students League. She was hired by theGeorge Matthew Adams Service[5] to createCap Stubbs and Tippie, a family strip following the lives of a boy Cap, his dog Tippie, their family, and neighbors. Cap's grandmother, Sara Bailey, is prominently featured, and may have been based on Dumm's own grandmother, Sarah Jane Henderson, who lived with their family. The strip was strongly influenced byMark Twain’sAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as Dumm’s favorite comic,Buster Brown byRichard F. Outcault. Dumm worked very fast; according to comics historian Martin Sheridan, she could pencil a daily strip in an hour.[6]
Her love of dogs is evident in her strips as well as her illustrations for books and magazines, such asSinbad, her weekly dog page which ran in bothLife and the LondonTatler. She illustratedAlexander Woollcott'sTwo Gentlemen and a Lady. ForSonnets from the Pekinese and Other Doggerel (Macmillan, 1936) by Burges Johnson (1877–1963), she illustrated "Losted" and other poems.
From the 1931 through the 1960s, she drew another dog for the newspaper featureAlec the Great, in which she illustrated verses written by her brother, Robert Dennis Dumm. Their collaboration was published as a book in 1946. In the late 1940s, she drew the covers for sheet music by her friend and neighbor, Helen Thomas, who did both music and lyrics. During the 1940s, she also contributedTippie features to various comic books includingAll-American Comics andDell Comics.
In 1950, Dumm,Hilda Terry, andBarbara Shermund became the first women to be inducted into theNational Cartoonists Society.[7]
When the George Matthew Adams Service went out of business in 1965, Dumm's strip was picked up byThe Washington Star Syndicate. Dumm continued to write and drawTippie until her 1966 retirement (which brought the strip to an end).[8]
Dumm never married. After she retired from her comic strip, she remained active with watercolor paintings, photography and helping the elderly at her New York City apartment building when she was well into her eighties.
She was a recipient of theNational Cartoonists Society Gold Key Award in 1978, and remained the only woman to win this award until 2013.
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