The Press: Little Guy

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Many a U.S. citizen, stoutly convinced that only a Briton could laugh at a British joke, was unknowingly doing it himself last week. A pantomime comic strip called Louie, a month after its U.S. invasion, was already in 28 newspapers, including the Milwaukee Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Oakland Tribune.

Created by a solemn, helpless-looking Liverpudlian named Harry Hanan, Louie is a solemn, helpless-looking little man with a bald head, a deadpan, a huge nose resting firmly on a huge mustache. Louie has no fixed profession. Sometimes he is a barber (as was Hanan's father), sometimes a henpecked husband, a wistful bachelor, a timid burglar—but always a meek soul with an inferiority complex about women. Like his happily married creator, Louie suffers from a gnawing desire to snip feathers off women's hats.

To Britishers, Louie is Britain's much-talked-of "little fellow," hard-pressed but phlegmatic; to U.S. readers, most of whom do not know that the strip is a British import, he is the baffled cipher* who sits on every park bench. Hanan draws Louie once a week for London's whopping (circ. 4,500,000) weekly, The People, draws him five other days a week for the people across the Atlantic.

Hanan does not need to tailor his U.S. strips to U.S. taste. His idol is the New Yorker's James Thurber, and Louie bears a spiritual resemblance to Thurber's ineffectual heroes. Above all Hanan hates Superman; he considers Louie a sort of anti-Superman.