| Flapper Fanny Says | |
| Creator: | Ethel Hays |
| Author: | Ethel Hays (1925–1930) Gladys Parker (1930–1935) |
| Current: | Sylvia Sneidman (1935-1940) |
| Status: | Concluded single-panel daily & Sunday strip |
| Altnames: | Flapper Fanny |
| First: | January 26, 1925 |
| Last: | June 29, 1940[1] |
| Genre: | Humor |
Flapper Fanny Says was a single-panel daily cartoon series starting on January 26, 1925, with a Sunday page (called Flapper Fanny) following on August 7, 1932. Created by Ethel Hays, each episode featured a flapper illustration and a witticism.[2] The Sunday strip concluded on December 8, 1935; the daily panel continued until June 29, 1940.
At the start, the panel was drawn by notable illustrator 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, John Held Jr., 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.
When Gladys Parker took over the strip in 1930, she gave it a "more cartoony style."[3] [4] Focus shifted from Fanny, now a curly-haired brunette resembling Parker herself,[5] to her little sister Betty, a schoolgirl.
Because the syndicate Newspaper Enterprise Association 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.[6] Despite this immediate success, Hays - finding the daily workload too heavy after the birth of her second child - turned Flapper Fanny Says over to promising newcomer Gladys Parker starting on March 21, 1930. Parker expanded the daily panel into a Sunday strip with the truncated title Flapper Fanny starting August 7, 1932, and continued both until December 8, 1935.
Parker relinquished Flapper Fanny Says to Sylvia Sneidman on December 9, 1935. That artist, who signed her work only "Sylvia," continued the strip until June 29, 1940. Parker began drawing her own creation Mopsy in 1939 (also in her own image).[7]
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.[8]