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Allen Saunders
Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986) was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake.
He is credited with being the originator of the saying, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" in 1957. The saying was later slightly modified and popularised by John Lennon in the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)".
His full name, John Allen Saunders, sometimes led to confusion with his son John (John Phillip Saunders, 1924–2003), who later continued two of his father's strips.
Allen Saunders covered the gamut of comics genres: editorial, commercial, gag, adventure, and melodrama. Big Chief Wahoo (later renamed Steve Roper and Mike Nomad) was popular in its day, a witty romp with puns, slapstick and satire. But although it defended Native Americans and joked at "palefaces," it relied on exaggerated stereotypes for humor. Saunders admitted that "if we were doing Chief Wahoo today, we'd have problems." It was his serious dramas or "open-ended novels" Steve Roper, Mary Worth, and Kerry Drake that showed his mature talents and reflected himself and his views on the human condition.
Roper, like Saunders, was a journalist who was decent, knew French, smoked a pipe, had run his college newspaper (and almost flunked physics) and faced tough challenges. Through him, Saunders defended journalism while also enjoying the action sequences he wrote for him and Nomad. He was especially fond of the "indigenous gimmick" technique, solving a problem by using something that is ordinarily ignored in the setting. But he identified more with Mary Worth: "Mary and I have come, over the years, to think pretty much alike" (1971 interview). As opposed to the existing action/adventure genre popular with male readers, his Mary Worth established the soap strip with its appeal primarily to women. (In his 1971 interview, he said that 90% of his fan letters for Worth came from females, and 90% of those for Roper and Nomad were from males.) It in fact was singled out for praise by Eleanor Roosevelt. He inspired later soap strip writers such as Nick Dallis, who started Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker, and Apartment 3-G. But he himself disliked the term "soap" because he saw an underlying unity in his own strips as "adventure strips" based on conflict—emotional conflict in Mary Worth, physical conflict in Steve Roper. One of his major contributions was to merge the two as Roper, Nomad, and Drake increasingly dealt with emotional conflicts in their personal lives and faced hard moral dilemmas.
Narrating conflicts in a range of social issues (drugs, the sexes, divorce, job loss, the youth scene and counterculture, prejudice, and of course crime, to name just a few), Saunders wrote tight, fast-moving stories with plot twists and dramatic tension lightened by droll predicaments. He was known for "sophisticated scripts with literate dialogue", with almost twice as much said (and happening) per daily strip as in the post-1979 versions, and under him, even Nomad (later treated as slow-witted and speaking in grawlixes) was a sharp, shrewd character who was articulate in three languages. Saunders explored personality and motivation in the long series of people passing through his strips, and they got to be "awfully real" to him. His scripts were interpreted and fleshed out by talented realist artists (Ernst in Mary Worth, Pete Hoffman and then William Overgard in Steve Roper, Alfred Andriola and his ghosts in Kerry Drake) who made the characters and settings both attractive and believable.
At the end of Saunders' autobiography (published in Nemo shortly after his death), Nemo editor Rick Marschall called him a "dedicated craftsman and a flinty, memorable personality." That showed through clearly in his 42-year output of popular dramas for his "paper actors."
Born in Lebanon, Indiana, Saunders enjoyed newspaper comics as a youth, and he practiced drawing them. After graduating from Wabash College in 1920, he taught French there for seven years while working in the summers on his M.A. at the University of Chicago and taking night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He drew editorial cartoons and the single-panel Miserable Moments, wrote detective fiction for magazines, worked in Chautauqua theater and wrote plays. These experiences converged in his later comics career.
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Allen Saunders
Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986) was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake.
He is credited with being the originator of the saying, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" in 1957. The saying was later slightly modified and popularised by John Lennon in the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)".
His full name, John Allen Saunders, sometimes led to confusion with his son John (John Phillip Saunders, 1924–2003), who later continued two of his father's strips.
Allen Saunders covered the gamut of comics genres: editorial, commercial, gag, adventure, and melodrama. Big Chief Wahoo (later renamed Steve Roper and Mike Nomad) was popular in its day, a witty romp with puns, slapstick and satire. But although it defended Native Americans and joked at "palefaces," it relied on exaggerated stereotypes for humor. Saunders admitted that "if we were doing Chief Wahoo today, we'd have problems." It was his serious dramas or "open-ended novels" Steve Roper, Mary Worth, and Kerry Drake that showed his mature talents and reflected himself and his views on the human condition.
Roper, like Saunders, was a journalist who was decent, knew French, smoked a pipe, had run his college newspaper (and almost flunked physics) and faced tough challenges. Through him, Saunders defended journalism while also enjoying the action sequences he wrote for him and Nomad. He was especially fond of the "indigenous gimmick" technique, solving a problem by using something that is ordinarily ignored in the setting. But he identified more with Mary Worth: "Mary and I have come, over the years, to think pretty much alike" (1971 interview). As opposed to the existing action/adventure genre popular with male readers, his Mary Worth established the soap strip with its appeal primarily to women. (In his 1971 interview, he said that 90% of his fan letters for Worth came from females, and 90% of those for Roper and Nomad were from males.) It in fact was singled out for praise by Eleanor Roosevelt. He inspired later soap strip writers such as Nick Dallis, who started Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker, and Apartment 3-G. But he himself disliked the term "soap" because he saw an underlying unity in his own strips as "adventure strips" based on conflict—emotional conflict in Mary Worth, physical conflict in Steve Roper. One of his major contributions was to merge the two as Roper, Nomad, and Drake increasingly dealt with emotional conflicts in their personal lives and faced hard moral dilemmas.
Narrating conflicts in a range of social issues (drugs, the sexes, divorce, job loss, the youth scene and counterculture, prejudice, and of course crime, to name just a few), Saunders wrote tight, fast-moving stories with plot twists and dramatic tension lightened by droll predicaments. He was known for "sophisticated scripts with literate dialogue", with almost twice as much said (and happening) per daily strip as in the post-1979 versions, and under him, even Nomad (later treated as slow-witted and speaking in grawlixes) was a sharp, shrewd character who was articulate in three languages. Saunders explored personality and motivation in the long series of people passing through his strips, and they got to be "awfully real" to him. His scripts were interpreted and fleshed out by talented realist artists (Ernst in Mary Worth, Pete Hoffman and then William Overgard in Steve Roper, Alfred Andriola and his ghosts in Kerry Drake) who made the characters and settings both attractive and believable.
At the end of Saunders' autobiography (published in Nemo shortly after his death), Nemo editor Rick Marschall called him a "dedicated craftsman and a flinty, memorable personality." That showed through clearly in his 42-year output of popular dramas for his "paper actors."
Born in Lebanon, Indiana, Saunders enjoyed newspaper comics as a youth, and he practiced drawing them. After graduating from Wabash College in 1920, he taught French there for seven years while working in the summers on his M.A. at the University of Chicago and taking night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He drew editorial cartoons and the single-panel Miserable Moments, wrote detective fiction for magazines, worked in Chautauqua theater and wrote plays. These experiences converged in his later comics career.