Allen Saunders

In the crowded daily newspaper pages of the mid-20th century, Allen Saunders built whole worlds in a few panels at a time. Born John Allen Saunders in Lebanon, Indiana, in 1899, he grew up enjoying newspaper comics and practicing how to draw them. By the time he died in 1986, he had become an American writer, journalist, and cartoonist whose name was attached, openly or otherwise, to some of the most popular story strips of his era: Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth, and Kerry Drake.

Saunders came to comics with an unusually broad apprenticeship. After graduating from Wabash College in 1920, he taught French there for seven years while spending summers on an M.A. at the University of Chicago and taking night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He drew editorial cartoons and a single-panel feature called Miserable Moments, wrote detective fiction for magazines, worked in Chautauqua theater, and wrote plays. In 1927, during a sabbatical from Wabash, he moved to Toledo, Ohio, as a reporter and drama critic for the News-Bee. Those experiences stayed with him: the journalist’s eye, the dramatist’s timing, the cartoonist’s economy, and the teacher’s ear for language.

His first big newspaper-strip success began with Elmer Woggon, a friend at the rival Toledo Blade. Their proposed strip eventually appeared on November 23, 1936, as Big Chief Wahoo. It was popular, full of puns, slapstick, and satire, though Saunders later acknowledged that its exaggerated Native American stereotypes would be a problem if done in a later era. As gag strips gave way to adventure, he reshaped the feature in 1940 into Steve Roper, centered on a racket-busting photojournalist. Roper shared more than a little with Saunders: he was decent, knew French, smoked a pipe, had run his college newspaper, and faced hard tests with nerve and wit.

In 1939, Saunders was asked to write Apple Mary after creator Martha Orr left, and he developed it into Mary Worth’s Family, later simply Mary Worth. He documented the transition himself, explaining how the Depression-era apple vendor became the advice-giving figure who entered the lives of people at moments of strain. The strip drew on women’s magazine storytelling and found a strong female readership. Saunders said in a 1971 interview that 90 percent of his fan letters for Mary Worth came from women, while the same share for Roper and Nomad came from men. Eleanor Roosevelt singled Mary Worth out for praise.

Saunders disliked the label “soap” for his work. He saw his strips as adventure stories driven by conflict: emotional conflict in Mary Worth, physical conflict in Steve Roper, and, increasingly, moral conflict across his work. He wrote about drugs, divorce, job loss, prejudice, youth culture, crime, and the changing relations between the sexes. His scripts were known for literate dialogue, quick movement, plot turns, and droll predicaments. Even when he wrote Kerry Drake for three decades without credit, under an arrangement in which artist Alfred Andriola received sole billing, Saunders kept supplying researched detective stories until he quit after Andriola accepted the 1970 Reuben Award for the strip.

One sentence has carried Saunders far beyond the comics page: “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” He is credited with originating it in 1957, long before John Lennon slightly changed and popularized it in song. The line fits the man who spent decades writing “paper actors” through accidents, schemes, heartbreak, and second chances. Saunders understood that plot was not just action. It was interruption, pressure, choice, and character revealed under stress, which is why his words still feel so recognizably human.