Called the First Lady of Cartooning, Edwina Dumm was the daughter of actor/playwright/newspaperman Frank Edwin Dumm. Edwina started drawing and sketching in grade school, and by 1915, she was a staff artist for The Columbus Monitor, a start-up Ohio weekly.

Though her primary duties there were to draw “Spot-Light Sketches,” a full-page feature dedicated to political cartoon reportage and written blurbs, Dumm astoundingly carved out an occasional time pocket to produce The Meanderings of Minnie, a semi-autobiographical comic strip about a tomboy and her canine companion.

But Dumm’s real comic strip break came two years later, when The Columbus Monitor went bust and she made a gutsy move to New York. There, publisher George Matthew Adams offered her an opportunity to create a strip about a boy and his dog.

In 1918, the famed boy-and-his-dog strip, now fleshed out and called Cap Stubbs was nationally distributed, featured six days a week and rapidly gaining popularity.

The slice of life comic was immediately endearing, opting for Rockwellian portraits of suburbia instead of punchlines, cliffhangers and wacky antics. Cap Stubbs was a normal boy with no outrageous physical traits whose trusty dog, Tippie accompanies him on his daily adventures. Other characters included Gran’ma, Mary and Milton Stubbs (Cap’s parents) and a neighborhood girl Cap secretly admired.

The strip survived until 1966 (enduring various name changes from Cap Stubbs and Tippie to Tippie and Cap Stubbs to Tippie), but its legacy endured in the hearts of readers for years to come. As for the pioneering Edwina Stubbs, she lived to be 97 and continued to draw for years after the strip’s completion. She has been featured in Journalism History, Cartoonist PROfiles, The World Encyclopedia of Comics and The Encyclopedia of American Comics.