Yesterday is tomorrow: revisiting Annie as a new New Deal dawns.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Little Orphan Annie

THE SECOND volume in IDW Publishing's ongoing reprint of the comic strip Little Orphan Annie ends in a familiar place: Just after the 1929 stock market crash, a small-town bank goes under because of wild gambles made with other people's money.

As America moved into the 1930s, the travails of the plucky, indomitable orphan girl had eerie resonance and relevance. While not a particularly funny funny, Annie can be read as a bitter comedy in which implacable fate batters one poor girl with more trouble than any reasonable providence could deem possible. The strip's stock moment is Annie's recurring reunion with adoptive father Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks, who is always leaving her in some situation where his constant attention is required, but then getting scuttled in the Far East, sucked away in some complex and impenetrable business shenanigan, or left for dead under implausible pulp-magazine circumstances. Annie is then left to hit the streets again. She's the kind of girl who gets to run away and join the circus (yay!), then become a trapeze apprentice and break her back (boo!). Spoiler: She gets better.

The strip, launched in 1924, quickly became a huge success and a pop culture landmark. It was also one of the few popular voices raised in opposition to the New Deal.

The treacly 1977 Broadway musical Annie and the film adaptation that followed five years later glorified a lovable Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Annie creator Harold Gray (1894-1968) would have been appalled. "I ... have despised Roosevelt and his socialist, or creeping communist, policies since 1932, and said so in my stuff," Gray once wrote.

Gray got his start in comics as an assistant to Sidney Smith, who drew the then huge, now forgotten strip The Gumps (from whom Gray lifted one of his most distinctive and most mocked stylistic tics, the pupilless eye). He soon surpassed his mentor, earning readers of every sort, highbrow and low, from all over the nation. Fans who wrote him letters ranged from Henry Ford to a young John Updike. Gray's cartooning featured solid and meticulous draftsmanship, combined with the gritty feel of a real, dirty, raucous, scary world, a style that can be clearly detected in the works of such later underground cartoonists as Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith (who draws Zippy the Pinhead), and Chester Brown.

Comics historian Jeer Hear, in one of his smart and useful introductions to these Annie volumes, points out Gray's most obvious literary progenitor in...