Edwina Dumm - Ohio To New York

Ohio To New York

For the Monitor, Dumm also drew The Meanderings of Minnie, a semi-autobiographical strip about a tomboy and her dog. Moving to New York City, she continued her art studies at the Art Students League and created Cap Stubbs and Tippie, syndicated by the George Matthew Adams Service. Dumm worked very fast; according to comics historian Martin Sheridan, she could pencil a daily strip in an hour.

Her love of dogs is evident in her strips as well as her illustrations for books and magazines, such as Sinbad, her weekly dog page which ran in both Life and the London Tatler. She illustrated Alexander Woollcott's Two Gentlemen and a Lady. For Sonnets from the Pekinese and Other Doggerel (Macmillan, 1936) by Burges Johnson (1877–1963), she illustrated "Losted" and other poems:

Losted

I feel so far from anywheres!

Perhaps my family

Has got so many other cares

They've all forgotten me.

I s'pose I'll starve to skin an' bone

If I stay losted here alone.

My little dog, he founded me,

An' wagged his tail an' whined,

But he can't lead me home, for he

Is taught to walk behind.

And so I'm crying yet, becuz

I'm just as losted as I was.

From the 1930s into the 1960s, she drew another dog for the newspaper feature Alec the Great, in which she illustrated verses written by her brother, Robert Dennis Dumm. Their collaboration was published as a book in 1946. In the late 1940s, she drew the covers for sheet music by her roommate, Helen Slater, who did both music and lyrics. During the 1940s, she also contributed features to the Wonder Woman comic book.

When the George Matthew Adams Service went out of business in the 1940s, Dumm's strip was picked up by King Features Syndicate. Dumm continued to write and draw Tippie until her 1966 retirement (which brought the strip to an end).