Steve Roper and Mike Nomad - Characters and Story

Characters and Story

Wahoo was a short Native American in a ten-gallon hat who was played for laughs but showed courage, loyalty, and common sense. It was whites who were often the targets of the jokes (Wahoo: "Paleface full of prunes!"), and of vigorous defenses of Native Americans (e.g., December 16, 1941). Wahoo was rich due to the discovery of oil on his land back in Te(e)pee Town (spelled both ways in the strip), and headed to New York to find his girlfriend Minnie Ha-Cha, who had gone away to college and was now a beautiful singer in a nightclub. On the way, he was joined by Gusto, who liked Wahoo's medicine so much that he bottled it up for sale as Ka-Zowie Kure-All. Gusto continued as a support character through August 1939, and then was dropped. (For more on Wahoo, see Elmer Woggon article; for a picture of Wahoo, Gusto, and Minnie, see Woggon's biography card at the National Cartoonists Society.)

The strip initially revolved around humorous tales, such as stories about people trying to cheat Wahoo out of his money or fish-out-of-water tales of Wahoo in New York or Hollywood. But from the beginning, it was a continuity strip, and had already moved into serious adventure by 1940, when a dashing young photojournalist named Steve Roper was introduced. (Sundays continued to do gags until rejoining the main plot line in 1944.) By World War II, Roper was the lead in war-oriented adventures, and the strip was retitled Chief Wahoo and Steve Roper in 1944, then Steve Roper and Wahoo in 1946, and in 1947 simply Steve Roper, as Wahoo and Minnie were written out (last seen on February 26 and November 19, 1947, respectively). As a very different kind of strip now, its artwork lost its earlier cartoonishness, ghosted by artists like Woggon's brother Bill Woggon, Don Dean, and (from December 1945 to July 1954) Pete Hoffman. But Woggon remained the strip's letterer and researcher until 1977, shortly before his death in 1978.