Allen Saunders

Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986) was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake.

He is credited with being the originator of the saying, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" in 1957. The saying was later slightly modified and popularised by John Lennon in the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)".

His full name, John Allen Saunders, sometimes led to confusion with his son John (John Phillip Saunders, 1924–2003), who later continued two of his father's strips.

Career overview Allen Saunders covered the gamut of comics genres: editorial, commercial, gag, adventure, and melodrama. Big Chief Wahoo (later renamed Steve Roper and Mike Nomad) was popular in its day, a witty romp with puns, slapstick and satire. But although it defended Native Americans and joked at "palefaces," it relied on exaggerated stereotypes for humor. Saunders admitted that "if we were doing Chief Wahoo today, we'd have problems." It was his serious dramas or "open-ended novels" He inspired later soap strip writers such as Nick Dallis, who started Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker, and Apartment 3-G. But he himself disliked the term "soap" because he saw an underlying unity in his own strips as "adventure strips" based on conflict—emotional conflict in Mary Worth, physical conflict in Steve Roper. One of his major contributions was to merge the two as Roper, Nomad, and Drake increasingly dealt with emotional conflicts in their personal lives and faced hard moral dilemmas.

Narrating conflicts in a range of social issues (drugs, the sexes, divorce, job loss, the youth scene and counterculture, prejudice, and of course crime, to name just a few), Saunders wrote tight, fast-moving stories with plot twists and dramatic tension lightened by droll predicaments. He was known for "sophisticated scripts with literate dialogue", with almost twice as much said (and happening) per daily strip as in the post-1979 versions, and under him, even Nomad (later treated as slow-witted and speaking in grawlixes) was a sharp, shrewd character who was articulate in three languages. Saunders explored personality and motivation in the long series of people passing through his strips, and they got to be "awfully real" to him.

In 1927, while on sabbatical from Wabash, he moved to Toledo, Ohio as a reporter and drama critic for the News-Bee, and he stayed on with that newspaper. Eight years later, Elmer Woggon (a friend at the rival Toledo Blade) proposed a comic strip for Publishers Syndicate, The Great Gusto, which he would draw if Saunders did the writing. They shook on it, but it wasn't accepted until they refocused on its Indian character. On November 23, 1936, it finally appeared in the newspapers as Big Chief Wahoo and scored a success—fortunately, as Saunders' regular job ended when the News-Bee folded in 1938. Gags gave way to adventure strips, so in 1940, he began to reshape the narrative into Steve Roper, centered on the escapades of a racket-busting photojournalist.

Mary Worth

In 1939, he was asked to write Apple Mary when its creator (since 1932) Martha Orr left, and he developed it into Mary Worth's Family. But as he noted in his autobiography, "as long as there are people, there are plots." He approached his work as a "craft."

After getting feedback for a story idea from his artists, he isolated himself to map it out over 13 weeks of dailies and Sundays (1953 article), with the playwriting formula "First act, get your leading character up a tree; second act, throw rocks at him; third act, get him down". Then, in his work week, he allocated two days to each of the three strips to create a week's worth, using his own cartooning skills to sketch roughs of the characters and dialog in each panel for his artists and letterers to follow. Saunders also served as chair of the Newspaper Comics Council, was a longtime member of the National Cartoonists Society who helped younger cartoonists get started (e.g., Fran Matera, Pete Hoffman, Nicholas P. Dallis, Alex Kotzky), and was a civic-minded leader in Toledo community affairs.

Later life and death In 1979, Saunders retired and turned over the writing of Steve Roper and Mary Worth to son John. He remained professionally active as "Dean of American Continuity Strips" (a reputation that amused him), received an Inkpot Award in 1981, and wrote his Nemo autobiography, a rich resource on the history of American comic strip writing. He died on January 28, 1986, survived by his wife of 63 years, Lois, and their four children (John, David, Penny, Lois Ann), and donating an archive of material to the Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, the enduring continuation of his first strip, finally came to an end on December 26, 2004, while Mary Worth still appears under Karen Moy and Joe Giella. Kerry Drake ended with Andriola.