Big Little Miss Muffet

Have you ever thought your copy of The Laughing Dragon of Oz was lonely in your Oz collection? Well, get it a companion! There is another Big Little Book with an Oz connection! It's Little Miss Muffet (1936).

Little Miss Muffet is based on a long-running newspaper comic strip by Fanny Y. Cory, who illustrated L. Frank Baum's The Master Key (1901) and The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903). Cory was a prolific illustrator, but she was also one of the first woman cartoonists. In the mid 1920s she began a one panel newspaper cartoon called Sonny Sayings, and in 1935 she began a new comic strip called Little Miss Muffet for King features.

Little Miss Muffet had nothing to do with the Mother Goose character, but was instead a comic strip designed to compete with Little Orphan Annie.

Cory wrote and drew the strip for several years but apparently she never really liked it all that much.

There were three comic book compilations as well as the Big Little Book shown above. For the Big Little Book,  the comic strip was rewritten and reformatted into prose. You can see one of the original format Little Miss Muffet newspaper strips reproduced below.

We'll be seeing a lot more of Fanny Cory in the coming months - but this is it for today!