Frances Edwina Dumm was America's first full-time female editorial cartoonist and the first woman inducted into the National Cartoonists Society. Her political cartoons promoted Women's Suffrage when that was a controversial issue. For almost fifty years (1918-1966) she produced this strip about "child and dog", joining the likes of Buster Brown, Little Orphan Annie, and Tintin (and much later, Johnny Quest).
Here are three consecutive daily strips in which Cap, Tippie, and Cap's grandmother Sara Bailey help a lost girl find her way home. Presumably they succeed in the final strips of the week. These are marked "Dec 2: Well, This is a Predicament"; "Dec 3: It Would Seem So!" and "Dec 4: Yes - Go Ahead!" There are also circled numbers 2,3, and 4 respectively which represent not the date but rather the placement of this strip within the six strips published each week.
The copyright notice gives no year of publication, but all three strips on the back have a handwritten "Wk 12-1-58" which probably refers to the first week in December 1958. This makes sense, because December 2, 1958 was a Tuesday, and the December 2 strip here is the second strip in this story, which would have begun with the December 1 strip on Monday.
Unlike many strip artists, Dumm uses panels of varying size both within a single strip as well as from one day to the next. The structure is more serial rather than the bump-set-spike of a three panel gag. Dumm has a distinctive font and uses a lower grade school vocabulary to entice young readers. I'm impressed by the dramatic change in font size and thickness for emphasis on certain words in the Dec 3 and 4 strips.
