Interviewed before a Comic-Con audience in San Diego, illustrator Hasen told TV-comics scripter Mark Evanier the origin of the strip during a trip to Korea:

“I belonged to the National Cartoonists Society, and we had USO trips to Korea during the war. I went to the frontlines with six cartoonists ... And Gus Edson ... he and I got to be very close on the trip. One day, he asked me, "What are you doing?" Now usually, when you're not working, you say, "I'm in advertising." I wasn't doing any advertising. So then he said, "Well, would you be interested in anything?" I said yes. I would have done anything at that time. Finally, we got back to New York. Three days later, I get my mail and I'm sitting in my car going through it, and I come to an envelope: "Gus Edson." Inside is a little piece of stationery and a very crude drawing of Dondi — a little kid with a big, oversized hat ... big, oversized everything. And Gus writes, "Dear Kleine — ("Kleine" means "short" in German. He was making a cartoonist's half-assed joke ...) — "Dear Kleine — The kid should look like this." He had told me he had an idea for a strip about an orphan ... and I'll tell you something. I looked at that drawing, Mark, and it's like that old story that you're on a dance floor, and you look across a crowded room and you say, "That's the woman I'm gonna marry!" What inspired it was that during the Korean war, officers were adopting war orphans. That was where it was started. And then we just made it World War II, instead. Gus wrote it. He wrote it in longhand — no computer, no typewriter. He couldn't use a typewriter. He drank a lot.”

Early on, the story was interesting, but Dondi never aged, and by the 70’s it was hard to argue he was a WWII orphan. At some point, people began to tire of the static storyline and readership began dropping. By the end, Dondi was running in only 30 plus newspapers

These strips are from the first couple of months and that’s what made them interesting to me.

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