''Agatha Crumm'' is a newspaper

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

created by the cartoonist

Bill Hoest William Pierce Hoest (February 7, 1926 – November 7, 1988) was an American cartoonist best known as the creator of the gag panel series, '' The Lockhorns'', distributed by King Features Syndicate to 500 newspapers in 23 countries, and ''Laugh ...

(creator of ''

The Lockhorns ''The Lockhorns'' is a United States panel (comic strips), single-panel cartoon created September 9, 1968 by Bill Hoest and distributed by King Features Syndicate to 500 newspapers in 23 countries. It is continued today by Bunny Hoest and John Re ...

'') and distributed by

King Features Syndicate King Features Syndicate, Inc. is a American content distribution and animation studio, consumer product licensing and print syndication company owned by Hearst Communications that distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editoria ...

. The strip ran from October 24, 1977, until 1997. ''Agatha Crumm'' was Hoest's third strip, following ''Bumper Snickers'' (1974).

Characters and story

The strip's title character was the eccentric, miserly, elderly owner of a cookie company. Comics historian

Don Markstein Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge) is an online encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation, initiated February 13, 2001. Donald D. Markstein, the sole writer and editor of Toonopedi ...

described the active and agile Crumm: :Agatha may not have been as wealthy as

Scrooge McDuck Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon character created in 1947 by Carl Barks for The Walt Disney Company. Appearing in Disney comics, Scrooge is a Scottish-American anthropomorphic Pekin duck. Like his nephew Donald Duck, he has a yellow-orange bil ...

or Richie Rich, and maybe not even

Rich Uncle Pennybags Rich Uncle Pennybags is the mascot of the board game of ''Monopoly''. He is depicted as a portly old man with a moustache who wears a morning suit with a bowtie and top hat. In large parts of the world he is known, additionally or exclusively, as ...

. But as owner of the Crumm Cookie Company, she was probably in the range of Mr. Abernathy, and that's about as wealthy as most toons need to be—even when they're financing a lifestyle that includes a lot of corporate wheeling and dealing. The seven-day comic strip where Agatha was introduced debuted from King Features Syndicate on Monday, October 24, 1977. (A report elsewhere, that she'd begun exactly two months earlier, is apparently in error, as August 24, 1977, was a Wednesday.) She was old enough to rival '' Uncle Elby'' or ''

Grandma Grandparents, individually known as grandmother and grandfather, are the parents of a person's father or mother – paternal or maternal. Every sexually-reproducing living organism who is not a genetic chimera has a maximum of four genetic gra ...

'', but spry, very active in the world of high-finance shenanigans.''Agatha Crumm''
at

Don Markstein's Toonopedia Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge) is an online encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation, initiated February 13, 2001. Donald D. Markstein, the sole writer and editor of Toonopedi ...

Archived
from the original on March 15, 2012.

Books

Between 1980 and 1983, Signet Books published three ''Agatha Crumm'' paperback collections, including ''The Return of Agatha Crumm'' (1982).

References

1977 comics debuts 1996 comics endings American comics characters American comic strips Comics about women Comics characters introduced in 1977 Female characters in comics Fictional female businesspeople Gag-a-day comics {{Comic-strip-stub