Elmer Woggon

Elmer Woggon (November 4, 1898 – April 1978), who signed his art Wog, was the creator of an early newspaper comic strip that eventually developed into the long-running Steve Roper and Mike Nomad.

Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Woggon was interested as a child in American Indians. Developing his drawing skills through the Federal School cartoon correspondence course, he got a job at the Toledo Blade as cartoonist, commercial artist and eventually art editor. With the American public's fascination after World War I with airplanes and daring aviators, in 1929 he tried an aviation-themed comic strip called Skylark. It failed "because its creator had never been in a plane".

Woggon then tried a gag strip, encouraged by Publishers Syndicate (later Publishers-Hall Syndicate) to base it on a comical "windbag" (Waugh). He drafted samples he titled The Great Gusto, featuring opportunistic medicine-show impresario J. Mortimer Gusto (Saunders, ibid), and in 1935 he enlisted as his writer Allen Saunders, a reporter at the rival News-Bee across the street. But their proposal and advance publicity were not accepted until they took the syndicate's advice to focus instead on Gusto's "cute" Indian sidekick, Chief Wahoo. This character, with his diminutive stature and 10-gallon hat, had little resemblance to the Cleveland Indians' mascot Chief Wahoo dating from 1946, but Dowd and others have assumed the mascot came from the comic character.

At last syndicated,Big Chief Wahoo took off in the newspapers on November 23, 1936, opening with Wahoo receiving a letter from his girlfriend Minnie Ha-Cha in New York and rushing to her. On the way (six days into the strip), he encountered Gusto, who now played second fiddle to Wahoo. The strip quickly became a hit, adding features such as reader-submitted "Indian slango" (e.g., credit = 'trustum-bustum') and spinning off products such as Wahoo chewing gum, coloring books and paper dolls. In fact, according to Saunders (ibid), their "sawed-off Seminole" (Wahoo was actually from the Southwest, not Florida) almost got into animated cartoons. The authors soon left their newspaper jobs as full-time authors of Big Chief Wahoo, taking a studio in downtown Toledo, and both joined the National Cartoonists Society.

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