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Denys Wortman’s Great Depression-Era “Funnies”
Denys Wortman (1887-1958) was one of the great comic strip page chroniclers of the Great Depression. While most well-known for the depiction of his Hooverville residents, the down-and-out Mopey Dick and the Duke, Wortman employed a rich and poignant cast of city characters, from young working women and tenement children, to organ grinders looking to make a few cents and kibitzers sitting on apartment building stoops. Titled Metropolitan Movies in its largest paper, the New York World, the panel cartoon was known as Everyday Movies in many, if not all the other newspapers it appeared in. While the setting took place in and around a city that looked a lot…