Toonerville Folks

Toonerville Folks, also known as The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All the Trains, was an American newspaper comic strip feature by Fontaine Fox. It ran from 1908 to 1955, beginning in the Chicago Post, and by 1913 it was syndicated nationally by the Wheeler Syndicate; from the 1930s it was distributed by the McNaught Syndicate. The feature was a single-panel gag cartoon, with longer-form comics on Sundays, offering a daily look at the fictional suburb of Toonerville. At its center was a rickety little trolley driven in a frenzy by a grizzled old Skipper to meet each commuter train, and its cast included Suitcase Simpson, Mickey McGuire, the Powerful Katrinka and Aunt Eppie Hogg. The feature spread beyond the newspaper page: Fox scripted 17 silent comedy shorts between 1920 and 1922, Mickey Rooney starred as Mickey McGuire in more than 55 comedy shorts filmed between 1927 and 1936, Van Beuren Studios produced three Toonerville cartoons in 1936, and comic book reprints appeared between 1934 and 1940. The strip was one of 20 chosen for the 1995 Comic Strip Classics commemorative postage stamps of the United States, and communities in four states were named after it.