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Stanley J. Link was an influential American newspaper cartoonist.
Link's career began in earnest when, as a teenager, he pursued a correspondence course in cartooning. At sixteen, Link secured his first professional position with a Chicago-based animated cartoon company. During the early 1920s, he honed his skills as a freelancer before becoming an assistant to Sidney Smith on The Gumps, a popular comic strip. Link notably ghosted the Sunday pages of The Gumps starting in 1926, establishing his reputation in the industry.
In 1927, Stanley Link and Sidney Smith co-created Ching Chow, a daily gag cartoon that featured a stereotypical Chinese man who imparted daily aphorisms and wise sayings. The comic strip debuted on January 10, 1927, and quickly gained popularity for its pithy humor. After Smith's death in 1935, Link continued to draw Ching Chow until his own death in 1957. The series, despite its racial insensitivity by modern standards, was a mainstay in the News-Tribune group's publications for fifty years. Will Henry, Link's assistant, carried on the strip until 1971, after which it saw several revivals before its final discontinuation in 1990.
On July 23, 1933, Stanley Link launched his own comic strip, Tiny Tim. This Sunday comic revolved around the adventures of Tim and Dotty Grunt, two siblings who were only two inches tall and were adopted by a farmer and his wife. The strip ran successfully until March 2, 1958, drawing on the long-standing appeal of tales about tiny people, a genre popularized by earlier works like Palmer Cox's The Brownies and William Donahey's Teenie Weenies. Tiny Tim also inspired several comic book stories published by Western Publishing in the mid-1930s through the 1940s.
Throughout his career, Link created several companion strips, known as "toppers," for his main features. A Ching Chow companion strip to Tiny Tim ran from October 31, 1943, into the 1950s. Other toppers included Dennis the Menace (no relation to the later famous creations by Hank Ketcham or David Law), Dill and Daffy (1935-1943), and Snap Shot Sam (1931-1934). These additional strips often provided lighter, humorous interludes to complement the main comic narratives.
In addition to his other works, Stanley Link created The Dailys, a gag-a-day family comic strip that ran from January 5, 1948, until September 14, 1957. This strip showcased Link's ability to capture the humorous aspects of everyday family life, further cementing his legacy as a versatile and enduring cartoonist.
