Cartoonist Chic Young had a knack for drawing pretty girls, and from the early 1920s on, he found himself drawing comic strips about them. However, it wasnt until he put an apron on one of his paper dolls that he was able to parlay this ability into a personal fortune, an empire, and then a dynasty. That all began in 1930 when Young created Blondie.

Murat Bernard Young grew up in St. Louis, but after graduating from high school, he returned to his native Chicago where he worked as a stenographer while attending night classes at the Art Institute. Late in 1921, he heard that the Newspaper Enterprises Association (NEA) was looking for someone to draw a comic strip about a pretty girl, so he went to Cleveland. The Affairs of Jane was th...