(From the preface.)
"People were not meant to be hurt."
Those seven words describe Franklin Folger's feelings toward his fellow men, or to be more exact and relevant to this book, toward the ladies he draws. And that's why, by reviewing their absurdities not with scorn but with gentle humor, Folger has made The Girls so delightful, engaging and winsome. You may shake your head over the naivete of the real-life counterparts of Folger's ladies but it's hard not to chuckle over the often subtle twist of their artless simplicity into downright cleverness, even wisdom.
Before he conceived the idea of The Girls, Franklin Folger had prepared for his career by studying painting, commercial art and cartooning at the Cincinnati Art Academy. He was a successful free-lance illustrator and cartoonist and even now, in addition to his six-a-week cartoon of The Girls, he draws and sells a dozen or so cartoons a week. Cartooning is his vocation, his avocation, and he has no other hobby.
Folger's gentle cartoons about his ladies are distributed by the Sun-Times—Daily News Syndicate and appear in over a hundred newspapers. His fan mail takes almost as much time as his cartooning. We hope this collection, the second in book form, will please his old fans and make many new ones.
Doubleday published seven collections of Folger's Girls cartoons over a decade, 1961-71. Folger's "Girls" were middle-class housewives before the women's movement, who took home-ec and had high school diplomas: Lucy Ricardo, June Cleaver, earnest and wide-eyed. Women who wanted careers were expected not to marry.
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