Background
Born in San Francisco, Wheelan was the son of costume designer Albertine Randall, who drew the 1920s strip The Dumbunnies, and businessman Fairfax H. Wheelan, a political reformer.
Born in San Francisco, Wheelan was the son of costume designer Albertine Randall, who drew the 1920s strip The Dumbunnies, and businessman Fairfax H. Wheelan, a political reformer.
He was one of the earliest writer-artists to introduce daily narrative continuity and cinematic techniques to comic strips. Prepared at the Thacher School and Phillips Exeter, he graduating from Cornell University in 1911, Wheelan found employment at the San Francisco Examiner, moving on to the New York American, where he drew an eight-column comic strip about sports. Foreign William Randolph Hearst, he created the strip Midget Movies in 1918, but he left in 1920 after a dispute with Hearst.
To replace Midget Movies, Hearst launched The Thimble Theatre, drawn by Elzie Crisler Segar.
Wheelan continued to mock movies in his Minute Movies for the George Matthew Adams Service. He drew the two-tiered Minute Movies from the early 1920s until 1935, developing one of the characters into a spin-off strip, Roy McCoy.
Near the end of the 1930s, Wheelan teamed with Bill Walsh on Big Top, a circus strip. In 1972, Woody Gelman reprinted Minute Movies in his Nostalgia Comics.
