The Pen Is Mightier Than Death: Believe It or Not!

Something is fascinating about taking over a comic strip created more than a century ago. You aren’t just getting a new job. You are picking up somebody else’s pen and stepping into a visual language that began long before you arrived, with generations of readers already knowing exactly how the characters are supposed to look, move and behave.

Howie Noel is doing that twice right now. He is the new cartoonist for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the syndicated feature Robert Ripley launched in 1918, making Noel the ninth cartoonist in its history. He is also the new regular artist for Dick Tracy, the detective strip Chester Gould created in 1931, working with writer Mike Curtis. That is quite a pair of inheritances for one cartoonist.

The story of Ripley’s is stranger than its age suggests. Ripley’s first panel, published in the New York Globe on December 19, 1918, was called Champs and Chumps and focused on unusual athletic feats. The concept eventually expanded into the familiar Believe It or Not! feature, turning a newspaper panel into a franchise that could outlive its creator.

Then comes the wonderful Charles Schulz connection. In 1937, 14-year-old Schulz had a drawing of his family dog Spike published in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! His father, Carl, had written to Ripley about the dog’s bizarre eating habits and included his son’s drawing. The February 22 panel became Charles Schulz’s first published drawing, years before he created Peanuts. Spike apparently had a taste for pins, tacks and razor blades, which is one heck of a way to make your first appearance in print.

Schulz eventually created one of the most recognizable comic strips in the world, but Peanuts and Ripley’s demonstrate two very different ways a creator’s work can live on. New Ripley’s panels can be created by a succession of artists, while the newspaper Peanuts strip remains the work Schulz originally drew, continuing through syndication and reprints rather than new strips created after his death.

That difference gets at what makes legacy comics so interesting. A successor artist isn’t merely drawing familiar characters. They have to understand proportions, expressions, pacing, line work and all the tiny visual decisions that make a character recognizable before the reader even sees the name. It is closer to learning someone’s handwriting than simply copying their pictures.

Noel has described his approach to Ripley’s in much the same spirit. He brings his own drawing style to the feature while incorporating elements associated with Ripley’s visual tradition, including shading, gestural inking and texture. The challenge is to make something that belongs in 2026 without making it feel disconnected from everything that came before.

That is why the real story isn’t simply that Howie Noel has taken over an old comic strip. It is what happens when a newspaper feature becomes bigger than the person who originally drew it. Robert Ripley is long gone, Chester Gould is long gone, and Charles Schulz is long gone, but the worlds they created or helped shape still occupy space on the comics page.

The artist eventually leaves. The work doesn’t necessarily have to. Somewhere, another cartoonist sits down, studies the old lines and tries to make them feel alive again.

It’s that the pen did too.

Believe it or not….