Ed Wheelan's Minute Movies began as its life as a means to poke fun at those new fangled motion pictures of the day - known at first under a slightly different moniker, Midget Movies (the name change came when Wheelan left Hearst in 1921). Minute Movies was actually an early forerunner of the adventure strip and one of the first strips, period, to incorporate continuity. Under the guidance of the esteemed director, Art Hokum, a regular stable of characters played roles in an ever changing set of movie serials captured not on celluloid, but on paper. This strip had it all at one time or another: action, comedy, melodrama...even an animated feature in the vein of the Fleischers' Out of the Inkwell cartoons. It amazes me how many panels Wheelan packs into a daily strip. Can you imagine trying to pull this off today? You'd need a microscope to read it.