Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986)[2] was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake.

Big Chief Wahoo (later renamed Steve Roper and Mike Nomad) was popular in its day, a witty romp with puns, slapstick and satire.

"[4] It was his serious dramas or "open-ended novels"[4] Steve Roper, Mary Worth, and Kerry Drake that showed his mature talents and reflected himself and his views on the human condition.

Roper, like Saunders, was a journalist who was decent, knew French, smoked a pipe, had run his college newspaper (and almost flunked physics) and faced tough challenges.

One of his major contributions was to merge the two as Roper, Nomad, and Drake increasingly dealt with emotional conflicts in their personal lives and faced hard moral dilemmas.

[8] Narrating conflicts in a range of social issues (drugs, the sexes, divorce, job loss, the youth scene and counterculture, prejudice, and of course crime, to name just a few), Saunders wrote tight, fast-moving stories with plot twists and dramatic tension lightened by droll predicaments.

He was known for "sophisticated scripts with literate dialogue",[9] with almost twice as much said (and happening) per daily strip as in the post-1979 versions, and under him, even Nomad (later treated as slow-witted and speaking in grawlixes) was a sharp, shrewd character who was articulate in three languages.

[8] His scripts were interpreted and fleshed out by talented realist artists (Ernst in Mary Worth, Pete Hoffman and then William Overgard in Steve Roper, Alfred Andriola and his ghosts in Kerry Drake) who made the characters and settings both attractive and believable.

Eight years later, Elmer Woggon (a friend at the rival Toledo Blade) proposed a comic strip for Publishers Syndicate, The Great Gusto, which he would draw if Saunders did the writing.

The result was a new kind of continuity strip patterned on women's magazine stories of the time, as Mary met people with interesting lives and dispensed her advice when their problems reached a critical point.

Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, the enduring continuation of his first strip, finally came to an end on December 26, 2004, while Mary Worth still appears under Karen Moy and Joe Giella.