Wallace Carlson

Some time after the newspaper folded, Carlson created his first animated cartoon, Joe Boko Breaking Into the Big League (1914) completely on his own, the same year as Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur.

The success of this short gained the attention of the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, who engaged Carlson to create a series, Canimated Nooz Pictorials, that was combined into their newsreels.

At first the character Joe Boko continued from the older subject, but shortly Carlson introduced Dreamy Dud, a winsome lad whose daydreams gets him into various troublesome situations.

[2] When Carlson introduced the Us Fellers series at Bray in 1919, it provided him the opportunity to bring back Dreamy Dud, who was the main focus of these subjects.

Nevertheless, Carlson belongs to the first generation of American animators and his work retains considerable interest in its close visual relationship to comic strip art and imaginative flights of fancy, particularly in the Dreamy Dud series.