Ad Carter


August Daniel Carter was an American comic strip cartoonist who created the long-running Just Kids strip. He was known as Ad Carter, the signature he used on his strips.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Carter was 11 years old when he witnessed his mother's death. She was hit by a streetcar and killed as they crossed the street, a situation which impacted him deeply and ultimately led him into the work force as a youth. Later in life, he would start the Just Kids Safety Club, which encouraged looking both ways before crossing the street, in response to his mother's tragic death. While employed as a Brooklyn Eagle reporter, he met the cartoonist Clare Briggs, who encouraged him to submit a comic strip to a syndicate. In 1916, Carter drew Our Friend Mush, a strip about a gang of kids.

''Just Kids''

In 1922, Carter was hired by William Randolph Hearst to create similar kid characters for a new strip, Just Kids. It was launched as a daily July 23, 1923, with the Sunday strip following during the next month. Later that decade, Carter began another strip, Nicodemus O'Malley, which also featured kids as the main characters. In 1950, the title of Just Kids changed to Mush Stebbins and His Sister. Comics historian Don Markstein described the Just Kids gang:

Books

The Adventures of Just Kids was published by Saalfield in 1934. Just Kids and Deep-Sea Dan was a 1940 Big Little Book published by Whitman.
An offshoot of the National Safety Council, the Just Kids Safety Club had 413,743 boys and girls as members.
Carter was married three times. With his first wife Kathleen, he had two children, a daughter Eileen and a son Wallace. With his second wife, Florence, a daughter, Hope. His third wife, Hannah Carter, worked with him on his later strips in the 1950s. Carter died in New York in 1957.