 As the Star Weekly 's circulation grew , so did its comics section . Cranston encouraged Frise to create a Canada @-@ themed comic strip in the vain of W. E. Hill 's Among Us Mortals , a Chicago strip which also ran in the Star . Frise protested he could not keep up with a weekly schedule but nonetheless began At the Rink , which débuted 25 January 1919 ; it became Life 's Little Comedies on 15 March . The strip proved popular and evolved by 1923 ; it had taken on the influence of John T. McCutcheon 's depictions of a fictional rural town in the American Midwest called Bird Center . Frise turned focus to humorous and nostalgic depictions of rural life and on 12 December 1925 renamed his strip Birdseye Center , whose setting he described as " any Canadian village " ; its lead characters included bowler @-@ hatted Pigskin Peters , Old Archie and his pet moose Foghorn , and lazy Eli Doolittle and his wife Ruby . The strip grew in popularity and in 1926 was voted favourite comic strip in a readers ' poll — as a write @-@ in , since the strip did not appear in the list of options . 
