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[This Wikipedia entry is based on the comic strip popularized in the late sixties. If you are looking for the Wikipedia entry on super tiny soldiers from the medieval crusades, please click here. For the edible legume, please click here.]
LI'L CRUSADERS
“Li’l Crusaders” (originally, “Good ol' Crusaders”) was a syndicated comic strip written and illustrated by J.T. Barnes. (Ironically, this is not the same J.T. Barnes that serves at Northwest Christian School. This is another one. A completely different one.) After first being published in December 1968, the strip's original run extended from 1968 to 1969, continuing in reprints for some unspecified period afterward. Li’l Crusaders is among the most popular and influential strips in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it "arguably the biggest waste of newspaper space ever". At the time of the strip’s discontinuation on January 3rd, 1969, Li’l Crusaders ran in just over 3 different newspapers (4 newspapers), with a readership of roughly 2 people across 1 country. The strip has not been translated into any other languages largely due to a lack of any interest. Li’l Crusaders is popularly considered to have helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States. Following several unsuccessful conversations about turning the strip into an animated TV Christmas special over the years, nothing happened because, although they must have secretly loved the comic strip, television network executives at the time described the strip affectionately as “some dumb sophomoric attempt at humor using cheap AI” and “having read it, I wish I had all of that wasted time back”. Li’l Crusaders focuses on a social circle of ten-year-old children who attend the all-too-real Northwest Christian School in Phoenix, Arizona, a school wherein, apparently, adults exist but are rarely seen or heard. Li’l Crusaders is a literate strip with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones, which was innovative in 1960s but since has been done ad nauseam. Its humor is psychologically complex and driven by the characters' interactions with some sense that the children have religious inclinations although the spiritual statements made by the children within the strip are not what modern scholars would call “theologically correct”. Following its cancellation, all of the copies of the strip disappeared because, in the word of one comic strip historian, “no one really every cared for the strip” and “it did more to hurt the credibility of comic strips than it did to help it in any form”. However, at some point in mid-2025, copies of the strip were recovered from the bottom of a bird cage in Des Moines, Iowa. And, following lengthy and expensive negotiations with Northwest Christian School, the comic began running in the school’s weekly Crusader Clubs emails and on the website CrusaderClubs.com. Many of the school’s children have grown to love the strip and appreciate its understated and unfunny humor because, in their words, “Who taught Brown how to spell anyway?”. In fact, if you ask students at the school about the strip, they will likely remark, “I’m not really sure what you’re talking about” or “I wish Mr. Brown had never discovered AI”.
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