 TCA is headquartered in Chicago, and had offices in various American cities (Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Queensbury, New York; Arlington, Texas; Santa Monica, California), the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong.Sidney Smith 's early comic strip "The Gumps" had a key role in the rise of syndication when Robert R. McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, who had both been publishing the "Chicago Tribune" since 1914, planned to launch a tabloid in New York, as comics historian Coulton Waugh explained