Andy Gump Statue
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
Andy Gump was the lead character in a Chicago Tribune comic strip that was popular long before you, or your parents, and possibly even your grandparents, were born. Its creator, Sidney Smith, lived in this upscale town, and the Tribune was so pleased with the success of his strip (and the circulation dollars that it brought in) that they had a statue made of Gump and placed it on Smith's property. When Smith died in 1935, the town, for some reason, moved it into a downtown park.
The statue was reportedly "smashed to smithereens" in a drunken riot in 1967, which normally would have been the end of a statue to a comic strip character that had been out of print for nearly a decade (Tipster Phillip Ginder notes that "While the creator of The Gumps did die in 1935, the strip was continued by another artist until 1959."). But the town rallied to the defense of its 2-D celebrity and built a new Andy Gump statue, which is the one that's now on display.