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H.L. Drucklieb’s Fabulous Illustrations and Enigmatic Life
As these things sometimes go, I was gobsmacked. I ran across these two marvelous little ink and watercolor illustrations on eBay 20-some years ago. The drawings are a skootch over two inches square each, but pack a big punch, with lovely and delicate line work and color throughout. Only one of the two illustrations was signed, and it took me a while to figure out that the artist was someone named H.L. Drucklieb. I fancy myself a pretty good lay-historian of the comic and illustration arts, but Drucklieb was not someone I was familiar with. After a couple of decades of on-and-off research into the life and work of H.L.…
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Bully For Edwina Dumm!
Edwina Dumm (1893-1990) remains one of the great unheralded ink-slingers of the 20th century. Edwina, as she signed her work, was doing some of the most beautiful drawings found on the comic strip page from the early 1920s through the 1930s. The line quality found in her Cap Stubbs comic strip was full of thick and thin bounciness, which helped convey the wonderful action in her strips. In addition to the quality of the line work was Edwina’s wonderful figure drawings. It didn’t matter if they were humans or animals. Edwina’s figures moved effortlessly in an animated fashion, combining a beautiful sense of realistic movement in comic strip bodies. So…
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George Clark’s WWII Neighbors
I’ve written about George Clark’s wonderful artwork previously, in my long-defunct Inkmunk blog. Clark remains one of the great cartoonists of the mid-20th century. He also remains a woefully underrated great cartoonist. There are a host of reasons why an artist falls into the underrated category. In short, Clark’s two main daily features, Side Glances (1928-1939) and The Neighbors (1939-1974), did not have reoccurring characters, which can result in less of a connection with the audience who never has a chance to develop an ongoing relationship with any specific characters. We’ve seen a similar situation with TAD Dorgan’s Indoor Sports and Outdoor Sports panels, as well as many of Clare…
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The Laughing Brush of Stuart Hay
One of the most wonderful cartoonist-illustrators that you have never heard of is Stuart Hay, referred to by Ernest Watson in his 1946 book, Forty Illustrators and How They Work, as the “Artist of the laughing brush”. By the 1930s and 40s, Hay did indeed employ a brush line filled with a great deal of joie de vivre, but it took him years, and some interesting changes of direction, to get to that brush filled with laughter. Stuart Hay was born in Sewickly, Pennsylvania in 1889 and studied art at the Cleveland School of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and the National Academy of Design. Additionally, Hay…
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Roughing It With Bud Blake
I grew up in central New Jersey. Kendall Park to be exact. Our circle of family friends were largely transplanted New York Jews from Brooklyn and the Bronx. This was a vibrant group of opinionated story and joke tellers who could laugh and argue with the best of them. Many, if not most of the circle of friends, were natural performers for whom the spotlight was never bright or large enough. Some of them, including my father, appeared in amateur stage productions over the years, but most of those took place before I was cognizant of what was going on. But what I was aware of were the productions that…
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Denys Wortman’s Great Depression-Era “Funnies”
Denys Wortman (1887-1958) was one of the great comic strip page chroniclers of the Great Depression. While most well-known for the depiction of his Hooverville residents, the down-and-out Mopey Dick and the Duke, Wortman employed a rich and poignant cast of city characters, from young working women and tenement children, to organ grinders looking to make a few cents and kibitzers sitting on apartment building stoops. Titled Metropolitan Movies in its largest paper, the New York World, the panel cartoon was known as Everyday Movies in many, if not all the other newspapers it appeared in. While the setting took place in and around a city that looked a lot…
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H.G. Peter: From Judge to Wonder
Harry George (H.G.) Peter (1880 – 1958) is most well-known for bringing William Moulton Marston’s superhero Wonder Woman to life in October 1941. For the 61-year-old Peter, this was a great stepping stone so late in his career, and he stayed with the super Amazonian for the next two decades, until his passing in 1958. When you look H.G. Peter up on Wikipedia, you’re presented with some good information about his career, from his early days working for the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Bulletin, to the magazine work done for Judge and other magazine. But the description of Peter’s actual drawing is rather odd. Peter’s early work is…
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The Mad Inklings of Troy Nixey
I first ran across Troy Nixey’s artwork on Facebook, likely because he was a friend of a Facebook friend and his work appeared on that friend’s page. Whatever the case, thank goodness for social media (though fewer people are saying that these days) because it introduced me to the work of a modern ink-slinging master. Troy had a Big Cartel page at the time and would sporadically offer up ink gems for sale. The subject matter varied, from monsters and guys with lightbulbs atop their heads, to assorted thugs and the great Lobster Johnson. The thing that remained consistent was the beautiful, lush, textured inking that Troy brings to his…
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The Action-Packed Stop-Motion of T.S. Sullivant
Much has been written about T.S. Sullivant’s wonderful work over the years, so I’ll try not to rehash what’s been written previously, but for those new to Sullivant’s work, 1) I envy your first-time exposure to his incredible drawings, and 2) I’ll present the briefest of biographical blurbs. Thomas Starling Sullivant (1854–1926) was born in Columbus, Ohio and raised partially in Germany. When Sullivant was 18, he moved from Columbus to Europe for a few years, eventually moving back to the States, where he studied with the famous painter and teacher Thomas Eakins, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. At 32, Sullivant was a late entrant…
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The Visual Verve and Vibrancy of Bud Blake and Tiger
The Home News was the newspaper in central New Jersey that my family subscribed to when I was a kid. It’s where I was introduced to the weirdness of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, the trials and tribulations of Harry Hanan’s Louie, and the beautifully drawn, sweetly humored Tiger by Bud Blake. Growing up, Tiger was comfortably familiar to me. Blake’s gags revolved around everyday kid stuff. The strip didn’t have the psychological weight of Peanuts. There wasn’t a ton of depth to the cast of characters. We knew that Punkinhead could be a nudge, Hugo liked to eat, and Julius was a bookish type. Tiger himself was sort of his strip’s…