Willard Mullin, The Sports Cartoonist

Willard Mullin (1902-1978) is considered by many, including me, to be the best-ever American sports cartoonist. He's likely to hold that informal title for a long time because sports cartooning is essentially extinct in these days of shrunken newspapers that still manage to have huge color photos on their front pages and a correspondingly deficit of words. Oh, well ....

Mullins' New York Times obituary is here. But a more interesting link is here: besides many examples of Mullin's cartoons it includes a step-by-step set of photos showing how he worked.

Mullin apparently had little or no formal art instruction. That didn't stop him from gaining a good deal of knowledge about human and animal anatomy -- skeletal and muscular -- to be able to depict subjects both accurately or in hugely exaggerated ways. Many of his cartoons were of the exaggerated kind, but he fairly often would include a realistic portrait of a sports personality. These he usually derived from photographs using a pantograph. But he didn't slavishly trace his reference photos. Instead, as he once put it, he used the pantograph as a sketching tool.

Although he worked in other places on his way to sports fame, Mullin's best-known work was done for the New York World-Telegram evening newspaper, those cartoons usually focusing on New York City teams.

Click on the images below to enlarge.

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This shows the characters he created representing pre-1958 New York baseball teams. From left to right are New York Giants (National League), New York Yankees (American League) and Brooklyn Dodgers (National League). The Giant is a bumbling hulk, the Yankee is a coldly efficient athlete, and the Dodger is Mullins' most famous creation, the Brooklyn Bum.

Here the Brooklyn Bum discusses Willard Mullin.

A panel dealing with Yankee shortstop Phil Rizutto that combines a portrait with cartoons.

The New York Yankee infield caricatured.

I'm not sure what this is, given all the whited-over text.  The general subject seems to be baseball Spring Training.  It includes a rare (for Mullin, who usually dealt with men's sports) female.

Alden McWilliams' Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Comic Books

Alden McWilliams (1916-1993) was one of those comparatively rare comics artists of his generation who could draw people convincingly. I wrote about his work on the Twin Earths comic strip here. Some biographical information can be found here and here.

One of McWilliams' projects was creating content for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet comic books. For detailed information about those comic books, click here.

McWilliams did cover art for eleven of those comic books, but interior art for only the first three. Those were issued February, May and August of 1952, which suggests that he did his work from the late summer of 1951 into the winter of 1952 (considering production lead-times). His Twin Earths daily comic strip debuted 16 June 1952, so he probably began working on it no later than early April of that year. Therefore, if there was any overlap for those projects aside from creating covers, it was minimal, so McWilliams could maintain the high quality of his work.  A strong possibility is that he chose to drop doing Space Cadet interior content when he got the Twin Earths gig: otherwise, he might have contunued Space Cadet.

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet started as a television show that began airing in 1950 and later bounced around several TV networks. This meant that the comic books had to portray the characters as personified by the show's actors. That is, McWilliams was doing portrait art as part of comic book art.

Below are some scans I made of the second and third issues of the comic book. They include the cover, one interior colored page and one page without color (the latter was always on the inside cover). Click on the images to enlarge.

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Inside cover of the August 1952 issue. It shows the leading cast members of the TV show who McWilliams had to depict convincingly in the comic books to satisfy fans.

Cover of the May 1952 issue.

Color page from May 1952.

Black & white page from May 1952.

Cover of August 1952 issue.

August 1952 color page.

Black & white page, August 1952.

Otto Soglow: From The New Masses to The Little King

Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was a successful comic strip cartoonist. His Little King character first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1930 and became a Hearst Sunday strip in 1934. Thereafter, it ran for more than 40 years until Soglow died.

His Wikipedia entry is here, but it's brief. A much more comprehensive survey of his career can be found here.

Soglow received some of his art training from John Sloan who, among other things, was involved in leftist politics, and helped Soglow get some cartoons published in The Liberator. Soglow also contributed work to The New Masses.

Around the same time he was contributing to The New Masses, Soglow began having cartoons published in The New Yorker, a brand-new magazine intended for sophisticates in that city and elsewhere. Also at this time his style was evolving from the Sloan-Masses-Ashcan style to highly simplified Moderne. His Little King retained that style over its 45-year overall existence.

It was an interesting transformation Soglow made -- from socialist content to taking William Randolph Hearst's shilling and drawing a royal cartoon character.

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A New Masses cartoon from 1926. The caption is "Iss diss a system?"

Poster for a 1932 New Masses ball. Its style is now Moderne, like his Little King cartoons.

A color panel. The Little King was always dressed in red. His personality was such that he didn't take kinship seriously and always did playful things.

His new royal portrait.

More playfulness.

George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates Background Detailing

American newspaper comic strips were greatly reduced in size decades ago and their content was reduced to various kinds of humor. Gone were the plot-continuity strips occupying a half or even a full page such as were found in 1930s Sunday papers.

One such strip was Terry and the Pirates, an adventure series taking place in China. When World War 2 came along, it evolved into a military-themed strip. By late 1946 Milton Caniff, its creator, had tired of the distribution syndicate's control and moved on to create an Air Force themed adventure strip.

Due to its popularity, Terry was continued by another artist, George S. Wunder (1912-1987) -- Wikipedia entry here. Wunder has been criticized, with some justification, for his treatment of faces. But what interests me here is the degree of background detailing found in his version of Terry, a carryover from strips of the 1930s and still common into the 1950s. That is, Wunder ranked up there with other cartoonists whose strips still went well beyond containing mostly faces and dialog balloons.

Background settings require a lot of extra work for the cartoonist who was under pressure to maintain about a six-week backlog to allow for production and distribution to newspapers carrying the strip (and for times when the artist was ill or otherwise not productive). The link to Wunder mentions that he took on an assistant in 1962, implying he did it all before that time (and stating that he continued to do the Sunday strips alone). A rational division of labor would be for the main artist to deal with the characters and leave backgrounds and other detailing to assistants.

Below are some examples of Wunder's Terry and the Pirates from his first five years on the job. Click on the images to enlarge.

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October 27, 1947
A daily panel featuring Terry, Pat Ryan, Hotshot Charlie and slang-talking Chopstick Joe who is always on the lookout for making money.

June 22, 1947
Now for some Sunday strips...

July 13, 1947

May 1, 1949

July 31, 1949

September 22, 1951
This seems to be original art -- note how the title and artist's name are attached to provide consistent branding over time.

J. Carlos: Jazz Age Brazilian Illustrator

Brazilian illustrator José Carlos de Brito e Cunha (1884-1950) shortened his name to J. Carlos for cartooning and other professional purposes. His English language Wikipedia entry (here) is brief, but the Portuguese entry covers almost exactly the same ground. The message is that he was both versatile and prolific.

I'll add that he also was very, very good.

This post features some of his covers for the weekly magazine Para Todos, which another brief reference holds that he owned and edited for much of its 1920s existence. The title's literal translation is "For All" though perhaps a better, looser version would be "Everybody's" -- also the name of an American magazine published 1899-1929.

All the Para Todos covers I found on the Internet were done by Carlos. But given their quality and on occasion elaborate nature, I almost can't believe that he was able to create a cover every week in addition to his other activities.

Here is a sampling:

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Richard D. Taylor, Big-Eye Cartoonist

It seems that most successful cartoonists settle into a distinctive style and stick with it. Consider it a trademark, form of branding.

Richard Denison Taylor (1902-1970), a Canadian who moved to New York City in 1935 and built a career at The New Yorker and, later, other publications such as Playboy, drew his subjects as having large, oval eyes. Moreover, those ovals were oriented so that they were taller than they were wide. And the pupils of those eyes were usually very large and light-colored (dark brown eyes wouldn't work well under Taylor's conditions).

There isn't much biographical information about Taylor on the Internet, this source being perhaps the best. Examples of his Toronto work are here.

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Lewis Baumer: Cartoonist and All-Rounder

Lewis Baumer (1870-1963) made his career as a cartoonist and book illustrator, but like some of his English contemporaries (I'm thinking of you, Heath Robinson), he was capable of a lot more. That was because he was trained at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal College of Art, among other places. Biographical information on him can be found here and here.

I'm not sure that Baumer had the right stuff to succeed doing fine arts painting, and perhaps he came to a similar conclusion. At any rate as early as 1893 his illustrations began appearing in the Pall Mall Gazette, and by 1897 was in Punch, England's leading humor periodical. Besides magazine work, he also illustrated many books -- a list is in the first link, above. By the 1920s, he was doing some portrait painting on the side.

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The Paralysing Fascination of The Latest Step - Punch Almanack - 1922
A cartoon from before the era of the strong punchline.

Etching
Baumer was also an etcher of some skill.

Illustration

The Little Model

Eileen - ca. 1925

Girl in a Red Coat - 1927
This is the largest image I could find.

Noel Streatfeild - ca. 1926
I like this portrait a lot, though can't quite explain why.

Raeburn van Buren: Second-Echelon Cartoonist

Raeburn van Buren (1891-1987) was an illustrator / cartoonist active as a freelancer in the 1920s and 30s until he found steady work drawing the "Abbie an' Slats" comic strip in 1937. As an illustrator, he lacked the skills of the likes of Henry Patrick Raleigh or Frederic Rodrigo (F.R.) Gruger. Nevertheless, his work appeared in major publications such as the Saturday Evening Post as well as elsewhere.

His Wikipedia entry is here and another biography is here. Van Buren was actively cartooning until 1971 and lived to be 96.

I include posts about lesser artists here because, in part, their work helps to put in context that of the best artists. A feeling for their times is also enhanced by being exposed to their interpretations. Van Buren might best be characterized as a journeyman, given the large number of highly talented illustrators active in the 1920s and into the 1950s.

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Football stadium scene - 1920s

Story illustration - 1928

Artist and model

"A blind date about to happen" - 1933

"Deep sea fishing"

"Idols"
For non- English-speaking readers, here we have a religious idol and a movie "idol."

"Is there anything else you wish?" - 1933

"Planning Their Summer"