Addams, Charles Samuel (07 January 1912–29 September 1988), cartoonist, was born in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Charles Huey Addams, the manager of a piano company, and Grace M. Spear. His father, who had studied to be an architect, encouraged young Charles to draw, and he did cartoons for the student paper at Westfield High School. Addams entered Colgate University in 1929 but transferred after a year to the University of Pennsylvania, which he left the following year (1931) to enroll in the Grand Central School of Art in New York, where he spent the next year (most of it, he once confessed, just “watching people” walk through Grand Central Terminal). Embarking on a career as an illustrator in 1932, Addams took a job as staff artist for a Macfadden true detective magazine, doing lettering, retouching of photographs, and diagrams of crime scenes for $15 a week. At the same time he started submitting cartoons to various magazines, selling his first in 1933. Soon thereafter, he was selling regularly enough to quit his job at Macfadden (“the last and only job I ever had,” he said) to earn his livelihood entirely as a freelance cartoonist....
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Addams, Charles Samuel (1912-1988), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
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Anderson, Carl (1865-1948), cartoonist
Dennis Wepman
Anderson, Carl (14 February 1865–04 November 1948), cartoonist, was born Carl Thomas Anderson in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Andrew Anderson, a Norwegian-born carpenter, and Mary Eid. He attended elementary school in Janesville, Wisconsin, and in Beatrice, Nebraska, but left school early to travel, supporting himself at his father's trade. A skillful workman, he patented a folding desk that was still being manufactured at the end of his life. Anderson had enjoyed drawing since his early childhood, and, as newspapers were beginning to hire artists to do pen and ink drawings, he decided to enter the field. He studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts in Philadelphia from 1892 to 1895, and from about 1894 worked as a fashion artist for the ...
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Arno, Peter (1904-1968), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Arno, Peter (08 January 1904–22 February 1968), cartoonist, was born Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., in New York City, the son of Curtis Arnoux Peters, a New York Supreme Court justice, and Edith Theresa Haynes. As scion of a prominent family, Curt (as he was called then) was sent to Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and then to Yale College, where he indulged his interest in music and art instead of preparing for the career as a banker or a lawyer that his father planned for him. He drew cartoons for the ...
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Arriola, Gustavo Montano (1917-2008), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Arriola, Gustavo Montano (17 July 1917–02 February 2008), cartoonist, was born in Florence, Arizona, the son of Aquiles Arriola, a general store owner who had come to the United States in 1894 from the hacienda of Espiritu Arriola in Hermosillo, Sonara, Mexico, and Petra Montano. The Arriolas moved in 1925 to Los Angeles, and Gus attended Manual Arts High School, where he took art courses and drew cartoons for the school newspaper. After graduating in 1935, he enrolled in an animation course and subsequently found a job with the Charles Mintz Studio. In August 1937 he went to work for MGM, starting as an inbetweener, a person who draws frames connecting action in animation, and ultimately joined the story department as a sketchman, visualizing elements of an animated cartoon as the writers talked through the plot....
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Baker, George (1915-1975), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Baker, George (22 May 1915–07 May 1975), cartoonist, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of Harry Baker, a middle-class merchant, and Mary Portman. In 1923 the family moved to Chicago, where Baker attended Roosevelt High School. After graduation he held a succession of inconsequential jobs (truck driver, cleaner and dyer assistant, salesman, clerk) before becoming assistant (c. 1935) to a commercial artist. In 1937 he applied to Disney Studios for a job, was accepted, and moved to California. He worked in the Effects Department on full-length features such as ...
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Barks, Carl (1901-2000), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Barks, Carl (27 March 1901–25 August 2000), cartoonist, was born on a wheat ranch near Merrill, Oregon, the son of William Barks, a homesteader, and Arminta Johnson Barks, a housewife. Carl attended a one-room school in the Lone Pine District and practiced drawing by copying newspaper comic-strip characters. In 1908 the family moved several times as William pursued other ventures but returned to the ranch in 1914, where Carl's mother died of cancer. At fifteen, Carl left school after finishing the eighth grade and worked for his father. In 1917 he completed some work of the Landon Correspondence School of Cartooning, and in December 1918 he moved to San Francisco, working in a print shop and trying unsuccessfully to sell cartoons to local newspapers. In 1920 he returned to the ranch and the next year married sixteen-year-old Pearl Turner; they had two daughters....
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Blake, Bud (1918-2005), cartoonist
Dennis Wepman
Blake, Bud (13 February 1918–26 December 2005), cartoonist, was born Julian Watson Blake in Nutley, New Jersey, the son of George Blake, an advertising artist, and Hazel Metcalfe, a boardinghouse operator. Julian's father, an art director at the Batten Company, later the prominent advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, was a noted illustrator responsible for many famous images, including the iconic Dutch boy in the ads for Dutch Boy Paint....
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Breger, Dave (1908-1970), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Breger, Dave (15 April 1908–16 January 1970), cartoonist, was born Irving David Breger in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Benjamin Breger, a butcher, and Sophie Passin Breger, within a few weeks of their arrival in the United States from the Ukraine. Young Breger earned his high school diploma in 1926 at Crane Technical School, where he drew cartoons signed “Irving Breger” for the school newspaper. He studied architecture at the University of Illinois but switched to medicine when he entered Northwestern University. Before graduating in 1931 with a degree in abnormal psychology, he served as editor-in-chief of the campus humor magazine, the ...
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Briggs, Clare A. (1875-1930), cartoonist
Elsa A. Nystrom
Briggs, Clare A. (05 August 1875–03 January 1930), cartoonist, was born in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, the son of William Pardee Briggs, who sold farm machinery, and Nancy Ellen Stewart. His family later moved on to Dixon, Illinois, and finally to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he studied drawing at the normal school. He had shown some talent for drawing as a boy and some of his sketches were printed in the ...
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Browne, Carl (1846–16 January 1914), political agitator, reform journalist, and organizer of "Coxey's Army"
Carlos A. Schwantes
Browne, Carl (1846–16 January 1914), political agitator, reform journalist, and organizer of "Coxey's Army", political agitator, reform journalist, and organizer of “Coxey’s Army,” was born in Springfield, Illinois. (The date and place of his birth are sometimes less reliably given as 4 July 1849 in Newton, Iowa). Browne was working as a sign painter in western Iowa in 1869 when he suddenly decided to move to California. At that time he desired more than anything else to paint a gargantuan panorama of the Yosemite Valley. He later exhibited this painting up and down the Pacific Coast, such panoramas being a popular form of folk art in the nineteenth century. One unfriendly critic observed, “As an artist Carl Browne belongs to a distinct school. In fact, he constitutes the entire school.” Browne’s response to critics was to affirm that as a young man he had apprenticed with a carriage and house painter (an experience that probably accounted for his love of huge panoramic images and garish colors such as might adorn a circus wagon)....
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Browne, Dik (1917-1989), cartoonist
Dennis Wepman
Browne, Dik (11 August 1917–04 June 1989), cartoonist, was born Richard Arthur Allan Browne in New York City, the son of William Joseph Browne, a cost accountant, and Mary Slattery, a theatrical wardrobe mistress. Browne had early dreams of being a sculptor, and after finishing high school in 1934 he enrolled in the Cooper Union art school in New York. A year later, family finances required that he get a job, and in 1936 he became a copyboy for the ...
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Buell, Marjorie Henderson (1904-1993), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Buell, Marjorie Henderson (11 December 1904–30 May 1993), cartoonist, known as “Marge,” was born Marjorie Lyman Henderson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first of the three daughters of Horace Lyman Henderson, an attorney, and Bertha Brown Henderson. Marge grew up on the 60-acre family farmstead on Hershey Mill Road in Malvern. She attended the Friends' School in West Chester and received her high school diploma from the Villa Maria Convent (or Academy) in 1921. She and her sisters drew throughout childhood, doing elaborate comic pictures for birthdays and special family events. Marge launched her commercial artistic career at the age of eight, selling drawings to her friends. While still in high school, she sold cartoons to the ...
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Bushmiller, Ernie (1905-1982), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Bushmiller, Ernie (23 August 1905–15 August 1982), cartoonist, was born Ernest Paul Bushmiller in the South Bronx, New York, the son of Ernest George Bushmiller, an artist, vaudevillian, and bartender, and Elizabeth Hall. Young Ernie quit school after completing the eighth grade and went to work as a copy boy at the ...
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Campbell, E. Simms (1906-1971), cartoonist and illustrator
Dennis Wepman
Campbell, E. Simms (02 January 1906–27 January 1971), cartoonist and illustrator, was born Elmer Simms Campbell in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Elmer Cary Campbell, a chemistry teacher and assistant principal at a St. Louis high school, and Elizabeth Simms, an elementary school teacher and amateur watercolor painter who encouraged her son's taste for art. An enthusiastic and skillful sketcher from early childhood, Campbell began his professional career at the age of eleven with a sign he drew for a local grocer and for which he skillfully negotiated the price of seventy-five cents. He graduated from his neighborhood elementary school and at the age of fourteen went to live with his aunt in Chicago, where he attended Englewood High School. Englewood was very supportive of the arts, and his editorial cartoons for the school paper, the ...
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Caniff, Milton Arthur Paul (1907-1988), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Caniff, Milton Arthur Paul (28 February 1907–03 April 1988), cartoonist, was born in Hillsboro, Ohio, the only son of John William Caniff, a printer, and Elizabeth Burton. Caniff apprenticed in the art department of the Dayton Journal while in high school, where he excelled in both art and drama courses, and he worked as an artist at the ...
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Capp, Al (1909-1979), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Capp, Al (28 September 1909–05 November 1979), cartoonist, was born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Otto Caplin, an unsuccessful salesman, and Matilda Davidson. Moving to Bridgeport and then Boston, the family lived near poverty much of the time. Young Alfred began drawing at an early age, a recreation he turned to increasingly (also reading voraciously) after the age of nine, when he lost his left leg under the wheels of a streetcar. After high school, he attended a series of art schools, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and the Designers Art School, where he met Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he married in 1932; they had three children. Tiring of the succession of art courses, Capp (the pen name he adopted as his legal name in 1949) went to New York City to seek his fortune....
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Clay, Edward Williams (19 April 1799–31 December 1857), artist and political cartoonist
Nancy R. Davison
Clay, Edward Williams (19 April 1799–31 December 1857), artist and political cartoonist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Robert Clay, a sea captain, and Eliza Williams. Clay, whose father died when he was five, was reared in the house of his grandfather, Curtis Clay, a Philadelphia merchant. Members of the Clay and Curtis families were educated, prosperous, and prominent as merchants and ministers during the eighteenth century and as bankers, lawyers, and politicians during the early nineteenth century. Clay received a liberal education, read law, and was admitted to the Philadelphia bar in 1825. His interest and training in art probably began after his mother’s brief marriage in 1814 to Joseph Anthony, a goldsmith and jeweler. Goldsmiths and silversmiths often engraved their work and engraved metal plates for printing. Although he served no known formal apprenticeship, Clay had learned the basics of engraving before he went to Europe to study art in 1825....
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Cole, John Ralph (1914-1958), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Cole, John Ralph (14 December 1914–13 August 1958), cartoonist, known as “Jack Cole,” was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, the son of DeLace Cole, a dry goods salesman and amateur song-and-dance man, and Cora Belle Cooper Cole, formerly an elementary schoolteacher. The third of six children, Jack at age fifteen enrolled in the Charles N. Landon correspondence school of cartooning, paying for it with his lunch money. Not a sedentary youth, he spent his summers during his high school years hiking and canoeing. Between his junior and senior years he bicycled to California for the 1932 Olympic Games, a 7,000-mile round trip that he described in an article he illustrated for ...
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Cranch, Christopher Pearse (1813-1892), Transcendentalist poet and artist
Walter Harding
Cranch, Christopher Pearse (08 March 1813–20 January 1892), Transcendentalist poet and artist, was born in Alexandria, District of Columbia (now Va.), the son of William Cranch, chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, and Nancy Greenleaf. He was graduated from Columbian College (now George Washington University) in 1832 and Harvard Divinity School in 1835. Cranch was never ordained, though he served as a Unitarian missionary in New England and the Midwest for a few years....
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Crane, Royston Campbell (1901-1977), cartoonist
Robert C. Harvey
Crane, Royston Campbell (22 November 1901–07 July 1977), cartoonist, was born in Abilene, Texas, and raised in Sweetwater, forty miles west, the son of Royston Crane, an attorney, and Mamie Douthit. After graduating from high school in 1918, Crane entered Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, transferring to the University of Texas at Austin the next year. In 1920 he went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he met a fellow Texan, Leslie Turner, with whom, after only six months of classes, he returned to Texas, hopping freight trains and riding the rails throughout the Southwest for a season—an adventure that Crane would recall later in his most celebrated comic strip, ...
