Chester Gould pre-Dick Tracy; Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson and Star Wars; the wonderful art of Bud Blake; Drowsy Dick awakes years before Little Nemo.
[Chester Gould’s] first newspaper job was at the Tulsa Democrat, the forerunner of the Tribune, within weeks of his 1919 high school graduation.
That job entailed drawing cartoons in a campaign against a proposed $5 million bond issue to develop Spavinaw Lake as Tulsa’s water source. The Democrat’s owner-publisher, Charles Page, was promoting Shell Creek near Sand Springs to be the city’s water source.
Gould’s cartoons ran on the Democrat’s front page daily for six weeks but failed to sway voters, who approved the Spavinaw option, which was backed by the Tulsa World.
Gould spent two years at A & M before going to Chicago, where he worked at various times for each of the city’s five newspapers while attending Northwestern University and an art institute.
For 10 years, he sent comic strips and cartoons to Joseph Patterson, the publisher of the New York News, and for 10 years received rejection slips.
The Tulsa World goes way back in its archives to December 2006 to re-present an article about the successful Sooner cartoonist from Chester Gould‘s early years to Dick Tracy‘s early years.
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A long time ago (1982) in a land across the waters Marvel U.K. editor Paul Neary interviewed Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson about their Star Wars comic strip and their adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back for comic books.
Then a few years ago Pete Doree posted the three pages on Twitter. hat tip to Mark Newbold for the notification
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Regular and irregular readers of my Ink-Slingers blog will know that Bud Blake is one of my favorite cartoonists. To recap: I grew up reading Tiger in the Home News newspaper in central New Jersey. The strip resonated with me, more for the gags than the drawing when I was a young ‘un. But as I’ve studied the strip over the past few decades, I’ve come to see Bud as a visual magician, making the difficult look easy and effortless.
It’s always a pleasure to read Rob Stolzer admiring Bud Blake. His most recent appreciation is no exception.
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Charles Reese’s Drowsy Dick awoke from his dreams three years before Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo.
Image from Wikipedia Commons which in turn got it from Origins of the Sunday Comics.
A series of Chester Gould’s cartoons attacking Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore in the 1920 election were widely circulated in the state. For anyone interested in Gould, I collected them here: https://bergetoons.blogspot.com/2020/07/political-cartoons-by-chet-gould.html
(And since writing that post, I’ve learned that while the Gateway to Oklahoma History doesn’t have the Tulsa Tribune, newspapers.com does.)
Dick Locher is still drawing Dick Tracy just for the Tulsa newspaper?
Paul, thanks for the link.
As stated it is from The Tulsa World archives of December 2006.
Many thanks for the plug, D.D. It’s much appreciated.