Short Biographies of some of the Artists:


Rudolph Dirks

Rudolph Dirks was born in Germany. At the age of seven, he moved with his parents to Chicago. By 1894, he was already selling his comics to Judge and Life magazine. He was employed by the New York Journal in 1897. His editor asked him to create a strip that could compete with the popularity of 'The Yellow Kid' by Outcault, which was published in a rival newspaper, The New York World. Dirks came up with 'The Katzenjammer Kids'. In 1912, when he wanted to go to Europe to devote himself to painting, his strip was taken from him. After a famous court battle, he regained the right to draw his characters, but the use of the title remained the sole right of the newspaper. This battle became a precedent for many cartoonists in trouble with their newspaper or syndicate.

Dirks then resumed the strip under the title of 'Hans und Fritz' (later: 'The Captain and the Kids'), which he drew for The New York World. He retired in 1958, leaving the strip to his son John. 'The Katzenjammer Kids' in the New York Journal was assigned to Harold H. Knerr, and often imitated and plagiarized since. Dirks died in 1968, at 91 years of age.


Tad Dorgan

When he was thirteen years old, Thomas Aloysius Dorgan lost the last three fingers of his right hand in an accident with a factory machine. While recuperating, he drew a lot of cartoons as manual therapy. A year later, he found himself a job as staff artist on the San Francisco Bulletin. In 1902, he was employed by the prestigious San Francisco Chronicle, where he created his first weekly comic strip, 'Johnny Wise'. He was hired away by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and put to work at the New York Journal as a sports cartoonist.

Soon he was loved by the public, not only for his sports features, but also for his prose (he wrote a column called 'Daffydills') and his cartoon gags about dogs, of which 'Judge Rummy' was the best known. Eventually, the dog comics ran under the title of 'Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit', accompanied by a one-panel gag series called 'Indoor Sports'. Due to ill health, Dorgan had to retire in the early 1920s. He died of a relatively minor case of pneumonia in 1929.


Bud Fisher

Harry Conway Fisher, who drew the world-famous 'Mutt and Jeff' strip as "Bud" Fisher, was born in Chicago. In 1905, he left in his third year at the University of Chicago to take a job as a triple-treat cartoonist (theater, sports and general news) at the San Francisco Chronicle. He persuaded the sports editor to let him draw a page-wide daily comic strip, in imitation of Clare Briggs' 'A. Piker Clerk', called 'A. Mutt', dealing with a chronic horseplayer's wins and losses. A Sunday page was added around the time the strip got its permanent title, 'Mutt and Jeff'.

In 1915, Bud Fisher wanted greener pastures, and took the strip to the Wheeler Syndicate, where he received 1,000 dollars a week for six strips. By 1921, he was well on his way to making a top salary of 4,600 dollars a week. By this time, he grew more and more interested in racehorses, and less interested in the daily mechanics of drawing Mutt and Jeff. He hired Billy Liverpool to do most of the artwork. Aside from his apparent loss of interest in the strip after 1934, Fisher continued to enjoy life, managing to squander most of the wealth 'Mutt and Jeff' had made him before he died on 7 September, 1954.


Rube Goldberg

Reuben Lucius Goldberg studied at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduating in 1904, he started working as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1907 he moved to New York after selling his Sunday half-page strip 'Mike and Ike'. This comic didn't generated much response. With a lot of effort, Rube Goldberg eventually landed a job at the New York Evening Mail. Apart from drawing comics, he also took a shot at vaudeville, becoming a stand-up comedian and fortune-teller in 1911.

Goldberg's sports cartoons kept growing in popularity, and in 1915 he was assigned to create a Sunday strip which was called 'Boob McNutt'. After that he re-launched his 'Mike and Ike' characters, this time with success.

In 1928, Rube Goldberg started his first (and probably best) daily strip, 'Bobo Baxter', which ran until 1930. In 1934 he created 'Doc Wright', about a doctor and his patients. In 1936 'Lala Palooza' was launched, but was not successful - and it ended in 1939.

Rube Goldberg was at his best and wackiest when he made his miscellany pages, such as 'Rube Goldberg's Sideshow', his last strip effort in 1939. Especially memorable were his creations of intricate and absurd inventions. He then focused on his editorial cartoons, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1945 he co-founded the National Cartoonists' Society, becoming its first president. Goldberg died in 1970.


George Herriman

George Herriman was born in New Orleans in 1880, and moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1886. Against the wishes of his father, who was a baker, George pursued an artistic career and sold his first drawings to the Los Angeles Herald when he was seventeen years old. By 1900, he has contributed numerous humorous illustrations to magazines like Judge, Life and the New York News. A year later, he was employed by the New York World, and George Herriman created his first comics in 1902: 'Musical Moose', 'Professor Otto and his Auto', 'Acrobatic Archie', 'Two Jolly Jackies', 'Lariat Pete' and 'He Got His Man' all appeared in the years to follow, while Herriman was also anonymously assisting Tad Dorgan in the New York Journal.

From 1905, Herriman created several Sunday comics, such as 'Bud Smith', 'Major Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade', 'Bruno and Pietro', 'Grandma's Girl', 'Handy andy', 'Rosy-Posy Mama's Girl', 'Alexander the Cat' and 'Butch Smith, the Boy who Does Stunts'. For The New York Journal, in 1907, he made 'Baron Mooch', 'Mary's Home from College' and 'Gooseberry Sprig'. In June 1910, Herriman came up with one of his best known comics, 'The Dingbat Family', later renamed 'The Family Upstairs'. As the series developed, Herriman introduced a "sideshow" underneath the main page featuring a cat and a mouse. These two animals eventually grew into Herriman's most famous work, 'Krazy Kat', a comic that is generally held as one of the best comics ever made. Because of this peculiar beginning, Krazy Kat's exact birthdate cannot be easily pinned down. What's certain is that the first real Krazy Kat comic is published in 1913. It is quite surrealistic and poetic for its use of New York slang

Other comics by George Herriman are 'Baron Bean' (1916), 'Now Listen, Mabel' (1919), 'Stumble Inn' (1922), 'Us Husbands' (1926) and 'Mistakes Will Happen' (1926). He also produced a series of comic illustrations called 'Embarrassing Moments' (later: 'Bernie Burns'), and was an assistant of Bud Fisher on 'Mutt and Jeff'. George Herriman continued 'Krazy Kat' until his death in April, 1944.


George McManus

George McManus was born of Irish parents in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1884. He dropped out of school at age fifteen and started working at the Saint Louis Republic. This newspaper published his first comic, 'Alma and Oliver'. In 1904, after winning some money, he moved to New York and was employed by the New York World. For this journal, he worked on several running stories, such as 'Snoozer', 'The Merry Marcelene', 'Panhandle Pete', 'Ready Money Ladies', 'Let George Do It', 'Cheerful Charlie' and 'Nibsby the Newsboy in Funny Fairyland' (which shows some similarities to 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' by Winsor McCay).

In 1904, McManus created 'The Newlyweds', about an elegant young couple and their baby. This series became quite popular and caused rival newspaper The New York American to invite McManus to work for them, which he did from 1912 on. He continued 'The Newlyweds', now renamed 'Their Only Child', and started up several other daily comics, like 'Rosie's Beau', 'Love Affairs of a Mutton Head', 'Spareribs and Gravy' and the famous 'Bringing Up Father'. This comic about a couple named Jiggs and Maggie, inspired several movies - in four of them, McManus played the role of Jiggs.

George McManus has influenced a great number of artists, including Hergé and Joost Swarte. With his subtle but relentless humor, he described American society, ridiculing its insatiable desire for luxury and its egotism.


Tom McNamara

Tom McNamara drew comics for such National comic books as New Fun and Buzzy. He illustrated stories like 'After School' and 'Alix in Follyland'. He also did the Sunday pages of 'Teddy Jack and Tommy' and 'On Our Block' in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Tom McNamara has done artwork for humorous cigarette pins, that were given away with packs of cigarettes in the 1910s throughout the 1930s.


Gus Mager

The son of German immigrants, Charles Augustus "Gus" Mager was inspired by the old-world comics sent to his parents by European relatives. At the age of twenty, he had already sold a number of sport cartoons to several newspapers. Drawing humorous animals, his gags soon appeared as a daily, with the title 'In Jungle Land' (or sometimes, 'In Jungle Society'). In 1904, the first of his 'Monk' strips appeared: 'Knocko the Monk', featuring monkey-like characters. Due to its popularity, Mager kept adding fresh figures such as 'Rhymo the Monk', 'Henpecko the Monk', 'Groucho the Monk', and eventually the immensely successful 'Sherlocko the Monk'.

In 1913, he moved to the New York World, where he created 'Hawkshaw the Detective', a humanized version of Sherlocko. In the 1920s he was an assistant to Rudolph Dirks on his 'Captain and the Kids' feature. Mager worked on 'Sherlocko' until his retirement in the late 1940s. Other comics by Mager were 'And then Papa came' (1904), 'Hawkshaw the Detective' (1913-1947), 'Obliging Otto' (1913), and 'Millionbucks' (1913).


Charles M. Payne

Charles M. Payne started his career in 1896, working for the Pittsburgh Post newspaper. His first comic strip was called 'Coon Hollow Folks', followed by titles such as 'Bear Creek Folks', 'Scary William' and 'Yennie Yonson'. After gaining much popularity in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia newspapers, he moved to Hollywood, where he created 'Honeybunch's Hubby', for the New York World. In 1910, he came up with the idea for a new strip, 'S'Matter, Pop?', which ran for 30 years. In spite of the fame and riches this strip brought him, Payne eventually died a poor man, in 1964.


T. E. Powers

T. E. Powers was an early American newspaper comic artists. He drew for the papers of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and was one of his favorite artists, although to others Powers was only a mediocre artist who used a bland kind of slapstick humor. He drew 'Our Moving Pictures' around 1910, and later created 'Mike and Mike'. He also drew a comment on fellow artist George Herriman, speculating on how he invented the famous 'Krazy Kat' comic. T.E. Powers also did political illustrations for the Political Round-Up column in Hearst's Magazine, July - Dec 1913.




An Additional History of Comic Artists that were also Cigar Smokers.

In a time before anyone thought of social history, the comics were doing social history, sort of inadvertently. In the early comics, the resonance of what was going on is so strong--just look at 'The Katzenjammer Kids,' for example, with the whole immigrant experience.

Indeed, Rudolph Dirks, the young German-born cartoonist who created "The Katzenjammer Kids," produced a strip that resembled a classic German cartoon picture book--Max und Moritz by Wilhelm Busch--and filled it with German dialect-speaking characters and raucous jokes. European immigrants were then a major bloc of the American urban population, and many of them learned English by scanning the newspapers. It made sense to have cartoons that would attract them, as well as other readers. Hans and Fritz did that in droves.

So popular were the Sunday comics sections that daily comic strips soon appeared. The first was drawn by Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher, a self-assured, cigar-smoking Chicagoan who was doing sports cartoons for the San Francisco Chronicle when he decided to draw a daily strip about Augustus Mutt, a woebegone horse player. On November 15, 1907, Mutt, contentedly puffing on a cigar, began his forever fruitless quest for a killing at the racetrack. Within six months he had met top-hatted Jeff (short for Jeffries; in 1908, the upcoming James Jeffries-Jack Johnson prizefight was all over the sports pages). Together their names became a synonym for any pairing of the long and the short; their success prompted other daily comic strips to follow in their wake.

The sports pages of the San Francisco papers were also the professional spawning ground of two cigar-smoking cartoonists whose impact on our language was more far-reaching and profound than Fisher's: Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, who signed his drawings "Tad," and Rube Goldberg.

Dorgan was born in San Francisco in 1877 and joined the art staff of the old San Francisco Bulletin at 14. By 1902 he was the top sports cartoonist for the New York Journal, as well as an incisive reporter and sportswriter--"the greatest authority on boxing," in the opinion of Jack Dempsey, no less. Dorgan also was an immensely prolific coiner of slang expressions. "More than any other newspaper man..., he influenced the speech of millions of Americans," the New York Herald Tribune said shortly after Dorgan's death in 1929.

Among the words and expressions Dorgan is generally credited with either creating or popularizing are "dumbbell" (a stupid person); "for crying out loud" (an exclamation of astonishment); "cat's meow" and "cat's pajamas" (as superlatives); "applesauce" (nonsense); "cheaters" (eyeglasses); "skimmer" (a hat); "hard-boiled" (a tough person); "drugstore cowboy" (loafers or ladies' men); "nickel-nurser" (a miser); "as busy as a one-armed paperhanger" (overworked); and "Yes, we have no bananas," which was turned into a popular song. In 1933, W.J. Funk of the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary company placed Dorgan at the top of the list of the 10 "most fecund makers of American slang"; Mencken credited Dorgan with designating a sausage in a bun as a "hot dog."

Dorgan was in the Polo Grounds press box one chilly spring day in the early 1900s while hawkers from the Harry M. Stevens Company peddled steaming sausages to baseball fans by calling out, "Get your red hots here! Get 'em while they're hot!" New Yorkers back then frequently called such sausages "dachshunds," perhaps because they resembled those little German canines--or to suggest slyly that this inexpensive comestible contained dog meat. Dorgan wanted to draw a cartoon about the snack, but didn't know how to spell "dachshund." So he depicted little four-legged sausages running around and labeled them "hot dogs."

Goldberg, also a native San Franciscan, was born in 1883 and added not only expressions to the language but his own name as a synonym for an extraordinarily complicated contraption devised to perform an extremely simple task.

Although he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1904 with a degree as a mining engineer, Goldberg never really wanted to do anything but draw cartoons while smoking cigars. "He smoked Cuban cigars, mostly Partagas," recalls Goldberg's son, George W. George, 75, a movie and theatrical producer whose credits include the film My Dinner with Andre and Dylan, a Broadway play about Dylan Thomas that starred Sir Alec Guinness.

"He loved cigars, and he knew a great deal about them. I took up cigar-smoking myself simply because my father smoked them. I love cigars, too, but only smoke about two a month--when I'm feeling expansive, usually after dinner. I like Partagas or Macanudo. I don't think Cuban cigars are as good as they used to be--but nothing is as good as it used to be, which is a common observation of anyone over 65," George says with a chuckle.

Rube Goldberg joined the San Francisco Chronicle's art department in 1904 as an $8-a-week office boy. Soon he was contributing cartoons to the sports page. He became Tad Dorgan's successor at the rival Bulletin and soon thereafter followed Dorgan to New York and got a job on the Evening Mail.

Goldberg branched out from the sports department, producing an immensely popular, long-running series called "Foolish Questions." (A battered man stands beside a demolished car. "Have an accident?" he is asked. "No thanks; just had one," he replies.) Goldberg also began to put his engineering education to work, creating the first of the extravagant, nonsensical "inventions" that would make his name a byword for technology run amuck. By 1918 he was earning $1,000 a week and had begun syndicating his most famous comic strip, "Boob McNutt," starring a gentle, unassuming figure in polka-dotted pants who was constantly embroiled in exotic adventures.

Many of Goldberg's comic strips were polished off with a small box containing an unrelated wisecrack--the cartoonists' equivalent of a stand-up comic's snare-drum rimshot. It was for these little kickers that Goldberg popularized the slang word "boloney" (now more commonly spelled "baloney") to punctuate the punchline. Goldberg recalled that the first time he heard the expression was during the 1920 World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Brooklyn Dodgers. An acquaintance scoffed at a theatrical extravaganza they had just seen by dismissing it as "just a lot of boloney."

"Such a descriptive phrase for such an event!" Goldberg wrote nearly a half-century later. After he had begun using the "that's a lot of boloney" tag line about six years later, it caught on because it satisfied Americans' "favorite hobby of branding anything a fake."

The scope of Goldberg's seven-decade career was remarkable. In addition to comic strips, sports cartoons, single-panel gags and sculpture, he was an editorial cartoonist for the New York Sun and the Journal-American, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. He knew, however, that he would be remembered most for his inventions, the products he credited to the fevered imagination of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, his cartoon alter ego.

Lexicographers recognized Goldberg's impact. Webster's Third International Dictionary lists "Rube Goldberg" as an adjective, defining it as "accomplishing by extremely roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply." When Goldberg died in 1970 at the age of 87, The New York Times editorialized: "Long before 'Parkinson's Law' and 'The Peter Principle' and 'Up the Organization' codified the notion that there are two ways to do things--the simple way and the way they actually are done--Rube Goldberg was telling Americans to watch out or the machines and technocrats would overwhelm us."

In the early years of Goldberg's career, comic strips mostly were confined to the Sunday papers. That changed on January 12, 1912, when William Randolph Hearst--in many ways the greatest promoter comic strips ever had--introduced the nation's first full daily comics page in his New York Journal. The following year, George McManus began "Bringing Up Father," the slapstick saga of Jiggs, a cigar-smoking bricklayer suddenly enriched by the Irish Sweepstakes, and his social-climbing wife, Maggie. Jiggs' fireplug physique, red nose and ever-present cigar echoed those of McManus.

By the time Jiggs began smoking his cigars and dodging Maggie's rolling pin, the comics already had passed through their initial phase of experimentation. Chroniclers of the comics have discerned distinct phases in the medium's evolution, with that first period highlighting fantasy ("Little Nemo") and stressing the comics' appeal to kids--even though in reality, most comics have always been aimed at adults (they're the ones who buy the papers).