We continue to showcase material from Famous Artists & Writers, a 1949 spiral bound promotional book put together by King Features Syndicate (KFS).
In our previous installment we selected a half-dozen cartoonists and three of KFS’s prose columnists, showing you their Famous Artists & Writers entries. Artwork by and biographies of Fanny Cory, Chic Young, Otto Soglow, Cliff Sterrett, Edwina Dumm, and Mac Raboy were joined by essays about King Feature columnists Walter Winchell, Westbrook Peglar, and Bugs Baer. Now we offer you this look at nine of their peers:
Elmer Simms Campbell was a trailblazer – the first nationally-syndicated African American artist, a talent who was a regular contributor to Esquire magazine and other “slicks,” including Ebony, The New Yorker, Playboy, and Redbook. In addition to his commercial art assignments Campbell was the talent behind King’s comics feature Cuties, a good-girl-art series that ran in almost one hundred fifty newspapers. Paired below with Campbell’s Famous Artists pages are the promotional volume’s contributions devoted to two other exceptional KFS comic strip creators: Roy Crane, who produced globe-trotting adventures in Buz Sawyer, and Frank Godwin, whose pen-and-ink artwork on Rusty Riley was as lush as his stories were wholesome.
King Features were connected with big names, and certainly few names were bigger than Walt Disney, whose studio produced multiple strips for the syndicate, including Donald Duck and Silly Symphonies. For decades one of the major players on the comics page was George McManus, and his Bringing Up Father was still entertaining millions of daily readers in 1949, thirty-six years after its debut.
In the KFS bullpen of columnists, Louella Parsons was a name to be reckoned with as one of the nation’s doyennes of celebrity gossip. We’ve paired her with the entry for King Features’s “Voice of Broadway,” Dorothy Kilgallen. She took her column about the Great White Way to the radio airwaves in the early 1940s and became a regular household visitor to the television public’s living rooms during the 1950s and ’60s as a panelist on the game Show What’s My Line, along with fellow series regulars Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf. (Episodes of the series are currently rebroadcast in the early morning on the Buzzr channel.) Her other successes never took Kilgallen away from her work as a print journalist, and she covered a number of major news stories. The November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy fascinated her during the last years of her life; she continued to probe the possibility of a conspiracy behind the death of America’s thirty-fifth president. Theorists who speculate along such lines often suspect Kilgallen was close to uncovering some inconvenient truths and was murdered for it, since, at age fifty-two, she was found dead from a combination of alcohol and barbiturates. A police investigation into her death simply concluded that there was “no indication of violence or suicide.”
If an air of mystery surrounded Dorothy Kilgallen’s death, two things about her are crystal clear: she was one of the most recognizable journalists and celebrities of the mid-20th Century, and her first claim to fame was her “Voice of Broadway” column for King Features Syndicate.
Back on the “funny pages,” Mel Graff provided a Secret Agent X-9 montage, and this Famous Artists feature seemed ripe for inclusion here, since we republished the original X-9 stories, plus fifteen years of the later strips after the series had been renamed Secret Agent Corrigan. Finally, since we began the previous installment with a look at the Famous Artists page devoted to Blondie creator Chic Young, it seems only proper to finish with the entry for his older brother, Lyman Young, of Tim Tyler’s Luck fame. You’ll note that Lyman was the one cartoonist honored in this book who chose to render his image in landscape format, rather than in portrait!
We thought we’d close with a smattering of the covers from LOAC books that have reprinted work from the grand talents featured in King Features’s 1949 promotional book, Famous Artists & Writers. Again, click each image for an isolated view …
