Coronet 2 of 2

The rest of the cartoons taken from the first issue of Coronet:

Abner Dean The next two were by Dorothy McKay. Gilbert Bundy E. Simms Campbell John Groth?

Coronet 1 of 2

These cartoons are from the first issue of Coronet that was published in 1936. They were a digest-sized magazine that also did a lot of educational films as well. The magazine was owned by Esquire which is why they had a lot of the same cartoonists. If you've been following this blog, I've reposted a lot of their cartoons before. Check the tag below for more.

This first one is from E. Simms Campbell George Shellhase This isn't a cartoon, but I liked it anyway. I wonder what happened to the calf after eating that lemon. I think this is E. Simms Campbell again. The next two are from Shellhase Gilbert Bundy More Campbell Raeburn Van Buren Shellhase Paul Webb (see more clicking on tag) George Lichty Next Thursday: the rest of that issue.

The Last of The Esquire Cartoon Album

E. Simms Campbell Ditto Barbara Shermund E. Simms Campbell Gilbert Bundy Gregory d'Alessio, as written about by Bill Crouch, Jr. in the 1980 World Encyclopedia Of Cartoons:

GREGORY D'ALESSIO (1904-*) American cartoonist, painter, and art teacher born in New York City on September 25, 1904. Gregory d'Alessio worked as an assistant to a commercial artist and as a bank teller on Wall Street prior to the Depression. Fired from his Wall Street job, he began freelancing cartoons, at the same time studying at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League. About 1932 he sold his first cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post. This was followed by sales to Collier's, Esquire,the New Yorker and most of the major cartoon markets of the day. In the 1930s his feature Twimbly Twins was published by the Saturday Evening Post. After World War II, Collier's magazine featured his panel Welcome Home, about the arrival of the American troops and the humorous problems that arose.

In 1940 a panel, These Women, starring the svelte secretary Miss Jones, was syndicated by Publishers Syndicate. The panel was stylish, and d'Alessio's quick brushwork gave it a light, relaxing quality, His magazine cartoons were also mostly brush and ink plus wash to the exclusion of much pen work. But since his magazine work was directed to specific audiences, d'Alessio could be more sophisticated in his humor and art than with These Women. A classic Esquire cartoon shows a shapely woman in a fur coat and hat walking past two other sophisticated New York women. One woman says to her companion, “There's a mink, from a rat, on a cat.”

During World War II, d'Alessio was chairman of the committee on war cartoons for the American Society of Magazine cartoonists. The committee worked closely with different government agencies in determining how cartooning would help the war effort and morale of the people.

Gregory d'Alessio eventually decided to end his distinguished cartoon career in favor of painting. He has long been associated with the Art Students League in New York City, where he teaches drawing and anatomy. His wife, Hilda Terry, whom he married in 1938, is one of the foremost women cartoonists in America.

*He died in 1993. Howard Baer William Steig. George Lichty. Also in the aforementioned Encyclopedia, written by Maurice Horn:

GEORGE MAURICE LICHTENSTEIN (1905-*) American cartoonist born in Chicago, Illinois in 1905. George Lichtenstein showed an early talent for drawing and sold his first cartoon to Judge at the age of 16. After enrolling at the Chicago Art Institute, Lichtenstein reputedly got dismissed in 1924 for drawing moustaches on some of the posters hanging in the school's gallery. The following year he attended the University of Michigan, from which he graduated in 1929. During his college years he edited the Michigan Gargoyle and won first prize in the 1928 College Humor contest.

In 1929 the Chicago Times came into existence, and “Lichty” (as the artist was now known) joined its staff from the beginning, mainly drawing sport cartoons and spot illustrations. In 1930 he created the short-lived Sammy Squirt, a gag strip about a soda jerk. Lichty was to prove more successful in 1932 with his Grin and Bear it, which won immediate recognition and national syndication two years later. In addition to Grin and Bear It (which he drew for forty years, relinquishing it in 1974 to Fred Wagner), Lichty has contributed innumerable cartoons to virtually every magazine in the United States. He was also the author of a satirical anti-Soviet panel, Is Party Line, Comrade, which ran during the 1950s and 1960s.

Lichty's style is a winning amalgam of loose penmanship, slapdash composition and broad humor. He works hard and fast (“I can finish a week's work within two days” he once asserted) with almost no wasted motion or redundance of line. Lichtenstein has received countless honors for his work and is a four-time winner of the National Cartoonist Society's Best Newspaper Panel award. The last cartoon in the book, by Abner Dean, I already posted here.

This is the bio page from the last page of the book. If you've been following these posts, you're familiar with everybody's work. This is what was under the book jacket. Next issue, the very first issue of Esquire.

Esquire Cartoon Album, pages 236-240

Here's more from 1957's Esquire Cartoon Album.

Howard Baer

Barbara Shermund

E. Simms Campbell. Let's see what Maurice Horn's World Encyclopedia of Cartoons from 1980 has to say about him.

ELMER SIMMS CAMPBELL (1906-1971) American cartoonist born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 2, 1906. The son of an assistant high school principal, Elmer Campbell was known as Elmer to his friends and E. Simms Campbell professionally. He began showing an interest in art at age four, and was undoubtedly encouraged by his mother, who herself painted watercolors. When Campbell was 14, his family moved to Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from Englewood High School there and attended the University of Chicago briefly. He knew art would be his career and switched to the Chicago Institute of Fine Art, from which he graduated.

In 1932 and 1933 he lived with his aunt on Edgecombe Avenue in the Harlem section of New York City. He studied at the Art Students League under George Grosz during the day and drew for College Comics, a humor magazine, at night. Although extremely talented, Campbell was a black man and as such was no stranger to discrimination in early efforts to sell his work. In a 1966 interview in Ebony, he said, “Oh I could always draw, but I was a failure as an artist 'til I became a successful dining car waiter.”

Campbell was 27 years old when his big break came in the Spring of 1933. He got his chance through a combination of talent, luck, and the recommendation of famed cartoonist Russell Patterson. A new magazine named Esquire was starting up. Arnold Gingrich, one of the founders of Esquire, had hoped to use art by Patterson, whose drawings of beautiful women were almost as famous as the Ziegfield Girls. At the time Gingrich could only offer $100 per featured cartoon, and Patterson declined his offer. However, as Gingrich remembered in his memoir of Esquire's early days, “He did have a suggestion, that is—if I didn't 'draw the color line'. I said I didn't.”

Gingrich needed color cartoons for Esquire's debut issue. E. Simms Campbell solved his problem. After visiting Campbell at his aunt's apartment, Arnold Gingrich had an armload of finished color cartoons and rough idea sketches. The debut issue of October 1933 contained 13 color cartoons, a good portion of which were by E. Simms Campbell or were worked up by artists such as John Groth and George Petty from Campbell idea sketches. Esquire was an instant success, and Gingrich credits the color cartoons with a significant contribution to that success.

Although dated January 1934, the second issue of Esquire appeared on December 5, 1933, the day Prohibition was repealed. It also marked the debut of Esky on the cover of Esquire. This popeyed, white-moustached, large-nosed admirer of female beauty was created by E. Simms Campbell. His cartoons also appeared in the old Life, Judge, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker, Playboy, Cosmopolitan,and Redbook. King Features Syndicate distributed the daily panel Cuties from about 1943 until his death. The panel featured beautiful women and a gag.

“Early in his career a friend told him if he specialized in beautiful women, he'd always have work. It was advice he took to heart. Beautiful women were his favorite subjects. One of his most famous creations was a continuing series in Esquire, and later Playboy: Sultan and Harem Cartoons. The sultan, a short, rotund, jovial sort more in love with food and toys than sex, was always surrounded by his harem. The series was published as a full-page color cartoon rich in both the intensity of the bright orange tones Campbell favored and in lush odialesques.

E. Simms Campbell changed from pen and ink to pencils and watercolor with ease. His drawing had spontaneity that often made the gag secondary. His color cartoons were painted and not just Line drawings with color trapped in between the borders. Although he did illustrate work by black writer Langston Hughes's Popo and Fifna, Campbell mostly cartooned the world of high society, nightclubs, expensive wine, women, and song. Ironically, many admirers of his work are often surprised to learn he was black.

His work did not elicit a belly laugh as much as a chuckle and the sincere gratitude of male readers who didn't know much about art but knew what they liked. Throughout Campbell's work, the women portrayed in sensuous watercolors and line drawings were usually white. This prompted Negro Digest in a 1951 article on Campbell, “Are Black Women Beautiful” Occasionally he did draw dark-skinned women, but they were usually Polynesian and not black.

For the last 14 years of his life until shortly before his death, E. Simms Campbell lived in Neerach, Switzerland. The expatriate life in Switzerland proved ideal, as he told Ebony in 1966, “out here in this little off-the-wall village we don't have to prove nothin' to nobody...Nobody bothers us unless we invite them in, and nobody gets mad because we're out here living in their community. Man, I can walk into any joint I want to and nobody starts looking as if they're thinking, 'Ugh, there's a [...] in here.'”

E. Simms Campbell left Switzerland after the death of his wife, Vivian, in October 1970. He returned to White Plains, New York where on January 27, 1971, he died after a brief illness.

Howard Baer

E. Simms Campbell

Howard Baer

Gilbert Bundy

E. Simms Campbell

Gilbert Bundy

Howard Baer

Note how the image was flopped. Now you can just push a button in Photoshop instead of having to get a transparency made of the image and reverse it that way. I'm sure they could afford it though.

The next few pages of this book next Saturday.

Pages 222-226

Here are some more gag cartoons from the Esquire Cartoon Album

Eldon Dedini Gobi Uppenburg Dorothy McKay Howard Baer E. Simms Campbell Gilbert Bundy Howard Baer Abner Dean Howard Baer E. Simms Campbell More Esquire cartoons next Saturday.