David Gantz has passed away at the age of 85. A native New Yorker, Gantz was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art, the National Academy of Design and, for some reason, the University of Iowa. Immediately after his schooling, he landed a job with what was then called Timely Comics, drawing and sometimes writing humor comics, including Mighty Mouse and Patsy Walker. (Timely is today known as Marvel.) He worked for an array of companies through the fifties at which time his career segued into magazine cartooning, political cartooning and the writing and/or illustration of books, primarily for children. His political cartoons were especially popular and he received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award in 1997 for his feature, Gantz Glances.
One especially delightful creation of Mr. Gantz's was a newspaper strip called Don Q, which ran from 1975 to 1981 and deserved more attention than it received. It was the first, perhaps only comic strip ever syndicated by The New York Times, although it never actually appeared in that paper. (Before that, he'd written and drawn a strip called Dudley D from 1961 to 1964.) Gantz was also the author of Jews in America: A Cartoon History, along with his 75+ other books. A very prolific, talented man.