Cartoonist (and historian of cartooning) R.C. Harvey died yesterday at the age of 85. He was a constant presence in the more prestigious magazines wherein folks preserve and analyze the history of comic art. He also did some very fine comic art of his own and the only negative comment I ever heard about him or his work was from folks who wished he'd spent a little less time writing about other folks' comics and do more of his own.
His daughter Julia Harvey McDonald posted the sad details to Facebook…
Last week Dad fell and broke 6 ribs. We did not know at the time how serious this would become. After he fell, he stood up, continued walking with us to a favorite restaurant. He joked with the waitress, drank his favorite martini (bombay gin, very cold) and told a couple stories. His last few days were in the hospital with his family as his body struggled with complications from the fall. We were with him for his last breath.
An awful story…but to go on walking and joking with people sounds like the Bob Harvey I knew. He was a fascinating guy…the kind you could talk to for hours about comic books and comic strips and never feel you were descending into the childish end of the business. His book on the life and career of Milton Caniff was daunting in its size — Bob never did a half-assed job on anything — but not one sentence of it wasted your time.
Bob was an important contributor to our current series reprinting the newspaper strip, Pogo. He would annotate the strips in each volume, noting the historical context in which they first appeared and explaining a lot of the obscure references and terms. Walt Kelly's work was brilliant but even on its original publication, some of it needed explaining. His last "Swamp Talk" section will appear in Volume 8, which is now at the printers and due out in a few months. He will be just about impossible to replace — in the Pogo reprints and in our lives.