Another great in the world of animation and comic book art has passed. Jack Bradbury died last Saturday after battling renal failure for months. He was 89 years old, having been born December 27 of 1914. Bradbury's art career began at age 20 when he went to work for the Disney Studios as an in-betweener and soon graduated to the rank of animator. Several key scenes in features were his handiwork, including the stag fight in Bambi, the Pegasus family gliding in to a watery landing in Fantasia, and Figaro walking across Gepetto's bed in Pinocchio.
In 1947, following a brief stint in Friz Freleng's unit at the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, he began a long association with Western Publishing. There, he illustrated hundreds of children's books, including Little Golden Books and others published in the millions, and also appeared in most of their comic books published under the Dell and Gold Key labels. He was the main artist on Pluto stories but could and did draw almost every animated character they published. His renderings of the Disney characters were so "alive" and so faithful to the source material that Walt Disney himself reportedly told the Western editors that they didn't need studio approval of anything that Bradbury drew. When Dell adapted the Time for Beany puppet show into a comic, producer Bob Clampett (who knew a little something about good animation-type art) specifically insisted that Bradbury be the man to transfer his characters to the printed page.
As good as his work was for Western's comics, many of his fans prefer the hundreds of comic book stories that Bradbury drew for a "shop" arrangement run by a cartoonist named James F. Davis. Working in his own style instead of some studio's, Bradbury drew strips like Spencer Spook and Hucky Duck for Ha-Ha Comics, Giggle Comics and others published by Nedor, Standard and ACG. (Davis also drew the Fox and Crow comic books and occasionally got Bradbury to fill in for him.) Some of today's top animators and young cartoonists have sought out Bradbury's work as a masterful example of how to pose a character and achieve maximum expression.
Eye problems and personal matters forced Bradbury to curtail his drawing after around 1970, but he continued to work intermittently for the Disney folks, mostly consulting and occasionally drawing for merchandise, especially coloring books. He was one of the greats and I'm sorry to hear of his passing. (Thanks to Dave Bennett for letting me know and supplying some of the above info.)