Elsewhere on this site, you'll find an article that I wrote about a great, unsung cartoonist named Owen Fitzgerald. (Oh, hell…I'll save you the trouble of searching for it. Here's a link.) I just stumbled across a neat website run by an animation artist named Shane Glines. He calls it The Cartoon and Illustration Paradise and it's where he posts examples of some of his favorites, including Erich Sokol, Hank Ketcham and Russell Patterson. He has a section on Owen which includes a scan of a comic book story — "Moronica," about a hopelessly stupid blonde lady.
It's not Owen's best but it's still wonderful and will show you his famed inability to draw a figure that wasn't funny and/or interesting. Go hunting around at www.shaneglines.com and, while we're on the subject, here are some links for…
- Hank Ketcham — the man behind Dennis the Menace.
- Chris Browne — who carries on his father's Hagar the Horrible along with his own creation, Raising Duncan. (Chris has some good, interesting essays about cartooning on his site.)
- Mike Peters — the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist and creator of Mother Goose & Grimm — has samples of both, plus fun web animations to offer. (Hi, Mike!)
- "Uncle" Fred Lasswell — who has been drawing Snuffy Smith since the time of Charlemagne.
- Bob Montana — the man who was the main Archie artist for years, is no longer with us but his family is selling prints and displaying artifacts of his life at their website.
- Rube Goldberg — another late, great cartooning legend, and the world's greatest inventor.
I'll post more of these in a few days so you won't spend all night surfing cartoonist websites.