Floyd Norman began his cartooning career assisting Bill Woggon, artist of the Katy Keene comic books. In 1956, he got a job as an in-betweener (an assistant animator) at the Walt Disney Studio where he started by working on Sleeping Beauty. He was the first black artist to work there and he subsequently applied his talents to other Disney films, including One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book, moving from animation to the story department in the process.
He has not spent his career exclusively at Disney — though he worked there enough to be named a Disney Legend in 2007. He popped up at almost every animation studio in town — I met him at Hanna-Barbera — and even co-ran a studio for a time. (It was Vignette Films, which among its other projects did a lot of the early animation for Sesame Street and produced the first Fat Albert cartoon for Bill Cosby.) He's one of those guys who's done just about everything in animation. He's also an incredibly nice, clever guy.
And he not only draws well, he draws fast…as you'll be able to see if you attend the Quick Draw! panel on Saturday at this year's Comic-Con International. Floyd has done it before and we're having him back to be one of the rapid-sketching combatants in our little game.
Floyd is 80 years old today, a fact that his friends are having a hard time believing, considering how young and energetic he is. I am pleased to be one of those friends and to wish him the happiest of b'days. If he had some obvious flaws, I could close this with a snide insult but he doesn't so I can't. It's the one thing I don't like about the guy.