Monday Cartoon Day
Bud Blake is best known for his comic strip Tiger, which ran from 1965 until his death well into this century. He died in 2005. Blake had a very funny cartoon style, which is loved by cartoonists everywhere. In most of his biographies it's mentioned that he did a daily gag panel called Ever Happen To You? Unfortunately most biographies rely on prss releases and artists memories, so mistakes occur/. I had already found that the panel he drew wan't always called Ever Happen To You, but ad a difrent title for eve day of the week (one of which included Ever Happen at some point). Even the Ohio State University makes this mistake in an important press release last March.
Cartoon Library and Museum Acquires Bud Blake Collection
March 18th, 2009
From the Bud Blake Collection
The estate of Bud Blake donated a substantial collection of his work to The Ohio State University Cartoon Library and Museum. Blake, who died at age 87 in 2005, began his career as a paste-up boy for the Kudner Advertising Agency in New York and worked his way up to Executive Art Director of the agency. By 1954 he was disillusioned with the corporate world, so he quit his job to become a freelance cartoonist. King Features syndicated Blake’s panel cartoon, Ever Happen to You? from 1958 to 1965.
During the mid-1960s, King Features turned down more than 50 “kid strips” before Blake submitted samples of Tiger, his charming strip about a little boy and his pals. Tiger was distributed by King Features from May 3, 1965 until Blake’s death. One critic described the comic strip as “expressively drawn in a distinctive and deceptively simple style…it is among the most attractively executed humor strips in the field.” Blake received the National Cartoonists Society’s Best Humor Strip Award 1970, 1978, and 2001.
The Bud Blake Collection includes more than 5,800 original Ever Happen to You? panels and approximately 10,000 daily and Sunday Tiger originals as well as related materials. Work on organizing the collection to make it available is underway. “We are honored and delighted to have such a substantial collection of Bud Blake’s work here at the Cartoon Library and Museum,” stated its curator, Professor Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Tiger is a remarkable comic strip about normal kids and the extraordinary observations that they, like real children, make.”
After a it of searching I think I found the first of Blake's panels in 1954. This means that he drew this vey funny and sometimes acerbic panel for more than ten years. All that time his style remained essentially the same.
I hope some publisher with good contacts with King Features will one day publish a series of this forgotten gem.
Oct 29 1954:
Dec 24 1954:
Dec 29 1954:
Sept 13 1955:
Sept 14 1955:
Sept 15 1955:
Sept 16 1955:
Sept 20 1955:
Sept 21 1955:
Sept 22 1955:
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