Lately I have been looking at Saturday Evening Post cartoons. It's mostly the same old crowd that worked the second tier circuit (with The New Yorker being the first ter and the girly magazines being at te bottom). Berenstain, Boltinoff, Chon Day, Hudson, Henderson, Keller, Rea, Caplan, Shafer, Gerard, Ross, Hilton, Syverson. One major difference is that Mort Walker did a lot of Saturday Evening Post (from Spetember 1948 onwards) and not a lot of Collier's (from October 1949) and Virgil Partch did a lot of Collier's and (virtually) no Saturday Evening Post. Absolute king for me is Hank Ketcham, who is always funny and always very well drawn. In 1948 another artist turn up, who reminds me of Ketch. He is pretty funny too, and although his style is not as flashy as Ketcham's, it is pretty well executed. I rad his name as Hickey, although I have found no referecne to this guy anywhere. Anyone out there who can help me?
4 comments:
He's George "Hickey" Hickson.
A quick search on the internet gave very little extra information, but he seems to have been British, or at least a regular contributor to Punch.
My parents (like ten zillion others) subscribed to the Post til it died. And I've re-read dozens of issues as an adult. So I feel qualified to say that I must be missing an important humor gene. I have never found a Post cartoon to be funny. I've even laughed at Reader's Digest jokes, but SEP humor escapes me. The cartoons are just so...bland. Like "Family Circus" panels.
Yet getting into the Post was freelancer's heaven--for illustrators, anyway. I wonder if the SEP's prestige and high rates extended to cartoonists.
The rates were nowhere near the New Yorker, of course. There oyu could live from a cartoon a month. The Post and magazines like that seem to have paid about $30/40 a cartoon. I quite like the work of Ketcham, Walker and some others and Idon't see a lot of difference to their work in SEP and Collier's, but I get your point.
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