Bud Grace, the now retired creator of the comic strip The Piranha Club (originally known as Ernie, extremely funny, insanely popular worldwide, especially in Scandinavian and Baltic countries) earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Florida State University and worked as a nuclear physicist before pursing a career in Cartooning.
Before creating the first successful daily comic strip published in the United States, Bud Fisher of Mutt and Jeff fame was a prizefighter. However, he wasn't very good at it so that career path was quickly abandoned. The Mutt and Jeff strip soon made him very wealthy as he had been smart enough to secure the copyright to the characters. He invested in Thoroughbred Racehorses, and in 1924 one of his horses (Nellie Morse) won the Preakness.
Barbara Brandon-Croft got her start as a cartoonist assisting her father, Brumsic Brandon Jr., the creator of Luther. She created the comic strip Where I'm Coming From in 1989 and it ran until 2005. She and her father are so far the only father-daughter duo to be featured in both the collection of the Library of Congress and the Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year.
At the age of 20 Gladys Parker landed the job of illustrating the single panel cartoon Gay and Her Gang, which feature the antics of a young Flapper and her friends. Two years later she took over the hugely popular Flapper Fanny Says and became quite famous, especially for the clothes she designed for the women featured in the cartoon. Eventually she created her own line of clothing, Gladys Parker Designs, which were not only sold in stores but also featured in several Films made in the 1930's and '40's.
Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, is a descendant of a crewmember who sailed with the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock in 1620. Walker himself was drafted into the U.S. Army during WWII and served in Italy, where he eventually came to be in charge of an Allied prisoner of war camp with 10,000 German POWs.
Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, wrote the graphic novel Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic, which achieved not only unexpected attention from the mainstream press, but was named one of 2006's ten best books of the year by Time magazine. Eight years later Fun Home the musical premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater. After an award winning and wildly popular off-Broadway initial run that closed in January 2014, the show made it's premiere in 2015 at the Broadway theater Circle in the Square, and went on to win five Tony awards. The list of cartoonist whose work has won a Tony award is extremely short.
Unknown to fans for the first ten years of his tenure as artist on the Buck Rodgers comic strip, Rick Yager was finally able to shed the ghost artist guise and begin signing his name on the strips he produced as he began his second decade as both artist and writer of Buck Rodgers. After he left the strip in late 1958 due to a contract dispute, he quickly developed an original strip, Little Orvy, which he worked on for nearly four years until early 1963 when he was made a generous offer to take over the artistic duties for the popular single panel cartoon Grin and Bear it. The creator (and original artist) of Grin and Bear it, George Lichty, had a vastly different style of cartooning than the commercial illustration style that Yager had perfected while working on Buck Rodgers - but Yager was able to emulate Lichty's cartoon style so well that most fans had no idea someone other than George Lichty was drawing the strip for the 25 years Yager worked incognito, until finally being allowed to sign his work in 1988.
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