PLATINUM AGE
Rose O’Neill
Cartoonist, artist and writer Rose O'Neill couldn't have known when she won her first art content at thirteen that she would go on to create a character that would make her a millionaire. That's precisely what happened in 1909 when an issue of Ladies Home Journal...
Marjorie Organ
At 16, Marjorie Organ became the only artist on the New York Journal staff who wasn’t a man, opening the doors for others to come after her. Born in Ireland in 1886, Ms. Organ went on to create a few different comic strips, the most successful being Reggie and the...
Inez Townsend
Writer, musician, singer, songwriter, illustrator, cartoonist - it can be said that Inez Townsend (aka Inez Tribit) was an extremely talented woman. Born in England in 1877, Inez moved to the United States in 1891. Within a decade, she was writing and illustrating her...
Katherine Rice
If you think that comics weren’t risqué in the early years of the 20th century, then you haven’t seen Flora Flirt. Flora was the brainchild of cartoonist Katherine P. Rice and ran in the Philadelphia North American from 1913-1914. What made it risqué? Flora’s...
Dorothy Urfer
When Dorothy Urfer first took her job as a dental assistant in her early twenties, she could not have known that by the age of twenty-four she’d be working as a cartoonist. That’s precisely what happened in 1929 when she was hired by the Newspaper Enterprise...
Fay King
Look closely while watching the 1924 movie The Great White Way, and you just might catch a glimpse of Fay King (appearing as herself with other illustrators). Who was Fay King? Ms. King was a journalist and cartoonist whose contributions to comics in the mid...
Virginia Huget
If you’ve ever seen the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes starring Marilyn Monroe, you may not know that its storied past included a comic strip adaptation in 1926. Spurred on by the success of the novel by Anita Loos in 1925, a successful play was produced in 1926. Loos...
Louise Hirsch
Born in Romania in 1901, Louise Hirsch made a name for herself in the late 1920s with a comic strip about a girl named Tessie. Tessie Tish ran less than a year and appeared with a single-panel tagged at the end, which featured a character named Charlie Chirps. It...
Margaret Hays
Margaret Hays may have been the sister of Grace Drayton, famous for her comic book art, but Margaret could hold her own. Not only was she an accomplished writer, but she also illustrated her own comics. A prime example of this was her 1908 strip Jennie and Jack, and...
Ethel Hays
As an illustrator for her high school paper, Ethel Hays had aspirations for becoming a painter. Her studies and talent led to a scholarship to attend the private art school, Academie Julian, in Paris. Those dreams were cut short by Wor'd War I. Not to be deterred,...
Carol Hager
Waddles was a very fortunate duck. One that was cared for and passed down generation after generation. In 1912, the year his grandaughter Carol was born, the artist Dok Hager created Dok’s Dippy Duck, which enjoyed a run in The Seattle Daily Times. When Dok lost his...
Edwina Dumm
She was known simply as “Edwina,” and she was the first full-time cartoonist in America. Her full name was Edwina Drumm and, in 1915, she took her first job as a cartoonist working for the short-lived Columbus Daily Monitor. During her time with the Monitor, she was...