“We’re Looking for…” (Seventeenth in a Series) – Library of American Comics
It’s been a full nine months since our last installment in this series, devoted to sharing the wealth of material provided to us from his personal collection by Bill Chadbourne, longtime friend of LOAC. Over the past three years “The Chadbourne Dossier” has been opened to provide us with examples of Government publications featuring comics (SSAM, Will Eisner’s P*S magazine), private letters and photos from Chad’s prior interactions with LOAC mainstays such as Alex Toth and Milton Caniff, and a variety of now-obscure series that Chad had preserved as clipped strips (Tug Transom, among others).
This particular installment falls under another familiar Dossier category: books and magazines about comics and the art of cartooning. In this case, we’re spotlighting content from the cartooning course Chad took from the Famous Artists School.
For those of us who grew up with the comic books of the 1960s, this was a familiar back-cover advertisement:
The Famous Artists School was a correspondence course launched near the end of the 1940s, with Albert Dorne and Norman Rockwell leading a diverse “faculty” of illustrators. Its heyday was arguably in the early-to-mid-1960s, when the School’s offerings expanded to include separate tracks related to Painting, Photography, and Writing. Cartooning was one of the earliest branch courses of study, offered beginning in the first half of the 1950s as an alternative to the core Illustration/Design curriculum. Regardless of the course of study each would-be talent followed, the course provided textbooks, assigned work based on the lessons therein, and the course’s staff artists would offer feedback before the next lesson was assigned.
Chad – no surprise! – opted for the cartooning course. During the duration of the program he received the three hardbound five-ring binders you see below. One view of the spine of the first volume has also been provided, plus random pages from some of the early lessons devoted to the fundamentals of the craft:
The Famous Cartoonists course lived up to its name, since those hardcover textbooks included content from “faculty members” who also happened to be the creators of popular comic strips, or were well-known “gag panel” or sports cartoonists. Each contributor took his own approach to his material – as you’ll see by the examples provided below, Milton Caniff practically delivered an autobiography (complete with the Billy Ireland “Stick to your inkpots, kid …” anecdote from his high school days!); Al Capp chose to provide specific Li’l Abner installments and discuss the technical aspects of each. By contrast, Harry Haenigsen – who produced the delightful newspaper strip Penny – favored specific, thoughtful instruction that offered insights into specifics of his artistic approach, or the choices he made in assembling elements included in each day’s installment.
And it would be impossible to deprive you of sports cartoonist Willard Mullin’s beautiful Christmas-themed piece:
If this taste of the Famous Artists’s Cartooning course has captured your fancy, you’ll want to keep watching this space. Chad also provided us examples of some of his coursework, plus the instructor feedback he received for each of the assignments, and we’ll share that material with you next time.
