Some enthusiasts here in Britain consider Phil May to be one of the most influential
cartoonists of all time, but outside of that small circle he remains almost unknown.
He was born in Yorkshire, just outside Leeds in 1864
His father died unexpectedly in 1873, leaving the boy and his mother with very little money.
At the age of 12 he took to hanging around the Grand Theatre in Leeds, where he sketched
and sold portraits of the actors.
But he wasn't making anything approaching a living that way so he got a clerical job
in a solicitor's office. That didn't pan out and neither did any of his other attempts
at a regular income.
Throughout this time he had continued to draw and had managed to get a couple of pictures
published in local newspapers.
At the age of 17 he recklessly decided to go to London, where he wound up sleeping rough
in the parks and doorways. But with admirable determination he eventually
found work as a designer in a theatrical costumiers, and also managed the occasional commission
for some relatively obscure magazines.
With this small amount of experience and a lot of optimism he sailed for Australia in
1886. There he showed his drawings to the editorial team at the Sidney Bulletin and
they were impressed enough to give him a job.
But after only three years of regular employment there he impulsively set off for tours of
Italy and France before returning to London in 1892.
Although May gets classified as a cartoonist his figure work and scene setting were in
the main quite faithful pen reproductions of reality. It was the situation, and the
dialogue when it was used that gave the work its comedic appeal.
His own impoverished upbringing created a genuine empathy for the downtrodden working
class, which he frequently expressed in many of his drawings, and he developed a reputation
for his depictions of what were known as street urchins.
Although his line work looked spontaneous it was invariably the outcome of observation,
and however gestural the sketch might look it would be resolved with just the right weight
and stroke of pen to evoke the character, movement and emotion.
May only rarely ventured into colour, but the few examples there are, such as his series
of comic postcards, were hastily colour-washed versions of his already completed line work.
In 1896 he became a staff artist for Punch magazine, and although he continued to create
occasional cartoons for other publications Punch would from that point on become his
almost exclusive vehicle of expression.
So with a permanent position at Punch and plenty of other work to keep him busy he looked
certain to have lasting success.
Unfortunately the success he did enjoy was short lived.
He had suffered from tuberculosis for many years, and he succumbed to the illness at
his home in London in 1903 at the age of only 39.
French poster artist Paul Colin is another whose place in the history books is far less
prominent than it should be.
He was born in 1892 in the town of Nancy, in Northeastern France, and at the age of
18 he became a student at the School of Fine Arts there.
Unfortunately for him he graduated just in time to fight in the First World War, and
he was seriously wounded in 1916.
But he survived and once the war ended and he had recovered from his injuries he relocated
to Paris where he tried to find work as an illustrator.
The going was far from easy but he picked up commissions where he could, and as the
years went by more commissions from more prestigious clients began to come his way.
And by 1925 when the Paris Art Deco exposition was attracting huge crowds and critical acclaim,
Colin's popularity and reputation as a poster artist were already established.
In that year he was commissioned to create a poster for The Revue Negre, an American
all black music and dance show which was on a successful European tour.
His posters and the subsequent album of images he produced a couple of years later featured
what are now rightly considered offensively generic depictions of the male performers
and musicians.
And yet his many semi-abstracted portrayals of the star of the show, exotic dancer Josephine
Baker were not.
Whether this had anything to do with them becoming lovers while she was resident in
Paris I couldn't say.
Despite being one of the pioneers of Art Deco even before it had a name Colin's work was
more human and energetic than most and frequently resonated with the influence of African art
in his non-representational approach to anatomy.
He rarely worked in line only although he did create a portfolio of pencil drawings
with a circus theme. But almost invariably colour was the driving force behind his images.
Most of his colour work was generally flat and opaque with a range of rough shading effects,
and one of the very few examples of his art I found is listed as being painted in gouache.
So although I have no real proof that's what I would guess he was using for his posters
too. And throughout the thirties he created poster
after poster, all of which showed the same undeniable powerful aesthetic qualities and
visual eloquence.
When World War 2 began in 1939 Colin created many posters to raise morale and encourage
support for the war effort by civilians in the regions of France which had not been occupied
by German forces.
Following the war there was no fall in popularity or productivity and his modernist style endured
into the 1950s and even the 1960s.
By the time he had retired he had designed more than 1400 posters and Paul Colin died
in 1985 at the age of 93.
How I'd managed to be completely unaware of American cartoonist Milt Gross until very
recently I honestly don't know.
He may well be better known in his own country but over here he's definitely unsung.
He was born into a Jewish family in the Bronx in 1895 and as a teenager he began working
as an assistant to Tad Dorgan, a popular strip artist of the day, now almost completely forgotten.
By the time he was 20 he had struck out on his own with his first strip Phool Phan Phables
for the New York Journal.
It ran only briefly, and after a couple of others that fared even worse he had his first
major comic success with Gross Exaggerations a couple
of years later. The strip had originally appeared as an illustrated column in the New
York World and he recreated it as a distinctive madcap series of imaginative comic
sequences.
In 1924 his series of usually wordless full page narratives began appearing on a
regular basis in Judge magazine, and they also helped to raise his public profile.
The following year the first instalment of his strip Banana Oil was published and although
every reader knew the end panel would always be a character shouting Banana Oil! its
popularity endured and it was widely syndicated in newspapers across the U.S.A.
In 1926 he published a collection of cartoons and comic stories titled Nize Baby, and this
book also spawned a full page colour strip of the same name.
It appeared weekly and provided him with a very good regular income and a growing
enthusiastic audience.
Gross created his strips as line only, and when they appeared in colour it was added
at printing. I'm guessing that this was done from his instructions, as it looks too imaginative
for the average studio hack to have come up with.
In that same year he published his comic parody of Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.
And as you can see by the title alone Gross's use of language in dialogue and narration
in all his work was a wildly caricatured phonetic
version of Jewish pronunciation of English.
By this point his calligraphic line work and wildly exaggerated posing had become even
more extreme, and there really was nobody else quite like him at the time.
In 1930, Gross finished work on what many consider to be his most significant achievement.
This was the story He Done Her Wrong, which was an early example of a wordless graphic
novel.
The narrative was told as a 300 page comical melodrama, satirising the popular films of
the period.
When it was first published it wasn't anything like as popular as his other work, but it
has since been reprinted several times.
Gross began working for William Randolph Hearst's publishing empire in 1931 and he created a
new strip titled That's my Pop, which became successful enough to be re-packaged as a radio
show.
In the mid 1930s he collaborated with the writer Margaret Linden on the book Pasha the
Persian, but generally he was most creatively comfortable as a one man band.
In 1939 he created another graphic novel, this time a fictional tour around New York
based on his That's My Pop strip, to capitalise on that year's World's Fair.
Gross had dabbled in animation during the 1920s but I've been unable to track down any
surviving evidence.
But there is this later MGM film, which he directed in 1939 starring his character Count
Screwloose. It was intended to be a series but only two episodes were ever made.
During the war his success continued with the newspaper illustrated feature Dear Dollink,
which spawned an equally successful book.
But in 1945 he suffered a heart attack and although he recovered he was forced to slow
down considerably.
His last book was I Shoulda Ate the Eclair, a gloriously surreal story involving world
war 3 and a chocolate eclair, published in 1946.
But creatively that was the end of the line for Milt Gross and in 1953 at the age of 58
he suffered another heart attack, and this one was fatal.
In his lifetime Bradshaw Crandell was widely known as the Artist of the Stars, due to the
idealised portraits of the Hollywood female elite he created for magazine covers.
He was born in New York in 1896 and at 18 he went to study at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He wasn't happy there and moved again to Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
But he didn't graduate from there either and there are a couple of unaccounted for years
during which he may or may not have been getting started as an illustrator.
The first dated example of his work I found is this far from dazzling illustrated press
ad for hair nets from 1921.
But not much later he created this cover for Judge magazine and more commissions soon came
his way from several other popular magazines including the hugely popular Saturday Evening
Post.
By this time he had become far more technically adept, and more prolific, and he was commissioned
by a long line of advertising clients for press ads and posters throughout the thirties
and well into the forties, all of which featured his increasingly popular renders of attractive
females.
Although he did create erotic nudes, mostly I think as private commissions, his commercial
pinups for calendars were actually more demure than most.
Exposed flesh was minimal compared to the offerings of many of his contemporaries. Whether
this was his decision or the clients isn't known.
Most frequently he worked in pastels with a level of skill most of us can only dream
of.
He produced a colossal amount of vibrantly coloured tonal renders of attractive females
in various poses which with the frequent use of a black or dark background practically
jumped off the page. He also seems to have had an obsession with parrots.
He did create some monochrome work but that was tonal too, and if he ever did any line
only work it's been well hidden .
The most significant commission of his illustration career was undoubtedly his series of covers
for Cosmopolitan magazine.
He had offered the contract when his predecessor Harrison Fisher retired and throughout the
1930s and 1940s Crandell's dreamy pastel portraits of female stars such as Carol Lombard, Veronica
Lake and Lana Turner appeared on each month's issue of the magazine.
During World War 2 he created recruitment posters for the women's army corps and also
produced a series of press ads for Pontiac Motors which blatantly capitalised on everyone's
sense of patriotism in wartime.
But In the 1950s Crandell was one of many representational illustrators who were hit
by the increasing use of colour photography in magazines and advertising.
So he simply gave up commercial illustration to carve out an equally successful career
as a portrait artist, taking commissions from those who could afford a Bradshaw Crandell
original.
And that's how he spent his time up to his retirement and subsequent death at the age
of 70 in 1966.
Which concludes this instalment and I hope you'll be back for the next.
So Goodbye for now.