Happy New Year!

I have run out of time again this year, and so I will close out 2021 with a simple image of children, drawn by Florence Sarah Winship (1900-1987). Soon, now, it will be time for bed . . .

Happy New Year!

Terence E. Hanley, 2021, 2024.

Christmas Greetings from Riley & Vawter

Christmas Greetings from the Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), and his illustrator, Will Vawter (1871-1941), from the book Songs of Friendship . . .

and from

Indiana Illustrators &

Hoosier Cartoonists!

Terence E. Hanley, 2021, 2024.

What Old Santa Overheard by Riley & Vawter

"What 'Old Santa' Overheard" by James Whitcomb Riley, illustrated by Will Vawter, from Songs of Friendship:

Terence E. Hanley 2021, 2024.

Paul R. Alexander (1937-2021)

Science fiction artist Paul R. Alexander has died. I wrote about him previously on this blog, on November 17, 2011. (Click here to read what I wrote.) I showed some of Mr. Alexander's artwork when I last wrote of him, but any small part is inadequate for lovers of art and illustration. Paul Alexander was a surpassingly good artist.

He was born on September 3, 1937, in Richmond, Indiana, son of Fred and Ora Olive Alexander. He graduated from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, in 1967. Although he lived and worked on the East Coast, Mr. Alexander returned to the Midwest later in life, living, working, attending church, and enjoying his hobbies and friends in Greenville, Ohio. That is where he died, too, on June 14, 2021, at age eighty-three. One new bit of information on him: Paul Alexander was a model train enthusiast. Called a "gadget artist" by Vincent Di Fate, Mr. Alexander knew his gadgets, from miniature trains to immense spacefaring vehicles of the imagination.

Paul Alexander's first work listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) is his cover for The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert, published forty-five years ago this month, in December 1976. His last came at around the turn of the current century, in the period 1998-2001. In addition to covers and interior art for science fiction magazines and books, Mr. Alexander created illustrations for Encyclopedia Britannica, Institutions Magazine, and the New Jersey Telephone Company. He also did designs for the packaging for Robotix toys made by Milton Bradley. Click here to see more.

There has been so much sadness these past few years, especially in the last two. Now we have more sadness. But at least we also have the undying work of Paul Alexander.

To read an obituary in the science fiction magazine Locus, click here.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Sharon Kane (1932-2021)

Sharon Katherine Smith Koester Kane has died. Known for her wonderfully made drawings of babies, toddlers, young children, and teenagers, she began her career as a published artist, illustrator, and cartoonist while she was herself still a child. Her picture-making went on for the next eighty years, ending only last month with her death.

Sharon Katherine Smith was born on February 18, 1932, in South Bend, Indiana, to Stuyvesant C. Smith, an engineer at Bendix Aviation, and Katherine Eunice (Young) Smith, also an artist and writer. "Ever since I can remember I have been drawing," Sharon Smith wrote in 1950, "mostly pictures of children." She had her first published drawing in Children's Activities Magazine (now Highlights For Children) when she was nine years old. Later she had her work published in Scholastic and Seventeen and became a regular contributor to Child Life and The Christian Science Monitor. But it was for her children's books that she is remembered so well today.

As a student at Mishawaka High School, Sharon Smith wrote and illustrated a humorous teen advice column for the school newspaper, the Alltold. Her mother encouraged her to submit her cartoons to the South Bend Tribune. "Atomic Teens," printed on the newspaper's teen page, was the result. In May 1950, McNaught Syndicate picked up the teenaged artist's feature, renaming it "Buttons an' Beaux" for national syndication. "Buttons an' Beaux" ran in newspapers until 1952. The popular song "Buttons and Bows" had won an Academy Award for best song in 1948. The punning title of Sharon's comic panel would have capitalized on the popularity of the song.

Sharon Smith attended Bradley University and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1954. The following year she married George C. Koester. While living with her husband in Seattle, she did freelance artwork as well as design work for a children's program on a local television station. The young couple spent two years in Seattle. In 1957, when she was just twenty-five years old, Sharon had her first book published. Entitled Where Are You Going Today?, it had been submitted to its publisher by Sharon's mother without her knowledge. More than two dozen children's books followed, her last being Kitty & Me from 2014.

Sharon Smith was married and divorced twice. Her second husband was Hawaiian historian and author Herbert "Herb" Kawainui Kāne (1928-2011). The late Mr. Kāne was an extraordinary artist and illustrator in his own right.

Sharon Kane lived in Glencoe, Illinois, and Plano, Texas. She died on November 3, 2021, at age eighty-nine. Her art is in the collections of the Northern Indiana Historical Society and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. She also created a mural in the Bloomingdale Public Library in Illinois. The scene is a woodland scene, perhaps recalling her childhood in Mishawaka. "It was a rural life," she remembered, "with hills and woodland and wide open spaces." These are the things we remember of our Hoosier homes.

* * *

To read more on Sharon Smith Kane, see "Sharon Smith Kane, February 18, 1932-November 3, 2021" by Andrew Farago on the website of The Comics Journal, dated December 13, 2021, by clicking here.

* * *

I have pictures from just one of Sharon Smith Kane's books to show today. These are from Tie My Shoe by Helen Wing (1964). The interior drawings shown here are two of my favorites and two of the best from the book, I think. These and other drawings made by women artists show just how well women depict children, much better, in my opinion, than the average male artist. Men tend to draw children as miniature adults, whereas women see and understand and can draw the essential childness of children. Anyway, please enjoy these pictures and join me in remembering the life and work of Sharon Smith Kane.

Updated on July 17, 2022.

Original text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Hoosier Cartoonist Censored by Big Tech

Ken Avidor is multitalented artist based in Indianapolis. His wife, Roberta Avidor, is also an artist. Working in oils and watercolor, she is a fine artist in more ways than one: her very fine depictions of urban scenes in the Circle City are well worth a look. Together the Avidors have a website called Avidor Studios. You can reach it by clicking here. You can read a little more about Mr. Avidor and his projects on the website FilmFreeway, here, and on his own blog, Bicyclopolis, here.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ken Avidor is a cartoonist, illustrator, street or urban artist, video artist, sculptor, and courtroom sketch artist. He recently created the first episode of an illustrated video series called Unjabbed and posted his video to the online platform Vimeo. On October 15, 2021, Mr. Avidor received word from Vimeo that it was removing Unjabbed because of its content. Vimeo explained:

"We do not allow health-related content that might cause people to take dangerous or unproven treatments or refrain from taking indicated precautions or treatments that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or World Health Organization (WHO). We also do not allow claims that an epidemic or pandemic (such as COVID-19) are conspiracies."

Mr. Avidor's video tells a story of a dystopian/post-apocalyptic future in which an unnamed disease and the human response to that disease have brought down a society and a civilization. In other words, Unjabbed is science fiction, more generally, fiction and a work of art. Evidently the platform Vimeo and all of its fellow travelers are unaware of the concepts of art and fiction. In any case, you can still see Unjabbed on another platform, called Rumble, by clicking here. I urge everyone to see it, to support Ken and Roberta Avidor in any way possible, and especially to stand up to censorship in all of its forms.

For the original story, see "Vimeo Removes Artist’s Fictional Vaccine Cartoon, Labeling It 'Dangerous' Health-Related Content" by Gabe Kaminsky on the website The Federalist, dated November 2, 2021, here.

Original text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Pictures of Adopted Hoosiers

Comedian Herb Shriner famously said, "I wasn't born in Indiana but I moved there as soon as I heard about it." He wasn't alone. Since its beginnings, the Hoosier State has been a destination for pioneers, settlers, refugees, migrants, escaped and manumitted slaves, industrial workers, and just plain, ordinary farmers, workers, artists, and others. Early on, people must have sensed that nothing better would await them beyond the rich and generous lands of Indiana. And so they stayed.

Johnny Appleseed was an adopted Hoosier. Born John Chapman on September 26, 1774, he was a native of Leominster, Massachusetts. Like Abraham Lincoln a generation later, he was orphaned with the death of his mother. His father remarried. Later in life, the elder Chapman pulled up stakes and moved to Ohio. Johnny had gone west before him, first to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio. It was in Ohio that John Chapman earned his nickname, Johnny Appleseed.

Johnny Appleseed lived a long life. In his later days, he lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that's where he died after reaching his allotted threescore and ten. Johnny's end came on March 18, 1845. He was buried in Fort Wayne, though no one knows exactly where.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was probably the most famous adopted Hoosier. He was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809. In the fall of 1816, when Abe was just seven years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851), moved his young family to what was then the Indiana Territory. Not long after, on December 11, 1816, Indiana became a state. Like Johnny Appleseed before him, Abe Lincoln's mother and a younger brother died when he was young. Nancy Hanks Lincoln (1784-1818) lies buried in Indiana, near her Spencer County home. Her son said of her, "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

Abe Lincoln spent his formative years in the Hoosier State, raised there by his parents and his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln (1788-1869). In March 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois. He had just turned twenty-one. Kentucky and Illinois have their claims upon the Great Emancipator, but Indiana has its claim, too. I might be biased, but I would call it equal.

In 1964, Scholastic Books published a children's biography, Johnny Appleseed, written by Eva Moore and illustrated by Judith Ann Lawrence. Born in 1942, Eva Moore lives or has lived in Montauk, New York. Also known as J.A. Lawrence and Judy Blish, Judith Ann Lawrence is an author and an artist. She was married to the science fiction author James Blish (1921-1975). Judy has a new book out. You can find out more about it by clicking here.

In 1948, Walt Disney released Melody Time, an animated musical featuring seven short films. One of these is "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed."  I had hoped to find a Hoosier, either native or adopted, who contributed to "Johnny Appleseed," but to no avail. In any case, Simon and Schuster published a children's book adaptation in 1949. It was printed by Western Printing and Lithographing Company as one of its Little Golden Library series. The pictures were by the Walt Disney Company. (There might be a Hoosier hiding in there somewhere.) The adaptation was by Ted Parmalee, about whom I know nothing at all. 

Here's an interior illustration from Disney's Johnny Appleseed. This is romanticized of course, but not by much. If you have been in Appalachia and to the American Midwest, you might have seen scenes like this one. We had a storm just like it yesterday.

Rand McNally & Company of Chicago had its own line of children's books, including those in the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club series. Here is one called Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance, written by Frances Cavanah, illustrated by Paula Hutchison, and published in 1959. I have cleaned up the image a little, as the original I have is a little worn. I found this and the two books above on Johnny Appleseed at the local secondhand store about three weeks ago.

Frances Cavanah was a Hoosier. She was born on September 26, 1897, in Princeton, Indiana, to Rufus Oscar Cavanah and Louella "Lula" Neale Cavanah. Educated at DePauw University, she worked as an editor at Child Life magazine in Chicago. (Sometimes people come to Indiana, and sometimes they go away from it.) Frances wrote dozens of books and lived in Washington, D.C., later in life. She died in May 1982.

The illustrator, Paula A. Hutchison, was born on December 19, 1902, in Helena, Montana. She worked as a teacher, illustrator, and fine artist. She was married to Michael John McGrath (1905-?) and lived in New Jersey. She illustrated many children's books, most of which seem to be biographies and other nonfiction. Paula died on November 5, 1982.

In the fall of 1816, Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Kentucky to Indiana. Part of the reason for the move was for him to get away from some land disputes, but part was also to relocate to what would soon be a free state versus the slave state of Kentucky. Making the trip with him were his wife Nancy and their two children, Sarah and Abe. That made Abe's sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby (1807-1828), an adopted Hoosier, too. The illustration is from Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance.

The endpapers of Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance together make this map of Lincoln Country. Plum in the middle is an image of Pigeon Creek Farm, the place in what is now Spencer County where Abe spent his childhood years, from age seven to age twenty-one. Here he was formed and here his mother lies.

Original text copyright 2021, 2204 Terence E. Hanley

Art for Memorial Day by Franklin Boggs (1914-2009)

William Franklin Boggs was born in Warsaw, Indiana, on July 25, 1914, just a few days before war began in Europe. He made a name for himself a generation later in his depictions of another war half a world away, this one in the Southwest Pacific.

Boggs was a young art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when he got the call to be a war correspondent during World War II. His job was to cover the Medical Corps in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. Reproductions of some of his paintings appear below.

Franklin Boggs was featured in the PBS documentary They Drew Fire (2000). By that time, he had taught at Beloit College in Wisconsin for several decades. He died in Beloit on November 7, 2009, just four days before Veterans Day. His life, then, was bracketed by war and punctuated by war.

On this day, we remember him and all of the men and women who have fought and died for our country and for the freedoms that we cherish. We also disavow and resist all of those who want to take away our freedoms, to tear down our country, and to destroy everything that America means and stands for. They should know that they will never and can never win, no matter what vaunted position they might hold.

Top to bottom:

[Men Loading Fuel Tanks on a P-38 Lightning.]

End of a Busy Day.

Battalion Aid Station.

Night Duty.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Brother Ernest, C.S.C. (1897-1963) & Nancy Garner (1924-2009)

Several years ago, I was at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis and they were giving away copies of Indiana Authors and Their Books. Three prized and well-made volumes and they were just giving them away. So I took them home and paged through them, reading entries here and there and cataloguing authors of special interest to me, on aviation or genre fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, and so on. These books have a special place on my bookshelf and I prize them still.

One of the things you'll notice in reading about Indiana authors is just how many have written on religious subjects. Native Hoosiers are generally conservative and many are churchgoing. These two attributes have helped to build among us a resistance to nonsense. That resistance breaks down occasionally, but most of the time it serves us pretty well.

For Christians, this is Holy Week, which culminates in the celebration of Easter, the holiest day of the year. Just last week, a couple of days before Palm Sunday in fact, I came upon a book by an Indiana author, probably illustrated by an Indiana artist, and on a Christian subject. My friend Troy plopped this book into my cart at the local secondhand store. It came at just the right time. The book is called The Son of Thunder: A Story of St. John the Apostle, and it was written by Brother Ernest, C.S.C. The illustrator was Nancy Garner. It's a slim book, a biography for children and just thirty-eight pages long. It was published by Dujarie Press of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1947.

Brother Ernest was born John Dominic Ryan on August 4, 1897, in Elyria, Ohio. In 1918, he entered the Congregation of Holy Cross of Notre Dame and took his vows in 1923. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1925, a degree in library science from Catholic University of America, and a master's degree from the University of Portland. Brother Ernest taught in Evansville, Indiana; New Orleans; Indianapolis; Portland, Oregon; and at Notre Dame. The Dujarie Press of Notre Dame was his creation. He founded it in 1943, but even before then he was an author. His first book listed in Indiana Authors and Their Books is Our Brothers, from 1931, but in his thirty-year career, Brother Ernest wrote scores of books, most of them biographies of saints for young readers. At some point he gave up teaching in order to devote himself to writing and to the operation of the Dujarie Press.

The illustrator of The Son of Thunder was Nancy Garner. She was born on April 3, 1924, in New Albany, Indiana, to Dr. William H. Garner, Sr., a surgeon, and Mary Louise Cavanaugh Garner. Unfortunately I have found nothing on her. I suspect she was a student: her work has the look of a young person learning her art. I suspect also that she was an artist close at hand, perhaps at St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, which was at the time affiliated with the University of Notre Dame. If she was indeed a young artist, She attended St. Mary's College, which was at that time affiliated with Notre Dame University. In 1947, when The Son of Thunder was published, Nancy Garner was a young artist. We can imagine her excitement from that long-ago time in receiving an assignment to illustrate the life of another young person, John the Apostle and Evangelist. In about 1947, she married, eventually to have five children. Nancy Marie Garner died on July 12, 2009, in Toledo, Ohio, at age eighty-five. Brother Ernest, C.S.C. (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce) died on March 4, 1963, in Notre Dame and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in the same place.

HAPPY EASTER!

Updated on May 27, 2024. Thanks to Mary Clare Decker for information on Nancy Garner.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Golf in Art by Indiana Artists

This entry on golf in art made by Indiana artists began when I found this slim paperback, Play It Pro: Golf from Beginner to Winner (1960), at a flea market in southeastern Ohio. The cover illustration is by Bob Abbett (1926-2015) of Hammond, Indiana, whose art is always worth a look.

John H. Striebel (1891-1962) of South Bend is best known for having drawn the comic strip Dixie Dugan, but in the 1910s and '20s, he kept busy with illustrations for magazines and newspapers, mostly for the Chicago Tribune. Here is a cover illustration by him for that newspaper's Sunday "Coloroto Magazine" section of June 17, 1923.

John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) of South Raub, Indiana, and Purdue University also worked for the Chicago Tribune. Here is an illustration for "New Fables in Slang" by McCutcheon's old Indiana friend, George Ade (1866-1944), published in The Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1912.

Fontaine Fox (1884-1964) was born in Kentucky but attended Indiana University (which now holds a large collection of his cartoons). While working for a Chicago newspaper in the early twentieth century, he began drawing cartoons about the people and events of a place called Toonerville. His Toonerville Folks became a very popular daily comic and Sunday strip, and it stayed that way for decades, until Fox's retirement in 1955. Toonerville is peopled with a large, colorful, and very memorable cast of characters, including the Powerful Katrinka, shown here playing the role of both golf cart and caddie. Fontaine Fox, by the way, was a great fan of golf, and the sport was a recurring subject in his cartoons.

Sidney Smith (1877-1935) was another cartoonist from a state bordering Indiana. His native state was Illinois, but around the turn of the twentieth century, he cartooned for the Indianapolis News. In 1912, he settled in with the Chicago Tribune, where he created first Old Doc Yak, which gave way to a vastly popular story strip called The Gumps. Here are the first few panels of an Old Doc Yak Sunday from May 26, 1912. The slapstick humor is typical for the day and for the strip.

Born in Indianapolis, Chick Evans (1890-1979) wasn't an artist, but he was a golfer. He was also an editor and philanthropist and the author of a short-lived comic feature called Fore, drawn by Dick Calkins, later of Buck Rogers fame. Here is the cover illustration for Golfers Magazine, September 1915, edited by Evans and Crafts W. Higgins. The cover art is by--I believe it says--Bessie Bethey (dates unknown).

Allen Saunders (1899-1986) of Lebanon and Crawfordsville, Indiana, started out as a cartoonist and French teacher but found his true calling by writing comic strip continuities. In 1936, he began as the scriptwriter for The Great Gusto, soon to be retitled Big Chief Wahoo, drawn by Elmer Woggon. Big Chief Wahoo went through more name changes as the years went by. In 1962, when this golf-themed strip appeared in newspapers, it was known as Steve Roper, and the artist was William Overgard.

Dave Gerard (1909-2003) was also from Crawfordsville. In fact he was mayor of that city from 1972 to 1976. Although he drew the syndicated comic strip Will-Yum and the comic panel Citizen Smith, Gerard created hundreds of magazine gag cartoons published from the 1930s onward. Here is one from Golf Digest, from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Captions copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Tom Floyd (1928-2011)

Cartoonist and commercial artist Thomas Wesley Floyd, Sr., was born on July 13, 1928,* in Gary, Indiana, to William Webster Floyd (1894-1936), a laborer in a steel mill, and Alice James Floyd (dates unknown), a housewife. Tom Floyd's parents came from the South, William from Wetumpka, Alabama, Alice from Mississippi. They were married on March 1, 1923, in Crown Point, Indiana.

Tom Floyd was their fourth child, but only three of those four showed up in the census of 1930, Tom, his older sister (Mary) Juanita, and his older brother James Frederick. All three were born in Indiana, and the family lived in Gary, the largest American city founded in the twentieth century and one known for its steel mills. In the census of 1940, Tom and his siblings were living in the household of their maternal grandparents, Walter and Ollie James. Walter James died in 1945.

Tom Floyd graduated from the University of Illinois in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in commercial art. He ran his own advertising business in Gary and worked as a designer of visual aids in the training department of Inland Steel Company, also in Gary. By 1971, he was vice president of W.V. Rouse & Associates of Chicago, a management consulting firm engaged in minority relations. Over the course of his career, Floyd also worked as an editorial cartoonist, single-panel cartoonist, comic strip artist, and comic book scriptwriter.

Race and minority relations were a continuing theme and interest in his life and work. He is best known for his cartoon collection Integration Is a Bitch! (1969), subtitled "An Assessment by a Black-White Collar Worker," but he also wrote and drew the cartoons for a second book, The Hook Book . . . The ABC's of Drug Abuse . . ., which he self-published in 1973 under his own firm, Tom Floyd Visuals of Gary, Indiana. It's a cute book on a serious and deadly subject. I stand with the late Mr. Floyd in his opposition to drugs and drug abuse, which has helped to ruin not just black people but all kinds of people in America and the world over. Integration Is a Bitch! won the Book of the Year Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews in 1971.

In 2012, comics historian Allan Holtz published a monumental work, American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. In the index of authors and cartoonists, there is a single-name credit, "Floyd," for a person who created three comic features for the Chicago Defender during the 1960s. I don't think there can be any doubt that the artist in question was Tom Floyd. The three features credited to "Floyd" are:

• At the Brink with J.J., which ran from December 11, 1965, to February 3, 1968 (It was renamed King Freedom. I don't have dates for that title.)
• Color Cuties, which ran from December 11, 1965, to March 30, 1968
• Integration Chuckles, which ran from December 11, 1965, to March 23, 1968

I have a sample only of the first title (shown below). Comparing a sample of Integration Chuckles with the cartoons in Integration Is a Bitch! might be all the evidence we need to show that "Floyd" and Tom Floyd were the same person. (A comparison of signatures, also shown below, makes pretty good evidence, too.)

Beginning in the 1960s, Floyd was involved in a project for which every comic book fan, especially every Hoosier comic book fan, can shout Yay! The project was a comic book about a black superhero called Blackman, who flies by pulling on his own bootstraps and who likes to eat peanuts. (We should remember that Floyd's parents were both Southerners.) Blackman finally made it into print in 1981 as a one-shot comic book pencilled by Eric O'Kelley and inked by Danny Loggins working from Floyd's script. It was published by Leader Comics Group, which is supposed to have been based in Indiana. I would like to think that that makes Eric O'Kelley and Danny Loggins Hoosier cartoonists, as well. By the way, Tom Floyd developed a supergroup that included Blackwoman, The Brotherhood, and The Big Dunker. 

In the 1980s, Floyd drew editorial cartoons for the Gary Post-Tribune. One of his drawings was included in the 1984 edition of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, edited by Charles Brooks. (See below.) Tom Floyd married Wynona Marie Gibson, a native Illinoisan, on February 25, 1956, in Cook County, Illinois, presumably in Chicago. They had three children. Thomas W. Floyd, Sr., died on September 22, 2011, in Gary, Indiana. He was eighty-three years old.

*Although his year of birth is everywhere given as 1929, Tom Floyd's birth certificate states clearly that he was born in 1928.

A cartoon from Integration Is a Bitch! by Tom Floyd. Floyd's book was published more than half a century ago, yet many--if not all--of his cartoons are still pertinent. This is one of my favorites--". . . And this is our Negro!"--an outright acknowledgment of a kind of tokenism that is never supposed to be spoken of or noticed. Note that one of the people applauding is a clergyman. I take that to be a poke at the virtue-signaling liberalism of mainstream religion in America.

At the Brink with J.J. by "Floyd" from the comics page of the Tri-State Defender, Memphis, Tennessee, July 9, 1966.

The cover of Blackman #1, a one-shot comic book written by Tom Floyd, penciled by Eric O'Kelley, and inked by Danny Loggins.

An editorial cartoon by Tom Floyd from the Gary Post-Tribune from 1984. Note the signature on the upper right and its resemblance to the signature in the comic strip At the Brink with J.J. from 1966. The same signature is on the cartoons for Integration Is a Bitch!

A photograph of Tom Floyd with his comic-book superhero, Blackman, in an article from 1995. Photograph by Milbert Orlando Brown.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The International Day of the Cartoonist 2021

Since 2015, I have here observed the International Day of the Cartoonist in honor and memory of five French cartoonists murdered for their art. They were Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Charb, respectively, George David Wolinski (1934-2015), Jean Cabut (1938-2015), Philippe Honoré (1941-2015), Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015), and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015). They were killed on this day in 2015 by Islamist terrorists in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

The same kind of terrorist infamously killed another Frenchman in 2020 because he showed some cartoons to his students. He was Samuel Paty (1973-2020), and he was a middle school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb of Paris. Every year since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, M. Paty showed his students cartoons drawn by its cartoonists depicting a person revered by Muslims. When he did the same thing in October 2020, a young Muslim man took offense, and on October 16, 2020, he killed and beheaded Samuel Paty in the street near his school. A few minutes later, police tried to arrest the killer. When he resisted, they shot him dead. The French government was strong in its response to the murder. Some Western media, including in the United States, were characteristically weak. The French showed strength and resolve. Some Americans, Canadians, and Europeans showed their bellies.

The French president awarded M. Paty the Légion d'honneur posthumously. I think we can honor him, too, for his courage and for his devotion to the principles of freedom of thought and expression and of resistance to tyranny and oppression. There are cartoonists all over the world currently engaged in the same kinds of things. We should honor and remember them, too.

Postdated to January 7, 2021.

Copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley