George Peed (1913-2002) of Grandview, Indiana, was an artist known by almost every child in America, though not by name, for he created scores of record album covers for Peter Pan Records of New Jersey. Among his many designs were those he created for holiday-themed records, especially Christmas records. Below is the cover for Jingle Bells (1039), a 45-rpm record containing four songs.
from Indiana Illustrators
&
Hoosier Cartoonists!
Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
Though born in Illinois, cartoonist Charles "Doc" Kuhn lived and worked in Indiana for many decades. Kuhn was an editorial cartoonist at the Indianapolis News from 1922 to 1948. In middle age, he decided to make a change in his cartooning career, launching Grandma, a syndicated comic strip, on April 14, 1947. Originally syndicated by Richardson Feature Service of Indianapolis, Grandma was picked up by King Features Syndicate the following year and ran in American newspapers until 1969. Kuhn lived with his wife in Acton, Indiana, just southeast of Indianapolis, until 1964, when they moved to Florida. Kuhn died on January 16, 1989, at age ninety-six.
Like so many early cartoonists, Kuhn was a jack-of-all-trades. In addition to drawing editorial cartoons and a nationally syndicated comic strip, he created instructional books on cartooning for children. These included The Boy and Girl Cartoonist: A Complete Course in Cartooning, published by Saalfield Publishing Company of Akron, Ohio, in 1936. The cartoons below are from that book.
Charles Kuhn's Lessons 57 and 58 from The Boy and Girl Cartoonist (1936), showing the stereotyped Republican elephant and Democratic donkey. They look very different here of course . . . 
Now see if you can guess which one has his big, fat hand out to the taxpayer. Look closely. Can you tell the difference? Neither can I. And these are the people we're going to elect today and then install in office in a few short weeks.
Illustrator John Gannam (1905-1965) was born in Lebanon but came to the United States with his parents in 1909. As a child he lived in Indianapolis. He received his art education in Chicago and worked in commercial art in Detroit and New York. Here is an illustration for Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther (1940), taking the form of a piece of commercial art advertising the Air Transport Association of Washington, D.C. The image is from National Geographic, February 1944, now eighty and a half years in the past.
Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
Indiana artist George Peed (1913-2002) created scores of record album covers for Peter Pan Records, based in his adopted home state of New Jersey. Below is his charming cover art for Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway musical The Sound of Music (8163), with music by the Peter Pan Orchestra and vocals by Janet Anderson and Marian Garvey. This image is imperfect: I have stitched it together from two scans and have left off the very edges of the design.
Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
William Merritt Chase was born on November 1, 1849, in Williamsburg, Indiana, to merchant David Chase and Sarah Swaim Chase. In 1861, the Chase family moved to Indianapolis, where he studied art under Barton S. Hays. In 1869, he left Indiana for New York City, and in 1872, the young artist embarked for studies at the Royal Academy in Munich. Chase remained in Europe for several years, living, studying, and painting in Venice in 1876-1877 with Frank Duveneck and John Twachtman. In 1878, he returned to New York to teach at the newly established Art Students League. Artist Charles Henry Miller wrote: "Mr. Chase upon returning to New York virtually took the town by storm, capturing its chief artistic citadel [. . .] the exhibition gallery of the Tenth Street Studio Building [. . .]." (Quoted in William Merritt Chase, 1849-1916 by Ronald G. Pisano, 1983, p. 42.) For the next nearly four decades, Chase lived, taught, painted, and advanced the cause of fine art in America, exhibiting in his many wonderfully good portraits, still-life paintings, and landscapes his bravura with brush and chalk. Some of his impressionistic paintings are really quite astonishing in their technique.
William Merritt Chase died on October 25, 1916, in New York City. He and Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley were exact contemporaries, having been born in and died in the same years. Whereas most of Riley's poems have not aged well, Chase's paintings live on as the imperishable works of a great artist. Below is one example, "The Nursery" from 1890, a fine picture for this beautiful spring season.
For my parents' wedding anniversary.
Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
Following is a tribute that I wrote for Larry Blake for the day and place of his graveside service, Saturday, April 20, 2024, Eden Cemetery, Reedsville, Ohio:
Everyone who knew Larry knows that he was a talented, imaginative, and very creative artist. He began drawing comics in 1960 and first saw his work in print in 1973. From then until the end of his life, except when he was in ill health, Larry drew and drew, always with great energy and enthusiasm. He loved drawing comic books, but Larry was also a gag cartoonist, illustrator, and muralist, and he made many colorful and evocative paper collages. Over the years, he knew and collaborated with many other artists and writers who were and are involved in small press, amateur press, and alternative comics, including Jim Pack, Jim Main, Tim Corrigan, Mike Gustovich, Steve Keeter, Doug Phillips, Larry Johnson, Russ Ferryman, Gerry Lee, and Dale Sherman, among many, many others. In later years, Larry worked with Kevin Yong, Eric Jansen, Tom Ahearn, Gary Gibeaut, Jason Gibeaut, and Terence Hanley.
Larry attended comic book conventions and other pop-culture conventions beginning in the 1970s. In the 2000s, he was a regular at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and other events close to his home in Reedsville, Ohio. In 2009, Larry received a lifetime achievement award at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (S.P.A.C.E.), an event put on every year in Columbus, Ohio, by Bob Corby, also a longtime friend.
Larry was a great fan of rock 'n' roll music. Like the rest of America, he watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, but it was the Monkees television series in 1966-1968 that turned him into what he called "a foaming-at-the-mouth rock 'n' roll fanatic!" He began collecting records, magazines, and memorabilia about his favorite kind of music and his favorite bands. During the 1970s, he attended lots of rock concerts. If you wanted to find Larry at a convention or other event, you just had to follow the sound of the music.
In addition to the Beatles and the Monkees, Larry was a fan of Alice Cooper, the Ramones, and KISS. For years he had artwork in fan magazines such as KISS Crazy, and he learned to draw flawlessly and from memory the members of that band, as well as the Ramones. Larry knew everything there is to know about rock music--all of the bands, band members, singers, songwriters, and songs. He also knew all about television shows and old movies. "I loved going to drive-in movies with my family," he remembered. "We'd pile in the car with a grocery bag fill of bread, lunch meat, chips, bottles of soda pop! Great fun." Family meant a lot to Larry. In addition to his younger sister Rita, he had many cousins with whom he played and pretended when they were children.
The comic book titles on which Larry worked is long and varied. I'm not sure that there will ever be a complete catalog of his more than half-century's worth of work. Titles on which he worked or that he created himself include: Afterworld, Alpha-Omega, The Big Book of Christian Comics, Christianman, Comet Tales, Ditkomania, Facets (Harrison Ford fanzine), Fandom Teamup, Fanzine '77, Five Star Comics, Followers of the All, KISS Crazy, Mothman 'Toons, New Sons of Thunder, Skeet's Fab Forum and Review, Reeealy Comics Presents . . ., Rotgut Funnies, Silver Wolf, Spectrum, Tim Corrigan's Comics and Stories, and Zero Man. Larry also created a long-running comic book series called Kevin Kool, based on his own friends and experiences from high school and after. He began drawing Kevin Kool in 1966, the same year in which he discovered the Monkees.
Larry's most ambitious work--really his life's work, a sprawling and ambitious epic--is Psychozort, an anthology of his own characters and stories that ran for dozens of issues from the 1970s until the early 2000s. Larry first started working on the characters that would one day fill the pages of Psychozort when he was just eight years old. Like much of Larry's work, stories in Psychozort were based on his own life, its characters based on people he really knew. Paul Burden, sidekick of super heroine Nightstar, is Larry himself, while Nightstar was based on a young friend. The fact that Larry's characters were based on real people made them and their stories more authentic, interesting, and compelling. The story of Nightstar and Paul Burden will never be finished. Maybe that's just as well. As in John Keats' poem, addressed to the ageless figures on a Grecian urn, "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"
Larry was close to his paternal grandparents, Reverend Eldon Blake and Harriet "Hattie" Blake. "Grandpa was an amazing guy," Larry wrote, while his grandmother encouraged him to draw. "I'd give her drawings," Larry remembered, "and she'd keep them in a dresser drawer in her bedroom." Larry and his family visited with his grandparents a lot when he was a kid. In 1983, after a bout with serious illness, Larry returned to the Reedsville area and his mother's Meigs County home. He lived there for more than three decades after that, just down the road from his friends Dee and Jeff Kimes. In 2018, Larry moved to Boonville, Indiana, at the invitation of his friend Kim Hemmerlein. She and her son Gary became a home-away-from-home family for him, and it was Kim who helped look after Larry and took care of his affairs at the end. Larry spent the last years of his life in Boonville and passed away there on March 28, 2024, meaningfully, I think, during Holy Week and just three days before Easter Sunday. He was seventy-one years old.
Larry was smart and funny and generous. He was a talented and extremely prolific artist, his body of work numbering in the thousands of pages. What he wanted was for his art to survive him and for people to go on seeing it for a long time after he was gone. We will miss Larry, and though he might be departed now, his art remains. He remains in our memories, too, as a happy, cheerful, laughing, and funny guy. Larry was a Christian. In his last letter to me, he wrote, "PSYCH [his comic book Psychozort] is the ONLY reason I still wanta BE here! Actually what comes NEXT sounds much more interesting! A new body, reunions with all who went on before & the full-time ALL enveloping presence of GOD who is love!" We can take comfort knowing that Larry is in that presence now. Meanwhile, as they say in the comic books, we go on here.
Quotations are from an interview Larry did with D. Blake Werts, published in his mini-comic Copy This! #32, October 2016. Thank you, Blake. All other text is copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley.
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| The final panel in Larry Blake's first story of Nightstar, published in the initial issue of Psychozort, 1998. Everyone who knew Larry recognizes the male figure here as the artist himself. Note that Larry's autobiographical character is wearing a Rez t-shirt. Music from that band played at his graveside service. So, again, if you followed the music, you would find Larry. |
Ursula Koering (1921-1976) illustrated children's books as well as articles and stories in children's magazines. She was associated for many years with Golden Press and the Western Publishing Company. Today I found a magazine with three of her illustrations. The magazine is The Golden Magazine for Boys and Girls. Her illustrations are in a historical article called "Anthony Wayne's Cattle Drive" (Part III) by Martha Brown. The date was March 1968, fifty-six years ago as I write. The culminating event in Martha Brown's article is the attack by Anthony Wayne and Casimir Pulaski on the British at Haddonfield, New Jersey, on March 1, 1778, one hundred forty-six years ago this month.
Here are Ursula Koering's three illustrations:
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
My friend Larry Blake is a cartoonist and comic book artist who has been at work in his chosen field for more than half a century. He has drawn every kind of comic book character, from Little Lulu to his own superheroes such as Missile, Nightstar, and Kevin Kool. He is also a great fan of rock 'n' roll and pop music. His favorites include The Ramones, KISS, Alice Cooper, and John Lennon. For years he attended small press and comic book conventions. He has collaborated with lots of other artists, including Tim Corrigan (1950-2015) with whom he created a weekly newspaper comic strip called Allegheny Man. Those involved in small press and alternative comics will remember Tim as the publisher of a journal called Small Press Comics Explosion and a supporter of and mentor to countless cartoonists. It was through Larry that I met Tim at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (S.P.A.C.E.) in Columbus, Ohio.
Larry Blake's health problems began many years ago. Things improved for him after he moved from Ohio to Indiana and to a better situation. Now Larry is down again and needs help. Bob Corby of Columbus has set up a GoFundMe page for Larry. You can access it at the following URL and link:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/larry-blake
You can read and see videos about Larry on the Internet. You can also purchase his books, which include:
I don't ordinarily provide links to commercial websites on this blog, but for this I'm making an exception.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
