Sunday, November 20, 2005
Pat Sullivan
Pat Sullivan is well-known as the creator of Felix The Cat. However, because of his bad treatment of Otto Messmer, who actually drew the Felix comic strip, a popular legend has grown that Pat Sullivan could not draw at all - that he just used his sharp business skills to co-opt Messmer's considerable talents. His lack of cartooning ability is not true, as the above sample of his work proves.
I won't rehash Sullivan's bio at length here (you can read a very well-researched account of his life in John Canemaker's Felix - The Twisted Tale Of The World's Most Famous Cat). Sullivan got his start in American comic strips by effectively duplicating William F. Marriner's cartooning style on Marriner's Sambo And His Funny Noises, a long-running McClure Sunday section feature. Sullivan also did several strips on his own, all done in the Marriner style - a few for McClure and some additional daily-style features for the New York Evening World. Great-Idea Jerry, seen here, ran 7/17/1912 to 4/5/1913.
