Stripper's Guide

With The Cartoonists
(from Cartoons & Movies magazine #9, June 1925)

G. H. Binns, well known cartoonist of Jewett, Texas, gives us the following thumbnail sketch:

"Ed." Wheelan, who is in his early thirties, is one of George Matthew Adams' stand-bys and daddy of "Minute-Movies" which enjoys a remarkable vogue. Wheelan is a Californian by birth, but migrated to Brooklyn, N. Y., and secured a contract with Brooklyn Daily Standard-Union to draw sport cartoons, and, as the saying goes, made quite a hit. Hearst drafted him over to the New York American to do sports.

A two-column series called "Mid-Summer Dreams" was published by the New York World, and we all wish "Ed." would resurrect "Old Man Experience."

Wheelan and Albert Payson Terhune were neighbors for quite a while and both were attracted to each other by their mutual love of dogs. "Bugs" Baer worked in the Standard-Union with Wheelan, and likewise jumped to the New York American.

Zere, of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Post, is another Brooklyn cartoonist who has made good with a bang!!


"Sid" Smith, originator of the Gumps, will illustrate the comic section of the Purdue University year-book this year.


Walter R. Bradford, of Philadelphia, "cartooner" of The North American for twenty years, died a few days after that newspaper suspended publication. He was familiarly known as "Brad."

Mr. Bradford was the creator of Enoch Pickleweight, the archtype of the henpecked husband; of Scow, the club-tailed cat; of John Dubbalong, the inventor whose name indicated his fumbling abilities, and of Jingling Johnson, the poet, whose ink-drawn outlines were a cartoon of Brad himself. There were other characters in his back-page strip that was a feature in The North American during two decades.

When the newspaper was purchased recently by Cyrus H. K. Curtis and its publication was discontinued, Bradford was its radio editor. He was as picturesque in Chat role as he had been in many others since he came out of a South Bend machine shop to be what he always called a "cartooner." That was his own name for his kind of job.

For months Bradford had been fighting against tuberculosis, putting up a fight that aroused the admiration of his associates on The North American. The closing down of that newspaper was a great blow to him, as his littered desk on the eighteenth floor had been as much a playground as a workshop.

"Almost immediately," Mrs. Bradford explained, "he went to White Haven, but he would not stay there and came home a few days later."

Bradford was fifty-three. His home was at 5551 Delancey Street, Philadelphia. He is survived by his widow, who was a native of England, and a son, William Bradford.

Bradford was born at Dayton, Ohio, and as a young man worked in the Studebaker carriage works at South Bend, Ind. He had a bent for drawing and started to attend night classes at Frank Holmes' school in Chicago, where he met John T. McCutcheon and other famous cartoonists, who encouraged him.

He worked on the Chicago Tribune, then on The North American, and shifted to the Baltimore Herald. When the Baltimore fire put him out of a job he returned to Chicago to work for the Journal. Then he went back to The North American for his last job.

"He loved his work there," Mrs. Bradford said. "He loved the characters he created and had fun out of them, Enoch, Maria, Dill and Pa Pickleweight — Ichabod, the old Injun fighter. The Scow cat was his mascot when he built his motorboat in our back yard in West Philadelphia about fifteen years ago and named it the Dubbalong. "He and Hugh Sutherland collaborated in his strip-comics over many years."

Bradford was protean with his hobbies. They included fishing, amateur photography and radio. In recent years he had written for a radio magazine, creating a new character, "Enoch, the Radio Doodlebug."
[Bradford is a 'cartooner' that we haven't seen much here on the blog, but he was a wonderful zany character; one of my all-time favorites is his Jingling Johnson. This short obit is the only biographical info I've ever seen on him. -- Allan]


Bernard Partridge, regarded by many admirers as the greatest cartoonist in the world, has been knighted by King George V. His name was included in a list of 600 persons honored on the British monarch's birthday. Mr. Partridge, as cartoonist for Punch, enjoys well-deserved popularity. He has that rare combination of powerful ideas and faultless technique. Nearly all of his work is done with pen and ink.

His cartoons on the World War— especially his clever satirical attacks on the former Kaiser—were reproduced in newspapers and magazines all over the world, and contributed substantially to the overthrow of William Hohenzollern. A noteworthy fact about Mr. Partridge's cartoons is that they are both dignified and forceful—there is very little caricature in them—so different from the grossly distorted cartoons of Germany, Italy, Spain and other foreign countries.

Labels: News of Yore