Just to echo shaxper's above post, I don't believe that this choice will be eligible. We're supposed to be picking our Top 12 "cartoonists", and in this case, cartoonists are creative people who plotted, scripted and drew a comic strip or comic book all by themselves.

To quote Cei-U! in the Advance Warning thread, "For our purposes here, I'm defining a cartoonist as a comics creator who plots, scripts and draws one or more comic books, newspaper strips or graphic novels. Your choice can partner with others for the inking, lettering, coloring and background art, as long as he or she did the creative heavy lifting."

Hope that helps, Mecha!

Cei-U! meant CREATORS who worked on the newspaper strips, not the strips themselves. If one man or woman did the majority of the writing and drawing on a strip, then you can choose that creator as your choice, but not the strip itself. However, you can reference that strip as a reason for you chose that person. 

 #12 Stan Lynde



As a kid, I usually had access to at least four Sunday newspapers that included expansive “Sunday funnies.” For me, going to church was the necessary payment I had to make before heading to my grandmother’s house, where I would be able to lie on the floor of her porch and spread out page after page of the funnies and read for what seemed like hours.

I know I read the funny pages before I’d ever read or maybe even seen a comic book, which meant that when I did finally read my first -- Star-Spangled War Stories 105, I’m pretty certain -- I was fluent in the language of the comics.

One of the strips that I loved was “Rick O’Shay,” a Western strip drawn beautifully by Stan Lynde (as in “kind.”) Lynde, I found out many years later, was a lifelong Montanan (less a few years in the Navy and a short stint in new York City) with a deep and abiding love and respect for the heritage of the American West. When I started reading “Rick,” Westerns were the pre-eminent genre in virtually all forms of American popular culture. (In 1959, 26 Westerns aired on prime-time TV and a batch of others aired in syndication.)

Lynde’s most famous strip evolved from a simply drawn gag strip into a rich, meticulously detailed portrait not just of the Old West, but of the many colorful characters who populated it. If you liked a bit of Dickens and a dash of Balzac in your grub, this strip was perfect for you. Lynde’s wit and his insights into human nature were pithy and perceptive, and his love for the residents of the small town of Conniption, and by extension, for all of us flawed humans, was palpable.

The characters were recognizable as western “types,” but only at first glance. The roster included a noble lawman, a dangerous gunman, and a beautiful woman, for instance, but they were not typical by any means.




Rick was the brave and very effective sheriff of Conniption, but he was unafraid to ask for help when he needed it, tried mightily to avoid gunplay, and was as humble and gentle as they come. His love interest was not a saloon girl with a heart of gold, but the publisher of the Conniption Cloudburst, the beautiful and brainy Gaye Abandon. (IIRC, she started as a dance hall girl, but that was just a jumping-off point.)

The character with the most powerful presence in the strip was probably the fearsome gunman, Hipshot Percussion, he of the whiplash moustache, lightning-fast draw, and sardonic wit. And though he was not a regular churchgoer, he was about the most pious gunslinger you were likely to meet, fond of talking about “the Boss,” and scared of but one creature in all the world, his cat, Belle Starr.

Hipshot clearly was a reminder of Jack Palance’s villainous Jack Wilson in Shane...





while Rick evolved from a guy who looked like Dottie Dripple’s husband Horace...


into a near-dead ringer for Will Hutchins of TV’s “Sugarfoot.”

The supporting characters were fun if only for their names (it’s clear that Lynde loved puns): Jubal lee, the parson; Deuces Wild, the gambler; Quyat Burp, the kid who tagged alongside Rick; Dr. Basil Metabolism and his nurse, Ophelia Pulse; and the town banker, Mort Gage.

Lynde’s gift for stripped-down dialogue and his love for authentic cowboy talk made each strip an exercise in “Less is more.”

Rick doesn’t say that his horse threw him; he says, “Him ‘n’ me dissolved our partnership.”

“I’m callin’ you out, Hipshot,” an angry cowpoke proclaims in another strip.

To which Hipshot replies, “Do you have anything else you want t’ say, bub? Or are you content for those to be your last words?”

As the would-be top gun shuffles away, Hipshot wryly adds, “A soft wrath turneth away answers.”

Meanwhile, his art became more naturalistic, (his style was just a hair’s breadth away from John Severin’s), his use of color akin to Hal Foster’s, and his layouts increasingly cinematic. Lynde’s eye for the Western landscape in all seasons was unrivalled; his panels were composed like shots from a John Ford. No wonder then, that Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel acknowledge his influence on their work. And there’s surely a touch of both Hipshot and Rick in DC’s fabled Bat Lash the deadshot rascal with a flower in his hat.

Rick and Hipshot lasted for nearly 20 years, until Lynde and the Tribune-News Syndicate split; Lynde created a new, strip, “Latigo,” which was a tad more realistic, but retained the whimsy of “Rick,” but it only lasted a few years.

You can find out a lot more about Lynde on-line, and there are many examples of his strips ad paintings, as well. He was a master of the comic strip, particularly of the Sunday page in the days when the funny pages were printed well enough and large enough to be epic in scope.

Looking back, Lynde’s old-fashioned nostalgic view of the West, like many an old Western movie, can seem less than enlightened toward the native Americans, and Lynde’s devotion to religion might make some reach for the insulin, but I think he sidesteps treacle and preachiness most of the time, and I have a low tolerance for both.


Stan Lynde’s intricate illustrations, his wit, his common-sense wisdom, his tolerance of the weaknesses and the foibles of human nature made it easy to love my many pleasant days in Conniption.

This was published over here in the Phantom. I greatly enjoyed the art in this, but the ploting was usually a little to naive for me. Great trip to memory lane though, thanks!

Hear, hear!

I, for one, am interested to see what all-in-one creators Mechagodzilla would rate as his twelve favourites. 

His name is the Comet and those beams are disintegrator beams.

12. Jeff Smith
...for his work on Bone.

My #12 choice is Jeff Smith. Bone was perhaps the first great children's comic I read (odd that I read it in college). I spent my first decade of comics collecting pretty focused on superheroes, then grew up a bit and moved on to superheroish books from DC with mature reader labels on them, then finally grew up enough to look at children's books. Bone is a cross between Uncle Scrooge and Lord of the Rings. Jeff Smith draws his three Bone characters in minimalist style and adds more texture to the setting and all the other characters, intentionally creating a sense akin to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of cartoons walking around in a "real" world. (The same sense George Lucas created repeatedly in The Phantom Menace, though perhaps less intentionally).

I loved it and respect the creator to this day. He stands on the shoulders of the true greats like Carl Barks and Don Rosa, but turned out a tale filled with humor and adventure that is beloved by many.



He would go on to a great little Captain Marvel series, returning a true sense of whimsy to the character for the first time in years.

To show his range, his next work, and perhaps my favorite work of his, was more adult, a sci/fi noir adventure about a reality-hopping criminal named Rasl.

Hoping to scan pages for this contest, I looked everywhere for my copy of Bone. I have the one-volume edition, so it's quite thick. But I could not find it. I'm afraid I may have lent it to someone who never returned it. Oh well. May be the motivation I've needed to finally invest in the color versions Scholastic has put out. I owned a couple of the original comics and picked one to scan a page out of.