Stan Fine (May 24, 1922 - May 21, 2009), [1] was an American gag cartoonist. He contributed to major magazines, signed his work with his full name but sometimes reversed his last name to submit cartoons under the signature Enif.
Born in Pittsburgh, Fine studied at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art and then launched his cartoon career. His work appeared for decades in a wide variety of publications, including The American Magazine , Cartoon Spice, Collier's , Good Housekeeping , Look , National Enquirer , National Lampoon , The Saturday Evening Post and Woman's World .
For a year in the mid-1960s, he entered into newspaper syndication with Art Linkletter's Kids , a daily gag panel featuring a cast of child characters—Klunkhead, Powder Puff, Specs Webster and Terry the Terror. Distributed by King Features Syndicate, the series began November 4, 1963 and continued until October 1964. [2] He also worked on the syndicated Hazel , as recalled by Ted Key's son, Peter Key:
Before moving to Florida, Fine's studio was at 125 Montgomery Avenue in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, where he lived with his wife, the former Renee Fox. Between sessions at the drawing board, Fine found time for his hobbies, woodworking, golf and reinventing himself as a cartoonist.
Fine used the services of several gagwriters, including Terry Wampler. In later years, Fine's most prolific work appeared in the pages of several men's magazines, most notably Hustler. The days of old school cartoonists had passed and Fine found a new home in the "adult" market - Hustler in particular, where the perfect medium came into play with Fine regularly drawing single page cartoons depicting (among other things) devious little kids, a far cry from the familial tapestry woven into Hazel. Many of his associates knew in actuality they were references to his estranged son whom Stan wrote an angst-laden letter to in 1982, an internal struggle in which Stan battled during his final years in Florida. [4] The other side of Stan's iconic humor was found in Wampler's contributions, acknowledged in one National Enquirer cartoon showing kids in Halloween costumes, outside a darkened house, saying, "We know you're in there, Mr. Wampler, so turn on the light and come out with your hands full."
Books with Fine's byline include How to Stop Smoking Without Hardly Trying (Gem Publishing, 1964) which displayed "16 detachable jumbo picture postcards". His cartoons were reprinted in many collections, including The Little Monsters (Ace, 1956) and the hardcover You've Got Me in the Suburbs (Dodd Mead, 1957), cartoons about commuters and suburbanites, edited by Lawrence Lariar. Fine was often represented in Lariar's Best Cartoons of the Year annuals.
His work is in the Daniel McCormick Collection at Wayne State University. [5]
A comic strip is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.
A cartoon is a type of visual art that is typically drawn, frequently animated, in an unrealistic or semi-realistic style. The specific meaning has evolved, but the modern usage usually refers to either: an image or series of images intended for satire, caricature, or humor; or a motion picture that relies on a sequence of illustrations for its animation. Someone who creates cartoons in the first sense is called a cartoonist, and in the second sense they are usually called an animator.
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Hazel is a single-panel cartoon series by Ted Key about a live-in maid who works for a middle-class family. Launched in 1943, Hazel ended September 29, 2018.
King Features Syndicate, Inc. is an American content distribution and animation studio, consumer product licensing and print syndication company owned by Hearst Communications that distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles, and games to nearly 5,000 newspapers worldwide. King Features Syndicate also produces intellectual properties, develops new content and franchises, like The Cuphead Show!, which it produced with Netflix, and licenses its classic characters and properties.
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Morris S. Weiss was an American comic book and comic strip artist and writer. Active from the 1930s through the mid-1970s, he created the teen-comedy character "Margie" for Timely Comics, the 1940s predecessor of Marvel Comics, and was the final cartoonist on the comic strip Mickey Finn. He also worked as a writer or illustrator on numerous other strips, including Joe Palooka.
Grin and Bear It is a former daily comic panel created by George Lichtenstein under the pen name George Lichty. Lichty created Grin and Bear it in 1932 and it ran 83 years until 2015, making it the 10th-longest-running comic strip in American history. Frequent subjects included computers, excessive capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy. Situations in his cartoons often took place in the offices of commissars, or the showrooms of "Belchfire" dealers with enormous cars in the background. His series "Is Party Line, Comrade!" skewered Soviet bureaucrats, always wearing a five-pointed star medal with the label "Hero".
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Quincy is an American syndicated newspaper comic strip published from July 13, 1970 to October 4, 1986, created and produced by cartoonist Ted Shearer. The series, about an African-American boy being raised by his grandmother in Harlem, was one of the earliest mainstream comic strips to star an African American in the lead role, following Dateline: Danger! (1968-1974) and Luther (1969-1986). Another predecessor, Wee Pals, features an African-American among an ensemble cast of different races and ethnicities.
Sylvan S. Byck (July 17, 1904 – July 8, 1982 was an American editor and cartoonist, who was the comic strip editor for King Features Syndicate for over 30 years, in which position he evaluated "up to 2000 comics submissions a year."