Gene Byrnes

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Eugene Francis Byrnes (born 1889, New York City - died July 26, 1974) created the long running comic strip Reg'lar Fellers. This humorous look at suburban children (who nevertheless spoke like New York street kids) was distributed by various syndicates from 1917 to 1949. A former bug spray salesman and shoemaker, Brynes broke his leg during a wrestling match and began copying the cartoons of Tad Dorgan while recuperating in the hospital. A graduate of Landon cartooning correspondence course, he overcame his limited drawing skills by hiring a phalanx of talented cartoonists to assist and ghost his strips.

Byrnes began in 1915 with his cartoon series, Things That Never Happen, drawn for a California newspaper. He met Winsor McCay who got him a job as a sports cartoonist with the New York Telegram where he created his cartoon panel It's a Great Life If You Don't Weaken, a phrase which became a rallying cry of the American Army during World War I. In 1917 this cartoon feature introduced the Reg'lar Fellers characters. In 1919, he began Wide Awake Willie as a New York Herald Sunday page, and this too featured Reg'lar Fellers characters. With Reg'lar Fellers running as a daily strip in 1920, he changed the name of the Sunday strip to Reg'lar Fellers (which ran through 1948) and soon Byrnes was making $25,000 a year from the feature.

With syndication in 800 newspapers, book reprints and comic books, Byrnes' cartoon kids made him a wealthy man. Between 1939 and 1952, he also wrote and edited several instructional books on cartooning and illustration. Ralph Bakshi learned how to draw cartoons after finding a copy of Byrnes' The Complete Guide to Cartooning in the early 1950s.

Byrnes died of a heart ailment in 1974.