Billy De Beck

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William Morgan "Billy" De Beck (April 15, 1890 - November 11, 1942) was a popular and very widely published cartoonist and writer. He created some of the most memorable comic strip characters of the 1920s and 1930s, including Barney Google, Bunky, Snuffy Smith, and the racehorse Spark Plug. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised there, where he eventually studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

De Beck was drawing cartoons by 1910. His comic strip Barney Google and Spark Plug first ran in June 1919 in the Chicago Herald and Examiner. The main character, Barney, was initially a simple henpecked husband and avid follower of sports, but within ten years Barney morphed into an urban rascal and natty dresser. The bony and goofy racehorse, Spark Plug, joined the characters in 1922, and Barney met his hillbilly friend, Snuffy Smith, in 1934. It’s said that the comic strip, and maybe Snuffy Smith in particular, was an escape for readers from the difficult and tragic conditions brought on by the Great Depression.

De Beck’s style of drawing is considered to be of the classic "big-foot" tradition quite prominent in American comic strips (e.g., The Katzenjammer Kids, Hägar the Horrible, many of Robert Crumb's characters. DeBeck died on Veterans Day, 1942, and the strip was continued by his assistant, Fred Lasswell.

The National Cartoonist Society's annual award was originally named "The Billy De Beck Memorial Award". However it was renamed the Reuben Award (after Rube Goldberg's real first name) in 1954.

The expression "heebie jeebies" (a fit of intense nervousness) and "Hotsy-Totsy" were coined by Billy De Beck in his Barney Google comic strip.