Percy Crosby

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Olympic medal record
Art competitions
Silver 1932 Los Angeles Watercolors and drawings

Percy Leo Crosby (December 8, 1891 – December 8, 1964)[1][2] was a U.S. author, illustrator, and cartoonist. He is best known for his 1923 to 1945 comic strip Skippy, a popular and acclaimed feature adapted into movies, a novel, and a radio show, and commemorated on a 1997 U.S. Postal Service stamp. The strip, an inspiration for Charles Schulz's Peanuts,[3][4] is considered by comics historians a "classic ... which innovated a number of sophisticated and refined touches used later by Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson...."[4] Critic and author Corey Ford in Vanity Fair magazine contemporaneously called the strip "America's most important contribution to humor of the century".[5]

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] (1891–1923) Early life and career

Percy Crosby was born in Brooklyn, New York, prior to the 1898 incorporation of the five boroughs of New York City, and raised in Richmond Hill, in what would be borough of Queens but at the time was considered part of Long Island.[6] His father, Thomas Francis Crosby, the son of Catholic immigrants from County Louth, Ireland, was an amateur painter who ran an art-supply business. His mother Fanny, was of English and Scottish descent. Percy had two younger sisters, Ethel and Gladys.[7]

Crosby quit high school during his sophomore year to take a job as an art-department office boy at editor Theodore Dreiser's magazine The Delineator. He was quickly promoted to artist, but the job ended after one issue. After selling magazines and delivering sandwiches, he eventually found a position as an editorial cartoonist for the Socialist newspaper the New York Daily Call. There he published his first two comic strips, Biff and The Extreme Brothers — Laff and Sy, but readers became outraged at frivolity in the paper and the strips were pulled.

Crosby next became a sports columnist and illustrator at the The New York Globe. On the side, he produced comics used as occasional filler for the paper. Eventually fired, he entered, in desperation, an Edison Company contest for the best cartoon on the use of electric light. He won the $75 prize and saw his cartoon appear in every newspaper in New York City. The exposure led to a job at the New York World, "at the time the promised land for aspiring cartoonists".[8]

[edit] (1923–1945) Skippy

Skippy started in 1923 as a cartoon in Life magazine, and became a syndicated comic strip two years later, through King Features Syndicate. Crosby retained the copyright, a rarity for comic-strip artists of the time.

The strip focused on Skippy Skinner, a young boy living in the city. He's drawn with a sketchy line suggesting restlessness, usually wearing an enormous collar and tie, and a floppy checked hat. The other characters are only vaguely defined. Skippy's parents seem kind but do not pay him much attention; he has a few friends (notably Sooky) without much personality, except for Butch O'Leary, the neighborhood bully. Skippy himself is an odd mix of mischief and melancholy; he may equally be found stealing from the corner fruit stand, or failing to master skates or baseball, or complaining about the adult world, or staring sadly at an old relative's grave ("And only last year she gave me a tie".)

The strip was enormously popular, at one point guaranteeing Crosby $2,350 a week,[9] an enormous sum at the time. Crosby published a Skippy novel and other books; there were Skippy dolls, toys, and comic books; and the comic was adapted as a movie by Paramount. A hit, it won director Norman Taurog the Academy Award for Best Director, and boosted the career of young star Jackie Cooper.

From 1928 to 1937, Crosby produced 3,650 Skippy strips, ten books of fiction, political and philosophical essays, drawings, and cartoons, as well as numerous pamphlets, while also mounting a dozen exhibitions in New York City, Washington, D.C., London, Paris, and Rome of his oils, watercolors, and other paintings and drawings.[4]

[edit] (1945–1964) Later years

During the World War II years, Crosby's politics increasingly intruded on the strip, and it began to lose readers. Negotiations on a new contract failed, and Crosby ended Skippy on December 8, 1945, the cartoonist's 54rd birthday.

His final years were tragic; unable to find steady work, he drifted into alcoholism. In December 1948, after the death of his mother, he was committed to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital for a suicide attempt.[9] In January 1949, he was transferred to the mental ward at Kings Park Veterans' Hospital, in Kings Park, New York, where he was declared a paranoid schizophrenic[9] and spent the last 16 years of his life.

In 1964, after a heart attack that had left him in a coma for months, Crosby died in the asylum on his 73rd birthday, having been unable to secure release.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Social Security Death Index for Percy Crosby, SSN 229-07-1487, gives December 8, 1891 - December 1964, with no specific date.
  2. ^ Robinson, Jerry. Skippy and Percy Crosby, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-03-018491-6. Gives specific death date of December 8.
  3. ^ "Bob's Comics Reviews: Percy Crosby - Skippy
  4. ^ a b c Horn, Maurice, editor. 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics (Gramercy Books, New York, 1996) "Skippy" entry, pp. 34-3498. ISBN0517124475
  5. ^ Quoted in Skippy: A Complete Compilation 1925-1926, forward by Bill Blackbeard, Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1977. ISBN 0883556294 (hardcover), ISBN 0883556284 (trade paperback)
  6. ^ Robinson, p. 5
  7. ^ Robinson, p. 5-6
  8. ^ Robinson, p. 11
  9. ^ a b c Nash, Collin, "The 'Skippy' Mystery". Newsday, November 10, 2002. Site last updated 2004-02-13

[edit] References