Elmer Woggon
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Elmer Woggon (November 4, 1898 – April 1978), who signed his art Wog, was the creator of an early newspaper comic strip that eventually developed into the long-running '' Steve Roper and Mike Nomad''.


Biography

Born and raised in
Toledo, Ohio Toledo ( ) is a city in Lucas County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is located at the western end of Lake Erie along the Maumee River. Toledo is the List of cities in Ohio, fourth-most populous city in Ohio and List of United Sta ...
, Woggon was interested as a child in American Indians. Developing his drawing skills through the Federal School cartoon correspondence course, he got a job at '' The Toledo Blade'' as cartoonist, commercial artist and eventually art editor. With the American public's fascination after World War I with airplanes and daring aviators, in 1929 he tried an aviation-themed comic strip called ''Skylark''. It failed "because its creator had never been in a plane".


Woggon's ''Wahoo''

Woggon then tried a gag strip, encouraged by
Publishers Syndicate Publishers Newspaper Syndicate (later Publishers Syndicate) was a syndication service based in Chicago that operated from 1925 to 1967, when it merged with the Hall Syndicate. Publishers syndicated such long-lived comic strips as '' Big Chief Wa ...
to base it on a comical "windbag" (Waugh). He drafted samples he titled ''The Great Gusto'', featuring opportunistic medicine-show impresario J. Mortimer Gusto (Saunders, ibid), and in 1935 he enlisted as his writer
Allen Saunders Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986) was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips ''Steve Roper and Mike Nomad'', ''Mary Worth'' and ''Kerry Drake''. He is credited with being the originator of the ...
, a reporter at the rival ''News-Bee'' across the street. But their proposal and advance publicity were not accepted until they took the syndicate's advice to focus instead on Gusto's "cute" Indian sidekick, Chief Wahoo. This character, with his diminutive stature and 10-gallon hat, had little resemblance to the
Cleveland Indians The Cleveland Guardians are an American professional baseball team based in Cleveland. The Guardians compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) American League Central, Central Division. Since , the team ...
' mascot
Chief Wahoo Chief Wahoo is a former logo last used by the Cleveland Indians in 2018 (the Cleveland Guardians after 2021), a Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise based in Cleveland, Ohio and is still used in merchandise. As part of the larger Native Amer ...
dating from 1946, but scholars have assumed the mascot came from the comic character. At last syndicated, ''Big Chief Wahoo'' took off in the newspapers on November 23, 1936, opening with Wahoo receiving a letter from his girlfriend Minnie Ha-Cha in New York and rushing to her. On the way (six days into the strip), he encountered Gusto, who now played second fiddle to Wahoo. The strip quickly became a hit, adding features such as reader-submitted "Indian slango" (e.g., ''credit'' = 'trustum-bustum') and spinning off products such as Wahoo chewing gum, coloring books and paper dolls. In fact, according to Saunders (ibid), their "sawed-off Seminole" (Wahoo was actually from the Southwest, not Florida) almost got into animated cartoons. The authors soon left their newspaper jobs as full-time authors of ''Big Chief Wahoo'', taking a studio in downtown Toledo, and both joined the
National Cartoonists Society The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the ...
. However, Woggon's "bigfoot" comic art style was not up to the strip's increasingly serious stories and wide-ranging settings. According to Harvey, this was a common problem for cartoonists faced with the era's transition to
photorealism Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can b ...
in adventure strips. As early as 1938, ghost artists were being called in for ''Big Chief Wahoo'': Woggon's kid brother
Bill Woggon William Woggon (January 1, 1911 – March 2, 2003) was an American cartoonist who created the comic book ''Katy Keene''. Woggon was born the fourth of six children in Toledo, Ohio, and he grew up there. Fascinated by an art correspondence cou ...
, Marvin Bradley, Don Dean, and (in 1945) Pete Hoffman. This resulted in a jarringly inconsistent look as each ghost filled in around Woggon's Wahoo and Gusto figures, eventually took over the whole strip for a while, and then left for other strips. With success, Elmer Woggon acquired a new home at 1650 North Cove Boulevard in Toledo, but on February 21, 1942, thieves ripped out a bay window of the house and made off with the refrigerator, bathroom fixtures and parts of an electric stove. Woggon estimated the loss at $500. Elmer Woggon's role as ghosted artist finally ended in 1954, when William Overgard took over as the strip's credited artist and imposed a consistent, attractively realistic look. Meanwhile, Saunders had delicately written out Woggon's early cartoonish figures (Gusto, Oscar the Octopus, Mooseface, horse Ammonia) to focus on a new character, a handsome young reporter named Steve Roper who on March 23, 1940, flew his plane into Wahoo's town (Woggon got his aviator) to get a story, and helped in a rescue mission. Wahoo joined him in his adventures, but as the strip followed Roper's career, Wahoo and Minnie (the only surviving members of the original cast) were increasingly out of place and were written out in 1947. The strip then became ''Steve Roper'' (and in 1969, ''Steve Roper and Mike Nomad''). Wahoo and Gusto were never seen or mentioned again, except in a special Christmas 1976 strip that Overgard drew of the "Steve Roper Clan," picturing himself, Allen Saunders and son John, and Woggon with Roper, Nomad, Wahoo, Minnie and Gusto.


Awards

Woggon continued as the strip's researcher and letterer, and according to Saunders, he took his strip's complete transformation in good grace.Harvey, R. C. 2004
Rants and Raves
opus 149.
During the 1960s, he moved to
Fort Lauderdale, Florida Fort Lauderdale ( ) is a coastal city located in the U.S. state of Florida, north of Miami along the Atlantic Ocean. It is the county seat of and most populous city in Broward County, Florida, Broward County with a population of 182,760 at the ...
, where he recovered from an appendectomy in March 1968. He died in Fort Lauderdale in 1978, finally recognized for his work by an
Inkpot Award The Inkpot Award is an honor bestowed annually since 1974 by Comic-Con International. It is given to professionals in the fields of comic books, comic strips, animation, science fiction, and related areas of popular culture, at Comic-Con Internati ...
that same year.


References


Sources

*Harvey, R. C. 1994. ''The Art of the Funnies''. University Press of Mississippi. *Harvey, R. C. 2004
Rants and Raves
opus 149. * Waugh, Coulton. 1947. ''The Comics''. University Press of Mississippi.


External links


National Cartoonists Society: Elmer Woggon
{{DEFAULTSORT:Woggon, Elmer 1898 births 1978 deaths American comic strip cartoonists Inkpot Award winners