1. Joseph Medill Patterson
2. Walt Disney
3. Ben Cooper
4. William Dozier
5. Karen Berger
Good question.
*****
Randall Kirby
Roz Kirby
Ann Eisner
Joan Lee
Josie DeCarlo
Jackie Estrada
*****
Jeet Heer
I've decided only to focus on people not already mentioned:
1. Woody Gelman -- the mentor of Crumb and Spiegelman, and collector who preserved Little Nemo for future generations.
2. Francoise Mouly -- as co-editor of Raw and editor at The New Yorker.
3. Chris Oliveros -- is their any publisher with better taste?
4. Martin Williams -- a fine critic who co-edited the pivotal, canon-forming Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics with Bill Blackbeard.
5. Coulton Waugh -- not really remembered at all as a cartoonist but the author of a great pioneering study of comics.
*****
Roger Green
1. Martin Goodman
2. Bill Gaines
3. Don & Maggie Thompson
4. Phil Seuling
5. Denis Kitchen
(Am I boring, or is it the question?)
*****
Jeet Heer
Hi Tom,
This might be unorthodox, but I came up with five more that fit your criteria that haven't been mentioned yet.
1. Harold Ross -- whose sensibility shaped the New Yorker and by extension all magazine cartooning.
2. Michele Urry -- the gatekeeper of cartooning at Playboy.
3. Charles Landon -- his Landon School of Cartooning (a correspondence course) educated virtually every great cartoonist of the early 20th century, including Caniff, Segar, Jack Cole, and Carl Barks.
4. Frank Wing -- not to be confused with Frank King, of course. He also educated students by mail. His most famous alumni? Charles Schulz.
5. Mollie Slott -- she kept Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate running in its mid-century glory days.
*****
Mike Catron
Ignoring the example of your list, I limited my selection to those still living (and not mentioned on others' lists). (And kudos to Randall Kirby for completely ignoring the suggestion in your headline.) Alphabetically, then:
1. Jack Adler -- his invention of the comics coloring process (R2Y2 was "flesh" for white characters, B was Superman blue, BR3 was Spider-Man Blue) made it possible to color comics at a rate faster than one page a week. He also pioneered many other production innovations. Not that it's relevant, but he also happens to be some kind of cousin (2nd, 3rd, 4th, I don't know) to Howard Stern (not that there's anything wrong with that).
2. Shel Dorf -- founder of the San Diego Comicon (OK, he didn't do it by himself, I know, but from what I understand he was the guy with the initial vision and drive.)
3. Steve Geppi -- winner in the direct comics distribution wars
4. Bob Klein and Tim Stroup -- so I cheated by naming two people. They're the co-founders of the Grand Comics Database (an organization with which I'm associated -- www.comics.org), which revolutionized comics indexing and research.
5. James Warren -- another publisher. Maverick, entrepreneur, he was the first to find a successful way of publishing "mature" comics outside the Comics Code, something even EC wasn't able to pull off. He was also the first to publish a number of the early underground cartoonists, in the now-forgotten Help!, edited by Harvey Kurtzman.
