Bud Blake, 1918-2005



King Features Syndicate is reporting that Bud Blake, the creator of Tiger and one of the most visually stylish modern cartoonists, passed away on December 26 in a hospital in Portland, Maine. He was 87 years old.

Blake was born in Nutley, New Jersey, where he grew up and attended school. With a few successful submissions to Judge as encouragement, Blake moved to New York City, taking classes at the National Academy of Design and finding various forms of colorful employment to get by. By 1937, Blake found himself in the employ of the Kudner Advertising Agency. With a few years off to serve an an infantryman during World War II, Blake rose to Executive Art Director at Kudner, a position similar to that of his father's while Blake was growing up. Although he spoke highly of the pay and people, if not the commute and the social obligations, in 1954 (some reports have it in the mid-'60s) Blake quit his advertising position to pursue drawing full-time. He worked for a variety of freelance clients and was able to syndicate the one-panel effort that eventually became Ever Happen to You? to King Features.

In May 1965, Blake brought Tiger to newspapers. Despite being rightfully positioned as more modern than many 1930s holdovers still in syndication at the time, Tiger featured a lot of classic kids strip elements of its own. It was the kind of strip that mined humor from its characters views on the world around them and that stayed focused on their experiences with one another. Blake had a very idiosyncratic appproach to comics art that evoked both the looser humor work of decades past and classic magazine cartooning yet also reproduced quite well in the limited space given modern newspaper cartoons. Blake's strip was well-respected by his peers, and Tiger won the comic-strip division of the Reuben honors in 1970, 1978 and 2000.

My hunch is that Tiger was at its most popular in terms of client newspapers during the 1970s, I think the lambiek.net page on Blake says 400 papers. King Features reports the feature still runs in 100 papers internationally.

You can download King Feature's release here:

Bud_Blake_Obit_2005.pdf

and as usual, Don Markstein's Toonopedia entry is worth a read.

Blake is survived by two children. Services for family and close friends will be held in Damariscotta, Maine. The cartoonist was preceded in death by his wife.


 
posted 7:41 am PST | Permalink
 

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