Roger Armstrong, 1917-2007

Roger Armstrong, a versatile cartoonist who worked in both comic strips and comic books as well as being a beloved teacher and mentor to several artists and an accomplished painter in watercolors, died on June 7. He was 89 years old.

Armstrong was born in Los Angeles and attended Chouniard Art Institute (since merged into the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts), in the late 1930s, dropping out after a downturn in financial circumstances to take a job at Lockheed. He was hired away from that job to draw Bugs Bunny comics for Western Publishing. This began a five-decade creer for Armstrong as an artist on various Western publications and those companies which fulfilled that publisher's niche in later decades, doing comic book version of popular characters in animation ranging from Warner's Porky Pig to Disney's Seven Dwarfs. According to an information-packed remembrance by Mark Evanier linked to above, he ghosted several strips including Charlie Plumb's Ella Cinders, where he took over for longtime artist Fred Fox, and Little Lulu.

He remained a painter throughout, and was a proud practitioner of the California school most popular in the first half of the 20th Century, whose virtues he taught even as other school came into greater popular favor.
 
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