Willard Mullin's Golden Age of Baseball Drawings 1934–1972

Willard Mullin

Agu 2013 · Fantagraphics Books

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  In Fantagraphics’ ceaseless effort to rediscover every world-class cartoonist in the history of the medium, we turn your attention to a neglected part of the art form—sports cartooning—and to its greatest practitioner—Willard Mullin. The years 1930-1970 were the Golden Age of both American sports and American comic strips, when giants strode their respective fields—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Hank Aaron in one, George (Krazy Kat) Herriman, Milton (Steve Canyon) Caniff, Walt (Pogo) Kelly in the other—and Mullin was there, straddling both fields, recording every major player and event in the mid-20th-century history of baseball. Mullin was to baseball players what Bill Mauldin was to soldiers: advocate and critic, investing them with personality, humanity, dignity, and poignancy; Mauldin had Willie & Joe and Mullin had the Brooklyn Bum, his affectionate 1939 character representing the bedraggled figure of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Willard Mullin’s Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934-1972 collects for the first time Mullin’s best drawings devoted to baseball—depictions of players like Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, and Sandy Koufax, legendary managers like Casey Stengel and George Steinbrenner, and events like Lou Gehrig’s emotional retirement speech on July 4, 1939, for which Mullin not only drew a portrait but composed a poem (which he often incorporated into his cartoons). Mullin’s fluid line and delicate but vigorous brushwork are shown to beautiful effect, with many drawings reproduced from original art. See why millions of baseball fans from the ’30s to the ’70s looked forward to Mullin’s cartoons in their daily paper.

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Willard Mullin (1902-1978) was an American sports cartoonist most famous for his creation of the "Brooklyn Bum," the personification of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. He was widely published: he cartooned daily for Scripps-Howard's New York World-Telegram and Sun for decades and was often published in Scripps-Howard's papers, as well as in The Sporting News. Michael Powers was born in Long Beach, California, and grew up on the beaches of Southern California and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He is an attorney and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of the Pacific. Over the last 30 years, he has written about baseball, jazz, boxing, art history, sports law and politics, among other subjects.