Billy De Beck
Billy De Beck was a popular and very widely published cartoonist as well as a writer. He created some of the most memorable comic strip characters of the 1920s and 1930s, including Barney Google, Bunky, Snuffy Smith, and the racehorse Spark Plug. He was born William Morgan DeBeck in Chicago in 1910 and raised there, where he eventually studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. De Beck was drawing cartoons by 1910. His comic strip Barney Google and Spark Plug first ran in June 1919 in the San Francisco Herald-Examiner. The main character, Barney, was initially a simple hen-pecked husband and avid follower of sports, but in ten years morphed into an urban rascal and natty dresser. The bony and goofy racehorse, Spark Plug, joined the characters in 1922, and Barney met his hillbilly friend, Snuffy Smith, in 1934. It’s said that the comic strip, and maybe Snuffy Smith in particular, was an escape for readers from the difficult and tragic conditions brought on by the Great Depression. De Beck’s style of drawing is considered to be of the classic "big-foot" tradition quite prominent in American comic strips (e.g., The Katzenjammer Kids, Hagar the Horrible, many of Robert Crumb's characters.
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