King Features Syndicate has committed $100,000 to establish an endowed scholarship fund in honor of Jay Kennedy, who served as King Features Syndicate Editor in Chief from 1997 until his untimely death earlier this year.
The fund will be administered through the National Cartoonist Society Foundation, the non-profit art of the NCS dedicated to advancing the ideals and standards of professional cartooning and encourage interest in the art-form. Additionally King Features and the NCSF will be responsible for additional fundraising to the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship Fund.
Regarding the scholarship, Daryl Cagle, the foundations current president says:
“This scholarship will be a big boost to the careers of aspiring cartoonists. College students’ work will be judged by a jury of top, professional cartoonists. The talented winner will meet his cartooning heroes as a guest at our annual convention and will receive his award on stage at our Reuben Awards celebration. We appreciate King Features’ support in establishing the scholarship to honor our friend, Jay Kennedy, and we look forward to making this a new tradition in the cartooning community.”
The recipient of the award will attend this year’s NCS annual convention in New Orleans.
Those wishing to donate to this scholarship fund can contribute to the foundation at:
National Cartoonists Society Foundation
Attention: Donations
341 N. Maitland Avenue, Suite 130
Maitland, FL 32751-4761
One other note of interest is the mention that Jay’s massive personal collection of underground comics has been bequeathed to the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.
This is nice of them to do, but I don’t understand. What kind of scholarship is it? How much money does the award winner get and for what kind of study?
Is this scholarship going to be separate from the one the NCS is already offering and whose deadline is January 15? I’d send this query to Daryl Cagle (I’d like to do a piece on it in Stay Tooned! Magazine) but two previous questions I’ve sent via e-mail have gone unanswered.
The amount of the scholarship will be determined when we see how the additional fundraising goes. We want the scholarships to go on forever, without touching the principal of the fund, so the investment return and the size of the fund will determine how much we can do. The Foundation may choose to give more scholarships â?? whatever is given out will be on the same schedule with the same deadline.
The Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship goes to any cartoonist in his Junior or Senior year of college. They donâ??t have to be an art or cartooning major (many cartoonists for college papers are not art majors).
I donâ??t recall missing e-mails from you, John, but my e-mail box is a huge, ugly thing, and most of it gets sucked into my spam filter. If you take care not to mention mortgages and Viagra it will probably get through. Or call Cagle Cartoons at (800) 696-7561.