Bill Nellor – RIP

D. D. Degg April 11, 2020 1 minute 4 comments

Cartoonist Bill Nellor has passed away.

William L. (Bill) Nellor
September 12, 1923 – April 8, 2020

advertising agency artist, director, owner
cartoonist

… he had an ongoing comic series in the Press Democrat called the “Funny Fizzles” which were all based on real life patented inventions that never made it to production. Quite humorous. He also created “Clo” the cow mascot for the Clover Milk Company of Sonoma that we have all come to know and love.

Funny Fizzles was a Sunday feature that ran from 1976 to 1977.
The feature warranted an Obscurity of the Day entry from Allan Holtz,
That, in turn, generated a reply from Bill himself:

I am the creator of Funny Fizzles and still alive at 87 and pursuing the arts in Santa Rosa, CA. Jim Molica was a former account executive with Young & Rubicam San Francisco where I also served as Art Supervisor. Molica did the research and contact with the newspaper agency. He also talked Schultz into adding an intro to the book published by Signet Pocket Books, since Schultz lived in the Santa Rosa area…

From a decade or so ago is a brief autobiography from Bill:

Here’s a very brief bio. My first in SF was with the Guild, Bascom, and Bonfigli Agency in the early 50’s. I had a short stint at Honig-Cooper and finally Y&R with some brief freelance work in between. I then moved to Santa Rosa to a partnership where I developed the Clover cow “Clo” and shortly after opened my own adv. agency “Bill Nellor Advertising”. Sebastiani Vineyards and Maherajah Water Skis were a couple of my other early accounts…

Presently I donate a cartoon series called the “Eco Kid” to the Northern California Sierra Club bimonthly bulletin.

More autobiography in the May 17, 2011 Insight magazine.

Comments ⁴

P.J. Terryberry

cool style

Brian Fies

Living in Santa Rosa, I remember when that came out. It was accompanied by an article in the Press Democrat that explained its origin. As I recall (and these are 44-year-old memories of a story I read once), Nellor was a student in a cartooning class that Schulz taught at Santa Rosa Junior College. (I know! Schulz teaching at a JC! As I also recall fuzzily, Schulz thought it might be fun and it turned out that it wasn’t. It was a short-lived lark for him.)

Remembering again from the article, Nellor developed the Funny Fizzles idea and showed it to Schulz, who encouraged him to run with it. So Schulz writing an intro for Nellor’s book wasn’t just an instance of one local cartoonist helping out another, but a teacher/mentor helping his student.

Again, if I recall correctly.

Kip Williams

I have a pair of gloves with a valve you can blow into to bring quick warmth to your frozen fingers. It’s short-lived warmth, but any little bit feels good.

Denny Lien

The patent for the “walking steam man” depicted on the cover presumably inspired one of the most famous of all dime novels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steam_Man_of_the_Prairies

which I’ve actually read, and which isn’t — too bad. Anyway, much better than one of the other Frank Reade Jr. dime novels I once read, which had the hero battling, not just *a* polar bear in Antarctica, but an entire *hunting pack* of polar bears in Antarctica — see page 11 of:

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=36493

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