Bozo by FoXo
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above: from March 24, 1935
Earlier this year GoComics began running the classic comic strip Bozo by FoXo Reardon.
Recently the GoComics crew interviewed Foxo’s son Michael about his father and the strip.
What was it like to grow up with a cartoonist as a father?
My father had been working as a professional cartoonist for sixteen years when I was born in 1937. He had worked the last fourteen of those years as a staff cartoonist for the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, one of the South’s leading newspapers, doing every type of cartooning: news, sports, humor, editorial, and creating a number of regularly published features, as well as working outside sketching assignments at the courts and at crime scenes.
Among his created features was Bozo, the world’s original pantomime comic strip. He created that strip at age 16 in 1921 just after being laid off as sports cartoonist at the Times-Dispatch and before being rehired in 1923.
above: A couple of the first Reardon cartoons for the Richmond Times Dispatch in 1921 by the then 16 year old. The “apologies to Christy Walsh” is because the editor and the cartoonist displaced Walsh’s cartoon (below) on the sports page which “Blasts From The Bleachers” copied.
Both are early samples of caption contests.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, my father became internationally syndicated with the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate with his comic strip Bozo, which was always his first love. The strip had appeared weekly in the Times-Dispatch from at least 1925. Syndication was a big change for him and our family. He set up his drawing desk between the living room and dining room at home, and his presence was always there.
above: May 31, 1925 (Bozo’s first print appearance?)
below: October 2, 1927 – FoXo’s Sunday page expanded over time
My dad was a born cartoonist. He never held a job title other than that of “cartoonist.” It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that he was born with a drawing pen in one hand and a bottle of India ink in the other. He liked to tell the story of how he as a 16-year-old “sat on the editor’s doorstep every day” until he was finally hired.
Read the full interview with Michael Reardon at the GoComics blog.
Read Michael’s biography of FoXo.
Read Bozo (three a day!) at GoComics.
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disclosure: The Daily Cartoonist and GoComics are both under the Andrews McMeel Universal umbrella.
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