On Strips: Soglow the Caricaturist

By | Friday, November 11, 2016 Leave a Comment
Otto Soglow is perhaps best know as the cartoonist who created and drew The Little King from 1930 (or 1934, depending on how pedantic you want to get) until his death in 1975. The character actually debuted in The New Yorker and soon became fairly popular, popular enough that it caught the eye of publisher William Randolph Hearst. However, legal obligations prevented him from getting The Little King right away so Soglow created a virtually identical strip, The Ambassador, which started in 1933 and ran for about a year until rights to The Little King cleared up and Hearst was able to begin running that.

In any event, I stumbled across this promotional footage (which I can't seem to embed directly; you'll have to click over to the Critical Past website) from World War II, in which Soglow visits a Merchant Seamans club in New York and draws caricatures of any of the Merchant Marines present. It's clearly staged for propaganda purposes, but it's still fun to watch Soglow draw, particularly trying to capture specific individual likenesses.
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