PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: cartoon
French artist
Honoré Daumier was a prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly...
English artist
William Hogarth was the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts...
American cartoonist
Bill Watterson is an American cartoonist best known for creating the popular and award-winning comic strip Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95). Watterson notably refused to license the strip’s characters for merchandising...
American film producer
Walt Disney was an American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck....
American cartoonist
Jim Davis is an American cartoonist who is best known as the creator of the comic strip Garfield. The strip’s titular character, a sardonic, lazy, lasagna-loving, Monday-hating, orange tabby cat, became...
American cartoonist, writer, animator, and director
Frank Tashlin was an American cartoonist, writer, animator, and film director who specialized in broad satirical comedies. Tashlin directed his animated cartoons like live-action films—employing a wide...
German-born artist
Rudolf Bauer was a German-born abstract artist whose role in the conception and founding of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was buried for some 60 years after he had a falling-out with Guggenheim. As...
American cartoonist, author, and playwright
Lynda Barry is an American cartoonist and author known for her syndicated weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek (1979–2008) and the graphic novels The Good Times Are Killing Me (1988) and What It Is (2008)....
American writer and cultural critic
Roxane Gay is a writer who gained widespread acclaim in 2014 for her book Bad Feminist, a collection of essays that reflect on her personal experiences, pop culture, and hot-button social issues. A prolific...
American artist and author
Will Eisner was an American comics artist who was a pioneer of the American comic book industry. Eisner is best remembered for creating the series The Spirit, featuring the titular crime-fighting superhero,...
American cartoonist
Roz Chast is an American cartoonist known for her humorous yet honest depictions of everyday life that explore themes of family, anxiety, loneliness, and the absurdity of modern living. Chast has published...
British artist and cartoonist
Ralph Steadman is a British artist and cartoonist known for his provocative, often grotesque, illustrations frequently featuring spatters and splotches of ink and for his collaboration with American author...
Indian cartoonist
R.K. Laxman was an Indian cartoonist who created the daily comic strip You Said It, which chronicles Indian life and politics through the eyes of the Common Man, a bulbous-nosed, bespectacled observer...
Canadian-born comic book illustrator
Todd McFarlane is a Canadian-born comic book illustrator who gained fame in the late 1980s for his work on the Marvel Comics series The Amazing Spider-Man and who in 1992 co-founded Image Comics, where...
American animator
Otto Messmer was an American animator who created the character Felix the Cat, the world’s most popular cartoon star before Mickey Mouse. The attribution has been questioned by some, in part because of...
American cartoonist
Gary Larson is an American cartoonist best known for his single-panel comic series The Far Side, which is renowned for its scientific content and bizarre humour. Larson produced The Far Side for 15 years,...
American cartoonist and graphic novelist
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist and graphic novelist best known for the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008)—which introduced the so-called Bechdel test, a metric that evaluates movies...
American comic book writer
Stan Lee was an American comic book writer best known for his work with Marvel Comics. Among the hundreds of characters and teams that he helped to create were the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Avengers,...
American comic book artist
Jack Kirby was an American comic book artist who helped create hundreds of original characters, including Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. Kirby left high school at age 16...
American cartoonist
R. Crumb is an American counterculture comic book artist and social satirist, known for his distinctive artwork and excellent marriage of drawing and narrative and for creating such well-known characters...
American writer and artist
Frank Miller is an American writer and artist whose work helped usher in a grittier, more mature era of storytelling in comics. Miller began his career in the late 1970s by providing the art for The Twilight...
American artist
Gil Kane was a Latvian-born American comic book artist whose innovative and dramatic style and precise drawing technique brought new life and vibrancy to such classic superheroes as Spider-Man, Green Lantern,...
American animator
Chuck Jones was an American animation director of critically acclaimed cartoon shorts, primarily the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies film series at Warner Bros. studios. As a youth, Jones often observed...
American satirist
Garry Trudeau is an American satirist whose literate, sophisticated comic strip Doonesbury reflected social and political life in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Born into...
American cartoonist and author
William Steig was an author, illustrator, and cartoonist who developed a national reputation in the latter half of the 20th century for his thought-provoking, doodle-style cartoons. He quickly gained prominence...
Japanese artist and author
Uchida Shungicu is a Japanese singer, dancer, author, and cartoonist known for her titillating manga (Japanese cartoons), which used subversive themes and flouted social propriety to keep her audience...
American cartoonist and animator
Matt Groening is an American cartoonist and animator who created the comic strip Life in Hell (1980–2012) and the television series The Simpsons (1989– ) and Futurama (1999–2003, 2010–13). Groening began...
American writer and cartoonist
James Thurber was an American writer and cartoonist, whose well-known and highly acclaimed writings and drawings picture the urban man as one who escapes into fantasy because he is befuddled and beset...
American cartoonist and writer
Jules Feiffer was an American cartoonist and writer who became famous for his Feiffer, a satirical comic strip notable for its emphasis on very literate captions. The verbal elements usually took the form...
American animator
Winsor McCay was an American newspaper cartoonist who was also a pioneer of animated films. At age 21, McCay started working as a poster and billboard artist for a Chicago company. In 1904, after working...
American political caricaturist
Thomas Nast was an American cartoonist, best known for his attack on the political machine of William M. Tweed in New York City in the 1870s. Nast arrived in New York as a boy of six. He studied art at...
German artist
George Grosz was a German artist whose caricatures and paintings provided some of the most vitriolic social criticism of his time. After studying art in Dresden and Berlin from 1909 to 1912, Grosz sold...
American cartoonist
Cathy Guisewite is an American cartoonist who created the long-running comic strip Cathy (1976–2010). Guisewite graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English in 1972. Both of her parents...
British illustrator and painter
Walter Crane was an English illustrator, painter, and designer primarily known for his imaginative illustrations of children’s books. He was the son of the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane...
American cartoonist
John T. McCutcheon was an American newspaper cartoonist and writer particularly noted for cartoons in which Midwestern rural life was treated with gentle, sympathetic humour. After receiving his degree...
American cartoonist
Scott Adams is an American cartoonist who captured the malaise of the modern workplace in his comic strip Dilbert. Adams was valedictorian of his high-school class (because, he said, "the other 39 people...
American cartoonist and author
Shel Silverstein was an American cartoonist, children’s author, poet, songwriter, and playwright best known for his light verse and quirky cartoons. In the 1950s Silverstein drew for the military magazine...
British caricaturist
John Leech was an English caricaturist notable for his contributions to Punch magazine. Leech was educated at Charterhouse, where he met William Makepeace Thackeray, who was to be his lifelong friend....
American cartoonist
Bill Mauldin was an American cartoonist who gained initial fame for his sardonic drawings of the life of the World War II combat soldier and who later became well known for editorial cartoons dealing with...
English cartoonist and author
Sir Osbert Lancaster was an English cartoonist, stage designer, and writer, best-known for his suave cartoons that appeared from 1939 in the Daily Express (London), which gently satirized the English upper...
American cartoonist
Charles Schulz was an American cartoonist who created Peanuts, one of the most successful American comic strips of the mid-20th century. Schulz, the son of a barber, studied cartooning in an art correspondence...
American cartoonist
George Herriman was an American cartoonist who created Krazy Kat, a comic strip whose originality in terms of fantasy, drawing, and dialogue was of such high order that many consider it the finest strip...
American cartoonist
Robert L. Ripley was an American cartoonist who created “Believe It or Not!,” a widely popular newspaper cartoon presenting bizarre facts and oddities of all kinds. Ripley claimed different birth years—1891,...
American cartoonist
Richard Felton Outcault was an American cartoonist and creator of The Yellow Kid, a comic cartoon series that was influential in the development of the comic strip. Outcault studied art in Cincinnati,...
American cartoonist
John Held, Jr. was a cartoonist whose work epitomized the “jazz age” of the 1920s in the United States. At the age of 16 he was drawing sports and political cartoons for the Salt Lake Tribune, and at 19...
English caricaturist
James Gillray was an English caricaturist chiefly remembered for lively political cartoons directed against George III of England and Napoleon I. Often scurrilous and violent in his criticism, he brought...
French artist
Paul Gavarni was a French lithographer and painter whose work is enjoyable for its polished wit, cultured observation, and the panorama it presents of the life of his time. However, his work lacks the...
French animator
Alexandre Alexeïeff was a Russian-born French filmmaker who invented the pinscreen method of animation with his collaborator (later his wife), the animator Claire Parker (1910–81). Alexeïeff spent his...
British artist
George Cruikshank was an English artist, caricaturist, and illustrator who, beginning his career with satirical political cartoons and later illustrating topical and children’s books, became one of the...
Belgian cartoonist
Hergé was a Belgian cartoonist who created the comic strip hero Tintin, a teenage journalist. Over the next 50 years, Tintin’s adventures filled 23 albums and sold 70 million copies in some 30 languages....