Art Collection: Magazine Drawings By College Student Mort Walker, 1947-8, Part Two

(Click any for bigger. Recommended!)

More fun college art from Mort Walker, drawn for the University of Missouri's "Missouri Showme" magazine. First up are two superbly competent deviations from Walker's "big foot" cartoony style, realistic portrait heads (unlabeled, alas) executed in brush, pen, and ink washes with white highlights. Very nice work, if a bit wooden. One can sense the laborious nature of these drawings, and they seem like more of an assignment than anything. Perhaps they were!

Now back to the more silly work we'd expect from Walker, another ad for Charlie's Café:

I really like his "raggedy" use of dot screens, although it does verge on sloppy in some cases. More fun spot illustrations:

His love of drawing people in humorous lounging/sleeping positions would come to serve him well in Beetle Bailey!

These are drawings of the UM mascot, Truman the Tiger:

 

Clearly Walker had no future as a "funny animal" cartoonist, but he gave it the ol'... college try!

And that concludes this episode of "Before They were Famous". Really glad I bought these fun drawings.