Lank Leonard
Encyclopedia
Frank E. Leonard better known as Lank Leonard, was an American
cartoonist
artist who created the long-running comic strip
Mickey Finn, which he drew for more than three decades.
in 1896, Leonard decided early in his childhood that he wanted to be a cartoonist while he made copies of Buster Brown
, Happy Hooligan
, Little Nemo
and The Katzenjammer Kids, eventually creating his own characters. In high school, he was the art editor of his school newspaper.
After his high school
graduation, Leonard took a job as a bookkeeper at a local factory, where he also drew cartoons for the plant's house organ. He studied at a business college from 1914 to 1915, then served in the U.S. Army during World War I
.
Returning from the service, Leonard designed a new type of suction sole basketball shoe for a sporting goods firm, which eventually hired him as a salesman. He was in his early twenties, working as a traveling salesman, when he met cartoonist
Clare A. Briggs on a train between Sioux City and Omaha and showed him the sketch pad he always carried. "Pretty crude, but there's no doubt you have talent," said Briggs.
Briggs referred him to Chicago Tribune
editorial cartoonist Carey Orr
, who suggested Leonard take the C. L. Evans correspondence course in cartooning. Leonard did so, mailing in assignments drawn in hotel rooms as he traveled about the country. Later, he took night courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and New York's Art Students League
.
In the spring of 1925, Leonard left his salesman job and started working full time as a cartoonist. As an inker at the Bray Productions
animation
studio, he took home a salary of $11 a week. He then drew sports cartoons for a baseball
magazine, then spent nine years doing a sports cartoon feature for the George Matthew Adams Syndicate
and writing about sports, while also selling sports cartoons to The New York Telegram and The New York Sun. Weighing in at 200 pounds and towering over six feet, the lanky Leonard also played semi-pro basketball.
bought his comic strip Mickey Finn
about the family life of an Irish-American policeman. From the start, the strip was calculated to show the good qualities of human nature rather than the sordid side of crime.
Appearing in more than 300 newspapers at the height of its success, the strip continued under Leonard for the next three decades, assisted by Mart Bailey and Morris Weiss with lettering by Tony DiPreta
. Leonard also did a topper
strip, Nippie: He's Often Wrong!, which ran beneath the Sunday Mickey Finn. Nippie was a child who ignored warnings in order to do things his way and suffered the consequences.
The character of Mickey Finn was inspired by Leonard's observations of Port Chester policeman Mickey Brennan. Other characters in Mickey Finn were drawn from Lank Leonard's own family, and the model for Mickey Finn was Leonard himself. Mickey's mother was based on numerous sketches of Leonard's mother, and his real-life Uncle Phil inspired the comic strip Uncle Phil. Kitty Kelly, Mickey's fiancée, was modeled on Florence McLaughlin, whom Leonard married in June 1939.
After World War II
, Leonard began working in Miami
, Florida
, during the winter months, and in 1950, he bought a split-level home in Miami Shores, spending ten months of the year there, drawing and playing golf.
On Saturday, March 10, 1951, at his new Miami Shores home, he hosted a gathering of cartoonists. Attending the party were Colin Allen, Frank Beck, Wally Bishop
(Muggs and Skeeter), Dick Briefer
, Al Fagley, Quin Hall, Bill Holman, Fred Lasswell
, Al Posen
, Zack Mosley
, Leonard Sansone, Chuck Thorndyke, Burt Whitman and Elmer Woggon
.
In 1951, Leonard and Bishop left Florida for Washington's Carlton Hotel, where they joined other members of the National Cartoonists Society
for breakfast on November 6 with Harry Truman. Gathered in Washington to help the Treasury Department sell Defense Stamps, the group presented Truman with a bound volume of their comic strip characters, some interacting with caricatures of Truman.
In the early 1960s, Leonard let Weiss take over the writing of the strip. Leonard died in 1970, two years after retiring. Lank and Florence Leonard had two children, Jim and Nancy. Jim was born in 1956. Daughter Nancy attended Salve Regina College
in Newport, Rhode Island
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
artist who created the long-running comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
Mickey Finn, which he drew for more than three decades.
Early life and career
Born in Port Chester, New YorkPort Chester, New York
Port Chester is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The village is part of the town of Rye. As of the 2010 census, Port Chester had a population of 28,967...
in 1896, Leonard decided early in his childhood that he wanted to be a cartoonist while he made copies of Buster Brown
Buster Brown
Buster Brown was a comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard Felton Outcault who was known for his association with the Brown Shoe Company. This mischievous young boy was loosely based on a boy near Outcault's home in Flushing, New York...
, Happy Hooligan
Happy Hooligan
Happy Hooligan was a popular and influential early American comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper.Happy Hooligan, the first major comic strip by already celebrated cartoonist Opper, debuted with a Sunday strip on March 11, 1900 in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, and was one of the first...
, Little Nemo
Little Nemo
Little Nemo is the main fictional character in a series of weekly comic strips by Winsor McCay that appeared in the New York Herald and William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspapers from October 15, 1905 – April 23, 1911 and April 30, 1911 – July 26, 1914; respectively.The...
and The Katzenjammer Kids, eventually creating his own characters. In high school, he was the art editor of his school newspaper.
After his high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
graduation, Leonard took a job as a bookkeeper at a local factory, where he also drew cartoons for the plant's house organ. He studied at a business college from 1914 to 1915, then served in the U.S. Army during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
.
Returning from the service, Leonard designed a new type of suction sole basketball shoe for a sporting goods firm, which eventually hired him as a salesman. He was in his early twenties, working as a traveling salesman, when he met cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
Clare A. Briggs on a train between Sioux City and Omaha and showed him the sketch pad he always carried. "Pretty crude, but there's no doubt you have talent," said Briggs.
Briggs referred him to Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
editorial cartoonist Carey Orr
Carey Orr
Carey Cassius Orr was an American editorial cartoonist.In his youth, Orr was a semi-professional baseball pitcher, and he used the money he made from baseball to study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts...
, who suggested Leonard take the C. L. Evans correspondence course in cartooning. Leonard did so, mailing in assignments drawn in hotel rooms as he traveled about the country. Later, he took night courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and New York's Art Students League
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
.
In the spring of 1925, Leonard left his salesman job and started working full time as a cartoonist. As an inker at the Bray Productions
Bray Productions
Bray Productions was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years before World War I.- History :The studio was founded in December 1914 by J. R. Bray, perhaps the first studio entirely devoted to animation, and series animation at that...
animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
studio, he took home a salary of $11 a week. He then drew sports cartoons for a baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
magazine, then spent nine years doing a sports cartoon feature for the George Matthew Adams Syndicate
George Matthew Adams
George Matthew Adams was a newspaper columnist and founder of the George Matthew Adams Newspaper Service, which syndicated comic strips and columns to newspapers for five decades...
and writing about sports, while also selling sports cartoons to The New York Telegram and The New York Sun. Weighing in at 200 pounds and towering over six feet, the lanky Leonard also played semi-pro basketball.
Mickey Finn
In 1936, the McNaught SyndicateMcNaught Syndicate
The McNaught Syndicate was an American newspaper syndicate founded in 1922. It was established by Virgil Venice McNitt and Charles V. McAdam. Its best known contents were the columns by Will Rogers and O. O. McIntyre, the Dear Abby letters section and comic strips, including Joe Palooka and...
bought his comic strip Mickey Finn
Mickey Finn (comics)
Mickey Finn was an American comic strip created by cartoonist Lank Leonard, which was syndicated to newspapers from 1936 to 1976. The successful lighthearted strip struck a balance between comedy and drama...
about the family life of an Irish-American policeman. From the start, the strip was calculated to show the good qualities of human nature rather than the sordid side of crime.
Appearing in more than 300 newspapers at the height of its success, the strip continued under Leonard for the next three decades, assisted by Mart Bailey and Morris Weiss with lettering by Tony DiPreta
Tony DiPreta
Anthony Lewis DiPreta , better known as Tony DiPreta, was an American comic book and comic strip artist active from the 1940s Golden Age of comic books...
. Leonard also did a topper
Topper (comic strip)
A topper in comic strip parlance is a small secondary strip seen along with a larger Sunday strip. In the 1920s and 1930s, leading cartoonists were given full pages in the Sunday comics sections, allowing them to add smaller strips and single-panel cartoons to their page.Toppers usually were drawn...
strip, Nippie: He's Often Wrong!, which ran beneath the Sunday Mickey Finn. Nippie was a child who ignored warnings in order to do things his way and suffered the consequences.
The character of Mickey Finn was inspired by Leonard's observations of Port Chester policeman Mickey Brennan. Other characters in Mickey Finn were drawn from Lank Leonard's own family, and the model for Mickey Finn was Leonard himself. Mickey's mother was based on numerous sketches of Leonard's mother, and his real-life Uncle Phil inspired the comic strip Uncle Phil. Kitty Kelly, Mickey's fiancée, was modeled on Florence McLaughlin, whom Leonard married in June 1939.
After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Leonard began working in Miami
Miami, Florida
Miami is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the eighth-most populous county in the United States with a population of 2,500,625...
, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, during the winter months, and in 1950, he bought a split-level home in Miami Shores, spending ten months of the year there, drawing and playing golf.
On Saturday, March 10, 1951, at his new Miami Shores home, he hosted a gathering of cartoonists. Attending the party were Colin Allen, Frank Beck, Wally Bishop
Wally Bishop
Wallace Bond Bishop , better known as Wally Bishop, was an American cartoonist who drew his syndicated Muggs and Skeeter comic strip for 49 years....
(Muggs and Skeeter), Dick Briefer
Dick Briefer
Richard "Dick" Briefer was an American comic-book artist best known for his various adaptations, including humorous ones, of the Frankenstein monster...
, Al Fagley, Quin Hall, Bill Holman, Fred Lasswell
Fred Lasswell
Fred Lasswell was an American cartoonist best known for his decades of work on the comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.Born in Kennett, Missouri, he got his start as a sports cartoonist for the Tampa Daily Times...
, Al Posen
Al Posen
Alvah Posen was an American cartoonist on several comic strips, but he is best known for his strip Sweeney & Son and as co-producer of the now-lost Marx Brothers film, Humor Risk ....
, Zack Mosley
Zack Mosley
Zack Terrell Mosley was an American comic strip artist best known for the aviation adventures in his long-running The Adventures of Smilin' Jack which ran in more than 300 newspapers from 1933 to 1973....
, Leonard Sansone, Chuck Thorndyke, Burt Whitman and Elmer Woggon
Elmer Woggon
Elmer Woggon , who signed his art Wog, was the creator of an early newspaper comic strip that eventually developed into the long-running Steve Roper and Mike Nomad....
.
In 1951, Leonard and Bishop left Florida for Washington's Carlton Hotel, where they joined other members of the National Cartoonists Society
National Cartoonists Society
The National Cartoonists Society is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops...
for breakfast on November 6 with Harry Truman. Gathered in Washington to help the Treasury Department sell Defense Stamps, the group presented Truman with a bound volume of their comic strip characters, some interacting with caricatures of Truman.
In the early 1960s, Leonard let Weiss take over the writing of the strip. Leonard died in 1970, two years after retiring. Lank and Florence Leonard had two children, Jim and Nancy. Jim was born in 1956. Daughter Nancy attended Salve Regina College
Salve Regina University
Salve Regina University is a university in Newport, Rhode Island. Founded by the Sisters of Mercy, the university is a Catholic, co-educational, private, non-profit institution chartered by the State of Rhode Island in 1934. In 1947 the university acquired Ochre Court and welcomed its first class...
in Newport, Rhode Island
Newport, Rhode Island
Newport is a city on Aquidneck Island in Newport County, Rhode Island, United States, about south of Providence. Known as a New England summer resort and for the famous Newport Mansions, it is the home of Salve Regina University and Naval Station Newport which houses the United States Naval War...
.
External links
- Lank Leonard (Frank E. Leonard) at the Lambiek Comiclopedia gives Leonard's death date as Aug. 1, 1970, as does Reynolds, Comic Strip Artists in American Newspapers, 1945-1980 (full cite above)
- Caskets on Parade gives Leonard's death date as Aug. 2, 1970)