Camera-ready comic art drawing for Gil Thorp

This pen-and-ink drawing produced for the Gil Thorp comic strip shows Coach Thorp trying to encourage Ziggy to stay on the team despite Ziggy's concern that he brings bad luck to the games.

John A. "Jack" Berrill (1923-1996) began his art career as a copy boy for the art department at the New York Daily News in 1941. He then assisted cartoonist Martin Branner on Winnie Winkle. After World War II Berrill began working on the Famous Funnies comic books. In 1958, inspired by his two sports heroes, football player Jim Thorp and baseball player Gil Hodges, Berrill developed a strip about a high school athletics coach named Gil Thorp. Berrill drew the strip until his health forced him to turn the work over to assistants in 1994.

Gil Thorp (1958- ) is a comic strip concerning a retired athlete who coaches high school students. The strip is focused on high school students and themes about competitive squabbles and dating, as well as more serious topics such as teen pregnancy and drug abuse. In the 1970s Thorp began dating a physical education teacher named Mimi. The two later married and started a family with two children.

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