Camera-ready comic art drawing for Big George

This pen-and-ink drawing produced for the single-panel daily comic Big George shows George learning how to play the ukulele using the key-tuning phrase “My Dog Has Fleas.”

Virgil Franklin "Vip" Partch (1916-1984) began his career in 1937 illustrating for Walt Disney Studios. He is known for his participation in the 1941 Disney animators’ strike, and as a result of his participation, never returned to work for the company. Before his service in the U.S. Army Partch assisted Walter Lantz on the Woody Woodpecker cartoons. This prewar work assisted his transfer to his position as the art director and cartoonist for the weekly military magazine Panorama. After he left the army, Partch began freelancing and published books containing single-panel cartoons. In 1960 he created Big George, the strip that became his biggest success.

Big George (1960-1990) was a comic strip featuring family humor. The title character, much like other comic-strip husbands, was often neglected or ridiculed by the rest of his family. The daily version of the comic was usually shown in a single-panel format, but with the debut of the Sunday page a few years later, in the early 1960s, it took on a more traditional strip form. Partch died unexpectedly in 1984 as a result of a car crash.

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