Willard Mullin
Willard Mullin (September 14, 1902 – December 20, 1978) was an American sports cartoonist. He is most famous for his creation of the "Brooklyn Bum",[1] the personification of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. He was widely published: he cartooned daily for Scripps-Howard's New York World-Telegram and Sun for decades and was often published in Scripps-Howard's twenty papers, as well as in the Sporting News.[1]
Publications
An oversize retrospective collection of Willard Mullin cartoons entitled Willard Mullin's Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934–1972 was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2013. The book also contains biographical and historical information. In 2015, Fantagraphics Books published Willard Mullin's Casey at the Bat and Other Diamond Tales. This book features Mullin's thirteen drawings to match the thirteen verses of Ernest L. Thayer's famous baseball poem, the poem as written in Mullin's once-celebrated cartoon lettering style, and a few selections from Mullin's other baseball cartoons. Until the Fantagraphics publication, the Mullin "Casey" had only ever been seen by those who attended an early 1950s convention of the National Association, then the overseers of minor league baseball and were given copies of the Mullin "Casey."
Awards
He received the Reuben Award in 1954 for his work, as well as the National Cartoonist Society Sports Cartoon Award for each year from 1957 through 1962, and again in 1964 and 1965.
Trivia
Mullin was mentioned in a Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schulz. Lucy is upset about hurting her arm playing baseball and starts naming people she will sue from Abner Doubleday to Babe Ruth to finally Willard Mullin – to which Charlie Brown, obviously shocked, replies "Willard Mullin?" [2]
Mullin was also the correct answer in syndicated newspaper trivia columnist's Wilson Casey list of questions for Friday August 6, 2016. What late cartoonist created the "Brooklyn Bum", his personification of the Brooklyn Dodgers MLB team? CHOICES: Willard Mullin, Charles Schulz, Hal Foster, Frank King