Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.34: Burne Hogarth

No.34: Burne Hogarth

One of the unsung pioneers of the four color medium, Burne Hogarth was, like contemporaries Hal Foster and Milton Canniff, a huge influence on many artists that followed in his footsteps, and was one of the cornerstones of the development of the comic form. As an artist, he was one of the first illustrators who understood the possibilities of the comic strip and how its parameters could be expanded – such innovation would of course be the lodestar for legends such as Will Eisner, Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood and Al Williamson. Words: Andrew Colman…

Getting his start early in the still-fledgling industry, Hogarth was studying art at the Art Institute in Chicago at the age of twelve and would continue at other distinguished colleges, studying anthropology, psychology and art history. He entered the business at 15, and by 18, he had drawn his first comic strip, Ivy Hemmanhaw. From 1929 Hogarth was struggling to find work due to the Great Depression, and opted to move to New York in the early 1930s, where his career would take off.

Having served his apprenticeship both as an artist and as an editor, Hogarth was called upon by artist Lyman Young to assist him with Tim Tyler’s Luck as his previous assistant, none other than the legendary Alex Raymond, was about to leave and start his own strips, such as Flash Gordon. He then spent several years in the mid-1930s at King Features Syndicate on odd strips such as Charles Driscoll’s pirate series Pieces of Eight before being offered his career-defining strip, Tarzan.

The strip’s then artist, Hal Foster, who Hogarth much admired, had spent a number of years working on the series, yet despite the obvious quality of his art, was keen to move on due to his lack of interest in the character (he could never take it seriously), beginning his classic Prince Valiant strip soon after. Hogarth immediately took Foster’s place and at first found it hard to establish his own artistic footprint on the character and his world, but within a couple of years had made it his own, investing it with detailed, fine line panels and a new type of dynamism in what the artist referred to as “the syntax of the figure”. His work propelled strip art forward, bringing an understanding of the medium’s unique narrative and how to bypass the inflexibility of the form, playing with panel structure and convention. In the late 1940s, in his final years on the strip, Hogarth reached his zenith with his figurative illustration with Tarzan, channelling his interest in Michelangelo’s anatomical drawings.

After a dispute with King Features in 1945, Hogarth left the company and moved to the New York Post to draw Drago, a Tarzan manqué who battled Nazis in Argentina, along with the humour strip Miracle Jones. Neither character caught on, and Hogarth moved away from the industry, firstly to casually lecture about his work to returning GIs, before deciding to open a school – The Cartoonists and Illustrators School (changed to The School of Visual Arts in 1956). Hogarth had gone back to doing the Sunday Tarzan in 1947 while teaching (helped by such distinguished students as Al Williamson and Gil Kane), and had reached even greater heights in his work, but another dispute developed over royalties for foreign reprints, so he dropped the strip and devoted himself to the school full-time.

Hogarth taught at the school until 1970, but continued teaching anatomy and illustration at other colleges until the early 1980s. His other major contribution to the medium and industry was his art textbooks about anatomical illustration, that are basically mandatory reading for any budding artist or devotee – Drawing the Human Head, Dynamic Light and Shade, Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery, Dynamic Anatomy, Drawing Dynamic Hands andDynamic Figure Drawing. By the 1960s his work had been reappraised due to the medium being taken seriously by the media and intelligentsia, primarily in Europe, which led to a number of major exhibitions of comic art (including at the Louvre in 1967), some of which positioned Hogarth as the most significant of all strip artists.

His popularity in this period became so great that in 1972, he drew two new Tarzan books. Tarzan of the Apes and Jungle Tales of Tarzan were beautifully drawn albums, featuring full page drawings that proved that Hogarth had lost none of his genius.

Hogarth’s position in comics’ fandom had been cemented, and he continued to attend conventions for both comics and Edgar Rice Burroughs in both Europe and America. One of the key classicists in the history of the medium, it’s difficult to overestimate his canon.

Here’s links through to the other entries in our 101 Greatest so far as well

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.35: LB Cole

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.37: Bill Everett

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.38: Robert Crumb

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.39: Mac Raboy

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.41: Jim Starlin

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.42: Mike Zeck

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.43: Adam Hughes

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.44: Daniel Clowes

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.45: Gene Colan

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.46: George Perez

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.47: Michael William Kaluta

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.48: Cary Nord

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.49: Frank Quitely

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.50: Mike Ploog

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.51: Johnny Craig

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.52: Darwyn Cooke

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.53: Steve Dillon

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.54: Gil Kane

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.55: Michael Zulli

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.56: John Romita

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.57: Joe Maneely

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.58: Marshall Rogers

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.59: John Severin

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.60: Alex Toth

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.61: Brian Bolland

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.62: David Mazzuchelli

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.63 Reed Crandall

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.64 Harry Anderson

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.65 Nick Cardy

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.66 Matt Wagner

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.67 Bryan Hitch

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.68 Shawn Martinbrough

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.69 Al Feldstein

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.70 Nestor Redondo

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.71 Tarpe Mills

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.72 Eduardo Risso

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.73 JH Williams III

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.74 Irv Novick

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.75 Dan Zolnerowich

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.76 Gilbert Shelton

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.77 Tommy Lee Edwards

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.78: Sean Phillips

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.79: Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.80: Dan DeCarlo

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.81: Marie Severin

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.82: John Paul Leon

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.83: Jim Lee

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.84: Denys Cowan

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.85: Ross Andru

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.86: Paul Gustavson

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.87: George Evans

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.88: Michael Golden

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.89: Matt Baker

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.90: Todd McFarlane

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.91: Fiona Staples

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.92: Carl Barks

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.93: Carmine Infantino

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.94: Alan Davis

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.95: CC Beck

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.96: Syd Shores

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.97: Bob Fujitani

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.98: Tim Sale

Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.99: Jim Aparo

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