ED BLACK'S CARTOON FLASHBACK
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CARTOON
GALLERY
Roy Hearn was called upon to do editorial cartoons from time to time, probably when the regular editorial cartoonist, the late Ray Osrin, was on vacation.
This Roy Hearn cartoon appeared in the Plain Dealer Friday, August 30, 1974 with an article about public figures who cried in public. In the middle is President Richard Nixon a few weeks after he resigned from office. The others, clockwise, are New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, Senator Edmund Muskie, boxer Jerry Quarry and Henry Kissinger.
This Sunday, March 23, 1975 Plain Dealer cartoon done by Roy Hearn accompanied an article about a research scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Yaphank, New York, who had a big interest in knights, squires and m'ladies. He was dressed in armor, carried a shield and broadsword and jousted with a telephone pole. Colleagues called security. As it turned out, the scientist belonged to a nationwide group with similar interests called the Society for Creative Anachronism and was practicing for their next get-together. Note the variety in the fellow scientists looking on.
A pure Roy Hearn cartoon for the Saturday Plain Dealer supplement, "Home Improvement." The article was about how to transplant evergreens. Roy zeroed in on the sentence: "With a ball of earth around the roots, the hole for the plant should be dug... 12. inches wider and deeper than the root ball." Note the texture of the Coquille board after use of the Stabillo pencil for shading.
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This Roy Hearn drawing covered a more serious subject on December 27, 1975. A "bad paper" referred to a dishonorable discharge from the service. the article centered on the difficulty ex-G.I.s with bad papers had in finding jobs, during the Viet Nam era. Note the contrasting elongated upper torso and short lower torso of the character to indicate the burden he has.
Roy Hearn's thick fluid brush strokes form the images of Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford on Sunday, February 22, 1976. The article it was drawn for was about keeping an eye on Federal employees to make sure men and women didn't spend the night with each other even if they were single.
This action-filled Roy Hearn attention-getting cartoon appeared on the entertainment page on Sunday, February 22, 1976 in the Plain Dealer regarding the remake of the classic movie, "King Kong," starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange (her first movie). The original King Kong was made in 1933 and starred Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot.
Imagine being a staff cartoonist at a major newspaper and the editor walks in and says, "Draw a person with a hangover." Roy Hearn got that assignment one day at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This was the result.
Roy Hearn's last cartoon for the Plain Dealer appeared Tuesday, August 3, 1976. It was about the number of banks opening in a town which for a long time had no banks: Mentor, in Lake County, directly east of Cleveland. The next day Roy's doctor put him in the hospital. Tests showed he had cancer. He died on August 17, 1976 at the age of 48.
-Ed Black
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