The estate of Bud Blake donated a substantial collection of his work to The Ohio State University Cartoon Library and Museum. Blake, who died at age 87 in 2005, began his career as a paste-up boy for the Kudner Advertising Agency in New York and worked his way up to Executive Director of the agency. By 1954 he was disillusioned with the corporate world, so he quit his job to become a freelance cartoonist. King Features syndicated Blake’s panel cartoon Ever Happen to You? from 1958 to 1965.

During the mid-1960s, King Features turned down more than fifty “kid strips” before Blake submitted samples of Tiger, his charming strip about a little boy and his pals. Tiger was distributed by King Features from May 3, 1965 until Blake’s death. One critic described the comic strip as “expressively drawn in a distinctive and deceptively simple style…it is among the most attractively executed humor strips in the field.”  Blake received the National Cartoonists Society’s Best Humor Strip Award 1970, 1978, and 2001.

The Bud Blake Collection includes more than 5,800 original Ever Happen to You? panels and approximately 10,000 daily and Sunday Tiger originals as well as related materials. Work on organizing the collection to make it available is underway. “We are honored and delighted to have such a substantial collection of Bud Blake’s work here at the Cartoon Library and Museum,” stated its curator, Professor Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Tiger is a remarkable comic strip about normal kids and the extraordinary observations that they, like real children, make.”

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About the Cartoon Library & Museum: The Cartoon Library and Museum’s mission is to develop a comprehensive research collection of materials documenting American printed cartoon art (editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, sports cartoons, and magazine cartoons) and to provide access to these collections. The library is open Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. See https://cartoons.osu.edu/ for further information.