ETHEL HAYS
Below you'll see one of Ethel Hays’ typically sweet line drawings of a wonderfully svelte young woman done in 1935 for Everyweek Magazine, a newspaper supplement produced by the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) feature syndicate; a tiny hand-lettered date reads “8-25-35.” Hays’ drawings were usually rendered with a clean, uncluttered line — the supple line itself, as here, performing all the work. In contrast, another great woman cartoonist of the period, Nell Brinkley, drew equally attractive young women but with a line that was endlessly fussy, encumbered with feathering and hachering of all sorts. We’ll meet Brinkley a few weeks hence when we review a new Trina Robbins’ book from Fantagraphics, The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons from 1913-1940 (136 9x13-inch pages, color; hardcover $29.99), so I’ll dwell here instead on Hays.
Not much
has been written about Hays in the usual cartooning histories — the most I know
of appeared in the 2005 edition of Hogan’s
Alley, No. 13, in a piece by one of comics best historians, Allan Holtz.
Hays was born in 1892 in
Instead, she began teaching art in army hospitals to amuse and engage the wounded during their convalescence. When one class of soldiers professed an interest in learning how to become cartoonists, Hays confessed she didn’t know the first thing about it, but she subsequently enrolled in the Charles N. Landon correspondence course in cartooning and, staying a lesson ahead of her students, taught them cartooning.
When Landon saw her work, he exulted and promptly touted her talent to the editor of the Cleveland Press, where Landon had worked as art director until about 1912. Suddenly, Hays was a staff illustrator and cartoonist at a daily newspaper. Her first assignment was illustrating the gossipy first-person narratives of a flapper’s adventures written by Victoria Benham; Vic and Ethel debuted December 5, 1923, and Hays was now drawing in the simpler style of John Held, Jr. When Benham left to get married, Hays continued solo, now just Ethel, and her drawings soon shed the Held influence, characters becoming sleek and spritely with solid blacks spotted as skillfully and as effectively as those by Gluyas Williams, another master of the unadorned line.
Coincidence and happy happenstance continued to dog Hays’ steps: the Cleveland Press was one of the Scripps chain, and Scripps also ran the NEA syndicate. Editors at NEA noticed Hays’ work in the Press right away, and she was syndicated by early 1925, her thrice weekly Ethel supplemented by a one-column daily cartoon, Flapper Fanny. Hays married at the end of the year, and by 1930, she was the mother of two and reduced her workload by one feature; Fanny was picked up by another promising woman cartooner, Gladys Parker. Hays and Parker appeared together in tandem until Hays gave it up in 1934, only to come back the next year with a weekly comic strip, Marianne, for Everyweek. That lasted only until 1938, and soon thereafter, Hays devoted her time solely to illustrating children’s books, a vocation she assumed in the late 1930s. Hays died in 1989 at the age of 97. Holtz’s Hogan’s Alley article is nicely illustrated, and you might find even more samples at hoganmag.com or, at least, subscription and back-issue information.
And if you enjoy cavorting through comics history like this, you’ll probably enjoy a department at www.RCHarvey.com, namely Harv’s Hindsights, which is fraught with stuff like the foregoing.
Thanks for posting this! Great information about Hays and a lovely image to boot!
Posted by: rachelmariecranewilliams | February 01, 2012 at 09:49 PM