Charles Plumb (cartoonist)


Charles Plumb was an American cartoonist best known for maintaining a high quality of artwork on the comic strip Ella Cinders over three decades. He usually signed his work with the signature Charlie Plumb or Chas. Plumb. He also drew the topper strip Chris Crusty which ran above Ella Cinders from 1931 to 1940.
Born and raised in Joplin, Missouri, Plumb moved at age 15 to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where his father, Carl H. Plumb, was a mining engineer in the Tri-state area of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. After attending Baxter Springs High School, Charlie Plumb studied journalism, art and advertising at the University of Missouri and then worked as an artist and political cartoonist for newspapers in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities. His parents eventually relocated to Ozark, Missouri.

''Ella Cinders''

In the early 1920s, while Plumb was employed as an artist at the Los Angeles Times, he met screenwriter William Conselman, and the two created their Ella Cinders strip in 1925 for the Metropolitan Newspaper Service. Initially, as the name implies, the strip presented a variation on the classic Cinderella story, but then it diverged into other plotlines, as noted by comics historian Don Markstein:

Influences

Artists who influenced Plumb included N. C. Wyeth, H. M. Bateman, Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham. In his spare time, Plumb enjoyed fishing. After living in Pasadena, California, he had homes in San Antonio, Texas and Cuernavaca, Mexico, which he called his permanent residence. He also traveled widely, and for some years, the syndicate received his work shipped from an island in the Pacific. Plumb and his wife had four children, Joanne, Barbara, Peter and Charles G. Plumb.
Plumb employed a number of assistants and ghost artists, including Fred Fox, Joseph Messerli, Jack McGuire, Henry Formhals and Hardie Gramatky, ranked by Andrew Wyeth as one of the 20 greatest watercolor painters.

Final years

When Conselman died in the mid-1940s, his estate took over the strip and employed several writers, while Plumb received sole credit on the strip. Fred Fox took over as the strip's artist in the mid-1950s, followed by Roger Armstrong.