Billy DeBeck
| Billy DeBeck | |
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Billy DeBeck with Barney Google and Spark Plug
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| Born | William Morgan DeBeck April 16, 1890 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | November 11, 1942 (aged 52) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist |
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Notable works
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Barney Google |
| Collaborators | Paul Fung, Fred Lasswell |
William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 – November 11, 1942), better known as Billy DeBeck, was an American cartoonist. He is most famous as the creator of the comic strip Barney Google, later retitled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. The strip was especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and featured a number of well-known characters, including the title character, Bunky, Snuffy Smith, and Spark Plug the race horse. Spark Plug was a merchandising phenomenon, and has been called the Snoopy of the 1920s.
DeBeck drew with a scratchy line in a "big-foot" style, in which characters had giant feet and bulbous noses. His strips often reflected his love of sports. In 1946, the National Cartoonists Society inaugurated the Billy DeBeck Memorial Awards (or the Barney Awards), which became the Reuben Award in 1954.
William Morgan DeBeck was born on April 15, 1890 on the South Side of Chicago, where his father, Louis DeBeck, was a newspaperman employed by the Swift Company. The elder DeBeck was French, and the name DeBeck was originally spelled DeBecque. His Irish-Welsh mother, Jessie Lee Morgan, had lived on a farm and was a schoolteacher.
After graduating from Hyde Park High School in 1908, DeBeck attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He sold cartoon drawings during this time to finance himself, at first in 1908 for the Chicago Daily News. His caricatures of models drew the attention of his fellow students, and though he had intended to become a painter in the Flemish tradition, he quit the Academy after two years after he got a cartooning job with the weekly paper Show World in 1910. His cartoons showed the influence of John T. McCutcheon and Clare Briggs, whom he had admired in his youth; he also had the skill to draw in the more fastidiously cross-hatched style of a Charles Dana Gibson, copies of whose drawings he sold as originals.
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