Ed Dodd
| Ed Dodd | |
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Ed Dodd by Walt Kelly
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| Born | Edward Benton Dodd November 7, 1902 Lafayette, Georgia, United States |
| Died | May 27, 1991 (aged 88) Gainesville, Georgia, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist |
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Notable works
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Mark Trail (1946-1978) |
Edward Benton "Ed" Dodd (November 7, 1902 – May 27, 1991) was a 20th-century American cartoonist known for his Mark Trail comic strip.
Born in Lafayette, Georgia to Reverend Jesse Mercer Dodd and Effie Cook Dodd (the artist Lamar Dodd was his first cousin), Ed Dodd went to work for Dan Beard, founder of the Boy Scouts of America, at the age of 16. Dodd worked at Beard’s camp in Pennsylvania for 13 summers, where he honed his writing and illustration skills under Beard’s guidance. Dodd became a scoutmaster and the first paid Youth and Physical Education Director for the city of Gainesville, Georgia.
After studying architecture at Georgia Tech and at the Art Students League of New York, he purchased a ranch in Wyoming in 1926. In 1930, while working as a guide in the national parks, he created Back Home Again, a moderately successful daily single-panel which included characters from Gainesville and North Georgia. The panel, about a hillbilly family, was distributed nationally by United Feature Syndicate until 1945.
On April 15, 1946, he launched Mark Trail as a daily comic strip distributed by The New York Post to 45 newspapers. Mark Trail centers on environmental themes and its title character, a wildlife photographer and author whose assignments inevitably lead to involvement in local environmental conflicts. Trail was a younger "alter ego" of Dodd (Gurr 2006), likewise a pipe-smoking outdoorsman and conservationist but footloose and free to travel to adventure. Trail owned a St. Bernard named Andy and lived (between travels) with Doc and Cherry Davis in Lost Forest. Likewise, Dodd had a St. Bernard named Andy, and owned a home and studio (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) in a 130-acre (0.5 km2) forest in North Georgia that he named Lost Forest. Dodd's challenge with this alter ego was to write an educational outdoors-themed continuity strip, in varied settings, about a good-guy conservationist who nevertheless remained credible as a man in his responses to exploiters and to underdogs, and to romance and to hardship. At its peak in the 1960s, the strip enjoyed distribution to about 500 newspapers through North America Syndicate and spun off numerous publications about camping and wildlife.
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Wikipedia