Ernie Schroeder | |
---|---|
Born | Ernest C. Schroeder January 9, 1916 Brooklyn, New York City, New York |
Died | September 20, 2006 Brevard County, Florida |
(aged 90)
Nationality | American |
Area(s) | Artist |
Notable works
|
The Heap |
Ernest C. "Ernie" Schroeder (January 9, 1916 – September 20, 2006) was an American comic book artist and a commercial illustrator and sculptor, best known for drawing and co-writing Hillman Periodicals' influential muck-monster the Heap from 1949 to 1953.
Other characters with which Schroeder is associated include Hillman's Airboy and Harvey Comics' Shock Gibson and Spirit of '76.
In a 2004 interview, Schroeder described a family life in which his future father was a West Point graduate and Spanish–American War veteran who after that conflict settled in the Philippine Islands, and who met Schroeder's future mother, the daughter of an amusement park owner, while on a visit to the United States. Schroeder said that upon marriage, the couple lived in the Philippines, where his mother worked as a hospital nurse; they later returned to the U.S., where his father played a Confederate officer in the D.W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation, made a fortune with a New York City silver-polish company called Noxon, and sold Ford trucks in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, where Schroeder was born, before leaving the family when Schroeder was very young. The artist said he lived with his grandmother for a short time until his mother became resident nurse at the estate of Jesse Jay Ricks, president of the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, and that Schroeder then grew up in a wealthy household of four boys, where family guests included Carl Sandburg.