Ferd Johnson

Ferdinand Johnson (December 18, 1905 – October 14, 1996), usually cited as Ferd Johnson, was an American cartoonist, best known for his 68-year stint on the Moon Mullins comic strip.

Johnson was born December 18, 1905, in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania, and had a younger brother, George. Johnson's youthful interest in cartooning had the support of his family after he won an Erie Dispatch Herald cartoon contest. He recalled in 1989, "I think I was 11 years old. And then I won a newspaper cartoon drawing contest, and I think the prize was two or three tickets to Peck's Bad Boy, and that got my dad to thinking, and he gave me a $28 correspondence course. I went through that and worked on the high school yearbook all the time. I did lots of drawings there. At 13, I sold my first cartoon for money to a railroad magazine. It paid me $10 a month for years and years."

After graduating from high school in 1923, he attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for three months. When Moon Mullins creator Frank Willard taught briefly there, Willard invited the talented youngster to visit his workplace, The Chicago Tribune. Johnson recalled, "I stood around there for hours watching him work. He finally turned around and said, 'Ferd, if you're going to hang around here all this time, I'm going to put you to work.' So I got a job as assistant at 15 bucks a week. I wrote home, and I said, 'Don't send me any more money. I've got it made." Dropping out of school, he became Willard assistant two months after Willard launched Moon Mullins in 1923. Johnson worked at the Tribune as a color artist and sports illustrator.

While Johnson was still in his teens, the paper offered him the opportunity to create his own comic strip. Johnson's effort, Texas Slim, about a ranch hand working for the antihero Dirty Dalton, debuted as a Sunday page from the Tribune Syndicate on August 30, 1925. It ran three years. In 1932, Johnson revived Texas Slim as a topper strip paired with his short-lived domestic-comedy strip Lovey Dovey. On March 31, 1940, the characters returned once again as a Sunday strip titled Texas Slim & Dirty Dalton, which ran through 1958.

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