Ron Cobb

Ron Cobb
Born	1937 (age 79–80) Los Angeles, California

Ron Cobb (born 1937) is an American cartoonist, artist, writer, film designer, and film director.

By the age of 18, with no formal training in graphic illustration, Cobb was working as an animation "inbetweener" artist for Disney Studios in Burbank, California. He progressed to becoming a breakdown artist on the animation feature Sleeping Beauty (1959). (This was the last Disney film to have cels inked by hand.)

After Sleeping Beauty was completed in 1957, Disney laid off Cobb and he spent the next three years in various jobs — mail carrier, assembler in a door factory, sign painter's assistant — until he was drafted in 1960 into the US Army. For the next two years he delivered classified documents around San Francisco, then, after signing up for an extra year to avoid assignment to the infantry, was sent to Vietnam in 1963 as a draughtsman for the Signal Corps. On his discharge, Cobb began freelancing as an artist. He began to contribute to the Los Angeles Free Press in 1965.

Edited and published by Art Kunkin, the Los Angeles Free Press was one of the first of the underground newspapers of the 1960s, noted for its radical politics. Cobb's editorial/political cartoons were a celebrated feature of the Freep, and appeared regularly throughout member newspapers of the Underground Press Syndicate. However, although he was regarded as one of the finest political cartoonists of the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Cobb made very little money from the cartoons and was always looking for work elsewhere.His cartoons were featured in the back to the land magazine "The Mother Earth News."

Among other projects, Cobb designed the cover for Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album, After Bathing at Baxter's. He also contributed design work for the cult film, Dark Star (1973) (he drew the original design for the exterior of the Dark Star spaceship on a Pancake House napkin).

His cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s are collected in RCD-25 (1967) and Mah Fellow Americans (1968) (both Sawyer Press), and Raw Sewage (1971) and My Fellow Americans (1971) (both Price Stern and Sloan). None of these volumes remains in print.

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