Fred Lasswell

Fred Lasswell started his career as a sports cartoonist for the Tampa Daily Times around 1928. His work attracted the attention of Billy DeBeck, creator of the newspaper strip 'Barney Google and Snuffy Smith', in 1933. Fred Lasswell became his assistant, aged 17, and took over the famous strip after DeBeck's death in 1942. During World War II, Fred Lasswell served as a flight radio operator and created the strip 'Sgt. Hashmark'.

Apart from working in comics, he was an inventor, coming up with a successful citrus fruit harvester, a technique to enable the blind to read comics, a bilingual laser disc and a hypercard stack for computers. He also produced a series of videos for children, called 'Draw and Color with Uncle Fred'. Fred Lasswell won many awards for his comic work, including a Reuben in 1964.

Fred Lasswell continued to write and draw 'Barney Google and Snuffy Smith' for over sixty years. In 1998, his assistant, John Rose, took over this still very popular daily strip. Fred Lasswell died of a heart attack on 4 March 2001.