Clifton Meek was one of the early American comic artists. In the early 1910s he was working for the Scripps-McRae Syndicate in San Francisco as a comic artist. He learned the finer points of the profession from Johnny Gruelle and created a four-panel strip called 'Johnny Mouse and Grindstone George', that appeared in newspapers like the Evening World between 1916 and 1919.
In the 1920s he turned freelance and starting contributing animal strips, mainly about mice, to Life magazine. Meek's mice strips apparently inspired Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks to create 'Mickey Mouse'. Around 1923 Meek also had a cartoon panel called 'Auto-biographies', that ran in papers like the Schenectady Gazette.
