'Felix the Cat' daily from 1928.
Jack Bogle was an American animator and cartoonist, who spent several years working with Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's 'Felix the Cat' character. He not only worked for their animation studio, but, between 1927 and 1931, was also the first artist of the daily 'Felix the Cat' newspaper comic. Later on, Bogle animated for the Van Beuren and Disney Studios, and was also notable as a funny animal comic book artist for Dell Publishing.
Early life and career
John James Bogle was born in 1900 in a little town outside Newark, New Jersey. Although he wanted to become a cartoonist, he had his first job in a factory. He proved to have an creative mind, as he apparently built an inventive mouse trap, and went to work for Thomas Alva Edison at age 18. In the early 1920s, he did contributions to the Edison Herald, a magazine for Edison's employees.
'Felix the Cat' daily from November 1927.
Felix the Cat
In the 1920s, Bogle was employed by the animation studio of Pat Sullivan, working on the 'Felix the Cat' series. Interviewed by Marcy Springer for The Desert Sun (1977), Bogle claimed he was the one who came up with the idea of launching a 'Felix the Cat' newspaper comic. True or not, it was Otto Messmer who from 1923 on drew the first 'Felix the Cat' comics, though only as a Sunday comic. Bogle does deserve credit for being the first daily 'Felix the Cat' newspaper comic artist, drawing the feature from May 1927 until 1931. These early installments were adaptations of the animated shorts, and supposedly they often consisted of cut-and-pasted or re-inked animation stills.
Ozzy and His Gym / Barnyard Folks
Another daily comic strip by Jack Bogle was 'Ozzy And His Gym' (1924-1925), syndicated by McFadden Publishing. The title character is a gym coach who isn't really interested in helping people stay fit. He takes far more delight in his young, attractive female customers, of which the pretty Janet (sometimes named Mabel) and her short, chubbier friend Kewpie are the other recurring castmembers. Ozzy often makes a fool out of himself or gets into witty trouble.
In 1937, Bogle also drew the short-lived funny animal Sunday comic strip 'Barnyard Folks' for King Features Syndicate, although specific publication dates are unknown.
'Ozzy and His Gym'.
Later animation career
In 1936, Bogle briefly worked as an animator for the Van Beuren Studios which, by then, had obtained the rights to create their own 'Felix the Cat' animated cartoons. There, Bogle hired a still unknown Joseph Barbera (of later Hanna-Barbera fame). Later that decade, Bogle joined Walt Disney, where he contributed to early 'Mickey Mouse' cartoon shorts and the animated feature films 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' (1937) and 'Pinocchio' (1940).
Filler comic strip from Dell's New Funnies #66 (1942). The comic book was otherwise filled with comics starring characters from Walter Lantz cartoons, but this one has a copyright notice for Oskar Lebeck, the managing editor of Western Publishing.
Final years and death
Not much is known about Bogle's later career, except that in the early 1940s he drew some funny animal comics for Dell Comics/Western Publishing titles like 'New Funnies'.
In a newspaper article in the Desert Sun from 3 June 1977, conducted by Marcy Springer, Bogle was retired and living in Torrance, California. John "Jack" Bogle died two days before his 82nd birthday on 2 July 1982.
Jack Bogle in 1977.