'Willie Hawkshaw, the Amateur Detective'.
Frank Hutchinson, often signing with "Hutch", was a Canadian-American architect and comic artist, who created such newspaper features as 'Know-It-All Jake' (1904-1905), 'Willie Hawkshaw, the Amateur Detective' (1905-1906) and 'Superstitious Sam' (1905-1906). Frank Hutchinson should not be confused with the U.S. country blues musician Frank Hutchison (1897-1945). Some sources have also erroneously credited Frank Hutchinson's comic strips to A.C. Hutchison, who also signed with "Hutch". In April-May 2019, the experts in American newspaper comics at the Stripper's Guide blog managed to distinguish the separate career paths of these two artists.
Life and career
Frank Genora Hutchinson was born in 1872 in Morristown, Nova Scotia, Canada. Somewhere in the 1890s, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts in the USA, where he had himself naturalized. He worked as an architectural draftsman. His two earliest comic strips were 'Willie Wise, Tommy Tuff and Simple Sammy', between 13 November 1904 and 26 February 1905, and 'Know-It-All Jake', serialized between 27 November 1904 and 23 April 1905. They were both distributed by the recently founded World Color Printing in St. Louis, which provided comic features to newspapers' Sunday comics sections.
'Know-it-all Jake'.
Willie Hawkshaw, the Amateur Detective
In the Chicago Tribune, Hutchinson published 'Willie Hawkshaw, the Amateur Detective', which ran between 27 August 1905 and 29 April 1906. The name 'Hawkshaw the Detective' was borrowed from a character in Tom Taylor's theatrical play 'The Ticket-of-Leave Man' (1863), though much of Hutchinson's character was modeled after Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes'. Interestingly enough, Gus Mager later had a comic strip named 'Hawkshaw the Detective' (1913-1947).
Superstitious Sam
Between 24 September 1905 and 29 April 1906, Hutchinson drew 'Superstitious Sam', again for The Chicago Tribune. The series ran on a thin gimmick. Two men, Sam and Mr. Lunkhead, encountered something Sam would attribute to good or bad luck. Lunkhead would invariably pass it off as superstition, whereupon the duo indeed had bad luck of some kind (or in some cases bad luck with a little sunny side).
Later life and death
By 1910, Hutchinson moved to Spokane, Washington. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, he was drafted. Later in life, he lived in Oregon and worked as a draftsman in construction engineering. He also taught evening lessons in architecture (perspective and rendering) at the University of Oregon. By 1940, he was a staff artist with the State Highway Department, an occupation he held until his retirement in 1953. The veteran artist lived a long life. He was 101 years old when he passed away in 1973.
'Superstitious Sam'.