Comic strip biopic about baseball legend Carl Yastrzemski, early 1980s.
Tom Kane was an American publishing and printing entrepreneur, who was active as a sports cartoonist for the Boston Herald between 1980 and 1986.
Life and career
Thomas Joseph Kane II was born in 1934 in Everett, Massachusetts, but spent most of his childhood in Chelsea. Between 1953 and 1957, he studied at the Mass College of Art, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree. He spent his military service in Germany, and then settled in Stoughton, Massachusetts with his family. Kane was mostly active as an entrepreneur in the advertising, printing and publishing industries, operating from Boston, Massachusetts. He was production manager of Dickie-Raymond Direct Mail Advertising (1960-1965), outside salesman for Kingston Press (1965-1968) and owned the Bayside Press in Boston, Massachusetts, between 1968 and 1973. Since March 1980, he was the owner of Old South Publishing, focusing on the publishing of standard and specialty maps.
Cartooning career
In 1980, Kane became sports cartoonist for the Boston Herald newspaper. He created caricatures of sports stars, writing biographical trivia and drawing little cartoons around the caricatures. Kane also visualized sporting games in comic strip-like illustrations. Kane also designed the 'Bird's Eye of Boston', a map providing detailed drawings of the many streets in Boston from a bird’s eye view, also suitable for tourists.
Later years and death
In his final years, Kane was writing and illustrating a book about various baseball players throughout U.S. history, but this project was left incomplete due to his death in 2022, at age 87.