Charlie Plumb was an American cartoonist best-known for co-creating the newspaper comic strip 'Ella Cinders'. He was born Charles Plumb in Joplin, Missouri and studied journalism, art and advertising at the University of Missouri. He started out as a political cartoonist for newspapers from Chicago and Los Angeles before he was employed by the Los Angeles Times in the early 1920s.
By 1925, he teamed up with screenwriter Bill Conselman to create his Cinderella-based comic strip for the Metropolitan News Service. The story was about Ella, who had to work hard for her stepmother, Mytie Cinders, and her two daughters Prissie and Lotta Pill, until she won a beauty contest and got a Hollywood career. Within one year, this dream came true for the strip itself, when it was made into a movie starring Coleen Moore. 'Ella Cinders' had a topper strip called 'Chris Crusty' from 1931 to 1940.
Plumb was a bit of a vagrant, living everywhere across the USA, traveling widely, and at one time sending his work from a Pacific island. His strip was ghosted by several other artists, such as Hardie Gramatky, Fred Fox, Henry Formhals and Jack McGuire did a lot of his drawings. After Conselman's death in 1940, Plumb took sole credit for the strip. In the mid-fifties, Fred Fox took over.
