Sidney Smith (cartoonist)

Sidney Smith (actually: Robert Sidney Smith, born February 13, 1877 in Bloomington, Illinois, † October 20, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American comic book artist and cartoonist. He became famous for his daily strip The Gumps.

Smith, son of a dentist, first drew cartoons for the newspaper of his hometown. His first comic Buck Nix, who was born in 1908, he was responsible for the Chicago Examiner. With his move to the Chicago Tribune, he led the Strip continued under the name Old Doc Yak. From this series with anthropomorphized animals also various animated films in which Smith was involved appeared. In February 1917 he started on a proposal from Joseph Medill Patterson with his publisher of the series The Gumps, which was so successful that he had to stop the work at Old Doc Yak in June 1919 in order to concentrate entirely on The Gumps. In the course of the series Smith went on to lasting longer stories to tell, rather than providing a joke every day.

The financial success of his painterly activity was so great that Smith could afford several houses and a car park and it could not harm the global economic crisis. On the way back from signing a contract that would have guaranteed him a salary of one million U.S. dollars and a Rolls- Royce as a bonus for the next three years, Smith died in a car accident. The Gumps, in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the popular Daily strips, was taken over by Gus Edson and continued until 17 October 1959.