Franklyn Bruce Modell
“The Quintessential Gag Cartoonist”
Frank Modell was born on September 6, 1917, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “I’m told I was born in Philadelphia,” he said almost a century later, “but, of course, that’s hearsay.”
As is the case with most artists, Modell’s interest in drawing began in childhood. Thanks to a bout of scarlet fever at the age of six—which necessitated a quarantine—Modell’s interest in art became an obsession. “It wasn’t so much the art I enjoyed,” he wrote in his book, Stop Trying to Cheer Me Up! “It was the visibility I was getting.”
During World War II, the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art alumnus served as a sergeant in the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. The SIS was part of the Army’s Signal Corp—whose soldiers included Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), P.D. Eastman, Charles Addams, Stan Lee, and many other creative types.
Side note: After World War II, the Signal Intelligence Service (which was later called the Army Security Agency) would become what we know today as the National Security Agency.
“All that time, I was sending cartoon ideas to The New Yorker,” Modell recalled. “When the war was over, I married, got divorced, and joined the New Yorker staff.”
In the early days of Modell’s long-running relationship with The New Yorker, he worked as an assistant to art editor, James Geraghty. “I was a hit man,” he said in 2000. “If an idea was O.K.’d, Geraghty would see the cartoonist. But if it was a rejection, he would say, ‘Frank will see him.’”
Modell’s “hit man” description may not have been the most accurate. As fellow New Yorker cartoonist, educator, and author of Cartooning: The Art and the Business, Mort Gerberg, shared, “I loved being with [Modell] because he was kind and generous. Particularly when I, as a young, timid cartoonist, first met him outside Jim Geraghty’s office—and he spoke to me as if he’d known me all my life, as if he and I both were cartoonists. When I was around Frank, I was able to stand a little taller.”
On July 20, 1946, Modell’s first New Yorker cartoon was published.
Unbeknownst to Modell, this cartoon would be the first of thousands.