William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 - November 11, 1942) was a popular cartoonist who was widely known as Billy DeBeck. He created some of the memorable comic strip characters of the 1920s and 1930s, including Barney Google, Bunky, Snuffy Smith and the racehorse Spark Plug.
DeBeck was born and grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his father, Louis DeBeck, was a former newspaperman employed by the Swift Company. His father was French, and...
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William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 - November 11, 1942) was a popular cartoonist who was widely known as Billy DeBeck. He created some of the memorable comic strip characters of the 1920s and 1930s, including Barney Google, Bunky, Snuffy Smith and the racehorse Spark Plug.
DeBeck was born and grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his father, Louis DeBeck, was a former newspaperman employed by the Swift Company. His father was French, and the name DeBeck evolved from DeBeque. His Irish-Welsh mother, Jessie Lee Morgan, had lived on a farm and was a former schoolteacher.
Graduating from Hyde Park High School in 1908, Billy DeBeck enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and began doing cartoons that same year for the Chicago Daily News. In 1910 he took a job as a staff artist with a local weekly theater publication, Show World. From 1912 to 1916 he was an illustrator and political cartoonist with the Youngstown Chronicle Telegraph and the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times. In...
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