Gotto, Ray

Ray Gotto was a tremendous sports cartoonist who did many cartoon illustrations for The Sporting News. He is also quite well known for his two comic strip features, Cotton Woods and Ozark Ike. Most fans of work don't know that Ray also created the logo for the NY Mets in 1961; the same one that the team uses today.

I got to know Ray in the early 1990s, after I worked on the Cotton Woods book that Denis Kitchen published. Ray and I corresponded throughout the '90s and I visited him a couple of times at his trailer home in Florida. Sadly, towards the end of the 1990s, Ray developed Alzheimers and spent his last few years in a VA hospital. Ray had little family, only a nephew in CA, so I would check in with Ray's case worker once a year to see if he needed anything. Ray had no memory of the present, but physically was doing okay. He passed away on December 28, 2003, at the age of 87.

The panel cartoons in this gallery are ones that I purchased from Ray over the years. They're all unpublished cartoons. While the pieces are quite wonderful, Ray admitted that he didn't too much to try and sell them to a syndicate. They basically sat on a shelf for years until I purchased them. As much as I love these pieces, the letters and experiences with Ray are the most meaningful. He was a great designer-type cartoonist; a real stylist with a bold, clean style.