Shearer, Ted

The following mini-biography is from Muppet Wikia:

Ted Shearer (1919-1992) was an African-American illustrator, cartoonist and painter best known for his work on the comic strip Quincy and who designed the character Billy Jo Jive on Sesame Street.

Born in Jamaica, Shearer grew up in Harlem and sold his first cartoon as a young teenager. Entering the US Army during WWII, he served in the segregated 92nd Division and became an illustrator for Stars and Stripes. He later freelanced, selling drawings to The Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and other publications. Shearer went on to become television art director at the famed ad agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne before quitting in 1970 to launch the King Features comic Quincy, focusing on a ten-year old inner city kid. The strip ran until 1986.

More detailed information about Shearer and his career can be found on Ted Jackson's wonderful Pioneering Cartoonists of Color site. Mike Lynch does a tremendous job of analyzing some of Shearer's work on his excellent blog.

I've long been a fan of Ted Shearer's work. Like Hank Ketcham and Bud Black, Shearer created art that had a graphic liveliness to it. His use of Zip-a-tone was almost painterly, unlike most cartoonists who neatly assigned shaded shapes to particular areas. Shearer used the shading tape to create shadows, tones, shapes and spaces. His use of Zip-a-tone also caused the viewer's eye to follow the action from panel-to-panel.

Shearer's Zip-a-tone work is beautiful--no doubt--but one cannot forget about his powerful line work. Like Ketcham and Blake, Shearer's line was almost calligraphic in nature, with many variations in thickness and speed. This changing line added to the wonderful expressive quality of Shearer's work.

Besides the beautiful and lush artwork, Shearer excellent at narration and pacing. He would draw the reader in and out, changing camera angles like the best of movie directors. His narration was so seamless that one barely notices the changing angles, the mark of a true master.

Ted Shearer is another one of those artists whose work flies too low under the radar of comic strip history. His work deserves a wider audience, and hopefully, his due will come some day.