No Ordinary Hero

Charles Voight (1887-1947) is best known today as a newspaper cartoonist who influenced such artists as EC Comics great Bernard Krigstein with his finely detailed craftsmanship and gorgeous Good Girl Sunday strip, “Betty.”

Voight was first employed as a professional artist at the age of 14 by the New York World. Working mostly in advertising, he eventually branched out to cartooning with the creation of the “Pinky Dink” (1908) strip for the Boston Traveler and later wrote and drew a comic series entitled “The Optimist” for Life Magazine.

Voight’s big break, however, was the “Betty” Sunday comic that debuted in 1920. The heroine was a debutante who consistently wore the latest fashions and fended off scores of men.

The real star of the show, however, was Voight’s art, which balanced a sophisticated style with just enough naughtiness to keep the boys interested. “Betty” ran until 1943.

Afterward, Voight turned his attention to comic-books and illustrated some striking humor and adventure back-ups for Crestwood’s Prize Comics. Working for two extremely obscure publishers, he also created the super-hero spoofs Impossible Man – a Golden Age ancestor of Jim Valentino’s Normalman – and the following character, “Captain Milksop.”

I’m not quite sure how many Captain Milksop adventures were published, although I have seen at least one other floating around the Net. This particular offering appeared in the one and only issue of Atomic Bomb Comics, which was published in 1946 by “Jay Burtis.”

(GCD links the Burtis name to the equally small Gerona publishing house, which was responsible for The Duke Of Darkness among other interesting obscurities.)

At any rate, the humor of the strip is timeless and Voight’s work remains as distinctive and stylish in the 21st century as it did back in 1946, one year before the artist’s demise.

From Atomic Bomb Comics #1 (Jay Burtis, 1946), here’s “Captain Milksop.”