Don Margolis
Overseas digest magazines! Sexy cartoons! The GI Bill! The comic book boom! Certainly these were the best things to come from World War II. After a brief stint in the army, Don Margolis - a young and eager veteran, was ready to start his career. Chicago’s Academy of Fine Arts was one of the first schools beginning to offer cartooning classes and Don Margolis enrolled. Upon graduating he entered the New York comic book market, often working anonymously. The Forties decade was a cartoonist’s dream. The pay may not have been great but the markets were open for business. Being attracted to exaggerated forms and curvy woman, Don’s style was best suited to horror comics and heroines such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. He was in his early twenties when he broke into the field.
New York publishers were capitalizing on more adult cartoon content due to the popularity of magazines like Esquire and overseas weeklies such as Stars and Stripes. These included Crestwood Publications, the Humorama Line, Harvey and even contributions from paperback publishers like Fawcett and Dell. Their digests full of risqué cartoons and pin-ups had titles like Army & Navy Fun Parade, Breezy, Broadway Laughs, Squads Riot and 1000 Jokes. Local artists would do the rounds on Wednesdays, dropping off their sketches for editors. Those outside the Metropolitan area would mail in stacks of drawings via manila envelopes. When they were returned, new contributions were sent, along with unsold material to new markets. Don’s work appeared in newspaper supplements such as Family Weekly. These were bold and humorous ink line drawings that would illustrate articles with humor.
Meanwhile in Chicago, Hugh Hefner was making a name for himself. Playboy debuted in 1953. It was a hipper version of Esquire, aimed at a younger generation. And like Esquire, it featured full page color cartoons. Another cartoonist contemporary of Don’s, Arv Miller, designed the Playboy mascot, a cad of a bunny that would appear on the covers. It was a hit and a multitude of imitators followed. In 1957, Arv started his own modest, digest-sized magazine named Fling. It was to this publication that Don would make significant contributions for the next ten years.
At Playboy, Hefner hired Esquire artists such as Eldon Dedini. But the cartoon star of early Playboy issues was certainly Jack Cole. Yes, this was the same Jack Cole most well-known for creating the humorous comic book hero Plastic Man. Hugh seemed to recognize the strong storytelling and graphic style of the young comic book artists. He thought it could be redeveloped into something fitting his vision that spoke to an adult audience of young men. Arv must have saw this in Don Margolis. Don’s style was similar to Arv’s. While Arv no longer had the time to make cartoons with his new role as editor, he could rely on Don’s elaborately painted images. Unusual for the time, Don’s name would be called out in the magazine, sometimes even on the cover. In issue #11 and #13 Don’s contributions were full comic-book stories, possibly reworked from his comic book days now to include nudity. Fling had an unusual publication schedule, with two distinct runs that overlapped each other. In 1959, Fling evolved into a full color standard magazine-sized monthly. Around this time, Margolis was married at age 30.
By the late 1950s, New York editors became less open to cartoons as The New Yorker and Playboy became more exclusive markets. The era of cartoonists making their Wednesday rounds to New York publishers was slowing down. The cost of magazine production and distribution also went up, further putting the squeeze on artists. And for an artist not based on New York, like Don, the increase in postage rates was of no help either. Somewhere in the late 1960s, censorship restrictions dropped and photo features in men’s magazines began showing more skin than ever. Magazine cartooning became a narrow base and artists had to look for sources of other related income. The ones that were able to hang on were those whose names became a brand. The one equity for cartoonists became the rights to their own work.
Don worked his way into the ad industry that was quickly moving away from illustrative styles into a more modernist graphic and photo based one. For the Leo Burnett Agency, Don redesigned the look of the Snap Crackle and Pop characters for Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Unlike illustrative cartoons used for editorial purposes, cartoons used for advertising purposes did not carry the signature of the cartoonist. So it’s hard to say what the exact accounts were that Don worked on as an ad man. Nevertheless he did go on to a successful career in advertising. One example would be the humor book, Management by Hassling, produced by the McDonald’s Corporation in 1978. Don illustrated it. It is known that he managed the creation and manufacturing of a number of point-of-purchase displays for leading brands and ad agencies.
Margolis passed away in Las Vegas in 2017 at the age of 89. The examples shown herein are from Don’s ten year stint with Fling. Even though his cartooning career was short, the work itself is robust and bursting with energy.