Melville Porter Cummin (January 29, 1895 – December 1, 1980), popularly known as Mel Cummin, was a magazine illustrator and a newspaper staff artist; a notable cartoonist in the early decades of American comic strips; and a Golden Age comic book artist and art director. He was active in the Society of Friends. Cummin was also a well-known naturalist and explorer.
Biography
Early years
Mel Cummin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 29, 1895. Of Quaker origin, Cummin attended Friends Seminary (his mother, wife and both daughters were all educated there). On course at a young age for his eventual career, Melville Cummin is listed in Mary Mapes Dodge's St. Nicholas Magazine in 1909 as president of a seven-member chapter of the St. Nicholas League called "St. Nick Drawing Club". He attended National Preparatory Academy and the Art Students League of New York. He held no college degrees. He was a teetotaler. Cummin married at around age twenty. He became a father at age twenty-one in 1916.
Graphic artist
Cummin worked as a graphic artist for many decades. At various times he was a staff artist for publications of the Boy Scouts of America (c. 1912, shortly after the organization's founding) and West Point.
He served as art director for the American Kennel Club "Gazette". The editors of the "Gazette" paid tribute to Cummin in 2005 by revisiting his work, and called him "the master draftsman whose cartoons were such a distinctive part of the GAZETTE during the 1940s and '50s." In fact, Cummin drew for that publication at least as early as 1937.
Cummin drew editorial cartoons for The Middletown News-Signal, an Ohio daily. He worked as an illustrator for the San Francisco Examiner as well as a number of New York newspapers, and also contributed to magazines, including the original Life.
When the renowned Winsor McCay left the employ of the New York Sunday American in 1924, the great newspaper journalist Arthur Brisbane hired Cummin to fill the vacancy, because of a similarity of style. Brisbane told Cummin however that the job would be McCay's again if he desired to reclaim it. McCay did so in 1927. After McCay's death in 1934 Brisbane rehired Cummin (Brisbane died December 25, 1936). Therefore, Cummin originated and drew many of the big, eight-column cartoons for Brisbane's editorials in the New York Sunday American, the New York Evening Journal and occasionally The Mirror from 1924 to 1927, and again in 1934 and 1935. Cummin called Brisbane "a well-informed naturalist," and said the two collaborators discussed the subject of Naturalism frequently.
One of the endeavors that brought Cummin popular notice was his recurring paper dolls/cut-outs section for McCall's Magazine beginning in the early 1920s. Examples of his subjects include Teeny Town, Martha and George Washington, Dappelton Farm's Wagon House and Hay Barn, Strike Out for the Camp-Fire Trail! (shown), The Madisons and Their Family Carriage and John Adams and Abigail, His Wife. Our American Humorists (1922 ed.) lists Cummin among many others including Winsor McCay as "Our Comic Artists," and (in a probable reference to this work for McCall's) credits him with "Children's Cartoons."
Early comic strips
Later in the decade, Cummin was the first artist for Good Time Guy, which began in 1927. During the strip's short run at Metropolitan Newspaper Service, Cummin worked with writer Bill Conselman, a notable screenwriter who was writing under the pen name "Frank Smiley". Cummin was succeeded the following year by Dick Huemer.
Around the same time, Cummin began developing a comic strip called Hap Hazzard (alternatively titled Hap McSnap), which may not have ever seen publication. Hap Hazzard featured an art deco-influenced style (the originals surfaced in the 1990s comic art market), with dialog full of puns and complicated wordplay, suggesting it too may have been written by Conselman. Cummin made another foray into comics in 1929 with Traveler in the Land of Trundletree, a daily strip that may have been nationally syndicated, or only local.