Willard Mullin

Willard Mullin (September 14, 1902 – December 20, 1978) was an American sports cartoonist. He is most famous for his creation of the "Brooklyn Bum", the personification of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, based on fabled circus clown Emmett Kelly's "Weary Willie" hobo persona. He was widely published: he cartooned daily for Scripps-Howard's New York World-Telegram and Sun for decades and was often published in Scripps-Howard's twenty papers, as well as in the Sporting News.

Publications

An oversize retrospective collection of Willard Mullin cartoons entitled Willard Mullin's Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934–1972 was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2013. The book also contains biographical and historical information. In 2015, Fantagraphics Books published Willard Mullin's Casey at the Bat and Other Diamond Tales. This book features Mullin's thirteen drawings to match the thirteen verses of Ernest L. Thayer's famous baseball poem, the poem as written in Mullin's once-celebrated cartoon lettering style, and a few selections from Mullin's other baseball cartoons. Until the Fantagraphics publication, the Mullin "Casey" had only ever been seen by those who attended an early 1950s convention of the National Association, then the overseers of minor league baseball and were given copies of the Mullin "Casey."

Awards

He received the Reuben Award in 1954 for his work, as well as the National Cartoonist Society Sports Cartoon Award for each year from 1957 through 1962, and again in 1964 and 1965.