Carl Buettner

Carl Buettner (May 26, 1903 – January 21, 1965) was an American comics artist and cartoonist. He was one of the first American artists with Walt Disney comics, where he worked on such characters as "Li'l Bad Wolf," "Bucky Bug," and "Pinocchio."

Carl Buettner was born Carl George Buettner on May 26, 1903, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Karl Georg Büttner, a factory machinist at the North Star Shoe Company, and his wife Minnie Neumann. His German immigrant parents had met and married in Minneapolis in 1897. He had an elder sister Louise Wilhelmina Buettner (born 1898.)

Buettner showed an aptitude for writing and drawing from an early age. In high school, he won several awards for shorthand. In 1919, he won a free correspondence course in lettering at The Federal Schools of Minneapolis. After finishing the course, he continued his education in art, graphics, and cartooning elsewhere. 

In 1925, Buettner was hired as a teacher at the school he once attended. The following year, he became an illustrator at Fawcett Publications in Robbinsdale near Minneapolis, Minnesota. There, he contributed many cartoons to Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Smokehouse Poetry, Jim Jam Jems, Hooey, and other Fawcett joke books. These digest-sized magazines contained suggestive and irreverent humor and were widely popular during the Post-War era of Prohibition. His lyrical drawing style influenced fellow Fawcett-artists, including future pulp artists Norman Saunders, Allen Anderson, and Ralph Carlson.

In 1934, Fawcett began to move their operations to New York City, where Buettner was sent to work as an art editor for one of Fawcett's magazines. While in New York, he secretly began selling freelance interior story illustrations to Fawcett's arch-rivals — Paul Sampliner ("Saucy Stories") and Warren Angel ("Saucy Movie Tales"). He signed some of his work "CB," or a fictitious name "Carl Blaine" ("Blaine" was the middle name of his colleague Norman Saunders).

In 1937, Buettner left the world of pulp fiction and moved to California to work as an art director at Walt Disney Studios. He left Disney after a year to work for the Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising animation studio. That year, he also got married and began to raise a family. 

Around that time, Buettner met the famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen who had a double act with his puppets Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Buettner then teamed up with cartoonist Chase Craig (1910–2001) to succeed Ben Batsford (1893–1977) on the newspaper comic strip Mortimer and Charlie (October 1939-1940) which is based on Bergen's characters. The two also created another newspaper comic strip titled Hollywood Hams for the Los Angeles Daily News.

In 1942, Buettner and Chase Craig became art directors for Western (Whitman) Publishing Company at their new office in Los Angeles, California. Besides editing, Buettner also wrote and penciled many Walt Disney comics during the 1940s and collaborated with artists such as Carl Barks, Roger Armstrong, Paul Murry, Vivie Risto. He also created impressive comic book covers that influenced the young cartoonist Walt Kelly (1913-1973).

His first published story ("The Carnival King", 1942) starred the parrot "Joe Carioca" from the 1942 animation Saludos Amigos and the 1944 movie The Three Caballeros. The Carioca character became a major star in the Brazilian production of Disney comics.

Between 1944 and 1946, Buettner wrote and drew the first comic book stories with "Bucky Bug" — a character created by Earl Duvall and Al Taliaferro for the "Silly Symphonies" Sunday comic strip, in January 1932.

Buettner's first story in "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories" #40 introduced the colony of red ants and their king, on which Vivie Risto, George Waiss, and Ralph Heimdahl worked later.

His most noteworthy contribution to Disney was the development of the "The Li'l Bad Wolf" character, which debuted in his own self-titled series, beginning in the comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #52 (1945.) The character had appeared in at least four animated shorts in Disney's Silly Symphonies series: The Three Little Pigs (1933), The Big Bad Wolf (1934), Three Little Wolves (1936), and The Practical Pig (1939). The Three Little Pigs was very influential and adapted into animation multiple times — Burt Gillett-directed The Big Bad Wolf on Walt Disney (April 1934), Tex Avery-directed The Blitz Wolf (1942) at MGM, Friz Freleng's Pigs In A Polka (1943), Robert McKimson's The Windblown Hare (1949), and Friz Freleng's Three Little Bops (1957) at Warners. In 1980, the book with Erik Blegvad illustrations was made. In 1988, Weston Woods Studios created a short film based on the book.

Buettner also illustrated comics and covers for comic books starring characters from the Disney films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). He remained involved in Western's production of Disney comics until 1952, although in later years only as an inker or cover artist. He also took over the illustration of Looney Tunes from Ed Volke, Vivie Risto, Chase Craig, Roger Armstrong, and Thomas McKimson.

Buettner retired as an art director in 1947 (succeeded by Thomas McKimson) but continued to write, edit and illustrate for the Little Golden Books line, a joint children's book venture of Western Publishing and Simon & Shuster. He also produced comic books on Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tarzan, Joe Carioca, Bucky Bug, Dumbo, Bambi, Woody Woodpecker, Bozo the Clown, and The Seven Dwarfs.

Buettner died on January 21, 1965, at the age of 61, in Los Angeles, California.