Eldon Dedini

Eldon Dedini (June 29, 1921 – January 12, 2006) was an American cartoonist whose work appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy and elsewhere.

While his hometown was Carmel, California and he was born in King City, California, the nearby town of Salinas, California, hosted an exhibition, Broccoli & Babes: The Cartoons and Posters of Eldon Dedini, which ran from November 4, 2005 until January 20, 2006 at the Sasoontsi Gallery.

He received the National Cartoonists Society's Gag Cartoon Award in 1958, 1961, 1964 and 1988.

Eldon Dedini was born on June 29, 1921 in King City, California. His father was an Italian dairy farmer and bookkeeper, his mother a schoolteacher. His love of cartoons dates from his early boyhood, as he pored over "comic books" his mother made for him from the Sunday paper's comic section. He was around 13 when he started subscribing to Esquire, and five years later, he sold his first cartoon to them.

He graduated from Salinas Junior College (now Hartnell College), where he took art classes. Acting on the advice of his art teacher, the noted watercolorist Leon Amyx, Dedini compensated for the cartooning gap in the art curriculum through practical experience, contributing cartoons gratis to the local newspaper, the Salinas Index Journal. He continued his art education in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Institute of Art, where many of the Disney Studio's animators trained and where he met another artist, Virginia Conroy, whom he married on 15 July 1944, just after they both graduated. They adopted a son, Giulio, in 1960. He worked for Universal Studios and for Disney before becoming a regular contributor to Esquire.

Dedini died of cancer in Carmel, California in January 2006, at age 84.