Cartoonist and animation artist Robert Michael “Bob” Foster passed away in hospice care on Sept. 30, 2024, from complications pertaining to a long, dementia-related decline in health according to his partner, Diane Stone.
Foster’s love of cartoons “was there early on,” he told the Silverton, Oregon, newspaper Our Town in a 2015 profile. “I read the comic strips, comic books but not the superhero stuff, maybe Superman and Batman but not more than that. I really liked the funny animal comics, Disney animals, Barney Bear, Pogo, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, all that funny animal stuff really struck a chord with me.”
His father was a truck driver by day and a portrait photographer by night, and he always encouraged Foster in his own artistic endeavors. “Working late in the little darkroom he'd built in our basement, developing negatives and prints, washing them and drying them. Sometimes he'd let me spend the time with him, trapped in the dark until the process was complete,” Foster recalled in a blog entry about his artistic roots. “Often I would fall asleep. Other times, between the steps involved in the photo print process, when I was still awake, he'd draw cartoons for me. I think he'd taken one of those correspondence courses, the kind you see on the back of a matchbook or comic book, with a drawing of a Bambi look-alike or a pirate. I guess he was good enough to take the course but was never good enough to make any money at it.”
With his family’s encouragement, he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1961 to enroll in the prestigious Chouinard Art School as a film student, and would earn a BFA in film. “Chouinard was a great awakening for me,” Foster told Ken L. Jones in a 1985 interview, published in The Comics Journal #135 in 1990. It was my first time being away from the umbrella of home. ... I was semi-Victorian in my upbringing, and seeing all this wild and wicked stuff going on was great; I kinda enjoyed it. Chouinard and all the people there really loosened me up a lot.”
In 1966, Foster was drafted and served two years in the United States Army at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, where he put his film studies degree to use writing and directing educational films alongside cartoonist and writer Steve Stiles, who was also stationed at Fort Monmouth. Upon completion of his military service, Foster returned to Los Angeles and, while temporarily living in the basement of editor and publisher Bill Spicer, found work in the animation industry as an apprentice animation layout artist with Filmation in 1969. He spent the early 1970s working at Hanna-Barbera alongside such artists as Willie Ito and Lin Larsen, working on Saturday morning television cartoons like Yogi’s Gang and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.
In 1970, the prolific artist self-published the first issue of Myron Moose Funnies, a humor comic featuring the lethargic, introspective title character who suffers from low self-esteem and a sinus problem. Foster’s antlered protagonist made his debut in a late 1968 letter to his girlfriend, then living in New Jersey, in which the artist filled a two-inch blank space at the bottom of his letter with an improvised comic strip featuring Myron.
“I was just out of the army in '68 and was living in Bill Spicer's basement, and I was working at some job I hated and I was doodling little cartoons, and somehow the idea of Mickey Moose struck me as being hilarious,” Foster told The Comics Journal. “After I'd done some drawings that looked remarkably like Myron, I decided that Myron was a funny name and that was it. I showed them to Vince Davis and he said, "Why don't we do an underground? You do some artwork and so will I and we'll publish it ourselves."
The first issue of Myron Moose Funnies focused almost exclusively on Myron and his inactive exploits, and served as a showcase for Foster’s sense of humor and love of classic comics, as he included parodies of many of his favorite features, including Batman, Little Orphan Annie, Donald Duck, Dick Tracy, and contemporary underground comix, including Fritz the Cat.
“In my personal experience, Bob was always fun and funny and a true fanboy,” said cartoonist Michael T. Gilbert, looking back on Foster’s early career. “Matter of fact, my first encounter with Bob’s work was in the late sixties, in Bill Spicer’s wonderful Fantasy Illustrated fanzine. Bill wrote and drew a very clever adaptation of Fredric Brown’s Necktie Party story, for issue #5 (Spring 1966), many years before I actually met him. But for early fandom, what really put Bob on the map was Myron Moose.
“Bob had fun using his funny-animal protagonist to parody many beloved Golden Age splash pages, including Will Eisner’s Spirit, Bob Kane’s Batman, and Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. Only in Bob’s version the heroes were replaced by his not-so-bright, talking moose. The first issue of Myron Moose came out in 1971, and it was fun stuff.”
A second issue of Myron Moose Funnies was published in 1972, and veered farther into underground comix and adult material than Foster’s previous installment. Several artists contributed shorts and illustrations to the publication, including Vince Davis and Alex Toth, whose signature character The Fox made a guest appearance in that issue. Longtime friend William Wray recalled that the affable Foster had a knack for befriending artists, and was ahead of the curve when it came to his appreciation of fine cartooning.
“Bob was the first guy I knew who ever bought a blank sketchbook and got a top pro to do a drawing in there,” Wray said. “In the early seventies, he got Toth to do an Errol Flynn sketch, probably the best drawing I’ve seen from a professional in one of those sketchbooks. Nobody did that before him, and he really set that trend.”
While Myron Moose was hardly a commercial blockbuster – Foster claimed to have sold less than a quarter of the 10,000-copy print run – the series was successful enough to catch the attention of the Marvel Comics editorial department, and Foster was tapped to contribute to their newsstand humor publication Crazy Magazine under the auspices of Marv Wolfman."I got a call one day from Marv Wolfman. He had been a comic fan and did some fanzine stuff,” Foster told The Comics Journal. “I guess it was Marv's job to find would-be talent. He'd seen the undergrounds and things I'd done for Spicer and he wondered if I'd be interested in developing a moose character for Crazy in a kind of historical thing. I remember him saying, 'how about Washington crossing the Delaware, only it's Mooses'.”
The first seventeen issues of Crazy included Foster’s “The History of Moosekind,” an oddball, idiosyncratic look at the history of a world where moose were the dominant species. Foster’s introduction to a self-published 1976 collection of the series described it thusly: “The cloak of obscurity surrounding the geneology [sic] of Moose is being lifted. Recent findings reveal Moosekind’s true role in the Evolutionary Process.”
Larry Hama, editor of Crazy from 1980-83, inherited Foster and the other series regulars when he took over the magazine, and said that Foster made that an easy transition for the fledgling editor.
“It was such a pleasure to open the envelope and read the new installment when it came in. Always loved our phone chats," Hama said. “I forget how he came to work for Crazy. The connection might have been through Carl Fallberg's daughter Carla. Fallberg was an old Disney animator who worked on Bambi, and I met Carla in L.A. in '76. She was Carl Barks’s goddaughter. Bob was such a nice and mellow guy. I enjoyed the long talks we had on the phone, chatting about Disney in the old days, and the industry in general.”
Foster’s Crazy Magazine feature and his extensive body of work for studios, including DePatie-Freleng and Disney, bolstered his reputation for storytelling, and in 1980 he was hired to write the Donald Duck newspaper strip, a dream assignment for the lifelong Carl Barks fan. Foster would return to Myron Moose in 1987 for an ongoing series published by Fantagraphics that included reprints of his classic 1970s work alongside new material featuring the iconic moose. Once again, Foster’s comics were well received, but middling sales and a full non-Moose workload brought the revival to an end after three issues and a collected edition.
“We published three issues of Myron Moose Funnies first, and then collected his Evolution and History of Moosekind in 1989,” said Fantagraphics Publisher Gary Groth. “I would’ve published Bob forever but he never seemed to get around to drawing more comics.
“I would always see Bob at the San Diego con, where he’d either stop by the booth and chat or we’d occasionally go out to lunch. One of the things I loved about Bob was that he was obviously a connoisseur of cartooning who didn’t suffer philistines gladly. He had incredibly high standards and leavened his dogmatism with humor. Working with Bob always made me feel like we were conspiring. Conspiring with whom? Everyone who didn’t share our good taste, of course.
“My fondest memory of Bob is when I asked him if he’d do a sketch in my son’s sketchbook,” Groth continued. “I started this sketchbook before my son was even a year old. It was a book dummy from a Robert Williams coffee table book, must’ve weighed ten pounds, and I hauled it all over the world to conventions. Bob looked at the sketchbook, looked at me, mulled for a moment, arched his eyebrow, and said, ‘can I have it for a few hours? I have an idea.’ I said sure, and off Bob went. A few hours later he came back and handed it to me. He’d filled an entire 12” x 12” page with a hundred Myrons, a wallpaper of Myrons bleeding off the page, a mind-blowing drawing feat. Bob never half-assed it.”
Although his comics career went on permanent pause, Foster’s animation career continued to thrive, and he enjoyed steady work from Hanna-Barbera on all-new cartoons as well as series that showcased the classic H-B characters in new scenarios and settings.
“Bob had a long career as a cartoonist, animation artist and writer,” animation colleague Tom Sito said. “I've known Bob since I met him at Hanna Barbera on Laff-A-Lympics in 1978. For over 50 years in comics and animation, he knew everyone, and everyone knew him, and I can't recall anyone who didn't like him.”
The versatile cartoonist also served as a layout artist on action-adventure cartoons, including Hanna-Barbera’s Jana of the Jungle and Marvel Productions’ Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.
Bob Richardson, who served as animation director on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, became fast friends with Foster when they were young animators and the two would remain close for the rest of their lives. “As anyone who was close to Bob would know, he was a passionate comic book collector,” Richardson said. “We would go to various comic book stores back in the old days and Bob’s excitement at finding a comic he’d been looking for was unparalleled. But, back in those days the people running those stores didn’t value the comics like they would today. That was good since the price was very cheap, but it was bad, because not a lot of care was taken with these comics, and that could set Bob off in a tirade that would get us thrown out of the store.
“At a certain point in our careers, Bob was complaining about his lack of funds, so I told him I could get him a job as a busboy at the restaurant where I was the head busboy. We would work Friday and Saturday nights and get tips and dinner. This appealed to Bob, but the restaurant was the Castaways in Burbank and the theme was a cross between Polynesian and pirate. Now. Bob was not exactly a GQ kind of guy, but when he found out he had to wear a red and white striped tee-shirt, he wasn’t thrilled. We were great art and animation friends, but very weird pirates.”
The prolific artist continued to work on layouts and storyboards for television cartoons throughout the eighties, concurrent with his tenure as writer on the Donald Duck comic strip. That assignment would run through January 1990, at which point the syndicate ceased publication of new strips in favor of classic reprints. That was far from the end of his association with Donald Duck and Disney, however, as he transitioned from newspapers to comic books as the Managing Editor and Editor of Disney Comics USA, on Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Donald Duck Adventures, Uncle Scrooge Adventures and DuckTales.
“I edited those four titles, three of them were the major influence on my childhood which led me to a career in comics and animation,” Foster said in his 2015 Our Town profile. “Why me? To wind up editing those three titles, of all the people on the planet that could have that job, it was me. Wow. And I’m still proud of that.”
Over the next four years, Foster created gag cover sketches and concepts for all of the titles that he edited, and he also oversaw the production of several Disney graphic novels, including Dick Tracy, White Fang, The Rocketeer and Pocahontas, as well as writing the graphic novel sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Resurrection of Doom. “When I met him, he was supervising the Disney comic strips, among other things,” said Disney Publishing colleague David Seidman. “As the department's new comics editor, I worked with him closely and found him smart, funny, and no-nonsense.
“Our department was also directing writers and artists to produce comic-book stories for international publication. The management decided to publish comics for the American market, which had seen very few new Disney comics in nearly a decade. Bob and I became the books’ first editors. We even helped hire our boss, Disney Comics editor-in-chief Len Wein.
That’s where I saw 'Fearless Foster' at full strength. When Michael Lynton, the boss of all Disney Publishing, and other power players proposed or even demanded something inappropriate, Len and I responded as tactfully as we could. When someone asked, ‘Bob, what do you think?’, Bob would answer, ‘It’s crap.’ And he’d explain it the way you’d point out an obvious fact to people who should already know it.”
“Stick your head in his office doorway, and Bob would greet you with an exasperated 'Whaaat?' But if you got him talking about good art in any medium, Bob’s heart would open and he’d praise talents ranging from Carl Barks to k.d. Lang.
“Speaking of Bob’s heart, he did something that virtually no one else could do: write a story that convincingly presented the miserly Uncle Scrooge as a sentimental softy. With art by the superlative Mike Peraza, "‘Tis the Season" from Uncle Scrooge #251 is a tale of cartoon ducks that can evoke genuine tears.”
In addition to the best-known modern Duck artists like Don Rosa and William Van Horn, Foster brought a number of new and unexpected creators into the Disney fold, including indie cartoonist Michael T. Gilbert.
“So how did I originally hook up with Bob? It began around 1990, shortly after I started writing Mickey Mouse scripts for Disney Comics,” Gilbert said. “Working on The Mouse, I suffered through an insane amount of frustrating editorial interference. But on a lark, I pitched my first Donald Duck story to Bob Foster, who was story editor on the ducks. He gave the okay and I wrote up my idea. After looking over the final script, Bob timidly asked me if I'd mind if he changed something.
“‘Here we go again,’ I thought, but said that was okay. And then he changed … two words. What a refreshing change that was. To actually have my work treated with that level of respect! But Bob was like that.”
Like Donald Duck himself, Foster wasn’t above rustling some feathers when the situation called for it. “In case you didn’t know him, Bob Foster was an expert in the many, minor annoyances of life,” Disney Legend Floyd Norman wrote in a Facebook post about his fallen friend. “To be fair, Foster was not a complainer or a grump. He just happened to be an astute observer of the human condition. Though he may not be as forgiving as the next person, his measured annoyance at incompetence was always fun. As our mutual pal, Willie Ito would often say, ‘That’s just Bob.’
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with a unique group of individuals in my career. A remarkable bunch with a particular point of view. They were insightful individuals able to find humor in a particular situation or mock the bone-headed manner of others. Bob Foster always managed to find entertainment in everyday life. His unique sensibility allowed him to find the nuggets of silly fun in-between fits of frustration.
“Alright, I admit it! Bob Foster was a grouch. He was the king of the grumps. Yet, this is what made him so very special. When we worked at Disney, my day wasn’t complete without Bob sneering at a bad gag I had written or looking with disdain at a poor drawing. None of this was mean spirited, of course. At least I had gotten Bob’s attention.
“If you didn’t know Bob Foster, you’d probably think he was a jerk. For the most part this was simply a performance. Yet, Bob did have a way of getting under people’s skin. I recall a Disney creative meeting where tempers reached a boiling point. A particular writer leaped across the conference table and took a swing at Bob. Naturally, we found the whole thing hilarious. If only we had that kind of passion today.”
That passion led Foster to take creative risks, and sometimes career risks, according to friend and historian Brent Swanson. “Here's a great story we got from Bob about his time and Disney Comics,” said Swanson. “Disney's short lived comics publishing arm was down to their final few issues before Gladstone resumed publication in mid-1993. Bob wanted to reprint the suppressed ‘Sky Island’ story in two of the final Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories issues, 582 and 583. Even though David Seidman and Chris Palomino were still credited as editors, sometimes with Bob and sometimes alone with Bob as layout editor, Bob gave the impression that he was in charge of the final issues. He presented the layouts for 582 and 583 to whoever at Disney gave approvals, and he was told, ‘No.’ Dr. Einmug was considered an insensitive stereotype and the story remained on the ‘banned list.’
“Bob then went back to work and filled the pages, much of the second half of each book, with material that Disney wouldn't find troublesome. Then back the issues went to Disney, and they wholeheartedly approved. The two issues were headed for the printers. At some point, as close to the last minute as possible, Bob sneaked into where the paste-ups were waiting (he made this sound very cloak and dagger), and he surreptitiously replaced the Disney-approved material with the ‘Sky Island’ material.
“Off to the presses it went and Bob waited for the fallout. Of course, Disney fans, particularly the Gottfredson fans, were utterly delighted to see the complete story, which had been something of a near-miss in the Abbeville Mickey Mouse book. Disney? According to Bob, they said nothing, quite probably because whoever had been in charge of editorial sanitization had either been moved to another position or laid off after the final issues, #584 and 585 were put to bed, and nobody else at Disney bothered to read the books, especially with Disney Comics now a dead issue with the company.”
The end of Disney Comics was not the end of Foster’s tenure with the Ducks, however, and he immediately received an offer to move to Europe to continue his time with Uncle Scrooge, Donald and their nephews as an art director and editor.
“That’s when he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he began writing and editing comics for Egmont, then known as the Gutenberghus Group,” said Gilbert. “Egmont produced comics featuring the Disney characters and others for worldwide distribution. I started working for them too, although long distance. In between scripting and drawing my Mr. Monster character and other projects, I spent the next twenty years writing the adventures of Mickey, Donald and the Disney gang, mostly for other editors. Still, working on those early stories for Bob remains some of my favorite Egmont memories.”
The lifelong comics fan used his newfound clout to line up freelance assignments for his favorite contemporary creators but also to celebrate one of his favorite artists from his childhood. “While in Copenhagen, he initiated legendary Disney comic artist Carl Barks' first and only tour to Europe. Foster created the initial itinerary for it and in May 1994 Barks visited no less than 11 countries: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom,” noted the Lambiek Comiclopedia. “For Barks, it was the first time in his life that he ever left the United States. He always wanted to travel, but lacked the necessary money. Much to the 93-year old artist's surprise, his visit received a lot of local press attention.”
That same year, Foster returned to Los Angeles and resumed his animation career as a storyboard artist with a focus on television. His partial resume from this era includes: Freakazoid and Tom and Jerry Tales for Warner Bros.; Angry Beavers and Hey Arnold! for Nickelodeon; Tutenstein for Porchlight; Family Guy for Fox; and Buzz Lightyear, Hercules, and Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas for Disney. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he became a fixture at the monthly meetings of CAPS, the Comic Art Professional Society, a group formed by cartoonists and animators in 1977 to celebrate professional cartooning in its many forms and to provide a social outlet for artists who often worked alone in their homes and studios.
“I didn’t work with Bob like many of my friends did. I only saw him at our monthly meetings of our Los Angeles based cartoonists’ club,” said cartoonist Phil Yeh. “CAPS was an informal group that Sergio Aragones, Don Rico and Mark Evanier started in 1977. Bob Foster [who was a charter member of the group] was one of many talented people at CAPS and he was always nice to me. Bob had a great sense of humor and he would have made a good stand up comedian.”
Foster served for many years as the treasurer of CAPS, was a proud union member, and was the President of The Animation Guild, representing 3,000 artists and writers in the animation industry, from 2010 to 2013. No matter how many titles, freelance assignments, or other obligations came his way, though, he always had time for his fellow artists, especially up-and-coming cartoonists.
“I first met and became pals with Bob socially, through CAPS in the late '90s. We even served together as board members of that organization for a while, and bonded over our Disney experiences,” said cartoonist and illustrator Chad Frye. “Our friendship grew when we both found ourselves working together at Disney on the show Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, on which he was a storyboard artist. He was a great storyteller, who was always looking for ways to put some bit of visual business into the boards that gave his episodes charm and wit, and often as he pitched me his boards, I was learning things. Together with former Animaniacs/Pinky & the Brain producer Rusty Mills, the three of us were daily lunch buddies on Clubhouse, having all kinds of fun chatting about our cartooning experiences and things we thought were creatively cool.
“Bob would sometimes organize dinners with various friends from the industry, that even if we didn't know each other before, we all left as friends. One of my favorites of his dinner ideas was an impromptu get-together of just him, me, and Sergio Aragonès at The White House restaurant after a long day at WonderCon in Anaheim. Bob could bring people together.
“And then there was Bob, the collector. Man, he had a library of art related books, original art, and other cool stuff that he kept in at least three storage units when he lived in Glendale,” Frye continued. “I always thought he should just pay rent on a larger home to keep it all under one roof, but being physically separated from his treasures didn't prevent him from visiting them often. He took me to the storage units one time where I saw they were all neatly arranged and everything was accessible like they were his secret clubhouses to where he could escape.”
After Foster wrapped up his final assignment for Disney, Captain Jake and the Never Land Pirates, he retired, closed up shop in Los Angeles and moved to Silverton, Oregon. “Bob retired a number of years ago, and moved up to Oregon where he finally could afford to buy a house,” Frye said. “The L.A. real estate marketplace has not been very kind to cartoonist salaries. He loved it up there. Always bugged me to go up for a visit, but life always got in the way. The last time we spent together was in January of 2019 when he drove down to L.A. to see all his old pals. I was working at the former NBC studios, now called The Burbank Studios, under the employ of Warner Bros. on Green Eggs and Ham. Our mutual pal Bill Morrison was working across the street at Mad Magazine, so the three of us got together for lunch at my commissary. That was a pretty good day.”
Foster enjoyed retirement in Oregon, where he was able to focus on personal projects, catch up on his reading, admire his collections, and build a new community in Silverton. “Cut to some years later. Janet and I were living in Eugene, Oregon,” said Gilbert. “About an hour away was the town of Silverton, home of Oregon Gardens — one of our favorite vacation spots. As it happened, Bob was now living there, having left Copenhagen behind – quite the rolling stone!
“Most of the time, when we visited, we'd get together for dinner. Bob would proudly show us a sketchbook he'd gathered over the decades, filled with drawings he put together featuring the most amazing A-list newspaper, comic book and animation cartoonists you could imagine. I was green with envy!”
Embracing rural life in smalltown Oregon meant fewer visits to Los Angeles, less frequent contact with his friends, and dropping out of the animation and comics industries altogether, but that suited Foster just fine after more than forty years of nonstop work, juggling freelance assignments and day jobs and guilds and committees. It was nice to just relax and take things easy for the first time in his life.
“Like many others, I lost touch with Bob,” said David Seidman, looking back on their decades-long friendship. “I last saw him maybe ten years ago, when The Animation Guild put up a one-man show of his landscapes and other works in its gallery. I had no idea the guy painted—and pretty well, too. But that was Bob—a man who had a curmudgeon’s vocabulary, a comedian’s insights, and an artist’s soul. So long, Fearless Foster.”
The post Bob Foster: Nov. 16, 1943 – Sept. 30, 2024 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment