Updated Artist Profile: BOB WICKERSHAM (1911-1962) (Patreon)

(Attached photo above: model sheet of the Fox and the Crow approved by its director Bob Wickersham.)

Originally posted in June 2017 on Cartoon Research. This Patreon version contains new information seen here.

Robert Thomas Wickersham was born on August 5, 1911 in Colima, Mexico to Gordon Vail Wickersham and Louise Catherine Levy. His family moved to the United States a year later where Wickersham’s cartooning career began at age 12. He submitted his artwork for the “Junior Times,” a supplement in the Los Angeles Sunday Times; his earliest known artwork was published on September 16, 1923. He continued to draw for the “Junior Times” into the late 1920s while drawing cartoons for his school newspaper at Polytechnic High. For the Junior Times, he created a recurring strip featuring a humanized dog character known as Fido Bark. Under the nickname “Wicky,” he soon became the vice president of the Times Junior Club on March 1928.  

In the early 1930s, he joined Walt Disney’s studio and became a full animator by 1933. He animated on several Mickey Mouse, Silly Symphonies and Donald Duck cartoons throughout the decade. Wickersham worked on a few scenes in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia, but was not credited for his animation on both films. 

By June 1938, Wickersham had left Disney’s studio to work for Ub Iwerks in Beverly Hills, then known as Cartoon Films, Ltd. He arrived in Miami at Max Fleischer’s studio on January 21, 1940, indicated by journal entries from Al Eugster, who had previously worked at Disney’s with Wickersham. He worked for Fleischer as an animator and story artist, contributing to several theatrical shorts and their second feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town.  

Wickersham left Fleischer’s studio on April 4, 1941 and returned to the West Coast to work as an animator at Screen Gems, which produced cartoons distributed by Columbia Pictures. Frank Tashlin, a production supervisor during that period, promoted Wickersham as a director, replacing Art Davis. He directed several Color Rhapsodies, Phantasies and films featuring the Fox and the Crow. 

By November 1945, he went to work for James Davis’ shop to draw comic book stories, published by Benjamin Sangor’s various magazines, with humans and funny animal characters. Later, he drew comics based on Screen Gems’ Fox and the Crow for DC, most of which were written by Hubie Karp. Wickersham and James Davis drew different stories with the characters within the same issued magazines—Davis eventually became the regular artist.

Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, he continued to draw comic book series— one featuring The Kellys for Marvel, and another with The Kilroys, both capitalizing on the teenaged audience for the popular Archie comics. Cal Howard often wrote the stories for the Kilroys magazine. (Wickersham also drew for another teen magazine, Cookie, published by Sangor in the late ‘40s.) 

When Sangor abruptly ended work for Davis’ Los Angeles operations in the summer of 1948, Wickersham organized his own ad agency, which specialized in animated and live-action commercials for television. He went back into animation for a brief period at Warner Bros. on February 1950, animating for Bob McKimson’s unit. Wickersham is credited on two cartoons—Big Top Bunny (released late 1951) and Thumb Fun (released early 1952); studio drafts indicate work assigned on Who’s Kitten Who (early 1952), but was not given screen credit. The outgrowth of Wickersham’s firm led to an expansion with a small commercial outfit called TV Spots by October 1951. 

His advertising career continued as a character designer, producer and director of the Jolly Green Giant commercials for Swift-Chaplin Productions. In 1955, producer Shull Bonsall bought TV Spots and shipped Wickersham to New York to manage an office there. During his time in New York, he went to work at Chadwick, Inc., where he became a president and partner of the company. Later, he moved to Chicago in January 1958 to work at the Leo Burnett advertising agency as a copy supervisor before his death on April 21, 1962 at age 50.