Nicholas Peter Dallis

Nicholas Peter "Nick" Dallis (born December 15, 1911 in New York City , † July 6, 1991 ) was an American psychiatrist and comic book author .

life and work

Raised on Long Island , Dallis attended Washington & Jefferson College, where he graduated in 1933. After earning a medical degree from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1938 and marrying nurse Sarah Luddy, Dallis worked as a resident psychiatrist in Toledo , Ohio after 1945 .

At that time, journalist and cartoonist Allen Saunders was invited by the local psychiatric center. In his biography he remembered that Dallis told him that he wanted to write a comic about the history of medicine. Saunders replied that this praiseworthy plan would never work. The audience wants to be entertained - not taught. But a story about a handsome doctor who gets involved with his patients could turn out to be a hit.

Dallis' first daily strip was the Marvin Bradley drawn comic strip Rex Morgan, MD , which began in 1948. The series Judge Parker , which started in 1952, was created under the pseudonym Paul Nichols in collaboration with the illustrator Dan Heilman . The background to this comic series was his increasing preoccupation with the psychiatric assessment and assessment of juvenile offenders in cooperation with the juvenile court. Both strips, created in the style of soap operas , were in the tradition of Saunder's works, but in contrast to his Mary Worth , male protagonists were at the center of the stories, who professionally advised their clients or patients or intervened personally in order to overcome their problems. Judge Parker has received various awards over the years of its appearance in 175 newspapers, such as B. the Lena Warner Prize , awarded by the University of Tennessee for outstanding service to the health of the nation , and the National Academy of Nursing's Media Award Innovation . In 1958 he finally said goodbye to his medical career, moved to Phoenix , Arizona , and devoted himself exclusively to writing and creating comics. The comic strip Apartment 3-G , drawn by Alex Kotzky , in which three professionally successful young women shared an apartment in Manhattan , debuted in May 1961.

According to Woody Wilson , Dallis wrote 1095 comic strips a year in his 40 years as a writer.

Dallis died on July 6, 1991. After that, Kotzky also took over his writing role at Apartment 3-G and continued the strip until his own death in 1996. Rex Morgan and Judge Parker continue to this day, with the current author Woody Wilson already being integrated into the team by him during Dallis' lifetime.

literature

• Cartoonist Profiles # 27, Fairfield, CT: 1975.
• Andreas C. Knigge: Comic Lexicon . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , p. 160
• David Ray Papke: The Courtroom Trial as American Cultural Convention . In: Popular Culture in Libraries, Volume 2, February 4, 1995, pp. 53-62

Web links

• Doctors Endorse this Comic, page with photographs of Nicholas Peter Dallis during his two activities, in: Popular Science, Volume 169, No. 3, September 1956, p. 172
• Chronology of comic strips and comic books in America, mentioned in the Dallis with all three comic strips is (english)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the original: "his desire to write a comic strip, one tracing the history of medicine. I told him that, commendable as his idea was, such a feature would not succeed. Readers want entertainment, not enlightenment. But a story about a handsome young doctor's involvement with his patients might be a winner. " In: Allen Saunders: Autobiography "Playwright for Paper Actors," 1986. ch. 14th
2. ^ Marvin Bradley at lambiek.net (English) , accessed on January 20, 2010
3. ^ Dan Heilman at lambiek.net (English) , accessed on January 20, 2010
4. ↑ Remembering The Girls Next Door: Alex Kotzky and Apartment 3-G ( Memento from December 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ On the realistic style of the strips: Keeping it 'realistic,' for 50 years. Cartoonist Harold LeDoux is ready to lay down his pen in: dallasnews.com, June 29, 2006 (archive version on derkeiler.com , accessed August 14, 2013)
6. ↑ http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/jparker/aboutMaina.php ( Memento from March 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
7. ↑ Alex Kotzky at lambiek.net (English) , accessed on January 20, 2010
8. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated November 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ↑ http://www.bpib.com/comicsproj/today.html
10. ↑ http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/jparker/bioMaina.htm ( Memento from May 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
11. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.