Paul Norris

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the special effects artist, see Paul Norris (special effects artist) .

Paul Leroy Norris (born April 26, 1914 in Greenville , Ohio , † November 5, 2007 in Oceanside , California ) was an American comic artist . Norris was best known as co-creator of the cartoon character Aquaman .

Life and work

Norris grew up in the US state of Ohio. In 1934, during the Great Depression, he began to study at Midland Lutheran College in Fremont, Nebraska , where he gained his first experience as a semi-professional draftsman as the artistic director of the editorial team of the campus yearbook The Warrior .

After various transitional jobs, including at an electric motor assembly factory in Dayton, Ohio, Norris enrolled at the Dayton Art Institute School, where he trained as an academic draftsman. There he met his future wife Ann († 2000), whom he married in 1939. The marriage later had two sons, Michael and Paul Jr.

In the late 1930s, Norris became an illustrator and cartoonist for the Dayton Daily News .

In 1940, Norris and his wife moved to New York City, where he developed the Futureman, Power Nelson and Yank and Doodle series for Prize Publications. His oldest identified work was Prize Comics # 6 from August 1940.

In 1941, Norris began to work as a draftsman for the publisher DC Comics (which was then still known as National Comics or All-American Comics). During his time at DC, Norris finally presented his best-known work to this day, when he and the author Mort Weisinger created the character of the dashing underwater superhero Aquaman , who over the past seventy years has appeared in hundreds of comic stories and as a toy lunch box and the like and was even marketed in an animated series. The first published Aquaman story, The Submarien Strikes , which was also designed by Norris and Weisinger, appeared in More Fun Comics # 73 in November 1941 . Another series for which Norris drew at DC was the Adventure Comics .

During the Second World War, Norris initially worked as a military engineer. Due to a drawing he contributed to an army newspaper, Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr. noticed him, who brought him to the propaganda department of his army group. There Norris designed leaflets that the US Air Force dropped over Japanese cities in the later phase of the war, in which Japanese soldiers were asked to defend themselves / surrender to the US armed forces. Norris partner in the design of the leaflets was the Japanese prisoner of war George Totari , who had been a journalist for an English-language newspaper in Japan before the war.

After the war, Norris initially worked again for the King Features Syndicate. In 1948 he took on the drawings for the Sunday story of the Jungle Jim series , an adventure comic strip created by Alex Raymond and set in the African jungle. In the early 1950s, Norris worked for the publisher Dell Comics, for which he drew the series Tom Corbett , Space Vadet and Jungle Jim .

In 1952, Norris took over the science fiction comic strip "Brick Bradford" as the successor to Clarence Gray, which he continued to design for thirty-five years until he retired in 1987.

In the 1970s, in addition to his work on "Brick Bradford", Norris drew stories for the comic series Tarzan and Magnus - Robot Fighter, which appear on the Gold Key Comics program . Also for Gold Key , Norris and the author Gaylor DuBois created the adventure comic series The Jungle Twins , which reached a total of seventeen editions between April 1972 and November 1975. For Marvel Comics, Norris drew the humorous story " Now You See Them ... " about the Hanna Barbera characters Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo in 1978 , which appeared in the comic book Laff-A-Lympics # 10. Norri's last published work as a draftsman appeared in 1987 in the form of a contribution to the poster History of the DC Universe .

Norris and his wife retired in Oceanside , California.