The prolific illustrator and comic book artist Joe Messerli passed away last Wednesday at the age of 79. Complications relating to cancer are given as the cause.
Joe Messerli was successful in several artistic careers. Born in Kingston, Texas, he started out as an assistant to the local cartoonist Charlie Plumb on the syndicated Ella Cinders newspaper strip. Later, Joe was one of many who ghosted the Napoleon & Uncle Elby and still later, he inked and lettered the Flintstones and Yogi Bear strips. (Most of the online obits for Joe today feature a sample from a Sunday Flintstones strip…but I'm pretty sure that's not his work. That one was lettered and inked by Lee Hooper.)
Joe worked extensively for Western Publishing on their comic books and activity books in the sixties and seventies on most of their licensed titles but especially on Daffy Duck, Pink Panther and Woody Woodpecker. I wrote a lot of those so I got to know him a little. He struck me as a hard worker, very devoted to his drawing and deeply respectful of his fellow artists. At the time, a number of veteran "funny animal" artists were dying off and Joe was uncomfortable that he was inheriting key assignments for that reason. He learned so much, he told me, from inking the pencil art of some of those guys so it was rough to take over their end of the job.
He also had a very successful career in graphic arts and TV illustration. He worked for years at NBC and did many pieces of advertising and on-screen graphics for their shows, including the "More to Come" art pieces that you saw on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, going in and out of commercials. His most famous creation though was not for NBC. It was the famous logo for the TV series, The Twilight Zone…
Messerli's career also included work as an inker on the Dennis the Menace comic books published by Fawcett and an artist on Marvel's kids' line of the eighties. In his last e-mail to me a few years ago, he said he'd been working on merchandise art for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I gather he was rarely, if ever, without work and he seems to have made those who employed him very happy.