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William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 – November 11, 1942) was an American cartoonist. He is most famous as the creator of the comic strip Barney Google, later retitled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. The strip was especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and featured a number of well-known characters, including the title character, Bunky, Snuffy Smith, and Spark Plug the race horse. Spark Plug was a merchandising phenomenon, and has been called the Snoopy of the 1920s.
DeBeck drew with a scratchy line in a "big-foot" style, in which characters had giant feet and bulbous noses. His strips often reflected his love of sports. In 1946, the National Cartoonists Society inaugurated the Billy DeBeck Memorial Awards (or the Barney Awards), which became the Reuben Award in 1954.
DeBeck soon left Show World for better opportunities at Youngstown Telegram in Ohio as an editorial cartoonist, then again at the Pittsburgh Gazette-Time in late August 1912. He later contributed cartoons to the New York City humor magazines Life and Judge. While living in Pittsburgh, he traveled to New York to show comic strip samples to Arthur Brisbane, an editor working for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire; Brisbane rejected the work. DeBeck later stated the examples "were terrible" as he "had been doing political cartoons for the Pittsburgh Gazette, and the comics were new" to him. He returned to Youngstown and married Marion Louise Shields there in 1914.
In May 1915, DeBeck and a partner named Carter launched a newspaper syndicate and correspondence cartooning course; DeBeck's advice to his correspondence students was: "First learn how to draw—then go to a good art school and get a firm foundation in the arts". The school was not a success, and DeBeck returned to Chicago and joined the Chicago American in December 1915. He worked on a strip called Finn an' Haddie for the Adams Newspaper Service on the side. On December 9, immediately after starting at the Herald, he began a strip called Married Life that so caught the attention of Hearst; legend says that, to acquire DeBeck, Hearst bought the Herald and merged it with the Chicago American, as DeBeck had refused to join the Hearst empire after the Examiner raised his monthly salary from $35 to $200. DeBeck's creations were first adapted to film when an animated version of Married Life appeared in a Seattle Sunday Times newsreel in 1917. DeBeck created a number of other features, especially for the sports section, while his antics made him something of a local celebrity.
DeBeck kept readers on the edges of their seats with uncertain suspense: sometimes Spark Plug actually won a race. While DeBeck resisted at first, Hearst demanded a pretty girl be introduced into the strip. DeBeck brought in Sweet Mama, which initially created a stir, and certain papers dropped the strip, but after the phrase swept the nation, the strip's popularity only increased. Over the years, DeBeck was credited with introducing more and , such as "", "", "balls of fire" and "time's a-wastin'". In 1923, Billy Rose penned a Tin Pan Alley pop hit called "Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)". A series of Barney Google live-action films starring Barney Hellum appeared in 1928 and 1929.
DeBeck had included a topper called Bughouse Fables (signed "Barney Google)" with his main strip since 1921, though he soon handed it off to assistant Paul Fung. On May 16, 1926, he replaced Bughouse Fables with Parlor, Bedroom & Sink Starring Bunky, a strip that was popular enough on its own to survive until 1948.
According to later Barney Google and Snuffy Smith scripter Brian Walker, DeBeck had become "one of the highest-paid cartoonists in America" at this point. In the early 1920s, DeBeck moved to Riverside Drive in New York City, and in 1927 remarried Mary Louise Dunne. The couple spent the next two years in Europe, after which they settled down again in New York. DeBeck's active lifestyle sometimes caused him to miss deadlines. He enjoyed traveling, deep sea fishing, golf and playing bridge. As a golfer since 1916, DeBeck spent time on courses with such notables as Harold Lloyd, Walter Huston, Rube Goldberg, Fontaine Fox, Clarence Budington Kelland and bridge authority P. Hal Sims. He was also acquainted with such celebrities as Babe Ruth, Lowell Thomas and Damon Runyon. His best friend was the cartoonist Frank Willard, who also attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
DeBeck gained a growing interest into the culture of Appalachia in the 1930s and amassed a library on the subject that he later donated to Virginia Commonwealth University. Among the books he admired were those featuring Sut Lovingood by George Washington Harris; inside Sut Lovingood Yarns (1867) DeBeck produced his first sketch of Snuffy Smith, a character that grew from talking with and sketching the Appalachian hillbilly locals. Just as the strip's circulation was starting to flag, DeBeck introduced Snuffy in a storyline in which Barney inherited an estate in the mountains of North Carolina. After dodging the ornery hillbilly's bullets, the two became fast friends. The strip was eventually renamed Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, and Snuffy would take over from Barney Google as the central character. Lasswell, with his own country roots, provided much of the inspiration for Snuffy and his Appalachian environment. Especially, he provided a source for the locals' dialect. Hillbilly culture enjoyed much popularity in the 1930s; Snuffy Smith appeared the same year as Al Capp's Li'l Abner. By 1940, DeBeck's strip appeared in 210 newspapers with a combined circulation of ten million.
The Charles Mintz studios produced four full-color animated Barney Google and Snuffy Smith shorts in 1935. The series had two more live-action adaptations in 1942: Bud Duncan starred as Snuffy Smith in Private Snuffy Smith and co-starred with Cliff Nazarro as Barney Google in Hillbilly Blitzkrieg.
In 1943, Mary DeBeck donated to the Ringling School of Art all of her husband's art supplies, including Drawing board, reams of drawing paper, hundreds of colored pencils, lamps, drawing boards, inks, drawing pens, artist smocks, etching plates, and an etching press. She remarried, and died February 14, 1953, aboard National Airlines Flight 470, a DC-6 that fell into the Gulf of Mexico during a thunderstorm on a flight from Tampa to New Orleans.
DeBeck put Barney Google through great changes throughout his twenty-three-year run on the strip, changing situations and characters frequently. The storylines reflected the outlook of the 1920s boom years, the Great Depression, and World War II.
Debeck's hillbilly depictions, though stereotyped and distorted, had a higher degree of accuracy than those of Al Capp or other contemporary cartoonists, and painted hillbillies in a better light. DeBeck included authentic expressions such as "plime-blank" ("exactly") and "a lavish of" ("a lot of"), and included explanations of dialect unfamiliar to his readers. Some such as country singer Roy Acuff objected that the strip perpetuated stereotypes of hillbilly culture.
DeBeck is credited with introducing or popularizing a number of and via Barney Google, including "heebie-jeebies", "", "hotsy totsy", "balls of fire", "time's a-wastin'", "touched in the head", and "bodacious".
Charles M. Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, was nicknamed "Sparky" after DeBeck's racehorse character, and DeBeck's drawing style has been an influence on contemporary cartooning and popular culture, and on such later cartoonists as Robert Crumb and Bobby London. The Barney Google Sunday strip for September 18, 1938, was placed in the time capsule at the 1939 World's Fair.
The National Cartoonists Society's annual award was originally named the Billy DeBeck Memorial Award. Created by Mary DeBeck Bergman in 1946, these were known as the Barney Awards. She also made the annual presentation of engraved silver cigarette cases, with DeBeck's characters etched on the cover, to the winners (Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Chic Young, Alex Raymond, Roy Crane, Walt Kelly, Hank Ketcham and Mort Walker). In 1954, after her death, the DeBeck Award was renamed the Reuben Award after Rube Goldberg, and all of the earlier winners were re-awarded Reuben statuettes.
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