Irwin Hasen (; "An interview with the great Jules Feiffer, talking about cartoonist Irwin Hasen" July 8, 1918 – March 13, 2015) was an American cartoonist best known as the creator (with Gus Edson) of the Dondi comic strip. He also had a significant run on DC Comics' original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, in the 1940s as well as creating Wildcat (who became a superhero after seeing a Green Lantern comic book) for the same publisher.
Across the street was the National Academy of Design, a huge structure like a garage, an airplane hangar. One of the oldest art schools in America, one of the most prestigious. Classical art. I was always drawing. I was drawing ... on the empty pages of books. So my mother, God bless her soul, took me across the street and enrolled me in a course of drawing ... I was there for three years, every night during the week, drawing in charcoal all the statues of Michelangelo and all the Bernini and all the classics ... During the day, I would hawk, sell, drawings of prizefighters down in New York. That was my first job—boxing cartoonist. I made a very small, very slight living. I was 19-20 years old. I sold my cartoons to the Madison Square Garden Corporation. They were printed all over New York in different newspapers. It was like public relations for the fights.
During World War II, Hasen was stationed at Fort Dix and managed the Fort Dix Post newspaper: "I edited it, I published it, I took it to the printers, I learned how to set up type, I did the comic strip, I wrote the whole goddam thing, and I interviewed all the celebrities coming in from New York. I worked my ass off, and I wound up in the hospital. But that was my proudest time, editing that newspaper for a year and a half."
He returned to DC after he was discharged from the Army in 1946. In the post-war period, he drew Johnny Thunder, the Justice Society of America, The Flash and Green Lantern.
Hasen, an active member of the National Cartoonists Society, met Gus Edson while on a tour of Korea and together they created the Dondi comic strip, with Edson writing and Hasen drawing. The National Cartoonists Society Album, 1972 p. 66"Drawing on a Long Life, for a Short Guy", The New York Times, December 17, 2011
Hasen died March 13, 2015, at the age of 96.
Comic strips
Instruction
Personal life and death
Awards
External links
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