"Dear Leif; All of us die hard Rowland Wilson fans can't thank you enough for posting 3 days of Rowland's (the cartoonist's cartoonist) art! Any chance of posting more?"
Knowing that RBW had done work for Esquire magazine, I dug out a bunch from my old magazine collection and found some wonderful pieces from 1959/'60...
It seems that no matter what generation you're from, Rowland Wilson has probably touched your life. During the '50s and '60s he did gag cartoons for the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Playboy, and many others. Here's a two-page spread Wilson both wrote and drew for Esquire in 1967.
Also during the '60s, Wilson created a newspaper comic strip called "Noon."
I found one daily strip original at the Heritage Auctions website.
Until Bill mentioned it, I had no idea I was exposed to Rowland B. Wilson's work when I was a kid in the '70s watching Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday mornings on ABC. Bill wrote, "the two titles that Rowland designed were "Lucky Seven Sampson" and "Twelve Toes". (Side note- "Conjunction Junction" was designed by Tom Yohe and myself)."
For those of you too young (or too old?) to remember Schoolhouse Rock, here's Wilson's "Lucky Seven Sampson," found on YouTube...
Bill wrote, "Row's life's work includes so many pieces of great art done for many different venues. New England Life campaign, editorial art, TV Guide (inside & covers), other magazines and print ads, animated TV commercials, on staff at animation studios: Richard Williams studios in London where he won awards, Don Bluth studios in Dublin working on feature films, Disney Studios in LA, working on feature films. I'm sure I've left some stuff out."
While doing my online research, I found many examples of Rowland Wilson's magazine and TV commercial artwork - especially pencil sketches! - at a site called The Deep Archives, which sells original animation artwork.
Also, Michael Sporn has posted many wonderful photos of Rowland Wilson and many more examples of his work on his blog. If you click on Wilson's name in the sidebar of Michael's "Splog" you'll see tons and tons of RBW artwork from every period of his career.
One last note from Bill, who wrote, "The good news there was that we found out Suzanne Wilson (RBW's wife) is in the process of putting together a "How To" book using Row's art and notes. I've seen some of those and they are unbelievable. There are also completed and unpublished graphic novels that Suzanne has that Row did before his untimely death."
Bill concluded, "Suzanne and all of us fans still hope that some visionary publisher would still do a bio/collection of RBW and his art. It would certainly rank up there with the recent Sickles, Fawcett and Toth books."
* Many thanks to Heritage Auctions for allowing me to use the scans of the RBW "Noon" daily comic strip and the final image in this post, which is a watercolour original of a Playboy gag cartoon by Wilson, both from the image archives at ha.com
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