June 7 - Del Connell

Image courtesy npr.org

On this day, in 1918, Del Connell was born in Sixteen Mile Stand, Ohio. His birthplace gets its name from the distance it is from downtown Cincinnati (it's still a burg of only a couple thousand residents). Del didn't live in Ohio very long, though, as his family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was only one. He first graduated from South Pasadena High School before attending Pasadena Junior College as an art student.

As another one of the great Disney artists who responded to an ad in the paper, Del joined the studio in 1939. Since his area of art expertise tended more towards the three dimensional variety, he was assigned to the Character Model Department. It's the job of a modeler to take an animator's 2D drawings of a character and sculpt a 3D figure of it called a maquette. The animator will then use the maquette to help him draw the character with better perspective from any angle. Del created maquettes for Dumbo, The Reluctant Dragon, Fantasia and Lady and the Tramp.

Image copyright Disney

By 1940, Del was moving into the Story Department. He wrote and made storyboards for a short titled The Pelican and the Snipe (it wouldn't go into production until 1944) and began working with Bill Peet on adapting Alice in Wonderland for the big screen. After a year spent creating storyboards for Alice, World War II came along and Del was drafted into the United States Army. He was stationed in Panama, where he spent most of his time up in blimps making detailed maps of the canal. He never stopped writing, though. While in the tropics, he wrote The Cold Blooded Penguin and sent it to the Disney Studio. Walt loved it, bought it for $500 and it eventually became the opening sequence of The Three Caballeros.

Image copyright Disney/Western

Del returned to the Disney Studio at the end of the war in 1945. He took up working on the story for Alice in Wonderland again while simultaneously trying to adapt The Pied Piper of Hamelin (that feature would never be produced). In the early Fifties Del worked with Bill Peet again, this time on the script for the Academy Award nominated short Ben and Me. His final project working directly for Disney was as an artist and writer on early versions of the first souvenir guest guide for Disneyland.

In 1954, Del began working for Western Publishing, a huge comic book company. He worked mostly in the licensed character division, which included Disney comics as well as characters from Hannah-Barbera, Walter Lantz Studios, Warner Brothers and MGM. Over the next three decades, Del wrote and edited the scripts for thousands of comic book stories, creating all sorts of characters in the process. For Disney alone, he originated Daisy's nieces (April, May and June), turned Goofy into his popular SuperGoof persona and gave Goofy his ancestor, Mighty Knight. He also created several original series including Wacky Witch and The Close Shaves of Pauline Peril. His original series Space Family Robinson was eventually adapted into the television show Lost in Space. For twenty years, starting in 1968, Del wrote and drew the daily Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip. During the same time he became Western's editor-in-chief of their west coast comic book division.

Image copyright Western Publishing

After retiring from Western Publishing in the late Eighties, Del began working on an idea called The Historables, aimed at teaching history to young kids. He spent the next twenty years developing characters like Marie Ant-toinette. In 2012, a company was developing internet based apps for kids using Del's ideas, but the project didn't pan out. In 2011, Del was nominated for the Bill Finger Award given out at the San Diego Comic Con. The award is named after the uncredited co-creator of Batman and is used to honor comic artists who have gone under appreciated over the years. Since most of Del's work at Western was uncredited, three out of the four judges for the Finger Award had never heard of him. Needless to say, once they learned his story, Del was declared the year's winner and one of the judges quipped the award was one of the few times he ever had his name on anything. Unfortunately, Del was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's at the time and was unable to accept the award in person. He was reportedly lucid enough at one point, though, that he was aware of the nomination and was able to name several people he thought deserved the accolade more than he did. Shortly after receiving his honor, Del passed away on August 12, 2011. He was 93.