Cartoonist Gilbert T. "Gill" Fox, who helped launched characters like Plastic Man and the Spirit, died May 15, 2004 in Redding Ridge, Connecticut, reported the NEW YORK TIMES. He was 88 years old.
Fox worked as an editor, artist and writer at Quality Comics from 1940 to 1943, where he drew covers for Dollman and edited POLICE COMICS, which featured Jack Cole's Plastic Man. He also pen-and-inked TORCHY, a comic book created by the pin-up artist Bill Ward.
Born in Brooklyn in 1919, Fox studied art at Greenwich Village's Textile High School in and completed the Landon Art Correspondence Course, a training ground for cartoonists. In 1936, he landed his first job as an opaquer at the Fleischer animation studio, where he applied colored ink on the back of cels on which the characters were drawn. He soon moved up to inking the BETTY BOOP and POPEYE animated series. Fox would go on to draw backgrounds and wrote the scripts for episodes of the daily newspaper version of THE SPIRIT by Will Eisner and helped create HI AND LOIS by Dik Browne. In addition, he wrote and drew the long-running single-picture newspaper cartoon SIDE GLANCES from 1962 to 1982. For his political cartoons, which appeared in The FAIRFIELD CITIZEN and THE CONNECTICUT POST in Bridgeport, he was nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes.
Fox is survived by two daughters, Donna Morency, of Torrington, Conneticutt, Susan Fox of Terryville, Conneticutt; two grandchildren and a great-grandson.
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