At the age of 17, Don Flowers didn’t run away from Custer City, Oklahoma to join the circus, but rather to become a newspaper cartoonist. His first job was at the Kansas City Star before he moved to the Chicago American and finally settled at Associated Press (AP). Flowers hung out with other famous newspaper cartoonists and became friends with Lil’ Abner creator Al Capp and Male Call creator Milton Caniff while they worked at AP. It was here that Flowers created Oh Diana (aka Diana Dean) in 1931. He then gave it up, when his other strip, Modest Maidens, became hugely popular.
Like so many cartoonists, while his professional career was taking off, Flowers’ personal life went downhill. He divorced, and spent years leading a heavy-smoking, hard-drinking lifestyle in New York, leading him to contract tuberculosis.
Flowers was lured to AP’s rivals, King Features Syndicate, by newspaper magnate and owner William Randolph Hearst, who offered Flowers double what he’d been getting paid at AP. Since the rights to his cartoons belonged to AP, Flowers simply renamed his strip Glamor Girls and joined the King Features Syndicate. At its height, Glamor Girls was syndicated into nearly 300 papers around the world and the artist drew the daily strip and Sunday pages until his death.
Associated Press continued running Modest Maidens (occasionally called Modern Maidens), putting a variety of cartoonists on the strip including Virginia Clark, Wood Calley, Phil Berubi, Vernon Reick, and finally Jay Allen, until the series was cancelled in 1968.
Meanwhile, Flowers moved to Tucson, Arizona, and then to California, where he met his second wife.
Though never as well known as his contemporary, pin-up strip artist Russell Patterson, Flowers was regarded by many as Patterson’s equal. Author/cartoonist Coulton Waugh wrote of Flowers’ art in his book The Comics, “It dances; it snaps gracefully back and forth; the touches relate.”
Flowers worked with Venus #4 pencils, dip pens, Winsor & Newton brushes, and India ink on three-ply Strathmore art board, but his Sunday pages were colored in-house at King Features with the proofs returned to Flowers for approval.
In Alex Chun’s book on the artist, Flowers’ son, Don Jr., recalled, “Always a heavy drinker, my dad resumed smoking a few years before his death, committing what was probably a form of suicide (he’d already had a lung removed after being stricken with emphysema.)” Modest Maidens, Glamor Girls, and Don Flowers died almost simultaneously in 1968.
Flowers’ work inspired many modern illustrators and cartoonists, including MAD and Groo the Wanderer artist Sergio Aragones, who learnt to draw women by copying Flowers’ style. The US cartoonist’s work was reprinted in a Spanish-language humor magazine called Ja-Ja in Aragones’ home country of Mexico and Flowers’ influence can be still seen in Aragones’ work.
Flowers’ art style developed a fantastically distinctive look, which is strangely prescient of many European cartoonists, such as Jean-Richard Gevrts.
Biting satire of relationships between men, women, and families were Don Flowers’ forte. Flowers’ economy with line reveals the artist’s confidence in this cartoon from 1966.