Creig Flessel's 100th Birthday Celebration

From my friend Adrian Sinnott (an amazing illustrator and the Chair of the Berndt Toast Gang) comes the postcard below for Creig Flessel's 100th Birthday Celebration.

Creig, a master cartoonist and illustrator, with accomplishments in the fields of illustration, comic book and comic strip, was born in nearby Huntington, NY. He passed away in 2008. He would have been 100 years old on February 2, 2012.

The gallery show is going on now through the end of the month at the Art League of Long Island.

Read Adrian's account of the first time he went to a Berndt Toast Gang luncheon, and meeting Creig.

It was like meeting an old friend, all the nervous anxiety of meeting professionals doing the work I longed to do vanished. ­­Creig brought me around an introduced me to the various members gathered around the bar. There was Mort Drucker (MAD Magazine), Al Scaduto (They'll Do It Everytime!), Frank Springer (The list of his work in comics just goes on and on), Tom Gill (The Lone Ranger), David Gantz (Don Q and children's books), Lee Ames (Disney and the "Draw 50" series just to name a couple) and so many others that I'd fill the page with a veritable "Who's Who" in cartooning. And they were all welcoming me to the "Gang." That was over 20 years ago and, today, I act as chair for the Berndt Toast Gang, the Long Island chapter of the National Cartoonists Society. All because of a little piece of newsprint my Ralph saved.

Adrian drew the below caricature of Creig, in the guise of his Golden Age superhero creation The Sandman.

Below: Creig's version of The Sandman on the cover of Adventure Comics #60, March 1941 (nicked from Booksteve's Days of Adventure blog):

There will be a reception the evening of January 27, 2012.