Tizzy by Kate Osann

Kate Osann was, like a lot of New Yorkers, a Midwestern transplant. Born in St. Louis, MO, she would graduate from Hunter College. She got a job drawing advertising illustration for the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. It was in the 1950s that she created Tizzy, a panel cartoon that appeared exclusively in Collier's Weekly until that magazine's demise in 1957. The same year, Newspaper Enterprise Association picked up her panel for syndication. The feature, which was about an typical teenage girl, would run until 1970.

Three books of collected panels were published, reprinting the strip: Tizzy: That Loveable, Laughable Teen-Ager (Berkeley, 1958), More Tizzy (Berkeley, 1958), and Tizzy (Scholastic Book Services 1967).

She married William O. Chessman and would live in Bronxville, NY and then move to Orlando, FL. They had "two large and vocal children," William and Kathy. At Syracuse University, seven boxes of her originals are deposited.

Here are some of her panels from the 1967 Tizzy collection.  It's copyright that year by NEA.

-- This is an edited version of a blog entry that originally appeared April 10, 2018.