Mike Lynch Cartoons: From the Dick Buchanan Files: Clyde Lamb's "Millicent" 1950

Cartoonist Clyde Lamb (1913 - 1966) was a very successful gag and comic strip cartoonist. To say he lived life to the fullest is an understatement. Dick Buchanan will tell you Clyde's story and show you some of his Boys' Life "Millicent" single panel cartoons. Thanks, and take it away, Dick!

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CLYDE LAMB’S MILLICENT
(1950 - 1961)

Clyde Lamb was a gag cartoonist with a story that attracted the nation’s attention when it was learned that he made $4,000 in a single year while serving two consecutive 25-year sentences in the Indiana State Penitentiary. At that time, the median income of the average family was $3,100. The publicity Lamb’s story aroused led to his parole in 1947. He returned to his home in Montana and eventually settled in Van Nuys, California. For the next two decades he was a successful gag cartoonist whose work appeared in most of the major nation’s major magazines.

Lamb was a regular contributor to Boys’ Life in the late 1940’s when he created Millicent, an affable elephant who was at home in Africa, India, in a circus or in a zoo. Thanks to miracle of cartoonery, Millicent was found in different places all over the world. Was she an Indian elephant or an African elephant? No one can say for sure, but we do know she was an elephant with long eyelashes. She was a mother and she could read. She was even an expert witness in a trial. All this depicted with Lamb’s usual quirky wit.

Millicent appeared each month on the “Think & Grin” page of Boys' Life, a page filled with jokes submitted by readers. Millicent appeared in the bottom right corner of the page. After Lamb’s death in 1966 this “spot of honor” was filled for a while by John Gallagher’s Cartoon Bug before Orlando Busino’s Gus began its long run.

Here is a collection of Clyde Lamb’s Millicent, Queen of cartoon elephants, clipped from the pages of Boy’s Life with our trusty pocket knife . . .

1. CLYDE LAMB. MILLICENT Boys’ Life February, 1950.