Ernie Schroeder

Ernest C. Schroeder (January 9, 1916 – September 20, 2006) was an American comic book artist, a commercial illustrator, and a sculptor, best known for drawing and co-writing Hillman Periodicals' influential muck-monster the Heap from 1949 to 1953.

Other characters with which Schroeder is associated include Hillman's Airboy and Harvey Comics' Shock Gibson and Spirit of '76.

Biography Early life and career Airboy Comics vol. 9, #3 (April 1952), featuring the Heap. Cover art by Schroeder. In a 2004 interview, Schroeder described a family life in which his future father was a West Point graduate and Spanish–American War veteran who after that conflict settled in the Philippine Islands, and who met Schroeder's future mother, the daughter of an amusement park owner, while on a visit to the United States. Schroeder said that upon marriage, the couple lived in the Philippines, where his mother worked as a hospital nurse; they later returned to the U.S., where his father played a Confederate officer in the D.W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation, made a fortune with a New York City silver-polish company called Noxon, and sold Ford trucks in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, where Schroeder was born, before leaving the family when Schroeder was very young. The artist said he lived with his grandmother for a short time until his mother became resident nurse at the estate of Jesse Jay Ricks, president of the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, and that Schroeder then grew up in a wealthy household of four boys, where family guests included Carl Sandburg.

Schroeder later studied under George Bridgman and George Grosz at the Art Students League, in Manhattan. He joined the U.S. Merchant Marine in 1936. Leaving the service by 1939, Schroeder got married, had a child, and began working as a textile designer. As World War II was beginning, he began working in a machine shop, making tools for the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation's PTB bomber. After meeting comic-book artist Bob Powell, Schroeder quit the machine shop to pursue art, but a month later was drafted into the infantry and stationed at Camp Blanding, near Jacksonville, Florida. There he drew for the camp newspaper, The Bayonet, and drew some of his first comic books; his earliest known confirmed credit is penciling and inking the 6-page story "Satan Rides the Waves" in Harvey Comics' All-New Comics #7 (cover-dated March 1944).

Later, while in California waiting to be shipped with the planned invasion forces to Japan, news came that the atomic bomb had been dropped, precipitating the end of the war. Schroeder, who had four children by then, was discharged from the service.

Airboy and the Heap From 1946 to 1949, Schroeder drew and also occasionally wrote for Parents Magazine Press' non-fiction history series True Comics. Other work for that company included art for the comic books Bigbrain Billy, Calling All Boys, and Calling All Kids. The feature ran through the final issue. and other writers. He additionally became a sketch artist for New York City advertising agencies, working on staff for a time at the firm Norman, Craig & Kummel.

Schroeder said in his 2004 interview that in the early 1960s, he followed an uncle into a boat-building business in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, working at this for approximately 10 years. In the same interview, however, he says that after having "gone broke", he relocated his family to Seattle, Washington, in 1963. There he was later hired for the art department at the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, headquartered in a suburb. During his time with the company he also spent six months at its Vertol division in Ridley Park, a suburb of Philadelphia.

According to Schroeder he left Boeing in 1970 to become the chief sculptor of the Franklin Mint, located in the Philadelphia suburb of Aston Township. There he helped to design and produce commemorative coins. Leaving this position in 1979, he moved to Florida, where he freelanced for Franklin and other mints for approximately four years before retiring. His sculpture work afterward included a life-sized sabre-tooth cat model for a museum in Silver Spring, Maryland; he gave the model an articulated jaw that opened when viewers pressed a button on the floor. Schroeder also sculpted a bronze fountain in the public square of his town.

Later life Schroeder was living in Brevard County, Florida, at the time of his death on September 20, 2006.