Ethel Hays

Ethel Hays (March 13, 1892 – March 19, 1989) was an American syndicated cartoonist specializing in flapper-themed comic strips in the 1920s and 1930s. She drew in Art Deco style. After high school, where she was an illustrator for the school newspaper, she attended the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and then the Art Students League of New York. She won a scholarship to the Académie Julian in Paris, but the start of World War I derailed her studies there. At the time, Hays was on course to become a fine arts painter. During World War I, she took on the task of teaching painting to convalescing soldiers in Army hospitals. After encountering a group of students much more interested in learning cartooning instead, she determined to learn that subject herself. She enrolled in the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course and, "keeping a couple of lessons ahead," was able to instruct her class.

Hays's first work at the Cleveland Press was for a trendy feature called Vic and Ethel, which consisted of flapper-themed satire and social commentary—including stories of "steeple-climbing and swimming in ice-filled lakes" and interviews with visiting celebrities—accompanied by Hays's cartoons. Her first comic strip for Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) was derived from that feature and was called simply Ethel in some papers Here Hays continued to chronicle the era when women "bobbed their hair and took up active sports". In this panel, which featured a flapper illustration and a witticism, Hays "moved away from the fancy style of Nell Brinkley, drawing sleeker women with short hair—some even wearing pants". Her panel inspired competition for a time from Faith Burrows' similarly-themed Flapper Filosofy from the rival King Features Syndicate.

Ethel Hays was married in 1925 Hays continued to produce a variety of other work for NEA, including full-page illustrations and montages for Every Week magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement. Her final comic strip for NEA was Marianne, beginning around February 1936, which ran weekly. Comic strip historian Allan Holtz wrote, "While the art was vintage Hays, the gags were strictly jokebook material. You could tell her heart was no longer in it." Her final installment ran on December 26, 1937, though the strip continued without her for another year or two.

Transition to children's book illustration In 1938–1940, Hays worked for The Christian Science Monitor, drawing cartoons to accompany a series of poems called "Manly Manners". An instructional children's book collecting the feature was published. During this time her work was also featured on a twelve-month calendar (1939). These painted illustrations of children at play presaged in style and content the work of the next stage of her career. and booklets. Most of the artwork fell to Hays, "whose exuberant, curvilinear style perfectly captured the whimsy and energy of Gruelle's characters". Having been trained in painting, she was well-suited for this type of full-color artwork.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hays illustrated Puzzle Pages for the publisher McCormick-Mathers of Wichita, Kansas. Puzzle Pages has been described as "a reading seatwork series" for schoolchildren. The workbook pages included sections for reading and writing, as well as words and pictures for cut-and-paste activities. Students might do coloring in Hays's illustrations. The copyright on the series was renewed until at least the 1970s.

Assessment and legacy Ethel Hays has been called "one of the more successful women cartoonists of the 1920s".