Nell Brinkley

Nell Brinkley (September 5, 1886 – October 21, 1944) was an American illustrator and comic artist who was sometimes referred to as the "Queen of Comics" during her nearly four-decade career working with New York newspapers and magazines. She was the creator of the Brinkley Girl, a stylish character who appeared in her comics and became a popular symbol in songs, films and theater.

Early years Nell Brinkley was born in 1886 to Robert Serrett Brinkley and May French Brinkley in Denver, Colorado, and in 1893 her family moved to the small town of Edgewater on Denver's western border, facing Sloan's Lake at Manhattan Beach. Her father Robert Brinkley would later become the mayor of Edgewater. As a small child, she drew place-setting illustrations of knobby-kneed kiddies for Mary Elitch's garden parties at Elitch Gardens. She had no formal arts training, and dropped out of high school to pursue a career in illustration. She did cover and interior illustrations for the 1906 children's book, Wally Wish and Maggie Magpie by A.U. Mayfield. She did pen-and-ink drawings for The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.

Career Brinkley was scouted in 1907 by media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his editor Arthur Brisbane, who convinced her to move from Denver to Brooklyn, New York where Hearst's newspaper empire was centered. She was accompanied by her mother. She worked in Manhattan for the Journal, where she produced large detailed illustrations with commentary almost every day. Her art was featured in the prestigious magazine section, and the newspaper's circulation boomed. Brinkley later moved to New Rochelle, New York, a well known artist colony, home to many of the top commercial illustrators of the day. She soon became well known for her breezy and entertaining creations. The curly-haired everyday working-girl drawings were known as the Brinkley Girl, who soon upstaged Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl. The Ziegfeld Follies (1908) used the Brinkley Girl as a theme, and three popular songs were written about her. Bloomingdale's department store featured a Nell Brinkley Day with advertisements using many of her drawings. Women emulated the hairstyles in the cartoons and purchased Nell Brinkley Hair Curlers for ten cents a card. Young girls saved her drawings, colored them and pasted them in scrapbooks. The Denver Press Club greeted her when she vacationed in Colorado in the summer of 1908. Nell was most famous for her representing "relationships between boy and girl—man and woman—Bettys and Billies". Her illustrations used the drawing of "Dan Cupid" to represent the presence of that something most people call "love".

Brinkley's reputation was also established by an early assignment to cover the sensational murder trial of Harry K. Thaw. She was assigned many interviews with the actress-wife, Evelyn Nesbit. In later years, she covered other infamous murder trials. She produced numerous courtroom illustrations printed in the Evening Journal and other Hearst newspapers.

Brinkley had been on the staff of the Journal for only three months when the new trial began. She had come after two years on the Denver Post, bringing with her a talent for pretty-girl art that had not yet been matured into delicately fine-lined art-nouveau style for which she would become famous.

The Brinkley Girl became a national sensation, the topic of pop songs, poetry and theater. The second Ziegfeld Follies (1908) featured a number of references to the Brinkley Girl, including a song "The Nell Brinkley Girl" by Harry B. Smith and Maurice Levi.

Books

The Brinkley Girls (Fantagraphics Books, 2009) collects Brinkley's full-page color art from 1913 to 1940; her earliest adventure series, Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill; her romantic series, Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages; her flapper comics from the 1920s; her 1937 pulp magazine-inspired Heroines of Today and unpublished paintings, along with an introduction by the book's editor, Trina Robbins.

Her earliest series, Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill, is a comic chronicling the adventures of a girl known as Golden Eyes during World War I. It ran from March 1918 through February 1919 and featured full page illustrations in color. The series was renamed "Golden Eyes" and Her Hero "Bill" Over There, after a few episodes (as the narrative had shifted to France) and would keep that new name for the remaining 15 installments. Two years later, she gave birth to their only child, Bruce Robert McRae III on December 15, 1922. Brinkley and McRae Jr. later divorced in 1937.

In 1944, Nell Brinkley died after more than 30 years of entertaining fans from the "most read newspapers". Her death went largely unnoticed under the crush of WWII news, but the Associated Press reported she died in a New Rochelle hospital on the night of October 21, 1944, after a long illness. Brinkley, her mother and father are all buried in a cemetery in New Rochelle, New York.

Awards Brinkley was inducted into Friends of Lulu's Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2020, San Diego Comic-Con inducted Nell Brinkley into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame.