John Hix
John McCary Hix was born on June 17, 1907, in Huntsville, Alabama, to John Harmon Hix and Viola Ann McCary Hix. His brother Ernest Harmon Hix was born on September 13, 1902. Before World War I, the family first located to Nashville, Tennessee, then Spartanburg, South Carolina. John Harmon Hix was a traveling salesman and moved his family to Greenville, South Carolina, where their third child, a daughter, Elizabeth Jane, was born in August 1918.
At an early age, John McCary Hix had a strong urge to draw. He drew unflattering caricatures of his teachers which often got him into trouble. Eventually his cartooning paid off and his drawings appeared in the Nautilus, the Greenville High School newspaper. While in school, John took a job with the Greenville Daily News as a staff artist for $5 a week. He was also a delivery boy on his bicycle, which earned him $7 a week. His dog Pal, a shaggy black and white half-collie and half-water spaniel, followed him everywhere on his deliveries. John trained Pal to drop papers on the doorsteps of one side of street while he delivered the other. He got up every morning at 3:00 AM and was at the newspaper office by 4:00 AM. He was also the local agent for several magazines, selling them as well.
He studied cartooning through a correspondence course, since there were no art schools nearby. When his father died on March 5, 1926, of heart failure, John was in his senior year of school. After graduation from Greenville High School in May 1926 (he has a plaque on the Greenville High School Wall of Fame), John decided he wanted bigger things and applied to the Washington Herald newspaper as an editorial cartoonist. He got the job and moved to Washington, D.C., where he was paid $15 a week. While in Washington, D.C., he attended a few classes at the Corcoran School of Art.
He also started a daily one-column comic strip called Hicks by Hix, featuring various wise-cracking hick characters. It was syndicated by King Features Syndicate. The strip did very well and was syndicated to several newspapers. This success lead to a job with McClure Newspapers in New York City. He illustrated a new strip called Young Frank Merriwell, written by Gilbert Patten.[7] It debuted on March 26, 1928, and ran for 6 months (the comic strip was resurrected in July 1931 as Frank Merriwell's Schooldays and ran for three years, this time illustrated by Jack Wilhelm).[7] He also created a strip called O. Henry's Short Stories.[8] During this time he attended a few classes at the National Academy of Design in New York. His dream was to attend the Yale School of Art where several of his art school classmates were attending, but there was not the money for that so most of John's art training was learned on the job.
Ripley's Believe It or Not!, drawn by Robert Ripley, began syndication in 1918. It contained many fantastic claims, which were not always verified. In 1927, John conceived the idea of Strange as It Seems and in December of that year, he signed a contract with The McClure Newspaper Syndicate in New York City, making him the nation's youngest nationally syndicated artist at only 20 years old. The cartoon was announced for syndication by McClure in February 1928 and debuted on March 28, 1928, in about 50 newspapers, the same day Young Frank Merriwell debuted. The cartoon was one panel with several illustrations of strange and unusual people, places and events. The feature required much more than just drawing as countless hours of research were required for the ideas and to verify their authenticity. Hix advertised widely that all of his claims were verified by at least three sources. He even included a notation on his cartoons, "If you doubt this, write for proof to the author." In the May 20, 1929, issue of Time magazine, it was erroneously reported that the comic had debuted the previous week. A letter to the editor three weeks later from Harold Matson, Managing Editor of the syndicate, corrected the timing of the cartoons publication dates. Time compared Hix to Ripley with this observation: "Cartoonist Hix does not seem quite so able with his pencil as Cartoonist Ripley. Astounder Ripley, after nine years, does not seem quite so astounding as fresh Astounder Hix."
In the January 4, 1930, edition of Editor & Publisher magazine, Hix announced that in early February 1930, Strange as It Seems would be expanded to include a full page Sunday color edition. The comic was being carried in over 80 newspapers by this time. John was now drawing a daily panel plus a Sunday color panel, a full 365 cartoons a year. As the cartoon grew in popularity and distribution spread into more papers, fans began mailing John ideas for the feature. To verify the story ideas, John would correspond with educators, scientists, civic workers and historians from around the world for photographs and documentation of authenticity. The Los Angeles Times reported that Hix rarely traveled for his ideas, but relied on correspondence for verification and had built a repository of 50,000–60,000 usable ideas ready to be incorporated into his cartoons. The claim that drew the most requests for proof of authenticity was that George Washington was the eighth president of the United States and that he was born on February 11, not February 22. The cartoons were often accompanied by several paragraphs of explanation in an article next to the cartoon.
John Hix continued to live in Washington, D.C., and is listed in the 1930 U.S. Census as living on New Hampshire Avenue, a couple of houses down from the rest of his family. Strange as It Seems became immensely popular and there were many opportunities for expanding the feature. John's brother Ernest Hix became his business manager and together they recognized the possibilities of turning the Strange as It Seems cartoons into a multi-media empire, especially after Ripley's Believe It Or Not! cartoons were transformed into live action movie shorts for Paramount Studios beginning in May 1930.
Universal Studios offered John Hix an opportunity to create movie shorts for their studio and the first Strange as It Seems short was released on August 22, 1930. The shorts would eventually play in over 6,000 movie theaters across the country. Like the Disney brothers a decade before them, the Hix brothers relocated their feature to Hollywood, California, in 1931. In 1931, a hardback book of the cartoon stories was released. The first of many comic books with the cartoons in them appeared in 1932. In May 1932, the cartoon was in over 150 newspapers. By November 1932, the cartoons were appearing in England, China and Japan.
In the spring of 1935, John Hix turned his cartoons into a successful 15-minute radio program on the Columbia – Don Lee network. Beginning on Sept. 13, 1936, The John Hix Scrapbook was released as half of the syndicated Sunday Color full page cartoon. In September 1939, the radio show became a 30-minute program broadcast weekly over the CBS network for 72 weeks. Over 600 radio programs were eventually created. The California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego opened in May 1935 with an exhibit of Ripley's Believe It or Not!. But by the end of that year, exhibit was deemed to be too gruesome. So the exhibitors contacted Ernest and John Hix about opening their own exhibit to replace Ripley's in the 1936 season of the fair. Their exhibit opened in February 1936 and was immensely popular. In 1939, the Hix brothers outmaneuvered Ripley for an exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
In its heyday, it was reported that the Strange as It Seems comic strip was syndicated in over 1,300 newspapers. John Hix enjoyed people questioning the authenticity of his stories and continued to invite them to write for proof in each cartoon, a feature that became the centerpiece for many of his promotional newspaper articles. During World War II, John worked with the Office of Emergency Management to incorporate 70 ideas they supplied into his comics to help the war effort.
John's health began failing in the early 1940s and Dick Kirby took over the drawing of Strange as It Seems, but Hix still reviewed all of the cartoons prior to publication.
On Monday evening, June 5, 1944, John Hix collapsed against a car, gashing his head in front of a hotel on Ivar Ave. He was taken to his home by his physician and died the following morning, June 6, 1944 (D-Day). The cause of death was a heart attack caused by myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle due to a viral infection). He was only 11 days shy of his 37th birthday. On June 8, 1944, the Los Angeles Times announced that there would be a private service coordinated by Forest Lawn Mortuary. John was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, CA. His plot is in The Great Mausoleum, Memorial Terrace, Hall of Memory, Columbarium of Memory, Niche 19608. He had no wife or children.
Ernest Hix
Ernest Harmon Hix Sr. was born September 13, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama. After he moved to Washington, D.C., with his family in the 1920s, he met and married Elsie Huber in 1932. Ernest became the business manager of the "Strange as It Seems" business and helped to create a multi-media empire of cartoons, movies shorts, books, comics, radio programs and exhibitions. He relocated with his brother, mother, sister and wife to Los Angeles in the 1930s. In 1942, he shared an office with his brother, John, at 6362 Haywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA and his residence was on Canyon Drive, Los Angeles, California. Ernest took over the Strange as It Seems creative business after John Hix died suddenly in 1944. Besides continuing to write the daily syndicated cartoon, Ernest revived the radio show, as a transcribed 15 minute program in 1947. The program ran until his death on September 18, 1948, in a private plane crash, shortly after take-off from the Newhall Airport north of Los Angeles.
The plane's owner, Eugene Joseff, had been warned not to take off until a fog lifted, but he took off anyway. The plane crashed and burst into flames after circling the field. Beside Ernest Hix and Eugene Joseff, there were two other persons killed in the plane crash: John M. Lacey, the pilot and Wilmer F. Pemberton, a designer. Joseff was the maker and supplier of about 90% of the ornate jewelry used in motion pictures at the time. After his death, Hix's wife Elsie took over the Strange as It Seems work.
