Biograps Phil Davis

Famous Artists & Writers (1949)

Phil Davis

When you first come across 6-foot-4-inch Phil Davis, who draws the action-packed adventure strip, Mandrake the Magician, you have an immediate reaction. You have seen that face somewhere before. You keep scratching your head and asking yourself where, then suddenly you know - it's Mandrake.

Whether or not Phil started using himself as a model for Mandrake may never be known, because he just grins and says nothing. But he certainly is a ringer for his celebrated adventure hero. Tall, black-haired, mustachioed and debonair, all Phil needs to complete the picture is a cape and a silk hat.

Born in St. Louis in 1906 and equipped with one sister and one brother, Phil was a regular kid as a boy, with the exception that he got deeply interested in drawing at the age of 6. "I had a mania for parades," he says. "I drew every parade I could see. My family neither encouraged nor discouraged me; they just went along and accepted my dark fate."

He went to school in Soldan High School in St. Louis, and on being graduated went to work in the technical department of a telephone company as a draftsman. He didn't neglect his art, however, and continued studying at the Washington University art school, until he felt he had come along sufficiently to start earning his living with his pen.

His first commercial art work was done for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but he had dipped into several fields before he ultimately met Lee Falk - also handsome, also mustachioed, who might pass for Mandrake's brother - and they began turning out the spectacular adventure strip back in 1934. Once, Phil recalls wryly, he achieved fame of a kind by designing a streamlined coffin for a St. Louis casket company.

After leaving the Post-Dispatch, Davis did magazine covers and illustrations until he came with King Features. He recalls that once when he joined a display advertising company, his first job was to letter "Merry Christmas" 25 feet long. "I had no idea how to lay it out," he says. "They had to call in an outsider to do it."

Now, Phil, who lives in Clayton, Mo., does his work at a studio in town five days a week, adding three nights of work a week at home to maintain the high quality of Mandrake. While the strip is basically a fantasy, Lee and Phil try to keep it as believable as possible. None of the characters in Mandrake are patterned after real life ones, Phil says -although he has no comment on Mandrake himself. Asked to tell what he considers the most important requisite in a comic artist, he answers with gentle cynicism, "Endurance."

In 1941, Phil was singularly honored by the American Newspaper Publishers Assn., when he received a $500 award as the winner of a medal-design contest sponsored by the association. The medal he designed is presented annually to the winner of an annual essay contest open to students of journalism on "The Achievements of the Daily Newspaper in Public Service."

During the last war he served as Art Director for the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft plant in St. Louis planning technical illustrations for the instruction books which accompanied the Curtiss A-25 Dive Bomber. In addition to planning the drawings produced by a large drafting force, he did most of the pictorial illustrations himself, and found time to write the operational data for the radio equipment used in the plane. He once held an amateur radio operator's license, but now confines his interest in electronics to the making of home recordings.

Married to a fashion artist, who has a great deal to do with the beautiful and chic girls who appear in Mandrake, Phil goes in for swimming, woodworking and fooling around with dogs, as hobbies.

To small-fry artists, he says: “Never stop drawing."