Phil Davis

Phil Marquis Davis
Biographical information
Born:	March 04, 1906
Died:	Desember 16, 1964
Nationality:	American
Occupation:	Artist
Website:	N/A

Life and career

Phil Marquis Davis was born in 1906 in Saint Louis, Missouri. His father was Charles Henry Davis and his mother was Ethel Herchenrath Davis. He spent a happy childhood with his older brother Hugo (b.1903) and his baby sister Emily (b. 1908).

At the age of 6 he got deeply interested in drawings: "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."

During a summer vacation when he was 12 years old - that was during the first World War - he got a job as a tool boy in the Liberty Motors plant. There he met Franz Berger, who used to be captain of Purdue University's baseball and football teams. Berger was a mechanical engineering professor at Washington University - also doing a war job during the summer - and he encouraged Phil to take a manual training course at high school. Phil did, with every hope of becoming an engineer.

When he graduated from Soldan High School, his family was in financial trouble, and he had to get a job right away. Because of his training in mechanical drawing he was able to work in the technical department of a telephone company as a draftsman.

Then young Davis hit a series of bad luck streaks. He'd been sick in the flu epidemic, and had a form of sleeping sickness as an after-effect. The phone company had to transfer him to outside work - switch-board installation - but the continuing effects of the sleeping sickness made him undependable and he was laid off.

Phil tinkered with radio and got a first-class ham license (9 EDD). He took night-school courses in trigonometry and drafting, and finally hooked up with a civil engineering firm, where his lettering work was very much admired. One day the head draftsman said, "Why don't you try commercial lettering? There's a lot of money in that!"

Phil took a Y.M.C.A. course in showcard lettering, and bought all the books on the subject that he could find. His first commercial art work appeared in "St. Louis Post Dispatch" in 1928.

Through a series of small art jobs as a free lance artist (spending the night at Washington University art school, studying figure painting and illustration), he finally landed in a advertising agency who calling themselves The Illustrators Inc. The agency was in the 12.th floor in the Louderman Building, where several commercial artists rented a studio together. With Al Parker as the main illustrator.

Shortly after US Liberty Magazine printed a Phil Davis cover for the September 1933 issue a young man named Lee Falk came walking into his office.

Mandrake - The Early Years

Lee Falk came with his idea for an adventure strip, suggesting a partnership. Phil Davis worked out the physical appearance of characters in a story, which he figured could be serialized indefinitely, and made up a two-week sample. Part of Falk’s stake was to finance his own trip to New York to try to sell it.

And right away Mandrake the Magician landed in the New York Journal under the heading "Floyd Gibbon's daily page of thrills and mystery” June 11 1934.

Before the end of the year Phil Davis married Martha Grocott (Nov. 05 1934), the head fashion artist in Vandervoort's art department. They found their home in Clayton, Mo.

The 3rd of February 1935 the first Sunday page with Mandrake was to been seen in the newspapers.

"I didn't have any idea of the amount of work involved in a comic strip," Phil recalls. "I nearly killed myself in Mandrake's first year-working 14 hours every day, and 5 hours on Sunday besides! There's a lot of difference between taking a week to do one drawing for an advertisement - and doing 24 complete drawings for six comic strips! "Still, I wouldn't go away from my anatomically correct figures to do the faster type of cartoon illustration. Anyway, once you start a strip, the Syndicate wants it to be always exactly the same. "But all this pressure has had its advantage. By doing good art for Mandrake, I don't lose my touch, and I can always do commercial work in addition. I find that Mandrake has made me a better artist, and a much faster worker."

In the beginning Phil Davis did all the artwork himself. Late 1935 Phil Davis sublet parts of the ink work to a man named Ray S. Moore, whom later become the first artist of the other Lee Falk figure – The Phantom. It is believed that Ray S. Moore worked on the Mandrake dailies from the strip printed the January 13 1936, since Phil Davis stop signing the strips with his own name.

In 1939 Phil Davis had developed a tight work schema so that he could be 4 weeks ahead the publication dates, so at: - Mondays he roughing out the six strips of dailies and one page of the Sundays. - Tuesdays and Wednesdays he spent tree hours in pencilling one strip in the morning, afternoon and evening. - Thursdays he pencilled the Sunday page. - Fridays he spent inking in. - Saturdays at noon he picks up his wife and they went to their weekend house at Big River, in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.

As assistants he had a pen and ink draftsman, to whom he sublets part of his pen work, and another part time worker (Eddie Walcher) did the lettering.

From 1940 he took up his carer as an illustrator and did commercial illustrations for various companies, Coca-Cola etc.

In 1941, Phil Davis received a $500 award as the winner of a medal-design contest of the American Newspaper Publishers Association ($ 500). The medal he designed was presented annually to the winner of an annual essay contest open to students of journalism on The Achievement of the Daily Newspaper in Public Service.

Sources

• Marguerite Martyn (1939). The Man Who Draws Mandrake, Post-Dispatch (Every Sunday), August 30 1939, 3D
• Wind G.L. (1947), Chuck Dressler, page-page
• King Features Syndicat (1949), Phil Davis, Famous Artists and Writers, 1949, page-page
• Dale Bert (1948), Meet Phil Davis, The OPEN ROAD for Boy's, February 1948, page-page.
• Lacassin Francis et Tercinet Alain (1964), Pour prendre conge de Phil Davis, Giff.Wiff no 12 1964, 11-16