Jerry Marcus

Jerry Marcus was a prolific freelance gag cartoonist who also created the syndicated newspaper comic strip Trudy, a single-panel comic about the domestic doings of a traditional suburban homemaker. Marcus said he made the star of his comic strip a woman because of memories of his strong-willed mother, who raised four children in a cold-water flat as a young widow. King Features Syndicate launched the panel into national syndication in 1963, and several cartoon collections were published in paperback.

Special fans of his work have included comedian Jackie Gleason, presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, who had his original cartoons hung in the White House.

Jerry Marcus was born on June 27, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York, where, according to an entry he once wrote for a National Cartoonists Society album, he drew his very first cartoons on the sidewalks.

Marcus graduated from the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now known as the School of Visual Arts) in New York City after World War II. Marcus’s cartooning work soon gained national attention and appeared in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Look, McCall’s and the Ladies’ Home Journal.