Otto Messmer

Otto Messmer will be forever associated with one character, and it's a character he didn't even get credit for creating until years after the fact. Messmer was born in Union City, New Jersey (then called West Hoboken) on August 16, 1892. As a student at the Thomas School of Art in New York City from 1911–1913, he provided illustrations for fashion catalogs as part of a work-study program with the Acme Agency. But what he really wanted to do was get into the relatively new artform of animation. He was fascinated by early cartoons like Winsor McCay's How a Mosquito Operates, and was already drawing his own comics for local papers by the age of 20.