Background
Born and raised in Joplin, Missouri, Plumb moved at age 15 to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where his father, Carl H. Plumb, was a mining engineer in the Tri-state area of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.
Born and raised in Joplin, Missouri, Plumb moved at age 15 to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where his father, Carl H. Plumb, was a mining engineer in the Tri-state area of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.
After attending Baxter Springs High School, Charlie Plumb studied journalism, art and advertising at the University of Missouri and then worked as an artist and political cartoonist for newspapers in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.
He usually signed his work with the signature Charlie Plumb or Chas. Plumb. He also drew the topper strip Chris Crusty which ran above from 1931 to 1940. In the early 1920s, while Plumb was employed as an artist at the Los Angeles Times, he met screenwriter William Conselman, and the two created their strip in 1925 for the Metropolitan News Service (later United Feature Syndicate).
Initially, as the name implies, the strip presented a variation on the classic Cinderella story, but then it diverged into other plotlines, as noted by comics historian Don Markstein:
But Ella wasn"t the sort to let that get her down.
Outside the house, she had a boyfriend with the improbable name of Waite Lifter. She was pretty enough, in a 1920s sort of way, with straight, black hair and as big and bright a pair of eyes as you"ll find anywhere in comics.
But she wasn"t a raving beauty, and tended to dress down, especially in the early years. Her "fairy godmother" moment did come in the form of winning a beauty contest, but that was only because the guy judging it picked her photo at random.
The prize was relocation to Hollywood and a glamorous job at a movie studio.
When she got there she found the studio defunct, but at least she was out of the "Cinderella" situation. Foreign the next few years, Ella and Blackie kicked around Hollywood, doing melodramatic continuity in the dailies and one-episode gags on Sundays. Artists who influenced Plumb included North. C. Wyeth, H. M. Bateman, Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham.
In his spare time, Plumb enjoyed fishing.
After living in Pasadena, California, he had homes in San Antonio, Texas and Cuernavaca, Mexico, which he called his permanent residence. He also traveled widely, and for some years, the syndicate received his work shipped from an island in the Pacific.
When Conselman died in the mid-1940s, his estate took over the strip and employed several writers, while Plumb received sole cr on the strip. Fred Fox took over as the strip"s artist in the mid-1950s, followed by Roger Armstrong.
