Creator/Arcturus Publishing

Ben Yomen

labor cartoonist

Ben Yomen has 2 credited comics indexed across 2 series, working as writer, penciller, inker, letterer.

Yomen has noted that as a child, he copied newspaper strips of the day, developing a passion for art. He was trained at Cass Tech High School and the Wicker School Of Fine Art, both in Detroit. His first sale was as a student to a humor magazine called *College Life*. He was one of dozens arrested at the infamous Ford Hunger March of 1932, where he had come to sketch some of the participants. His arrest and his proximity to the death of laborers involved in the March radicalized him. He moved to New York, starting a job at Max Fleischer Studios and a job teaching with the WPA to make ends meet. When the government program slowly died out at the end of the decade, he transitioned into freelance cartooning, often selling to Milady and Judge magazines. He also painted and exhibited at New York area galleries. Yomen may be best known as the creator of "Congressman Dripp," a moronic, corrupt congressman that opposed the rights of labor and women. Yomen sold cartoons featuring Dripp to a variety of magazines and was syndicated from 1943 to 1955 to over 200 union-friendly publications through Federated Press syndicate, with which he had partnered since 1939. He was voted "most popular labor cartoonist" in an AFL-CIO poll in 1943. Yomen returned to Detroit in 1945, where he became art director of the United Auto Worker's *Ammunition* and worked in the union's Education Department. He also actively showed his work in Michigan art galleries whenever possible. He was briefly the art director for a grocery store chain in the 1950s. In 1980 he went to work for the union publication *Solidarity* and developed his second recurring feature, Senator Rightwing. In 1994, he produced a number of campaign cartoons for that year's gubernatorial campaign. He has three books to his credit: *Needles And Pins* (1941), *Roberto The Mexican Boy* (1947), and *Labor's Corner* (2005).