Hix, John

John McCary Hix (Jun 17, 1907 - June 6, 1944) was an American cartoonist, filmmaker, and author. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Hix's family moved regularly. Between his birth and 1918, the family lived in Nashville, Tennessee; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and Greenville, South Carolina. Hix developed an urge to draw at an early age, often creating unflattering caricatures of his teachers that regularly got him in trouble. His drawings appeared in the Greenville High School newspaper, the Nautilus, and he was a staff artist for the Greenville Daily News while in high school. Since there was not an art school close by, he studied cartooning via correspondence course. Hix was a senior in high school when his father died on March 5, 1926, and graduated about two months later. After graduation he applied to be an editorial cartoonist for the Washington Herald and got the job. This meant relocating to Washington, D.C., where he also took a few classes at the Corcoran School of Art. While in D.C. he started a one-column comic strip called Hicks by Hix that became popular and was eventually syndicated. This success earned him a position with McClure Newspapers in New York City where he illustrated Young Frank Merriwell, a new comic strip by Gilbert Patten. While in New York Hix attended a few classes at the National Academy of Design and dreamed of attending the Yale School of Art, where some of his classmates were students. Unfortunately, Hix could not afford to attend Yale, so his education was learned on the job. Hix created Strange as it Seems (a comic strip that featured outlandish facts akin to those in Ripley's Believe it or Not!) in 1927. Hix died on June 6, 1944, of a heart attack caused by myocarditis. He never married and did not father any children.