by R. C. Harvey

The love affair began early and lasted long. Born July 5, 1933, Shel Dorf said he was “born again” when he saw his first comics at about the age of six—a book of Katzenjammer Kids strips reprints. When he was seven, he bought his first comic book—Sure Fire, No. 1, cover-dated June 1940. Hooked, he spent his 25-cent weekly allowance on the four-color pulps—Superman, Action, Blue Beetle, Super Comics, Disney titles, Captain Marvel, Bullet Man, Doll Man, Batman—or on movies. Of his two passions, comic books were favored because they were fungible: after reading and rereading them, he traded them with friends for comics he hadn’t read yet. By the time he was ten, he was clipping comic strips out of the newspapers in his hometown, Detroit—which, at the time, supported three daily newspapers and, therefore, a fruitful plentitude of comic strips.

During World War II, Shel, like kids all across the country, joined in the war effort by collecting newspapers, tying them in bundles, and turning them in to neighborhood recycling stations. Before bundling up his haul, Shel pulled out the comics pages, daily and Sunday, clipped the strips, and pasted them in scrapbooks, six dailies on a single page, the facing page for the color Sunday. The pastime of the war years became a lifelong hobby, resulting in more than 500 scrapbooks, all of which Shel later deposited at the Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.

Growing up, Shel worked in the family candy factory and, later, supplemented his weekly allowance by clerking in a drugstore and working in a hubcap factory sweatshop. In grade school, he attended after-school classes in art; and with his father as tutor, he took the famed Landon correspondence course in cartooning. He graduated from Cass Technical High School with a major in commercial art, and in Chicago, he took classes in design, fine arts, and the history of painting and architecture at the famed Art Institute. Back in Detroit, he joined the art staff of the Detroit Free Press, where he did photo retouching and some cartooning, and he also freelanced commercial art, doing layout and design.