They blended the skills of a caricaturist and the mind-set of a columnist. They were entertainers and ink-stained jokesters. They were newsroom denizens and deadline artists who churned out five or six cartoons a week that received prominent display. If they possessed power, it was that they drew players, owners and managers in ways that reporters could not with their words.

Sports cartoons were usually more amusing and informative than critical, which reflected the times when the sports section was the fun-and-games department.

Some cartoonists created indelible characters that engaged and comforted readers.

Who can forget the unshaven Brooklyn Bum, created in the 1930s by Willard Mullin of The New York World-Telegram, who connected with fans viscerally long after the Dodgers’ Bum days were over? Or Bill Gallo’s Basement Bertha, the Mets’ washerwoman fan, and his George Steinbrenner-like General von Steingrabber (with spiked helmet and exaggerated German accent) in The Daily News?

“They were kind of visual columnists,” said Larry Merchant, a former New York Post sports columnist who has an original Mullin cartoon of Casey Stengel hanging in his office in Santa Monica, Calif. “With the stroke of a pen, they animated the page, maybe in a way that even photographs could not.”

Mullin was the dean of newspaper sports cartoonists, a gifted draftsman and writer whose signature looked like blades of grass. He spent 33 years at The World-Telegram before it closed in 1966; his work also appeared in books; Life, Collier’s, and Time magazines; the covers of Mets yearbooks; and in advertisements.

His final cartoon for The World-Telegram (by then merged with The New York Sun) was a vivid illustration of the boxers Dick Tiger and Emile Griffith. He loved to draw boxers because “they’re completely basic; you don’t have to know what inning it is,” he told The New York Times in 1978.

Bob Staake, an artist whose Web site features a gallery of Mullin cartoons, said that Mullin had a “highly nuanced understanding of anatomy and sports, such as the way he drew a thigh guard on a running back in the ’50s.” He added, “He captured animation in a still image in an uncommon way.”