cartoonist, was born in Sydney on 7 February 1887, son of a Darlinghurst cab-driver. He studied at evening art classes while working as a brewery clerk, sold caricatures of boxing and turf celebrities to barbers’ shops as a student and had occasional cartoons published in the Bulletin and other illustrated papers. He apparently used 'PO'S’ as his signature initially but because it was constantly confused with 'PAS’ (Pasquin) changed to 'Pat Sullivan’.
In 1904, aged 18, Sullivan was employed as a cartoonist by the Worker and remained there for three years. Then he illustrated for the Gadfly, e.g. 'Consoling’ 1907, a poorly-drawn shipboard joke about there being no danger of drowning because of the sharks (ill. Lindesay 1979, 141). Canemaker claims it’s the only signed cartoon by Sullivan in the paper. (Nobody seems to have investigated the Worker, though Gibbney and Smith cite 19 August 1905, p.6, as well as 22 February 1933, p.19. The latter is evidently an obituary, even though Canemaker says none was published in Australia.)
Sullivan left for England in 1908 where he did drawings for children’s penny weeklies at two shillings each. Then he sailed to America in a cattle-boat in 1909. He worked in the boxing ring and on the vaudeville stage before he began selling comic postcards and cinema posters. Finally, he made big money with Felix the Cat, created in 1917 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 164, and Canemaker). It became a comic strip in 1923. He drew other film animals and 'a little coon, “Sambs”’ (Home, 1926). According to Inkspot 24 (Summer 1994, p.13): 'Historians [presumably Canemaker] now state that Felix was actually created by Otto Messmer in Sullivan’s New York studio in 1919 [sic], although Sullivan took all the credit.’
[In October 2004 the ABC Television programme Rewind broadcast a segment on this question, in which Judy Nelson of the State Library of New South Wales revealed a USA Library of Congress copyright record crediting Pat Sullivan with the film 'The Tail of Thomas Kat’, 3 March 1917 (Thomas Kat being an earlier name for Felix or the character on which Felix was based, depending on one’s stand in this dispute). This discovery formed the basis of an exhibition at SLNSW the following year]
He revisited Sydney in 1920 (according to Gibbney and Smith) and in 1925 and was reportedly given a civic reception on the latter occasion. A drawing of Felix inscribed 'With Best of the Best to my old Pal Perrier’, and annotated: 'His last visit to Australia early 1930s’, is in ML (SSV*CART 40: filed under 'Pat O’Sullivan’ though signed 'from Pat Sullivan’).
Sullivan died in New York on 15 February 1933.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
