Roger Armstrong, whose five-decade career as a cartoonist included doing artwork for “Bugs Bunny,” “The Flintstones” and numerous other comic books as well as for comic strips featuring characters such as Little Lulu and Scamp, has died. He was 89.
Mr. Armstrong, a longtime art teacher and a noted Southern California oil and watercolor painter, died of cardiac arrest June 7 in Mission Viejo, Calif., said his wife, artist Alice Powell.
As a cartoonist for Western Publishing in Los Angeles in the 1940s, he worked on Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. characters, including Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd — as well as Walt Disney characters such as Little Hiawatha, the Seven Dwarfs, Donald Duck and Pluto; and Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker. He also was one of the cartoonists who drew the “Bugs Bunny” newspaper cartoon strip from 1942 to 1944, the year he was drafted into the Army.
Mr. Armstrong, who had been cartoonist Clifford McBride’s assistant on the comic strip “Napoleon and Uncle Elby,” took over the strip when McBride died in 1950 and continued doing it for a decade. He also drew the cartoon strip “Ella Cinders” in the 1950s and later returned to working on the “Bugs Bunny” strip, in addition to working on the strips “Little Lulu,” “The Flintstones” and “Scamp.”
At Western Publishing in the ’60s and ’70s, Mr. Armstrong did comic book artwork for the Flintstones, Scooby Doo, the Pink Panther, the Inspector, Super Goof and the Beagle Boys, among others.
As a painter, Mr. Armstrong was primarily known for his watercolors.
His paintings are in more than 300 private collections, and his work is also in a number of public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution. “His art is really the art of everyday life in Southern California,” said Jean Stern, executive director of the Irvine Art Museum, which specializes in the art of California in the early 20th Century and has two Armstrong paintings.
He was working on the assembly line at Lockheed Aircraft in 1941 when he was hired at Western Publishing to draw Bugs Bunny for a new Warner Bros. comic book.
