Ken Ernst

Ken Ernst was born in 1918 in Illinois. At the age of 12, he was elected president of the Chicago Chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. Ernst began his working life as a stage magician, but he aimed for a career in art. Using money made performing magic to finance his education, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

It was in the field of newspaper comics, however, that Ken Ernst became famous. Between 1940 and 1942, he assisted on the daily Don Winslow of the Navy strip. (Another source reports that he "ghosted" that strip). In 1942, Ernst took over as artist on the King Features Syndicate comic strip Mary Worth, and that strip became his life's work. According to Ernst in a comic-style segment from the January 8, 1949 issue of Collier's ("Mary Worth and Us" by Ken Ernst and Allen Saunders, p. 45), he and writer Allen Saunders replaced the "tear-stained melodrama" of Apple Mary, the strip's previous incarnation, with more "modern material-- stuff that might appear in slick paper fiction." The new approach brought success, as well as a succession of Ernst's gorgeously drawn, but often troubled females into range of Mary's meddling and advice. "I have to grind out a new honey every few weeks, instead of drawing the same face every day for 20 years," Ernst remarked. Ernst rendered the strip in a realistic style "inspired by that of his mentors Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles." His Mary Worth became a prototype for the "gentle and sophisticated" soap opera strip. Eminent comic strip historian Coulton Waugh made note of Ernst's "smooth, smart, dressy, modern style." Waugh also admired Ernst's device of drawing a group of characters in a panel without any background and—through clever use of shadow—making the figures appear to leap out of the panel.