Colin Campbell Dawkins (September 8, 1922 - November 27, 1986) was an American writer for advertising and
comic book
A comic book, also called comicbook, comic magazine or (in the United Kingdom and Ireland) simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are of ...
s, notably for
EC Comics
Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC Comics, was an American publisher of comic books, which specialized in horror fiction, crime fiction, satire, military fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction from the 1940s through the mid-1950 ...
. He was a vice-president of the
J. Walter Thompson
J. Walter Thompson (JWT) was an advertisement holding company incorporated in 1896 by American advertising pioneer James Walter Thompson. The company was acquired in 1987 by multinational holding company WPP plc, and in November 2018, WPP merge ...
ad agency.
Born on an Indian reservation near
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa () is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and 47th-most populous city in the United States. The population was 413,066 as of the 2020 census. It is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area, a region with ...
, Dawkins grew up in New York City, where he studied art with plans to become a portrait painter. He met John Severin when both attended the High School of Music & Art and their close friendship continued throughout their lives. In 1943, he worked with WABC radio's wartime all-night record operation. Joining the Air Corps that year, he graduated from private to corporal while working in public relations and on corps newspapers. Returning to New York after the end of World War II, he began his 34-year career at J. Walter Thompson Company as a mailroom messenger, advancing to market research clerk and copywriter. From 1949 to 1951, he worked in JWT's office in London, where he married Patricia Horan, an American who worked in the art department of the London office. After a period in Montreal, he rejoined the New York office, where he became the Vice President in 1965. In 1972, he was Creative Director in JWT's Paris office.
Comic books
John Severin
John Powers Severin (; December 26, 1921 – February 12, 2012) was an American comics artist noted for his distinctive work with EC Comics, primarily on the war comics ''Two-Fisted Tales'' and ''Frontline Combat''; for Marvel Comics, ...
and Dawkins collaborated on the "American Eagle" stories for ''Prize Comics Western''. In 1954, they were the uncredited co-editors of ''Two-Fisted Tales'' #36-39. Dawkins provided the writing for the majority of the title's 1954-55 stories. For ''Two-Fisted Tales'', Severin and Dawkins created the action-adventure character Ruby Ed Coffey, as Severin recalled:
:Those were written completely by Dawkins. Those were characters he dreamed up. I did the designing and that was all I had to do with this. He did the writing, everything on that. I loved them. I like what I did. I drew them, and I love them. He was a good writer. Too bad he was in advertising... I related his stories to the stories I had read, the real ''Doc Savage'' in the pulps, not the stuff they have in the comics. Colin had talked to me long before we had ever thought about getting together and doing this sort of thing. Ruby Ed, and he’d have a worldwide network of people that he could work with, and so on and so forth. It sounded good to me. It sounded like my old ''Doc Savage'' stuff. I liked that... I’ll tell you one thing though, one of those characters was based on Ham—Doc Savage had that lawyer... And the other guy was based on Captain Easy.
"The John Severin Interview", ''The Comics Journal'' #215 (August 1999), #216 (October 1999).
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Dawkins also contributed to 1981-82 issues of Warren Publishing's '' The Rook''.
Books
In 1978, Dawkins began writing a history of advertising with the emphasis on J. Walter Thompson. Although the completed work, ''Ain't It Hell on a Windy Day'' (1981), was never published, the manuscript is located in the JWT files.
He retired from JWT in 1981 and died in Pennsylvania in 1986.
References
External links
Comic Book Database: Colin Dawkins
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dawkins, Colin
1922 births
1986 deaths
American comics writers
EC Comics