Percy Lee Crosby (December 8, 1891 – December 8, 1964) was an American author, illustrator and cartoonist best known for his comic strip Skippy. Adapted into movies, a novel and a radio show, Crosby's creation was commemorated on a 1997 U.S. Postal Service stamp. An inspiration for Charles Schulz's Peanuts, the strip is regarded by comics historian Maurice Horn as a "classic... which innovated a number of sophisticated and refined touches used later by Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson." Humorist Corey Ford, writing in Vanity Fair, praised the strip as "America's most important contribution to humor of the century".

Percy Crosby was born in Brooklyn, New York, prior to the 1898 incorporation of the five boroughs of New York City. He grew up in Richmond Hill, in what would be the borough of Queens but at the time was considered part of Long Island. His father, Thomas Francis Crosby, the son of Catholic immigrants from County Louth, Ireland, was an amateur painter who ran an art supply business. His mother Frances (née Greene), known as Fanny, was of English and Scottish descent. Percy had two younger sisters, Ethel and Gladys.

Crosby quit high school during his sophomore year to take a job as an art department office boy at editor Theodore Dreiser's magazine The Delineator. He was quickly promoted to artist, but the job ended after one issue. When he was 17, he sold a drawing to Life for $6. After delivering sandwiches and working as a magazine salesman, he found a position as an editorial cartoonist for the Socialist newspaper the New York Daily Call. There he published his first two comic strips, Biff and The Extreme Brothers—Laff and Sy, but readers became outraged at frivolity in the paper and the strips were pulled.

Crosby next became a sports columnist and illustrator at The New York Globe. On the side, he produced comics used as occasional filler for the paper. Eventually fired, he entered an Edison Company contest for the best cartoon on the use of electric light. He won the $75 prize and saw his cartoon appear in every newspaper in New York City. The exposure led to a job at the New York World, "at the time the promised land for aspiring cartoonists". After a few years, he left to freelance, selling cartoons to World editor John Tennant. In 1916, the George Matthew Adams Service syndicated Crosby's first feature, the daily and Sunday strip The Clancy Kids, earning Crosby a respectable $135 a week.

While continuing on this first strip, Crosby studied at Manhattan's Art Students League under such instructors as George Bridgman, Frank DuMond, Joseph Pennell and Max Weber. The painter and League president Gifford Beal, recognizing Crosby's talent, invited him to spend the summer in Cape Cod, where Crosby made the acquaintance of Edwin Dickinson, Edward Hopper, Eugene O'Neill and other habitues of the Provincetown, Massachusetts artists colony. Back in New York, he fell in love with fellow League student Gertrude Volz, the artist-sculptor daughter of a well-to-do real-estate broker. After being commissioned a second lieutenant in the Officer Reserve Corps in 1916 and being called to active service the following year, serving for a time as a jiujitsu instructor, he and Volz eloped and were married at the training camp in Plattsburgh, New York, on July 7, 1917.

While in training, Crosby created a daily comic panel, That Rookie from the Thirteenth Squad, for the McClure Syndicate, writing and drawing it from the front in France while serving as a first lieutenant in the 77th Division, AEF. The comic was collected into his first two books, That Rookie of the Thirteenth Squad (1917) and Between Shots (1919). While at the Argonne front, Crosby was struck by shrapnel in the eye, suffering no permanent damage, and earned the Purple Heart.

Following the war, he resumed his studies and syndicated a series of panel cartoons from 1921 to 1925. These covered a variety of subjects, with some series, such as Who Cares for the Feelings of a Small Boy, The Local Boy, Back o' the Flats, The Little Girl Who Moved Away and Send a Poor Child to the Farm, featuring children, particularly from the slums.

One such series, Always Belittlin', presaged Skippy with its star, a child with a striped shawl and a bonnet with a black pop-pom, whose thoughts consisted of the text's daily aphorism. This series and two others, Bugville and Bug Lugs, would eventually run as the supplemental topper feature accompanying the Skippy Sunday strip.

Skippy (1923–45)

Crosby concurrently became a prolific contributor to Life, where several of his cartoons featured a child named Timmy, who became the prototype for Skippy Skinner when Crosby pitched art director Frank Casey about a regular feature. As Crosby recalled, "I drew up three pages and thought of forty-four names (among them Beanie and Jumper)—Skippy last on the list. A minor editor put his oar in and suggested Tiny Tim. I bristled with [sic] such uncalled-for interference, and... the thought flashed through my mind: '[The title] had to be Skippy and nothing else!'"

Following a full-page house ad in the March 15, 1923, issue, Skippy premiered in Life and quickly became a success. It became a syndicated comic strip two years later, initially by Johnson Features, Central Press Association and Editors Features Service, before publisher William Randolph Hearst signed Crosby to his King Features Syndicate. King distributed its first daily Skippy on October 7, 1926, and its first Sunday on April 1, 1929. Crosby retained the copyright, a rarity for strip artists of the time.

The strip focused on Skippy Skinner, a young boy living in the city. Usually wearing an enormous collar and tie and a floppy checked hat, he was an odd mix of mischief and melancholy who might equally be found stealing from the corner fruit stand, failing to master skates or baseball, complaining about the adult world, or staring sadly at an old relative's grave: "And only last year she gave me a tie."

The popular strip at one point guaranteed Crosby $2,350 a week, an enormous sum at the time. Crosby published a Skippy novel and other books; there were Skippy dolls, toys and comic books. The comic was adapted as the 1931 movie Skippy by Paramount Pictures. A hit, it won director Norman Taurog the Academy Award for Best Director, and boosted the career of young star Jackie Cooper, who played the title role.

From 1928 to 1937, Crosby produced 3,650 Skippy strips, ten books of fiction, political and philosophical essays, drawings and cartoons, as well as numerous pamphlets, while also mounting a dozen exhibitions in New York City, Washington, D.C., London, Paris and Rome of his oils, watercolors and other paintings and drawings.^[With its success, he befriended a pantheon of famed creators, including the author Marc Connelly, the humorist Robert Benchley, The New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Life magazine editor and future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert E. Sherwood, and the cartoonists and painters George McManus, H. T. Webster and Guy Hoff.