Bill Holman (March 22, 1903 – February 27, 1987)[1] was an American cartoonist who drew the classic comic strip Smokey Stover from 1935 until he retired in 1973.

While working part-time at Nappanee's local five and dime store, he developed an interest in art as a career and sent away for the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course.

The position gave him the opportunity to hang out with the top Tribune cartoonists, including Sidney Smith, Harold Gray and E. C. Segar.

In Cleveland, he began working for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, which syndicated his short-lived animal strip, Billville Birds (1922).

He scored a success when he headed in a new direction, submitting his cartoons to a variety of different magazines, including Liberty, Redbook, Collier's and Life.

[4][5] Holman thought firemen were funny, "running around in a red wagon with sirens and bells," and he began doing Smokey Stover as a Sunday strip for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate on March 10, 1935.

With a perpetually bandaged tail, the firehouse cat Spooky lived with its owner, Fenwick Flooky, who did embroidery while sitting barefoot in a rocking chair.

When Gaar Williams, who drew a gag panel under a variety of titles, died in 1935, Holman stepped in as a replacement.

[9]By 1939, when Holman was earning $1500 a month, he gave a humorous summary of his life to Editor & Publisher: To make a long Foo short, here is the dope, and I do mean me.

At an early age my father died, and I was sent out into the world to make a living for my mother, one cat with a sore tail, and no kitten.

Hundreds of my drawings infested the pages of Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Life, Judge and Everybody's Weekly of London.

[8]For the USO, Holman made many trips abroad to entertain troops in the South Pacific, Europe, Japan and Korea, in addition to his chalk talks at veteran’s hospitals.

Even after retiring from Smokey Stover, Holman could not stop the flow of puns and verbal/visual ideas, and he produced stack of sketches for a possible syndicated panel he titled Wall Nuts.

Town, training, and careers connected these artists.According to Holman, more than 100,000 copies of Whitman's ten-cent Smokey Stover books were sold by 1939.