Charles Plumb (November 13, 1899 – January 19, 1982 [1]) was an American cartoonist best known for maintaining a high quality of artwork on the comic strip Ella Cinders over three decades.

After attending Baxter Springs High School, Charlie Plumb studied journalism, art and advertising at the University of Missouri and then worked as an artist and political cartoonist for newspapers in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.

[2][3] In the early 1920s, while Plumb was employed as an artist at the Los Angeles Times, he met screenwriter William Conselman, and the two created their Ella Cinders strip in 1925 for the Metropolitan Newspaper Service (later United Feature Syndicate).

Initially, as the name implies, the strip presented a variation on the classic Cinderella story, but then it diverged into other plotlines, as noted by comics historian Don Markstein: Artists who influenced Plumb included N. C. Wyeth, H. M. Bateman, Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham.

Plumb employed a number of assistants and ghost artists, including Fred Fox, Joseph Messerli, Jack McGuire, Henry Formhals (who drew Freckles and His Friends) and Hardie Gramatky, ranked by Andrew Wyeth as one of the 20 greatest watercolor painters.