When Ferd Johnson was thirteen years old, he won a gold watch for drawing cartoons for a railroad station agents' magazine. He studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He got a job at the Chicago Tribune, coloring Sunday pages of Frank Willard's 'Moon Mullins'. In 1925, Ferd Johnson drew his own Sunday page, 'Texas Slim'. In 1932, he created another, 'Lovey-Dovey'. His great break came in 1940, when he revived Texas Slim in a strip called 'Texas Slim and Dirty Dalton'. This popular cowboy comedy ran for eighteen years, until the death of Frank Willard, after which Johnson took over 'Moon Mullins'. He worked on this strip with his son Tom until his retirement in 1991. Ferd Johnson died in 1996.
