E. G. Blankenship Scrapbook

Edgar Gerald Blankenship was a pilot with fighter squadron VF-18 on board the aircraft carrier Intrepid during World War II. He kept a scrapbook of photographs from his time in the U.S. Navy. Tucked into the scrapbook are original pencil cartoons created by Blankenship’s squadronmate Edward Ritter. The main character in his cartoons was a bumbling pilot named Snipo. Ritter modeled Snipo’s appearance after Blankenship. In an article in the Brooklyn Eagle from 1945, Ritter noted that Blankenship “looked something like Snipo, certainly didn't fly like that.” Ritter created watercolor versions of his cartoons, and these pencil drawings are sketches of some of the same images. While prints of the watercolor versions survived the war, all of Ritter’s original watercolor cartoons were destroyed in a kamikaze attack.