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Cliff Roberts, ca. 1950s
Cliff Roberts (1929-1999) was a cartoonist and animator who worked on inserts for Sesame Street as well as the spin-off comic strip and Sesame Street Magazine. Roberts spent much of his early career in New York City as a freelance commercial artist and director. He also worked as a photographer, with work displayed at the 1964 World's Fair, and contributed cartoons to Playboy and New Yorker. He soon became a popular designer for animation, creating character model sheets for Terrytoons and UPA projects. Roberts' style, reflecting his commercial illustration background, involved flat but appealing forms and a minimal color palate; most of his characters were white blobs with occasional splashes of color.
For Sesame Street, Roberts created Jasper and Julius, the two characters who would engage in debates over body parts. Jasper and Julius were brought over to Roberts' Sesame Street strip, along with other Roberts' creations and, in Spanish strips, Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. Roberts later worked on such Saturday morning series as The Smurfs, Scooby-Doo, and The Pink Panther, and illustrated the Langston Hughes book The First Book of Jazz. He retired in 1993.
