Pete Hoffman - Jeff Cobb and Why We Say

Jeff Cobb and Why We Say

Jeff Cobb debuted on June 28, 1954, both written and drawn by Hoffman and distributed by General Features Syndicate. As Hoffman said in a later interview, "Hopefully, some of Allen Saunders' expertise rubbed off on me when I worked on Steve Roper." Indeed, Cobb could have been a blond clone of Roper circa 1952, except that he didn't smoke a pipe and wore a black eye-patch after losing his right eye in a roof cave-in the 1960s. (It actually made him more popular.) Also like Roper, Cobb was an attractive, clean-cut, two-fisted investigative reporter (working for the Daily Guardian) who defended his standards, fought crime, and endured near-fatal threats to his life; he had to, "to keep his creator eating regularly". On the other hand, Hoffman's Jeff Cobb developed a greater range of expression and a more mature level of fine-line photorealism than his Roper. Like Saunders, he also emphasized characterization in plot development, and said he never ran out of ideas: the well-written stories were inspired by newspaper articles he read, and characters were often based on real people. At the same time, Hoffman was illustrating the single-panel feature Why We Say (1950–78), which was written by Robert Morgan and explained word and phrase origins in laypersons' terms.