Swing by our booth at CrockerCon 2024 and peruse back issues while hanging out with the Humor Times editor and staff.
CrockerCon is back, celebrating all things comics, pop culture, and cartoons! Returning for its tenth iteration, CrockerCon 2024 will happen on Thursday, September 12th, 6-9 PM at the Crocker Art Museum in downtown Sacramento.
Cosplay as your favorite character to meet and mingle with cartoonists and comic book creators from across California and beyond. This event is family-friendly.
Part of Crocker's ongoing ArtMix events, it's another fun-filled evening with live performances, DJed music, festive food and drinks, art activities, and more. "Expect the unexpected" they say, and "ArtMix puts the art in party!" is their motto.
Swing by our Humor Times booth and hang out with the publication's editor, James Israel, and meet some of our staff.
At the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street, Sacramento, CA 95814.
[post_title] => CrockerCon 2024: Visit the Humor Times Booth!
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Swing by our booth at CrockerCon 2024 and peruse back issues while hanging out with the Humor Times editor and staff. CrockerCon is back, celebrating all things comics, … Read more
THE COMIC BOOK Archie is so durable an American cultural artifact that it is surprising to discover that the newspaper comic strip version is nearly its equal. The daily began February 4, 1946; the Sunday, later the same year on October 13. And it’s still going -- albeit in reruns since June 2012. The comic book character debuted in Pep Comics No.22, cover-dated December 1941. And is still going. That’s 80 years for the comic book; 65 for the strip. And Bob Montana drew the newspaper strip from the beginning until he died at age 54 on January 4, 1975, of a heart attack while cross-country skiing; he is last credited on the daily of March 1, 1975. That’s 29 years.
We can see Montana’s handiwork in Archie’s Sunday Finest: Classic Newspaper Strips from the 1940s and 1950s (156 10x13-inch pages, color; 2012 IDW hardcover, $49.99) and in Archie: The Complete Daily Newspaper Comics, 1946-1948 (302 9x11-inch landscape pages, b/w with occasional color; 2010 IDW hardcover, $39.99).
The first-named of these two volumes reprints selected Sunday strips, beginning with the first and concluding with September 24, 1950. Reproduction is excellent; the page size generous enough to show off Montana’s manner. And it’s Montana, not John Goldwater, who invented Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica and all the rest of the Riverdale gang.
At Archie Comics, they steadfastly maintain that Archie was the creation of Goldwater, one of the trio that founded the company. But that is not true. Montana explains in his interview with Jud Hurd, publisher of Cartoonist PROfiles, in No.6 (May 1970).
Soon after joining MLJ Magazines, Montana told Hurd, he was approached by Goldwater, who “said they’d like me to try and create a teenage strip.”
At first blush, it looks like Goldwater was the creative impetus. On second blush, it gets complicated.
Like many who have had a role in the early history of comics and who have survived their contemporaries, Goldwater doubtless exaggerated somewhat his claims to fame. In recounting the events of his early life, for instance, Goldwater customarily recollected various of his romantic adventures with the fairer sex that paralleled Archie’s life with Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge and therefore seemed to support the claim that Goldwater had been Archie’s creator because he had lived in his youth a similar life from which he took inspiration. By the early 1980s, no one was around anymore who could contradict him. It seemed wonderfully pat.
But I contacted Bob Montana’s daughter (through their family website), and I was able to incorporate their version of how Archie was created into my version. Here, then, is my unofficial history of John Goldwater, knitting together as many of the known facts and reasonable testimonies as I can -- in as charitable and sympathetic a construction as possible with a conspicuous lamination of some likely alternative interpretations.
JOHN GOLDWATER was born February 14, 1916, in New York, New York, son of Daniel Goldwater and Edna Bogart Goldwater. About that, only the date is disputed. In tcj.com, Steve Rowe, responding to an earlier version of this essay, claims Goldwater shaved ten years off his age by claiming a 1916 birthdate. “And so he was married for the first time at age 11? Well no. There are other disputes about his early life as well... From this we know he was a good storyteller.”
Goldwater’s arrival, whether 1906 or 1916, was (according to Goldwater) accompanied by melodrama enough to be a credit to an aspiring dramatist. According to various sources (for which Goldwater supplied the information), his mother died during childbirth, and the father, overcome by grief, abandoned the child and died soon afterward. Growing up in a foster home, Goldwater attended the High School of Commerce where he developed secretarial skills and some facility as a writer.
At seventeen, he hitch-hiked across country, stopping first in Kansas at the little town of Hiawatha in the northeast corner of the state where he found a reporting job on the local newspaper. In later years, Goldwater said he was fired because he got into a scrap over a girl with the son of the paper’s biggest advertiser.
According to Goldwater, girl trouble was prominent in his young working life. Everywhere he worked on his travels across the country -- Kansas City, Grand Canyon National Park, San Francisco -- everywhere he went, to hear him tell it, his life was as complicated as that of Archie Andrews -- and all because of girls. He’d get interested in a girl (or a pair of them), and he’d be fired because of it.
After about a year, Goldwater returned to New York via the Panama Canal, en route becoming involved (again), he says, with two girls (a blonde and a brunette) in a shipboard romance that went nowhere else.
Back in New York, he worked for various publishers and then became an entrepreneur, buying unsold periodicals, mainly pulp magazines, from publisher Louis H. Silberkleit and exporting them for sale abroad. Observing the success of the Superman character in the infant comic book industry in 1939, Goldwater joined with Silberkleit and Maurice Coyne to launch a publishing firm with himself as editor (while continuing as president of Periodicals for Export, Inc.), Silberkleit as publisher, and Coyne as bookkeeper.
MLJ Magazines (named with the first-name initials of the partners) produced its first comicbook, Blue Ribbon Comics, with a cover date of November 1939. Top-Notch Comics followed in December, then Pep Comics in January 1940, and Zip Comics in February. These titles featured a cast of heroic characters similar to those in other comic books of the period -- The Shield (the first patriotic comic book superhero), The Black Hood, Steel Sterling, Mr. Justice, The Comet, The Rocket, Captain Valor, Kardak the Mystic Magician, Swift of the Secret Service, and so on. None of the MLJ costumed crime fighters achieved the success enjoyed by rival publishers with Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Captain America.
And then in late 1941, MLJ published the first story about the character who would make the company’s fortune. Archie Andrews, the irrepressible freckle-faced carrot-topped teenager, debuted in the back pages of Pep Comics with issue No. 22, and, almost simultaneously, in Jackpot Comics No. 4, both titles dated December 1941.
Drawn by cartoonist Bob Montana, Archie quickly became the most popular character in the MLJ line-up and would eventually become the archetypal American teenager. Within a year, he was starring in his own comic book title, and on May 31, 1943, the radio program, “The Adventures of Archie Andrews,” began (to continue, on different networks, until September 1953). A newspaper comic strip version, produced by Montana, started in early 1946 and ran through the rest of the century and, as we’ve seen, into the next.
In 1946, the publishing company officially became Archie Comics Publications. Archie subsequently appeared in a television animated cartoon series (1969-77) and in two live-action television movies. For a brief time in the 1970s, the character lent his name to a chain of restaurants.
In early 1950s, as the nation experienced an increase in juvenile crime, an assortment of critics, psychiatric and literary and political, charged that comic book stories bred youthful miscreants. Alarmed as the critics appeared to enlist greater and greater public support (particularly in governmental bodies with the power to produce controlling legislation), comic book publishers formed an organization to censor their product of objectionable content. The Comics Magazine Association of America was incorporated in September 1954 with Goldwater as President.
“I was its prime founder,” Goldwater said. “Its purpose was to adopt a code of ethics to eliminate editorial and advertising material which was inimical to the best interests of the comic book industry as well as its readers. I ... succeeded in cooperation with industry leaders to quell the uproar and eliminate legislation which it is said could have put the comics industry in dire straits if not out of business altogether” (quoted in Mary Smith’s The Best of Betty and Veronica Summer Fun).
The CMAA’s chief function was to review in advance of publication every page of every comic book produced by its member publishers to assure that all comic books obeyed the Comics Code.
Goldwater was one of the principal authors of the Code, which consisted of forty-one prohibitions concerning the portrayal of crime, violence, religion, sex, horror, nudity, and the like in both editorial and advertising pages. (“No unique or unusual methods of concealing weapons shall be shown”; “Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.”)
The Comics Code soon drove out of the industry several comic book publishers whose product could not pass the review and still retain its essential appeal. (The most celebrated of these was EC Comics, which had inaugurated an industry-wide trend of horror comic books. Bill Gaines, EC’s publisher, more than once rather strenuously suggested that it was to put EC Comics out of business, more than any other motive, that inspired Goldwater, who was, if we are to judge from Gaines’ remark, the prime censorship mover that he claimed he was.)
Goldwater served as CMAA president for twenty-five years until he voluntarily relinquished the office, whereupon the board of directors created the position of Chairman of the Board, in which capacity Goldwater served for several years.
ALTHOUGH THE QUESTION of who created Archie is clouded by rival claims from Montana and Goldwater, it may be that both contributed to the conception of the character that became the cornerstone of the publishing company. In Archie Comics own version of its history, Goldwater is credited with inventing the characters and Montana with visualizing them.
Goldwater usually pointed to his teenaged experiences in Hiawatha, Kansas, as the foundation for his vision of teenage life: as reporter for the local paper, he covered the high school athletic contests, which, in small town Hiawatha, were among the chief entertainments of the citizenry.
Montana, on the other hand, points to his high school career at Haverhill, Massachusetts, where he encountered many people who later became characters in Archie. And the Thinker statue outside Archie’s Riverdale High School is a direct borrowing from Haverhill High.
Goldwater says the “catalyst” for Archie was Superman. “Archie was created,” he told Mary Smith, “as the antithesis to Superman -- ordinary believable people with a background of humor instead of superheroes with powers beyond that of any normal being. Innumerable sleepless nights, dreaming and writing and rewriting characters that could catch the public’s fancy as Superman had was not just an ‘idea’ but a conscious appraisal of my experiences in the Middle West, California, and elsewhere. I had gone to school with a boy named Archie who was always in trouble with girls, parents, at school, etc.”
This notion seems at pretty severe odds with the usual supposition (mine, and I’m not alone) that Archie was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of such contemporary teenage heroes as Andy Hardy in the movies (sixteen of them, 1937-1948) and Henry Aldridge on radio (1939-1953). Still, MLJ hadn’t had any success with the superhero genre, so Goldwater might well have been looking into other more ordinary crannies for inspiration.
To suppose, for the nonce, that in this dispute, as in most such contests, each side has possession of a part of the truth, we can construct a situation that gives both sides credit for some part of the creation. Perhaps it went something like this:
Montana (according to his daughter quoting her mother) had been sketching ideas for a teenage comic strip for some years before he began freelancing with MLJ Comics in 1941. He presented his idea for a strip about four teenage boys to Goldwater, who was looking for a feature about teenagers (probably inspired, as I say, by the popularity of Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich).
Goldwater then suggested that the cast be reduced to two boys, Archie and Jughead (Forsythe P. Jones), and, ostensibly drawing upon his own youthful adventures in the West with the opposing sex, he directed Montana to add a romantic interest, who was Betty Cooper. Vic Bloom reportedly wrote the first story, perhaps guided somewhat by the Popular Comics character, Wally Williams, who had a sidekick named Jughead. (Ron Goulart told me that Wally Williams was written by a Vic Boni, who, he supposes, could have been Bloom writing under another name.) (Or vice versa.)
Veronica was missing from the initial appearances of the feature, but subsequently, after the first or second story, we may suppose that Goldwater recommended that Archie’s love-life be complicated by a rival to Betty (again, as Goldwater implied, relying upon his memories of his own escapades with blondes and brunettes in tandem). This was Veronica Lodge, a dark-haired vamp in contrast to Betty’s blonde wholesomeness. Veronica was named after a movie star, Veronica Lake, who was a blonde, not a brunette, and famously combed her hair so it covered one eye and that half of her face.
With the arrival of Veronica in April 1942, the stage was set for what became the feature’s chief plot mechanism -- the competition between the two girls for Archie’s favors, a canny reversal of the traditional competition in which two men vie for one woman. (The sort of reversed configuration that Goldwater -- again according to Goldwater -- had apparently found himself in frequently. Known out West, he says, as “Broadway” because of his New York origins, he seemingly regularly attracted the affections of at least two girls at the same time.) In the comics, Archie complicated the reversal by not being able to make up his mind which of the girls he desired most.
MAYBE, HOWEVER, IT WAS NOTHING LIKE THIS. I asked around in various places to find out if any living witnesses could be found who recalled the creation of Archie and company. Jay Maeder kept my request in mind and was able, eventually, to provide the following:
“Met a gent named Joe Edwards at a cartoonist function yesterday, and, as he turned out to be a very early MLJ guy who said he'd been around at Archie's creation, I picked his brain a little. And he sez: One day he and Bob Montana were called in by John Goldwater and instructed to whip up something new, market-wise, something totally unlike all the costumed-superhero stuff flooding the stands. Whereupon he and Montana sat down and created Archie and the whole cast of characters. This was the entire sum and substance of Goldwater's contribution. In short, Goldwater had nothing to do with it. Not only did he not specify an Archie-like character, he never even specified teenage humor. All he wanted was non-superhero.
“RE the story Goldwater told about his having hitchhiked around the country and gotten into some small-town trouble over the local Indian babes, this ostensibly being the genesis of Reggie [and of Betty and Veronica]: Edwards says he's heard that story many, many times, and it's a total crock. How self-serving Edwards' own version might be, I can't say. He didn't seem to be a braggart or a blusterer (unlike JG, for example), and his Bails listing supports the career history he gave me. Anyway, for what it's worth, here's a primary-source reminiscence for ya.”
David Allen’s introduction to the Archie Sundays book repeats the company line, saying: “Goldwater told the young Montana of his Archie character and asked him to develop the visuals.”
In the PROfiles interview, Montana goes along with this, crediting Goldwater with conceiving of a comic book feature about teenagers. But this 1970 interview was published whilst Montana was still, in effect, an employee of Archie Comics -- and Goldwater was very much alive -- so he must needs quote the company line or risk losing his job.
Said Montana: “John thought of the name ‘Archie,’ and together we worked it out. I created the characters and developed it.”
He’s still allowing for the company line but coyly glossing over who created what -- “together we worked it out.” Having allowed as much as he did to Goldwater, he then takes the greater credit: “I created the characters and developed it.”
I don’t think there’s any doubt that Montana invented Archie and the Riverdale gang. Or, to put it another way, I don’t think there’s much but doubt about the Goldwater version of the creation of Archie et al.
Montana greatly enjoyed his high school years, and he admits that he perpetuated them in Archie.
“In Archie,” he told Hurd, “I’ve drawn heavily on teachers and characters I met at that time. I’ve never admitted this though -- I wouldn’t want to get sued.”
MONTANA WAS BORN INTO VAUDEVILLE on October 23, 1920: his mother was a Siegfeld Follies dancer and his father did a cowboy and banjo act in which the young Montana and his sister sang harmony. “I did rope tricks, and she did a buck-and-wing.”
From the age of four, Montana traveled with his family on vaudeville’s Keith Circuit. Impressed by Frederic Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, he drew cartoons from an early age. “I would draw a lot in order to while away the long hours we spent on the train [going from place to place on the Circuit] and in dressing rooms. My parents encouraged me.”
When vaudeville died in 1929, the family went into the restaurant business in Boston. “I did murals on the walls of a night club we ran,” Montana told Hurd.
Montana took some courses in art but nothing in cartooning.
While traipsing around the Circuit, Montana said, “my schooling consisted of taking the Calvert Course, which was a correspondence course for professional children traveling on the road. My mother worked with me on the lessons, which went up to the ninth grade.”
Later, he studied sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston.
“This was at a point where I got sidetracked from cartooning and thought I wanted to be an illustrator.”
But that didn’t last long. After his father’s death, Montana went to New York and put himself through the Phoenix Art Institute on Madison Avenue. In addition, he went to the Art Students League and took Life Drawing and other “serious” courses.
But his interest in cartooning re-emerged, and, realizing at last that he had to make a living, he found a position at MLJ Magazines. “You see, I had to eat,” he explained.
And soon after that, Goldwater supposedly directed him to develop a feature about teenagers.
Montana left MLJ Magazines in late 1942 for military service in World War II.
“Archie had become a hit and they kept it going while I was away,” he recalled.
When Montana returned to civilian life and MLJ in 1946, it was deemed time to introduced Archie to newspaper readers and Montana was given the job. While Montana was solely responsible for the newspaper comic strip version of Archie until his death in 1975, Goldwater continued to oversee the operation of Archie’s fate in an ever-lengthening list of teenage comic book titles from Archie Comics.
IDW’s COMPANION ARCHIE VOLUME for the daily strips prints three strips to a 9x11-inch page; facing pages thus make up a whole week, Monday through Saturday. The book prints all the strips consecutively, starting with the first Archie on Monday, February 4, 1946, and ending with the strip for Saturday, October 16, 1948. In appearance, the strips didn’t change much in this roughly two-and-a-half year stretch. Montana’s line was perhaps a little bolder in 1948 than it was in 1946, but not much: his pictures were always confidently rendered with a clean flexible line and no hachuring.
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While Archie’s wardrobe almost never changes, it’s clear that Montana worked to keep Betty and Veronica attired in the latest teenage fashions.
The strip was a gag-a-day venture, but initially Montana ran a storyline to string the gags together for at least a week of continuity, sometimes as much as a month. In the 1950s, he gave up on continuities and stuck to a gag-a-day.
Montana added that in recent years, he’s started slipping a little satirical commentary into the strip. “I want it to say something,” he said. “I’m trying to make the strip more contemporary and am slyly injecting some social comment wherever I can.”
The book ends with a long essay by Maggie Thompson about the pulp magazine industry out of which MLJ Magazines, Archie’s birthplace, developed. She concentrates on the career of Louis Silberkleit (the “L” in MLJ).
Touching briefly on the creation of Archie, she maintains the company myth that Goldwater created the character. Her essay is accompanied by rare illustrative material -- including the splash page of a realistic comicbook mystery feature that Montana drew and a photograph of several of the MLJ artists.
In his Introduction to the volume, Greg Goldstein correctly notices the “kinetic energy” of the strips. Characters are always active physically, and the jokes often depend upon the pictures. Remembering Montana’s youth in vaudeville, Goldstein says it’s “clear that those early childhood influences of slapstick and pratfall defined his work.”
Goldstein goes on to note that “it is here in the daily strips that we see Archie and his gang evolve. Archie himself, at first, seems like he descended from the same family tree that Alfred E. Newman would ultimately emerge from. Within a few short months, however, he morphs into the more recognizable ‘every kid’ we know today.” (But I think Goldstein means Alfred E. Neuman, Mad’s mascot with a ‘u’ not a ‘w.’)
“Much of Montana’s genius is in his ability as a storyteller,” Goldstein says, “ -- he also packed each strip with a lot of funny sight gags. In the Cartoonist PROfiles article, Montana explains:
“The only way I could think of to compete with all the other great cartoonists would be to try to have as many things going for me in the strip as possible ... I would throw away gags throughout a Sunday page, for instance, and didn’t just concentrate on one gag at the end of the page.”
If anyone besides Dan DeCarlo, who established the visual style of Archie (Montana’s style), kept Archie alive all these years, it was Bob Montana, who also created the character.
[post_title] => Who Really Invented the Comic Character 'Archie'?
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Funnies Farrago reveals who, actually, invented Archie. THE COMIC BOOK Archie is so durable an American cultural artifact that it is surprising to discover that the newspaper comic … Read more
President levels the most brutal of sanctions yet on Putin: No more political humor for you!
SNN political correspondent Proppah Ghandah reports that President Biden has cancelled Vladimir Putin's subscription to Humor Times magazine as a major part of the personal sanctions levied against the Russian dictator.
[caption id="attachment_98752" align="alignleft" width="400"] Putin will miss it, but luckily, the entire free world can still subscribe.[/caption]
Officials at Humor Times headquarters stated that in protest of the Ukrainian invasion, they will not refund Putin's subscription payment. They also stated that because Putin paid in Russian Rubles, his subscription is only worth six cents.
It has been further reported that Putin's subscriptions to TV Guide and Better Homes and Gardens were also cancelled.
Other personal sanctions levied against Mr. Putin include:
He cannot date Martha Raddatz, Jen Psaki or Whoopi Goldberg.
He is forbidden to make March Madness TV commercials with Spike Lee, Charles Barkley and Samuel L Jackson.
He cannot appear on The View or Fox News Channel.
His Sling TV subscription was cancelled.
His membership in The Ukrainian Vodka of the Month club was revoked.
Major League Baseball has cancelled the 2022 season so Putin cannot throw out the first pitch at The New York Mets home opener.
The World Health Organization will declare Putin a pandemic.
In a related story, SNN Moscow correspondent Roscoe Siberia reports that Mr. Putin is dispatching his personal assassin Ludmilla The Thrilla to Humor Times headquarters to get his subscription back.
[post_title] => In Latest Round of Sanctions, Biden Cancels Putin's Subscription to Humor Times
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Dispatches from SNN (Slobovian News Network) President levels the most brutal of sanctions yet on Putin: No more political humor for you! SNN political correspondent Proppah Ghandah reports … Read more
How Charles Schulz and his Peanuts strip re-shaped the comics medium.
When he announced his retirement after producing a comic strip every day, seven days a week, for almost fifty years, the face of his creation appeared on the cover of Newsweek.
When Charles M. Schulz died a heartbreakingly scant two months later, his face was on the cover of People magazine.
The cover treatment in both instances was a dramatic manifestation of the immensely popular appeal of Schulz’s comic strip,Peanuts: magazine publishers don’t put faces on their covers unless they’re pretty certain the faces will sell magazines.
Schulz sold.
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And in this demonstration of his prowess, we find ample testimony to the enduring potency of newspaper comic strips: no single comic strip can attain such heights unless comic strips generally are enormously popular with the reading public.
Even that staid gray lady of the Big Apple, The New York Times, recognized the Peanuts power: the announcement of Schulz’s death at the age of 77 appeared on page one and jumped inside to an unprecedented two-page spread. And the Times, as a matter of policy, doesn’t even publish comic strips.
The last new Peanuts strip was published on Sunday, February 13, 2000. Schulz, ever the master of timing, died the night before. The coincidence was staggering and provoked awed comment everywhere. Diane Iselin, a spokeswoman for Schulz’s syndicate, said: “It’s almost as if he couldn’t bear to live without creating Peanuts every day.”
Certainly Sparky (as everyone who knew him called him) hadn’t stopped doing his comic strip willingly. Diagnosed with colon cancer and suffering from the after effects of several small strokes, he no longer had the energy to produce comedy on deadline. Shortly after he announced his retirement in December 1999, Schulz was interviewed on the Today show.
“I never dreamed that this would happen to me,” he said. “I always had the feeling that I would stay with the strip until I was in my early eighties -- or something like that. But all of a sudden it’s gone. It’s been taken away from me. I did not take it away. This was taken away from me,” he finished, his voice cracking.
Schulz received many awards and honors during his long career -- including, twice, the Reuben for “outstanding cartoonist of the year” from the National Cartoonists Society. And he was posthumously awarded the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award from NCS at its Reuben Banquet on May 27, 2000.
But all these awards and honors pale in significance beside the world-wide affection and regard that his comic strip enkindled. Thousands conveyed their best wishes and gratitude in cards and letters sent to Schulz upon his retirement.
During that Today interview, Schulz expressed his astonishment at his fame and the admiration he inspired among his readers and colleagues. “It is amazing that they think that what I do was that good,” he said haltingly, his voice quavering. “I just did the best I could,” he finished, nearly breaking down.
His best turned out to be so very good that it ushered in the Age of Schulz.
Peanuts broke new ground in newspaper comic strips. The sense of humor on display in Schulz’s strip was different, more subtle, than could be found elsewhere on the comics pages when it first appeared (in a paltry seven newspapers on October 2, 1950). Even the drawings in Peanuts added a new dimension to comic strip art -- a minimalist simplicity that would become its most imitated aspect. But the name of the strip, that was something else.
“Peanuts is the worst title ever thought up for a comic strip,” Schulz said on numerous occasions. The strip was christened by the editors at United Feature Syndicate, who didn’t like Schulz’s name for it. (Moreover, Li’l Folks, his original title, evoked Li’l Abner, another United strip, and it was too much like the name of a retired strip, Little Folks, by Tack Knight.)
The syndicate editors thought Peanuts was the perfect name for an all-kids strip. (And it fit their marketing scheme perfectly, too, as we’ll soon see.) But Schulz hated the title and resented it his entire career.
“I don’t even like the word,” he said. “It’s not a nice word. It’s totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity. And I think my humor has dignity. The strip I was going to draw I thought would have dignity. It would have class. They didn’t know when I walked in there that here was a fanatic. Here was a kid totally dedicated to what he was going to do. And then to label something that was going to be a life’s work with a name like Peanuts was really insulting.”
Born November 26, 1922, Schulz grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, the shy and only son of a barber. He took a course in art from a correspondence school, the Federal School, based in Minneapolis. And during World War II, he was drafted and served overseas in the infantry. After V-J Day, he returned to the Twin Cities and took a position with the Federal School, now called Art Instruction School, correcting student mailed-in lessons.
He freelanced in his spare time, lettering comic strips for a locally-produced Catholic magazine and, eventually, producing a cartoon feature called Li’l Folks for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The feature ran once a week, a collection of single-panel cartoons about the antics of little children who seemed a bit more sophisticated than most cartoon children.
The kids were cute because of the way Schulz drew them. They were all tiny, and Schulz distorted proportions -- giving them round heads as big as their bodies -- which made them seem even more diminutive. And tiny was cute.
Schulz was also sending cartoons to national magazines. He broke into The Saturday Evening Post with the submission of a single drawing of a small boy who was seated on the end of a chaise longue, dwarfed by the expanse of the seating arrangements, in order to prop his feet up on a footstool.
While submitting gag cartoons to magazines, Schulz also submitted ideas for feature cartoons to syndicates. Early in 1950, United Feature indicated interest in Li’l Folks, and when Schulz journeyed to New York for a conference, they decided a strip format would be better than the panel format.
The editors saw in Schulz’s tiny figures a novel marketing ploy. At the time, newspaper editors were restive about the amount of precious newsprint paper they devoted to comic strips every day and were looking for ways to reduce the size of comic strips. Because Schulz’s characters were small, the editors decided to tailor the strip’s dimensions to the kids’ size -- a maneuver that would, they believed, appeal to editors seeking to conserve space.
Schulz’s strip would have the same horizontal dimension as all strips but would be shallower vertically. It would therefore take less room. And then the editors added yet another marketing ingredient: the strip should always be drawn in four equal-sized panels. This arrangement would give editors great flexibility in running the strip. They could run the strip in one column with the four panels stacked vertically, or they could divide the strip in half, the first two panels stacked on top of the other two panels, and run it as a two-column box.
The syndicate’s promotional brochure for the strip touted these aspects of the strip’s design -- and its tiny size. “The Greatest Little Sensation Since Tom Thumb!” the brochure trumpeted. For such a feature, Peanuts was the perfect title. “Peanuts” suggested something small.
To Schulz, it suggested something insignificant -- ”something with no color,” he muttered, “or else it might be the nickname of a ball player or some little kid.” He pointed out that readers would assume the strip was named after one of the characters: “They’re going to confuse Charlie Brown with the name.”
The editors assured him that wouldn’t happen.
“Then throughout the first year,” Schulz said, “I got letters saying, I love this new strip with Peanuts and his dog. Geez!”
The editors mistakenly supposed that “peanuts” was a common term for little children. This astonishingly wrong-headed conclusion was not based upon anything in their own life experiences, apparently; instead, it was drawn entirely from a popular kids’ television program of the day, The Howdy Doody Show. The show’s principals were marionettes, and the puppet show was performed before a live studio audience of children. The audience seating area was called “the peanut gallery” by everyone on the show, and every time “the peanut gallery” was mentioned, all the kids cheered with gusto.
Schulz wasn’t convinced; he knew kids are never called “peanuts.”
Despite the gimmicky packaging, the strip got off to a slow start. But after a year, it was picking up client papers steadily. And it continued to increase circulation through the decade. Then in the 1960s, it took off.
By the mid-1950s, Schulz had found his footing. He had begun to develop the idiosyncratic personalities of his characters. Charlie Brown had become the archetypal mid-century American man in search of his identity, and his dog Snoopy had started to fantasize an assortment of human roles for himself. Schroeder had established Beethoven as the strip’s icon. And Lucy Van Pelt had made a name for herself as a world-class fuss budget.
Reflecting on the strip’s development, Schulz said: “When Lucy came into the strip, around the second year, she didn’t do much at first. She came in as a cute little girl, and at first she was patterned after our own first daughter. She said a lot of cute, tiny kid things, but I grew out of that whole `tiny’ world quickly, and that’s when the strip started to catch on. ... As Charlie Brown got more defensive, as Snoopy [became] a different kind of dog, as Lucy started to develop her own strong personality, I realized I was really on to something different. And I think the security blanket really was the major breakthrough.”
Linus, Lucy’s baby brother, didn’t talk when he first appeared in the strip; he was too young. But as he grew older, he talked plenty -- profoundly, even: he became the strip’s scholarly idealist and philosopher. En route, he clutched his flannel baby blanket and sucked his thumb. And when Schulz called it a “security blanket,” he added a term to the American lexicon and struck a chord with readers everywhere. Suddenly, everyone was identifying with one or more of the Peanuts gang.
In 1962, Schulz produced a book of aphorisms called Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. It was an immediate bestseller, confirming a growing suspicion: the American public had Peanuts mania.
In April 1965, Time did a cover story on Schulz and his strip (April 9). And in October, Snoopy climbed on top of his doghouse and flew it into the skies of World War I for epic battles with the Red Baron. The list of subscribing newspapers grew by leaps. And then that Christmas, the first television special was unveiled, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Peanuts was undeniably big time. By the early 1990s, the strip was being published in over 2,000 newspapers in 68 countries; by the end of the decade, the number reached 2,600 worldwide. It’s hard to imagine there being any more newspapers than that.
There have been 30 television specials, 4 feature films, and an off-Broadway play, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” And Schulz, thanks to the merchandizing of his characters, was many times over a millionaire.
Schulz retained direct control over the licensing, personally approving every use of every image of his characters. Despite this inherent roadblock to saturation merchandising, the Peanuts gang was ubiquitous. Charlie Brown and Snoopy -- particularly Snoopy -- were everywhere, even, eventually, around the moon with the astronauts. The Age of Schulz is distinguished as much by this wholly commercial aspect of Schulz’s work as by the simplicity of his drawing style and the uniqueness of his sense of humor.
Peanuts was unquestionably the world’s most popular comic strip. And its popularity made it a candidate for imitation.
In spite of the strip’s undeniable originality, Peanuts has served as a model for a great variety of new strips. Aspects of it can be easily aped. The “show” in Peanuts, albeit brilliant, is not as obvious a dazzling and highly individual combination of ingredients as is, say, Pogo. For one thing, the surface elements of Peanuts, its most apparent features, lend themselves easily to adaptation by others, who shape those elements into an expression of their own talents.
Once the strip became popular, its simple graphic treatment began to set a new fashion for gag strips. Gag strips had always been drawn in the comic rather than the illustrative manner, but even comic characters bore more resemblance to real people than do the characters in Peanuts with their tiny bodies and big, round heads. Like Mort Walker, whose Beetle Bailey debuted only a month before Peanuts and achieved, for a time, an equivalent circulation, Schulz drew in a “magazine cartoon style,” but his work was more abstract at the start than Walker’s.
Since Peanuts, a number of gag strips have been drawn with similarly stylized simplicity, often so simple as to appear crude. The unfortunate fact about simple drawing styles is that clumsy, inept drawing ability seems, to the unsophisticated artistic eye of most newspaper editors, to be just another variety of simplicity. So pretty soon the funnies were awash in strips drawn in a minimalist manner, often little more than primitive scrawls with no redeeming aesthetic quality at all.
The humor of Peanuts also set new standards. Almost from its beginning, the strip appeared quite simply to be about children who often spoke in a remarkably adult way. The humor arose from the dichotomy between the speakers and what they said, between the visual and the verbal presentations.
To this, Schulz brought a unique cast of characters, each with a distinct personality trait or quirk that offered additional possibilities for variation on the initial themes. Schroeder had fixation on Beethoven. Lucy was a chronic complainer. “Pig Pen” was a kid who couldn’t stay clean: no matter what he did, he wound up dirty from head to toe. And Charlie Brown was a loser. But he didn’t start that way.
“I didn’t know he was going to lose all the time,” Schulz once said. “He certainly wasn’t [at first] the victim [he became]. When he began, he had a personality a lot like Linus. He was slightly flippant, a kind of bouncy little character. He was able to come back with a wise saying to the other characters.”
But Charlie Brown was unpopular from the very beginning. He was often annoyingly clever. And he wanted to be “perfect,” as he sometimes confessed. And from these ingredients, Schulz eventually fashioned the epitome of the loser, Charlie Brown the culture hero.
Schulz could parlay the personalities of his cast into strings of gags. A given situation -- say, Linus getting ready to leave for summer camp -- can be presented for several days, and on each day, a different character reacts to the situation in his own individualistic way. This method, in turn, lends itself to the creation of “set pieces” that can be repeated with endless permutations.
Schulz once identified twelve such devices, routines to which he attributes the popularity of the strip: (1) the kite-eating tree that frustrates Charlie Brown’s every attempt to fly a kite; (2) Schroeder’s music, the elaborate visual of a stanza of classical music, and Beethoven; (3) Lucy’s psychiatry booth from which the fuss budget delivers her pragmatic and unsympathetic advice; (4) Snoopy’s doghouse, the vehicle for the beagle’s over-active imagination; (5) Snoopy himself, another example of a second banana taking over a strip; (6) the bird Wood-stock, Snoopy’s second banana; (7) the Red Baron, which symbolizes Snoopy’s emergence into stardom; (8) the baseball games that Charlie Brown always loses; (9) kicking a football, an annual exercise in which Lucy tricks Charlie Brown into trying to kick the football she holds then yanks it away at the last moment, landing the hapless Charlie Brown flat on his back; (10) the Great Pumpkin, Linus’s yearly search for confirmation of his spiritual sincerity; (11) the little red-haired girl with whom Charlie Brown is hopelessly in love; and (12) Linus’s blanket.
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Much of the humor in Peanuts arises from ordinary, trifling daily incidents. It is with this aspect of the strip that Schulz believes he did something new. “I introduced the slight incident,” he said. “I can remember creating it sitting at the desk ... what would happen in the three panels that I was drawing at that time was a very brief and slight incident. No one had ever done that before in comic strips. Older kid strips were of the `What shall we do today?’ school. I changed all of that. I remember telling a friend that I knew I was really on to something good.”
Percy Crosby in his great kid strip Skippy had done something similar, Schulz acknowledges; but Crosby’s kids haven’t the idiosyncratic personalities that Schulz’s kids have.
The “slight incident” acquires comic impact only in conjunction with the pronounced personality of one of the strip’s characters. Until Schulz showed how to combine these elements with a different emphasis, gag strip humor had been chiefly situational: the comedy sprang more from the situation than the characters. The characters had personalities, and they behaved “in character” in whatever situation they were placed, but the emphasis was on the situation.
Schulz shifted the focus. He showed his characters reacting to the most mundane situations imaginable, and because their personalities were so convincingly developed, he could create comedy. When Charlie Brown coaches Linus in penmanship and Linus demonstrates an impressive calligraphic style at his first try, the incident (using a pen for the first time) is less important to the humor than Linus’ personality (he’s a unqualified genius, expert at anything he may put his hand to).
In similar fashion, Schulz can wring laughter out of Snoopy scowling at Lucy or licking her face, or Linus’s shoelaces being too tight. And once Schulz had demonstrated how singular personalities can generate humor in a strip, other cartoonists began mining the same terrain.
While the essential element of the strip’s humor arises from the contrast between the world of children and that of adults, the charm of Peanuts and its introspective greatness lies not in its pointing to the difference between adults and children, but in its emphasizing the similarity.
Charlie Brown and his friends may sound precocious, but the strip nonetheless preserves the innocence, the dreams, and the aspirations as well as the trials and insecurities of childhood. Peanuts makes childhood universal without making it adult -- as does Miss Peach, for example, in which the precocious kids sometimes sound as cynical as we are led to believe all adults become. In Peanuts, the kids never become cynical.
The achievement at the source of Peanuts’ appeal is the trick Schulz plays with the very nature of his medium. The pictures show us small children. But their speech reveals that they are infected with fairly adult insecurities and quirks and other often disheartening preoccupations. The dichotomy between picture and word permits us to laugh about heartbreak.
Because the Peanuts characters are kids, their personality flaws don’t seem all that important to us. Kids’ problems are always relatively trivial compared to grown-ups’ problems. As adults, we tend to dismiss kids’ problems. Or we chuckle because those problems seem so monumental to the kids plagued by them. We -- older and wiser -- see that these problems are actually small problems. We understand that they will go away.
Even as we chuckle at the Peanuts gang, however, we realize that the same preoccupations that haunt them often haunt us as adults. Because these are kids, we can see the humor in their dilemmas. And because we can recognize their dilemmas as ours, we can see the humor in our predicaments, too. Before we know it, we are laughing at ourselves. With a giggle, we put our cares behind us (or beside us) and go on with our lives.
That’s how Schulz worked his trick. And he worked it so well that it made his comic strip the most famous comic strip in the world.
Besides that, his kids, with their big round heads and lilliputian bodies, are just plain funny-looking. And that makes their having problems all the more hilarious: that these goofy-looking characters could have real-life problems is incongruous and therefore funny.
If it weren’t for the funny pictures -- and the comedy that is born in the dichotomy of pictures and words -- Peanuts would be pretty discouraging. Charlie Brown never gets a Valentine from the little red-haired girl; his baseball team never wins; his kite never flies. On the basis of this evidence, we have a strip about unrequited love and unrealized aspiration.
But Charlie Brown always comes back. Every fall, he tries to kick that football once again -- knowing, no doubt (how could he not?), that Lucy will snatch it away at the last minute and that he (and his ambition) will come crashing down one more time.
And so the strip is also about human resilience and hope, hope that rises again like a phoenix from the ashes of each and every disappointment.
Against this somewhat ordinary and certainly unglamorous assessment of the human condition, Schulz balances the fantasy life of Snoopy, whose seeming brilliant success at every endeavor reassures us that life is not only about disappointment and endurance: it is also about dreams and the sustaining power of the imagination.
Snoopy embodies the strip’s constantly questing spirit better than any of the other characters. During the sixties, Snoopy rose to such prominence that he threatened to take over the strip. The humor here springs from the dog’s preoccupation with pursuits normally followed by humans; again, a dichotomy is at the core of the mechanism. And, again, it is the dichotomy of the non-sequitur: from the evidence presented to our eyes (a dog), it does not follow that we will be witnessing activity usually associated with humans (flying an airplane, writing a novel).
We were not always privileged to know Snoopy’s thoughts. At first, he was a dog like all dogs. He barked; he didn’t write novels. But then, he began thinking. He thought about how much he disliked being a dog. He tried being other animals -- an alligator, a kangaroo, a lion lurking in the tall grass. Then he began doing imitations of humans -- of Lucy, Violet, even Beethoven. Before long, he was walking on his hind legs. And then he started flying his doghouse into dogfights with the Red Baron.
Mort Walker watched Snoopy’s development into something other than a beagle with growing dismay -- then wonderment.
“When Charlie Schulz first did Snoopy in a helmet sitting on top of the doghouse pretending he was fighting the Red Baron, I thought Schulz was going to ruin the strip. I could believe Snoopy sitting up there sort of pretending or imagining he was a vulture or something, but where did he get the helmet? What does a dog know about World War I or the Red Baron? And then he showed bullet holes in the dog house. I said, Good golly -- this has gone beyond the pale. Then when it became so popular, I said, It just shows you -- comics, as Rube Goldberg used to say, are an individual effort that is so beyond explaining that nobody could ever mastermind it.”
Schulz sees Snoopy as the fantasy element of the strip. “He is the image of what people would like a dog to be,” he told Time. Maybe not all people; maybe just children. In his role playing, Snoopy clearly does what little kids normally do: he imagines adventures in which he is the hero.
His charm, Schulz recognizes, resides in the child-like combination of innocence and egotism that define his personality and propel him into new and unlikely circumstances again and again. He never tires, never gives up. And neither does Charlie Brown.
Despite Snoopy’s bid for stardom in the strip, the strong personalities of the other characters kept reasserting themselves. And Schulz kept inventing more distinctive personalities -- Peppermint Patty, Marci, Sally, Rerun. But he always came back to Charlie Brown.
“All the ideas on how poor old Charlie Brown can lose give me great satisfaction,” Schulz once said. “But of course his reactions to all of this are equally important. He just keeps fighting back. He just keeps trying. And I guess that particular theme has caught the imagination of a lot of people nowadays. We all need the feeling that somebody really likes us. And I’m very proud that somehow all these ideas about Charlie Brown’s struggle might help in some very small way.”
Schulz was quite aware of his influence on his profession -- particularly with respect to visual imagery. We talked about it briefly during the only time I ever spent with him -- about the trend of simple drawing in comic strips that he had inaugurated.
“I’m not so sure it’s a good thing,” he said with a smile.
For Schulz, however, Peanuts was a very good thing indeed.
The venerated Editor & Publisher, the newspaperman’s trade mag, published a special supplement to its issue of October 30, 1999. The special issue named the “25 most influential newspaper people of the 20th century,” including such legendary figures as Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Robert McCormick, Joseph Patterson, William Allen White, H. L. Mencken. Pulitzer is credited with giving newspaper journalism a social mission, crusading always for reform and progress, and against injustice, demagoguery, and corruption. Hearst, in contrast, practiced journalism according to his belief that the public “is more fond of entertainment than it is of information.” Over the century, Hearst’s way has doubtless won out.
It was the Pulitzer-Hearst circulation battles of the mid-1890s that saw the coining of the term “yellow journalism” for their particular brand of sensation-mongering in search of a newsstand nickel. The two papers enlisted a comic character, Richard F. Outcault’s famed Yellow Kid, in their battles, each paper touting its Sunday comic section’s stellar creation as an attraction. Yellow Kid posters were everywhere promoting both papers. So bystanders to this fray began calling the newspapers “the Yellow Kid journals,” then just “the yellow journals.” And by subsequent evolution, the kind of journalism practiced in them became known as “yellow journalism.”
None of this is quite beside the point because the point is that the E&P’s “top 25" includes two cartoonists -- Herbert Block, the celebrated editorial cartoonist, and Charles Schulz.
This is a signal event. That a couple of newspaper cartoonists are viewed by the trade’s bible as influential at all -- let alone being among the twenty-five “most influential newspaper people of the century” -- is a trumpet blast about the importance of cartooning. We all know it’s important, us cartoonery types and fans of the medium. But to have E&P proclaim it to its hundreds of newspaper editor readers is a stunning confirmation of what we’ve all maintained.
Not that there’s anything very new about it. Pulitzer knew it. Hearst knew it. They knew that their Sunday comics were selling newspapers. And every periodical publisher in this country knows that Scott Adams’ Dilbert is doing the same thing. It’s the thing comics have been doing since the very beginning.
But sometimes editors forget. In their dogged pursuit of DNA codes in dress stains and cocaine busts in ancient Texas, they forget. So it’s nice that E&P should remind newspaper editors about the importance of cartooning.
In recognizing Schulz’s place in this E&P pantheon, Lynn Johnston (of For Better or For Worse) writes about her friend, idol, and mentor. In putting a finger on Peanuts’ appeal, Johnston says Schulz “had the courage to talk about loneliness and loss, about disappointment and anger. In so doing, he profoundly influenced a new generation of comic artists and readers as well. It was rebellion in reverse; impact with understatement and an honesty that healed even when it hurt.”
Perhaps “unwittingly,” she goes on, Schulz “helped to unlock a nation’s inhibitions. ... He made us look at and into ourselves. ... Until this funny, gentle, and simply drawn work came to be a part of our culture, we didn’t talk too openly about deep personal feelings. You were a failure if you did.”
Among the inky fingered fraternity of his colleagues, Schulz is, quite simply, revered. Many of today’s cartoonists ply their craft because he counseled them with advice and encouragement. If he didn’t touch them personally, he nonetheless inspired them with the example of his work.
Said Doonesbury’s creator, Garry Trudeau: “While the public at large regards Peanuts as a cherished part of our shared popular culture, cartoonists also see it as an irreplaceable source of purpose and pride, our gold standard for work that is both illuminating and aesthetically sublime. Schulz completely revolutionized the art form, deepening it, filling it with possibility, giving permission to all who followed to write from the heart and the intellect.”
Schulz had his bad days, like all of us. He could snap at people for no apparent reason. “That’s the Lucy in me,” he might say afterwards in apology.
For the most part, however, no one could tell from his demeanor that he was fabulously wealthy and famous. As Greg Evans (creator of Luann) once said: “He never made you feel like you had to pay any dues to relate to him as a fellow cartoonist.”
What Lynn Johnston doesn’t say in her essay, though, is that Peanuts was the first of the big box-office successes of the present era in licensing comics. The Age of Schulz is characterized as much by the extensive merchandising of comic strip characters as it is by the deceptive simplicity of a drawing style that many other cartoonists tried, some less adeptly than others, to imitate in hopes that drawing style alone would lead them to experience similar success.
In short, Schulz’s biggest influence in the world of newspapering lies in showing how important a comic strip can been in the economic life of a newspaper. Just as the Yellow Kid demonstrated the commercial impact of the comics, so does Peanuts. Schulz’s success is a re-affirmation of the very principles that were enacted by the earliest newspaper comics, principles that guaranteed the survival of the comics medium.
And Schulz -- and Dilbert -- will help the medium survive again, into the 21st Century.
Not only was Peanuts a huge financial success for both its host newspapers and its creator, it was also good psychologically. As Schulz said when he retired, doing the comic strip fulfilled his childhood dream. Being a cartoonist was all he ever wanted to be. And it was, in effect, all he was. When he ceased being a cartoonist, he ceased being.
Schulz’s death will go down in the history of popular culture as one of those ineffable coincidences. Dying precisely on the eve of the publication of the last Sunday Peanuts that he would ever produce, Schulz gave numinous meaning to an otherwise untimely and therefore meaningless exit.
Among millions of Peanuts fans and thousands of cartoonists, that Sunday, February 13, 2000, had been anxiously anticipated ever since Schulz announced his retirement on December 14 -- two months before, almost to the day. But we never expected Schulz to go, too.
For nearly fifty years, Schulz produced a comic strip for every day in the calendar. And he did it, as we all now acknowledge, himself. No assistants. No letterers. Just Sparky. In this, Schulz represented -- stood for -- cartoonists in an almost emblematic way. He was what all cartoonists are -- only more so.
Schulz did it himself because, he insisted, there was no other way of doing it. The characters were aspects of himself, and you can’t get someone else to do aspects of yourself.
“If you read the strip for just a few months, you will know me,” Schulz said, “because everything that I am goes into the strip. That is me.”
And so those of us who have been reading Peanuts for most of our reading lives grieved at Schulz’s death as we would at the loss of any friend. As of 9:45 p.m. on February 12, 2000, that friend is not around in person any longer.
And there can be no more stunning an instance of the intimate relation between a creator and his creation than that accompanying the publication of the last Peanuts strip that Schulz produced. Schulz’s nearly simultaneous departure proclaimed with the awful power of some sort of celestial poetry that, as he often said, he was himself the comic strip he created. When the show stopped, he had to leave the building.
It was, as all good comic strips are (Schulz’s in particular), a masterpiece of timing -- ”prophetic and magical,” Lynn Johnston said. “He made one last deadline. There’s romance in that.”
It was even more than that. Writing Schulz a posthumous letter, Johnston credited her friend with one last enviable ending:
“Leaving us as your last strip appeared was the winning touchdown,” she wrote, “the Valentine, and the Great Pumpkin all rolled into one. It was more than a punchline: it was a powerful reminder that there’s more to this life than we can see with our eyes and feel with our senses. I cannot imagine an exit with more class. Once again, you accomplished something extraordinary.”
So be it.
But Peanuts continues. Not freshly minted strips as before for almost fifty years. By prior agreement, the syndicate agreed that no one would continue producing new strips. So what we see these days in our newspapers is Schulz’s Peanuts. Not a concoction by some hired hands but reruns of his strip from the mid-1970s. And books of reprints. All Schulz’s work. All of it, our friend Sparky himself.
And so the Age of Schulz goes on. It would even without the reruns and the reprints. His impact on his profession was profound. He gave the medium a new direction, and we will be traveling that road -- whether cartoonist or reader -- for a good long time to come.
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How Charles Schulz and his Peanuts strip re-shaped the comics medium. When he announced his retirement after producing a comic strip every day, seven days a week, for … Read more
Funnies Farrago encounters the longest-running comic strip: Mister Oswald.
IN 1968 WHEN A BOOK COLLECTION of Mister Oswald was published, Forty Years with Mister Oswald, almost no one knew about the eponymous full-page comic strip that appeared in the monthly trade journal, Hardware Retailer, except, of course, hardware store owners and operators. The journal had a circulation of about 30,000, so those subscribers knew Mister Oswald: they knew it was about a hardware store and its owner. But it’s highly likely that no one in comics fandom knew about the character or the comic strip. And in 1968, Mister Oswald had been published continually for 41 years.
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It would continue for another 40 years, and its longevity was, at first, its most distinguishing characteristic among comics fans who’d never heard of it and wondered how that happened.
Perhaps the strip’s name — and its star player — contributed to its being so widely unknown.
Oswald is not an uplifting name. Russ Johnson, who created the character and named him Oswald, thought the name suggested a rather dumb person. Well, maybe not “dumb” exactly, but probably unsophisticated, a little frumpy, perhaps with a somewhat one-track mind.
Johnson gave Oswald a first name and middle initial — Oscar S. — but he regretted having done that. And when thinking or talking about the character, Johnson never called him “Oscar”; always, “Mister Oswald.”
He may not have liked the name, but he loved the character. Or, rather, he loved cartooning, and Mister Oswald enabled him to pursue his affair. And so he did — for six decades.
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Starting in October 1927, Johnson drew Mister Oswald unassisted for 62 years, which prompted some aficionados to claim that the strip was the longest-running comic strip produced by a single individual in the history of the medium.
Unhappily, another comic strip has a claim to exactly the same record: Australian cartoonist Jim Russell has entered the Guinness Book of Records for drawing the same comic strip single-handedly without any assistance for a period of over 62 years. The strip was The Potts, which was called You and Me when Russell inherited it in 1940; he changed the name to Mr. and Mrs. Pott and then, in 1950, to The Potts, whereupon it promptly became a daily strip having thrived until then as a Sunday only strip.
Longevity records with comic strips are cluttered by variations and expectations. For instance, The Potts was a daily strip for over 50 years; Mister Oswald was a monthly effort, appearing in Sunday strip format (one-page) in Hardware Retailer, the magazine of the National Retail Hardware Association. In terms of sheer effort and persistent endurance, The Potts took much more of both than Mister Oswald. So what, exactly, do the cartoonists’ longevity records mean?
In terms of longevity, the top ten American-originated comic strips are as follows (all were drawn, at one time or another, by different cartoonists; unless otherwise noted, all the strips are still being published with new material):
The Katzenjammer Kids (started in 1897), a weekly strip, has run for 125 years
Gasoline Alley (1918), daily and Sunday; 103 years
Barney Google (1919), daily and Sunday; (later, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith); 102 years
Thimble Theater/Popeye (continuous since 1919); 102 years
Blondie (1930), daily and Sunday; 91 years
Dick Tracy (1930), daily and Sunday; 91 years
Alley Oop (continuous since 1932); 89 years
Annie (1924 as Little Orphan Annie), daily and Sunday, ending 2010; 86 years
Prince Valiant (1937), Sunday only; 84 years
Brenda Starr (1940), daily and Sunday, ending in January 2011; 71 years
— a tie with Beetle Bailey (1950), daily and Sunday; 71 years (68 by originator Mort Walker)
Such lists, with their qualifying and disqualifying footnotes, amusing and even edifying though they may be, have only a little to do with Mister Oswald: they put him/it and Russ Johnson in a longevity context, and rightfully so. Beyond that, nothing.
At the time of its debut, Mister Oswald was just another of several cartoons Johnson was doing. Johnson, who worked in the hardware store his father owned, had been contributing cartoons to Hardware Retailer for a couple years before Mister Oswald showed up. And Johnson was freelancing cartoons to other magazines at the same time.
But his most unusual production was a weekly cartoon that he posted in the window of the hardware store every Tuesday. It generated a following that was enthusiastic enough to congregate at the window on Tuesday mornings, awaiting the arrival of that week’s cartoon.
The cartoon might feature gags about items displayed in the window or it could be a caricature of the town loafer, leaning against a light pole with cobwebs stretching from his leg to the pole.
Much of my information about Johnson and Mister Oswald comes from an interview Rob Stolzer conducted with the cartoonist in 1995 when Johnson was 101 years old. Stolzer, a collector of original cartoon art and a dedicated aficionado of the medium, has recently launched a Russell Johnson/Mister Oswald website, https://misteroswald.com
“I've owned the domain name for a number of years,” Stolzer said, “and have just recently been given permission from the fine folks at Hardware Retailer to move forward with the website.”
Interested parties can subscribe to the site to be notified of each new posting.
RUSSELL JOHNSON WAS BORN ON A FARM at the middle of Illinois near what eventually became Gibson City on December 10, 1893; he died at the humbling age of 101, having retired from Mister Oswald in 1989.
Like most cartoonists, he began drawing at an early age.
“I remember sketching my dad and my brother playing checkers. I drew something and my dad laughed ... The neighbors came in and he showed it to them, and they laughed.” Ever since, he said, “my one desire has been to draw a picture and make people laugh.”
Johnson went to college at Dixon College and Northern Illinois Normal School, a joint operation. Dixon was a business-oriented private college, while the Northern Illinois Normal School was a teacher training institution, said Rob Stolzer at his Mister Oswald website. “The schools ceased operation around the time Johnson graduated in 1915.”
Johnson promptly left the farm and went to the Big City, Chicago, where he found work at Montgomery Ward in the Exchange and Personnel Department. He also soon found an outlet for his passion for cartooning and started drawing cartoons for the store news.
When the United States entered the European War (later denominated World War I) in the spring of 1917, Johnson enlisted in the Navy. When discharged from the Navy at war’s end, Johnson returned to Chicago and his job at Montgomery Ward. He also started taking night classes in cartooning at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. His instructors were Carl Ed, who produced the comic strip Harold Teen, and Billy DeBeck, who did Barney Google.
“I'll tell you, Billy DeBeck was a genius!” Johnson said to Stolzer. “That’s all there was to it. He could draw, and he had good ideas.”
DeBeck eschewed lecturing as a means of instruction: he strolled around the classroom, giving students individual instruction. DeBeck’s emphasis was putting action into the cartoons.
Johnson could remember only one of his classmates — Vaughn Shoemaker, who became the editorial cartoonist at the Chicago Daily News. At night school that winter, Johnson remembered, Shoemaker demonstrated that he hadn’t mastered perspective.
BY THIS TIME, JOHNSON’S FATHER had left farming and entered the hardware store business. Soon after World War I broke out, he sold the farm and bought a store in Anchor, Illinois, about 15 miles northwest of Gibson City.
In January 1921, Johnson moved the store to Gibson City. “He doubled his staff,” said his son, “ — he hired an employee.”
By September — eight months on the job — Johnson’s father was getting worn out by doing all the work single-handedly.
“He asked if I would take a six-month leave of absence from Montgomery Ward and come and help him,” Johnson remembered. “So I went down there and started to work for that store. I loved that old store. Boy, it was really great!
“I loved that hardware store right from the start. I enjoyed planning the window displays and departments. Everything. It was fun. I never even thought of returning to Montgomery Ward. Anyway, my leave of absence has probably been canceled by now,” he joked during a 1985 interview with Craig Yoe.
“I didn’t stop drawing cartoons,” he went on. “I made one for the window each week, to attract attention. If feasible, and where possible, with local background characters. It served its purpose. Every Tuesday, there were always several people waiting at the window to see what the next one would be.”
He continued cartooning beyond the walls (and window) of the store, too, mailing cartoons to various outlets. And he was sending out a little newspaper.
It was his aunt who got Mister Oswald into print.
His aunt was a school superintendent’s wife but she made spending money by writing articles for trade magazines. In 1925, she visited the Johnson hardware store in Gibson City. She saw Russ’s weekly cartoon in the window and wrote a story about it for the Hardware Retailer, headlining the story: ‘A Hardware Dealer Advertising with Cartoons.’
In Forty Years, Johnson quotes “the exact words” of Rivers Peterson, who was editor at the time: “I paid her for the story, threw it in the waste basket and caught the first train [from Indianapolis, where the magazine was published,] to Gibson City, where I made arrangements for Russell Johnson to draw cartoons for the Hardware Retailer regularly.”
He wanted to see samples first, and Johnson happily supplied them. When Peterson approved, Johnson started submitting cartoons, ultimately filling two pages in every issue with cartoons.
The one-page cartoon published in the October 1927 issue featured a hardware store owner, who, toward the end of the cartoon, is identified as Mister Oswald.
The editor wrote Johnson that the cartoon received such favorable comment that they would like him to continue the character. And so they did. On the character’s 60th anniversary, he was on the magazine’s cover. And Mister Oswald continued for yet another 21 years.
In appearance, Mister Oswald’s visage echoes that of Johnson’s father Fred P., who died in 1930, but, as author Max Collins observed, “Mister Oswald is clearly Johnson himself: a well-meaning but often frustrated merchant in a small town (Dippy Center), muddling through life as best he can. Though Mister Oswald is the strip’s constant fall guy, the butt of nearly every gag, he bounces back. If the strip has a moral, it’s to be found in the resiliency of this hardworking, good-hearted little man.”
Max Collins is the person who introduced Mister Oswald to the world of comics fandom.
I’ve been a fan of Mister Oswald ever since Collins, in a 1979 “guest review” in Don and Maggie Thompson’s Beautiful Balloons column in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, announced his discovery of a 286-page 1968 book collection of the strip, Forty Years with Mister Oswald.
The Thompsons were frankly awed by Johnson’s achievement, saying: “How often does someone discover a major comic artist whose name and work are unknown to comics collectors and historians but who has been working at his craft excellently for half a century?” Good question.
Collins’ review was an unabashed rave; he goes on:
“As in many strips, the central character (Oswald) is often overshadowed by the supporting characters — who tend to contrast Oswald’s Everyman normality with pure insanity. Since the audience of the strip was primarily hardware store owners, the customers often come across as unfeeling, slightly wacky opportunists; the salesmen who approach Oswald are manipulative connivers; Oswald’s employees are usually well-meaning but often bumbling (particularly the undersized Herman Hammers, hired during WW2 as a ‘temporary fill-in’ and still employed there today); and his relatives are leeches, with even his wife buying items from the dreaded enemy: the chain store.
“What is remarkable about all this,” Collins continues, “is that even the most unsympathetic characters are handled in a gentle, very human manner. Johnson — like Oswald — doesn’t hate anybody (not for long, anyway). Further, the hardware setting (and the very narrow audience the strip was aimed at) hinders Mister Oswald not whit; it’s as accessible as any great comic strip — and Mister Oswald is a great comic strip. If it’s going too far to call it a ‘classic,’ it’s fair to call it a ‘minor classic.’
“The artwork — and the humor — brings to mind such greats as H.T. Webster and Jimmy Hatlo. There is a similarity in the style of humor, as well. J.R. Williams also comes to mind — yet Johnson’s work doesn’t look like the work of anybody but Johnson. Echoes of contemporaries Billy DeBeck and Carl Ed (with whom Johnson studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts) can be seen. Certainly, the work of underground cartoonists like R. Crumb and Jay Lynch (among others who strive for an ‘old-timey’ feel to their work) comes to mind.
“But Mister Oswald is a unique experience,” Collins finishes, “ — one any real fan of the comics will savor. Its depiction of small-town life is second only to Gasoline Alley; its humor is as fresh as Hagar or Beetle Bailey at their best. ... The book is the story of 40 years in the life of a small-town America, and it evokes nostalgic memories.”
The book’s 286 pages are arranged in chronological order — the Great Depression coming before World War II — and divided into 41 chapters, each dealing with a different topic. Johnson introduces every chapter with a half-page of text about that chapter’s topic. Strung together, the introductory chapters make an autobiography of the cartoonist/hardware store operator.
The book’s publisher, Hardware Retailer, did not do much to promote sales of the book, Johnson said.
“I don’t know how many books they had printed,” he said. “As soon as it came out, they had me come over to Indianapolis and autograph 133 books to give away to all the top hardware men. They ran two or three ads in the magazine — $4.95 plus postage and handling. It had no information about what postage and handling would be, so how would you order the book? What would you do?
“I was told a lot of times by a lot of people that the only thing they read in the magazine was Mister Oswald, so a lot of people wanted to see it. I wanted to put down at the bottom of the cartoon, ‘The Oswald book is now ready’ because so many people kept asking me when there would be a book. But the managing editor wouldn’t let me do it. He said it would commercialize the cartoon.”
Commercialize the cartoon? The cartoon IS a commercial. What idiocy.
“They didn’t make much effort,” Johnson said. “After they got through giving some away, they sent me about 3,800 books. I put them in storage in Champaign [just down the road from Gibson City], and I autographed books in the hardware store here. I had no problem getting rid of all those books.”
The magazine’s editors may not have had any commercial instincts, but Johnson did.
He visited the Hardware Retailer headquarters in Indianapolis in 1962, and an editor told him that they get many requests from advertisers for the page next to Mister Oswald. And that made Johnson think:
“Gee whiz, if they get requests for advertisements on the page opposite the cartoon — why don’t they run cartoons on more pages?”
He and the editor agreed to experiment. Johnson lengthened the next Mister Oswald to two pages instead of just one. Instead of one adjacent page for advertisers, there were two. Advertisers were “tickled to death.” From 1962 on, Mister Oswald ran on two pages.
ONCE MISTER OSWALD STARTED appearing in the Hardware Retailer regularly, Johnson started getting requests for advertising cartoons from other hardware stores — and other businesses. He did two strips for Armstrong Cork Company — one for their retail stores and one for their wholesale outfit — a full page strip for Sporting Goods Journal, and another for Remington Arms.
The strips had casts of characters, Johnson explained. “In the strip that I did for Sporting Goods Journal, two guys ran a sporting goods store, and their names were Adam and Steve. For Armstrong Cork’s Wholesaler, I had Buster Bunk and the Boys; for the retail store, Sellem & Son.”
Before long, Johnson was spending more time at his drawing board in the back of the store than out front with customers. He finally sold the store in 1953 and devoted full time to cartooning.
“My dad died in 1930,” he said, “ — so I had to take it over. I not only had the hardware store, but my brother-in-law came down and started a shoe store. He pooped out on it and left me with the shoe store. So I had the hardware store, the shoe store, a bottled gas route and the strips! Sometimes I wondered how the Dickens I did all that!”
Before long, Johnson realized he was doing too much. He quit all the strips except Mister Oswald.
SOME OBSERVERS have called Johnson’s drawing style in Mister Oswald “big foot.” They arrive at this designation in the belief, apparently, that there are only two drawing styles: realistic at one end of the scale, and at the other, wholly unrealistic, “big foot.” But there are gradations between Realistic and Big Foot that these would-be critics seem unaware of. For them, Big Foot is the only alternative to Realistic. According to them, a cartoonist draws in one of these styles or the other; nothing else.
But there is plenty of “else.”
Imagine a scale with Big Foot at one end and Realistic at the other. Somewhere about in the middle is Caricatural, a style that exaggerates features in face and form. Right next to Caricatural is Cartoony.
Mister Oswald is rendered in a Cartoony style. This style is on the Realistic side of Caricatural. It offers lots of Realism, but not every character is realistically drawn. Most visual aspects of the strip are simplified imagery, not the complex of wrinkles in face and wardrobe that distinguishes Realistic.
Still, the characters don’t have big bulbous noses or huge feet. Not Big Foot, in other words. Cartoony is something in between. And it embraces a range of simplification from severe to suggestive. Severe Cartoony style reduces ordinary forms and anatomical shapes to simple geometric imagery. And it veers off in the direction of Big Foot — without quite getting there. Suggestive Cartoony style is severe but with hints of realism.
Beetle Bailey is drawn in a severe Cartoony style; ditto Hi and Lois and Dilbert and Pearls Before Swine. Blondie, on the other hand, is rendered in an suggestive Cartoony style. It simplifies imagery but leaves plenty behind — Dagwood’s shoes, for example; and the way Daisy, the family dog, is drawn.
Mister Oswald is in the same group as Blondie — suggestive Cartoony. The chief clue distinguishing between severe and suggestive is wrinkles in clothing: suggestive has wrinkles; severe does not. Pickles and Luann and One Big Happy and Sally Forth are drawn in the same way.
Johnson finally sold the hardware store in 1953. He was 60 years old.
“And from then on,” Stolzer said, “you worked exclusively on Mister Oswald.”
“From then on, I enjoyed life,” Johnson said. “I lived the strip. I carried a little book around with me all the time. My wife complained about me looking at the book every once in a while, because I was living with all those people all the time. All those make-believe people, all those employees, I was living with them. When we would go to restaurants, they were at the table with us. I think I had some pretty good ideas.”
Johnson retired from the hardware business, but he had no inclination to retire from cartooning or from Mister Oswald. Even though a replacement had been lined up to take over Mister Oswald when he was through cartooning, Johnson kept going on the strip for another 36years.
Years later, at 95, Johnson was still cartooning. “As long as I can keep at it,” he said to Stolzer. In other words, he added, “I don’t have any plans to retire from cartooning.”
But that year, 1989, he did retire from Mister Oswald. Ironically, his last strip had been rejected by the editors at Hardware Retailer.
“After all the years I did the cartoon,” he said, “they finally turned one down.”
In the strip, the old lady goes into the hardware store to watch her tv serial because her own television set had gone on the blink. So she went in and sat down and watched it on the store’s demonstration model. Johnny Potts had a tv customer who came along, and he was bothering the old lady. Herman told Johnny that the old lady had AIDS. Johnny ran over to her and asked, “Is it true that you’ve got AIDS?” And she said, “Yes — one in each ear!”
Said Johnson: “The editors were afraid that people with AIDS would object to it.”
Johnson retired from Mister Oswald after 62 years, but Mister Oswald continued for another 20 years. The strip was taken over by Larry Day, an artist who worked for Leo Burnett, an advertising agency in Chicago. Day did illustrations for the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday magazine — watercolors for articles.
“He’s getting better,” Johnson allowed in his 1995 interview with Stolzer. “He’s been at it since 1989. He’s had it for six years. He’s getting a lot better each time. His handicap is that he didn’t have the retail experience. He never worked in retail stores, so his ideas were different than mine would be. But he’s doing better. As I say, he’s a wonderful artist, but he has a lot of work to do. His work looks a little like he’s doing it for the money. His work doesn’t look like he loves it like I did. My Mister Oswald cartoons, I think, show that my heart was in the hardware business.”
At the time of his interview with Stolzer, Johnson was working on a strip about retirees that he hoped to get syndicated. (It was never published.) He had tried before to get into newspapers with a strip. He concocted a couple and submitted them. Neither went anywhere, however.
“They always told me they weren’t funny enough,” Johnson told Stolzer. “I gave it an effort. I still remember one of the illustrators for one of the syndicates thought it was very good. He gave my name to the editor there and they asked for some samples. But they decided it wasn’t funny enough. My cartoons are, well...I had the talent for Gibson City.”
But Johnson was wandering off into self-deprecation. The strips he submitted weren’t intended to be funny: he was working up continuity storytelling strips.
“I think that was my mistake,” he said, “ — I wasn’t trying to be funny: I was trying to establish a story. I think that was one of the reasons my strip was turned down. If I’d spent a little more time trying to tell jokes, I’d have been better off. I was always trying to create a story.”
Johnson may have thought he could revive newspapers’ comic strips by contributing one of his own.
Growing up, Johnson had read the comics in the Chicago Tribune. He enjoyed The Katzenjammer Kits and Jimmy Hatlo’s They’ll Do It Every Time and Gaar Williams’ panel cartoons. He also admired Jay “Ding” Darling’s editorial cartoons.
He was still reading the comics in 1995, but he was disappointed that they’ve been reduced in size, which had a bad effect on the artform. When Stolzer asked him to name his favorite strip, he declined.
“I think they’ve deteriorated considerably because of the reduction in size,” Johnson said. “They all just tell jokes now, showing the heads talking to each other. There are no backgrounds, and they can’t help it. They’re too small. They’re putting too many strips on the page. They used to print a strip all the way across the page. Then they could put some detail in it. Those were good.”
STOLZER SEES MISTER OSWALD as “a time-capsule of the 20th century American retail trade. It mirrors our country’s social history through the Great Depression, wars, and changing technologies.” And it was authoritative, produced by a man who worked and lived in the retail business.
Stolzer added: “It was also drawn by a terrific cartoonist, one who had a great ear for dialogue and knew how to deliver a gag. Russ’ work featured excellent character development, strong line work, and a wonderfully delineated sense of place.”
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Funnies Farrago encounters the longest-running comic strip: Mister Oswald. IN 1968 WHEN A BOOK COLLECTION of Mister Oswald was published, Forty Years with Mister Oswald, almost no one … Read more
Fay King: The greatest woman cartoonist, caricaturist and ‘kidder’ in the world — and where did she disappear to?
IF FAY KING HADN’T MARRIED A PRIZE FIGHTER named “Battling” Nelson, we’d know almost nothing about her life. We know her opinions about the manners and mores of the twenties and thirties from her comic strips, cartoons and columns. And we have an inkling of what she looked like because she often included self-deprecating caricatures of herself in her cartoons or to accompany her columns. But just an inkling. Her picture of herself as a skinny Olive Oyl personage with a large pointy nose and gigantic feet was a cartoonist’s satire of herself and is not to be taken literally. (Besides, Olive Oyl hadn’t been invented when King started using her self-portrait.) Fay King was actually a quite attractive albeit diminutive woman, barely five feet tall.
Gene Fowler, a fellow journalist and co-conspiring staffer at the Denver Post, recorded his reaction to King upon first meeting her in her hotel room. “She was a petite, lively girl ... I was unprepared to come upon so much vitality in such a small package. She was dark-complexioned with very large dark eyes, and she wore numerous pieces of jewelry which chimed like bells as she played with nine canary birds who shared her room in the hotel. There were gold hoops in her ears, and on one forefinger she wore a heavy gold band to which was affixed a cartoon effigy of herself. She was part gypsy.
“The canary birds were fluttering about the room,” Fowler continued, “sometimes alighting upon her head and shoulders. They seemed charmed by her cries and her laughter.”
Fay King arrived at the Denver Post, her first professional gig, April 20, 1912 when she was 23 years old. At the end of July that year — three months later — she was interviewing Nelson.
Oscar Matthew Nelson was born on June 5, 1882, and he grew up in Hegewisch, a neighborhood on the southeast edge of Chicago near Burnham. By the time Fay King met him, he had been mayor of Hegewisch and owned a lot of land there, all of which he may have acquired with the earnings of his prize-fighting career.
According to St. Wikipedia, Nelson (sometimes called “the Durable Dane”) began boxing professionally when he was 14 in 1896 and gained the lightweight title in mid-1905 with an 18-round knockout.
Nelson lost the title the next year to Joe Gans in a 42-round decision. He regained the title from Gans in 1908 and successfully defended his title several times thereafter, but he lost it again in 1910 to Ad Wolgast in a fight so fierce it inspired a book about it. Nelson lost because his face was so battered and bleeding that he couldn’t see, and the referee stopped the fight in either the fortieth or forty-second round.
Nelson was still active as a professional prize fighter when he met King for an interview at the end of July 1912.
The result of the interview was published in the Post on July 29 under the headline: “Battling Nelson, Capitalist, Author, Mayor of Hegewisch and Greatest of Ring Champions, Is Visiting in Denver.”
But King wasn’t interested in boxing.
“Do you think you’ll ever marry, Bat,” King asked (“remembering it was leap year”).
“If I believed in dreams,” said Nelson, “I should say NOT because the other night I dreamed I was married and presented my country with five young lightweights all at one time! [Quintuplets, one of whom Nelson named William Jennings Bryan.] ... I was just opening congratulatory telegrams from all the dignitaries of the U.S.A. when I awoke. Do you wonder I hesitate to enter a (wedding) ring career after a jolt like that.”
Neither of them knew it at the time, but more jolts were forthcoming.
Shortly after the interview, the two of them went off together to see a baseball game, and King regaled her readers with their adventures in her cartoon published on July 30. A few days later, they went to a circus that was in town, as King reported in her cartoon published on August 3. King had previously made Nelson the subject of her cartoon that was published next to the interview on July 29.
We may ponder in this sequence of events the lightning spark of a budding romance: it sure looked like events were spiraling into consequence.
Not quite a week after the interview was published, they were apparently a couple, and they went up to the summit of Pike’s Peak. According to report, they’d arranged to be married there. But the preacher got tired of waiting and left them stranded 14,115 feet above sea level.
One of the people at the summit was an undertaker who offered to perform the ceremony, but Nelson was not persuaded. The San Francisco Call’s report of the Pike’s Peak fiasco declared that Nelson decided to make other arrangements for a wedding, which, he said, would conclude with a honeymoon in Australia.
The Pike’s Peak episode sounds very much like some sort of publicity stunt rather than a serious attempt at marriage. But if it were a stunt, it didn’t end properly — with a joke. Except maybe the undertaker. If he were the punchline, however, it was grave rather than jolly.
Nelson was interviewed about the near miss at nuptials on September 29, but he dodged most of the questions, which began with: “Is it true that your rumored engagement with Miss Fay King of Denver is all off?”
Nelson said the only match he knew about was the one that his Chicago representative was trying to set up with another boxer, Packey McFarland.
He continued at greater length: “There’s no use in my talking marriage. Any man who says he’s going to marry a woman is crazy unless he has her right at the altar — and even then he’s liable to be fooled. She may not like the color of his necktie and call off the match.
“Miss King,” he went on, “is a fine cartoonist, and she’d make a fine wife for anybody. If I’m the lucky fellow at the finish, I’ll be tickled to death, that’s all. But I’m not saying a word one way or the other on the time, the place or the girl.”
Without further ado, they were wed four months later.
ALAS, THE MARRIAGE WAS SHORT. And perhaps turbulent. Three days after the wedding, King left her husband and filed for divorce.
One newspaper account said: “Bat couldn’t stop the battling, even at home, throwing the piano at her or whatever it was. Fay was suing for divorce after only six weeks though both parties said the marriage lasted only three days.”
In her suit, King maintained that she had been kidnaped by Nelson on the night of January 20 for her marriage three days later at the fighter’s home in Illinois.
Remembering the events of the last week in January, King said: “Nelson heard of my reported engagement to a Denver man and he stopped his fighting engagements to come here for me. He took me by storm after I was weak and a nervous wreck from resisting him and his proposals. He forced me into a taxicab and rushed me off to the station.
“I realized that I had made a mistake the day of the wedding, and the first opportunity I got, I hurried back to Denver. I will go right on working at the Post as though the affair had never happened. The marriage must not and will not stand.”
Right about this time, Fay King met Gene Fowler.
Gene Fowler came right out of Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur’s “The Front Page.” Fowler, like other newspaper legends of his day, was “hard-drinking, irreverent, girl-goosing, and iconoclastic.” They were all “young men wearing snap-brim hats with cigarettes dangling from their whiskey-wet lips and bent on insulting any and all individuals who stood in their paths, no matter how celebrated or sacrosanct.”
“It is probable,” said H. Allen Smith in his biography of Fowler (The Life and Legend of....), “that a majority of newspapermen and freelance writers are heathens, freethinkers, or outright atheists. It is likely that most people in the theatrical professions are nonbelievers if not scoffers. Gene Fowler worked and frolicked with such people all his adult life, enjoying their company as they enjoyed his.”
At the time Fowler met Fay King, he was still working at the Rocky Mountain News, one of the other Denver newspapers (he would join the Post staff a few weeks later), and he had been assigned to interview the cartoonist, who was staying at a hotel in downtown Denver. She was of news interest at the moment because she was reported to be divorcing her husband, Battling Nelson.
Fowler had just concluded — or, rather, been excluded from — two romances, one with the bugler in a Salvation Army band; the other — on the rebound — with the daughter of a wealthy Denver resident far above Fowler’s station in life as a newspaper reporter. So Fowler was vulnerable to Fay King’s charms.
Writes Smith: “Handsome Mr. Fowler called on Miss King in her hotel suite and found her with nine pet canaries fluttering around her pretty head. Nine hundred canaries began fluttering inside Mr. Fowler, and he hurried to the main point: was it true that she was divorcing Bat Nelson? She said it was.
‘Have the papers been filed?’ he asked her.
She replied: ‘Do you like corn on the cob?’
“Within ten minutes, they were downstairs in the hotel, looking for corn on the cob.”
Before too many more afternoons had passed, Fowler was regularly squiring Fay King around town. Within a short time, it was being noised about in the Press Club that Fowler and King were planning on marriage. They both denied it.
Asked point-blank if he and Fay King were going to get married, Fowler (Smith says) responded:
“Jesus, no. Neither one of us believes in it. Marriage is for dumb and stuffy people who can’t think of any place to go.”
Regardless, Fowler’s romancing of Fay King went on apace. And he wrote about their relationship in his autobiography, A Solo in Tom-Toms.
“Fay King was one of the few women cartoonists in the newspaper world. She wrote articles to accompany her drawings, and both her art and her articles had a freshness and a simple originality which revealed their creator as an extraordinary person.
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“She was the daughter of an old-time trainer of athletes in Seattle. Many champions had seen her grow from childhood to young womanhood, and regarded her as their mascot.”
“I worked nights and Fay King worked days. The young cartoonist’s editors objected to her late hours in my company, but she had a way of charming them. ... Fay and I together attended the baseball games and prizefights, for now I was writing of sports [for the Denver Post] as well as other events. Because of her girlhood among the champions, as well as her analytical mind, she was an excellent appraiser of athletes and their games.
“She was the only woman I ever knew who fully understood the fine points, such as the fact that a short punch actually originates in a boxer’s legs and is much more effective than a showy, swinging blow that has little behind it but the torso and shoulder. When I began to referee the professional fights, she would view my mistakes with the stern eye of a critic, and I was happy indeed that she didn’t publish these opinions in her cartoons or columns.”
BEFORE FOWLER STARTED LAUGHING his way through summer 1913 with the lady cartoonist, his friendship with her suffered a wedge. Battling Nelson was back with Fay by that spring. It’s not entirely likely that they were living together as a married couple in Denver, where King continued to work. But the divorce had never gone through, and Nelson had taken an unusual step to please Fay King. He announced that he was quitting the ring — to please his wife.
The Call on May 6, 1913 reported that Nelson intended to retire from his bruising profession that fall.
But he likely did not quit boxing forever that fall. Wikipedia claims he didn’t retire from the ring until 1920. By then, he’d fought in 135 prize fights and won 73 of them, 40 by knock-outs.
The couple was back in the news in March 1916, and the report published on March 3 cleared up, a little, the status of the couple after the summer of 1913.
The headlines for the article tell the story:
“Bat Nelson to Secure Divorce”
“Judge Indicates He Will Grant Separation from Fay King”
The article elaborates:
“Oscar Battling Nelson, former lightweight champion, testifying before Judge George Kersten in the Circuit court, in his suit for divorce against Fay King Nelson, asserted that their marriage had never been consummated. He alleged that they had never lived together as husband and wife.
“The hearing was by default. ‘Bat’ charged desertion in his bill. Upon examination by his attorney, the ex-pugilist said he married Mrs. Nelson in January 1913.
‘How long did you live together?’
‘She left me three days after our marriage,’ he replied.
‘Did she return?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but she went away again.’
‘How long have you been separated?’ the Judge interposed.
‘Since November 1913.’
Nelson said King never loved him but regarded him as a “li’l pal.” He introduced some letters from her in which she referred to him as a “dear little woolly lamb.”
After hearing the evidence, the Judge indicated that he would grant a divorce.
The two didn’t appear together in print again for 38 years — until the winter of 1954. On February 7, Nelson, at the age of 71, died in the Chicago State Hospital, a mental institution, where he had been committed, “a man out of contact with the world.” He had lost everything in the financial crash of 1929 and faded from public view.
Nelson’s death was attributed to senility by one source, lung cancer by another.
When Fay King was told of his death, her response was: “He was such a noble, honest man, he did not deserve such a tragic end.”
She said she hadn’t seen him since 1919. But she took the unusual step of defraying the expenses of the funeral so Nelson could be buried in Chicago next to his second wife, “whom he loved so much,” who had died just two months before, December 26, 1953.
FAY BARBARA KING was born in Seattle, Washington, sometime in March 1889. Her family, father John and mother Ella, was reported twice in the U.S. census of 1990, and in both reports, the Kings then lived in Portland, Oregon. John King was employed at a Turkish bath and was a trainer of athletes, from which his daughter acquired a knowledge of and affection for sports. “She grew up surrounded by sportsmen and pugilists,” Trina Robbins says in her Women and the Comics.
Fay grew up in Portland and attracted the attention of the city’s Oregonian newspaper at least four times, saith Allan Holtz’s strippersguide.blogspot.com, the most complete compilation of information about her. (And about almost any other cartoonist you’d care to name; try it, you’ll like it. We’ve relied upon it for most of this essay.)
On December 4, 1904, the Oregonian reported on Fay’s “marked” artistic ability. She had drawn pictures in color of various local dignitaries who participated in a benefit at the Columbia Theater — “all splendid likenesses,” the paper opined.
Fay said the first drawings she’d ever made were of paper dolls that she did when “I was just a bit of a girl.” Her ambition, she said, was to be a cartoonist.
Attending Seattle University, Fay cartooned and wrote for the campus newspaper, The Spectator.
A sign of her adventurous spirit was her plan to make an ascension in a hot air balloon in August 1911 with noted early parachutist Tiny Broadwick. But that plan was frustrated by the advance notice of her intention, which alerted her parents, who, the Oregonian said, “emphatically set their parental feet down and announced that no such action would be permitted. Miss King is an only daughter.”
What Fay King did for the next eight months we don’t know. But she must’ve done some drawing for publication — perhaps in the Oregonian. She did enough of it to assemble a portfolio of samples that she presumably sent to various other newspapers, advertising her services. One of those papers, the Denver Post, took her up on the offer and hired her.
Her impending arrival at the Post was announced on Thursday, April 18, 1912, under the headline: Fay King’s Coming; Sends a Picture So Denver’ll Know Her — followed by an introductory article which we post next (in italics):
Fay King is coming to Denver.Know her? Well, if you do not, you will mighty soon, for she is to join the Post staff on Saturday this week.Fay King is the greatest woman cartoonist, caricaturist and “kidder” in the world today, and she’s just bubbling over with fun of most contagious, infectious kind.You’ll laugh with her, for you just can’t help yourself.Fay King is young — very young, in fact — but the hats of veterans in the comic art world are off to her. She comes to Denver from the Pacific northwest, where she had made a tremendous hit. [No indication about how she managed this feat.]
She not only makes pictures but she writes and writes well.She’s a writer, a critic and a cartoonist in one, and good in each and every line.Here’s the letter she sent to F.G. Bonfils [editor/publisher of the Post] in response to his telegram inviting her to join the Post family:Dear Mr. Bonfils,Your telegram received. I bought my ticket today and will leave here Thursday (April 18) at l0 a.m., and will arrive in Denver Saturday (April 20) at 10 a.m.You are very kind to come to the depot and meet me. You don’t know how much I will appreciate it. That you may know me, I will be dressed like the enclosed sketch and will carry a Denver Post.
Sincerely,Fay KingAnd the sketch (the article resumes) that she enclosed — well, just look at it and see if you can keep from laughing.
TWO YEARS LATER, in January 1918, Fay King left Denver and the Denver Post for the San Francisco where she joined the Hearst syndicate for national distribution. By the end of the year, she was in New York and her work was appearing in Hearst’s tabloid, the New York Mirror. The 1920 census reports that King was living at the Pennsylvania Hotel (the one whose telephone number has been immortalized by Glenn Miller in a song title, “Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand”) at 425 Seventh Avenue, just across from Penn Station.
King’s cartoons and comic strips commented on the ephemera of popular culture and were usually accompanied beneath by text, written by King. Wikipedia observes that King’s cartooning efforts were among the early examples of autobiographical comics, but I can’t recall any other comics in the “autobiographical” category; besides, just inserting into your comic strip a self-caricature does not make the strip autobiographical.
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But that is a quibble. The Fay King self-caricature was comical and personable and was undoubtedly the aspect of her work that was most popular, assuring her a place in the affections of her readers for years.
Although King’s strips included her opinions and referred to events in her life, as Marilyn Slater observed at freewebs.com, “her work in many ways also tells a history of the new and emerging women of her era.”
St. Wikipedia credits King with the creation of two short-lived comic strips: Mazie (in 1924, briefly) and Girls Will Be Girls (1924-25). About the latter, King wrote a lengthy article for the February 1925 issue of Circulation, a syndicate promotional publication. Herewith, we quote excerpts (in italics):
Fay King’s Recipe for Success — Pretty Girls and Eating Onions By Fay KingNo doubt all of us have secret ambitions though we may never voice them or reach them.
I had a secret ambition, but I voiced it and have reached it!I am doing a comic strip!Many is the time I sat at my desk turning out my regular daily story and little cartoon, looking with longing and envy at the favored folks who do “the funnies.” What must be their joy working each day in those little squares, following the career of the creatures they have created — imaginary folks that have become very real to everyone!Surely work like that must be fun!Well, since starting my own strip, which I call “Girls Will Be Girls,” I have found the fun is work all right — but I do enjoy doing it!Being a girl, I decided that girl topics would be more in my line, and that my strip should have lots of girls, and all kinds of girls, and deal with the ambitions, loves, hopes, disappointments, harmless deceits, and daily changing fashions so dear to the heart of every girl, no matter how young or old she may be! ...My girls are all pretty, because I have not the heart to make them otherwise when a turn of my pen can make their destiny!I have long harbored the thought that a strip about Girls done by a Girl might be made quite interesting, and that’s why I am so interested in doing Girls Will Be Girls.
Alan Holtz, from whose Strippers Guide I poached this article, says Girls Will Be Girls ran in Hearst’s New York Mirror. “If there was a syndication attempt it was a failure. According to Jeffrey Lindenblatt [a comic strip historian] the strip ran there from June 24, 1924 to March 19, 1925. In other words it was canceled only a month after this breathlessly positive article ran in Circulation.”
The short lives of King’s comic strips may not indicate any dwindling status for King. In fact, we have evidence of her continued popularity through the decade and into the next.
Trina Robbins, herstorian, in two of her books (A Century of Women Cartoonists, 1993, and Women and the Comics with Catherine Yronwode, 1995) cites cartoonist/historian Chuck Thorndike, who, she says, in his 1939 book, The Business of Cartooning, “refers to Fay King as one of the five top women cartoonists in America.”
Thorndike’s book offers short biographies of 70-plus cartoonists, arranged alphabetically, and I don’t see Fay King in the list. But there is other evidence of King’s popularity — scant, but telling.
In the 1924 MGM movie “The Great White Way,” King appeared as herself with other popular jazz age cartoonists — George McManus, Bill DeBeck, Nell Brinkley, Winsor McCay. And in 1928, she covered the sensational trial of Ruth Snyder, who was convicted of murdering her husband Albert and was sentenced to die at New York’s Sing Sing Prison. The photograph of her in the electric chair was widely circulated. King alternated with Nell Brinkley in recording the daily events of the trial.
We almost lose track of Fay King at this point in the narrative of her life. Very little evidence in print is available about what she did next.
In his column “New York Day by Day” on October 25, 1934, O.O. McIntyre calls“Fay King, so far as I know, America’s only lady newspaper cartoonist.” Which only shows his ignorance: among the female newspaper cartoonists at the time were Ethel Hays (Ethel), Virginia Huget, Gladys Parker (Mopsy), Edwina Dumm (Cap Stubbs and Tippie), Martha Orr and Dale Conner (both on Mary Worth) not to mention Nell Brinkley
But McIntyre goes on, supplying a little more detail about the cartoonist’s life. He says King is “the most pronounced recluse among the limners. Vivacious and sparkling, she is sought wherever crowds gather but rarely responds [to those invitations]. I have yet to see her at any of the whirligigs of literary folk. She resides at a sedate midtown hotel [probably, according to the 1930 census, the Commodore next to Grand Central Station], is an indefatigable walker, devoted to a canary and a frequent loiterer in the galleries. But she is — and that’s unusual for a Manhattan celebrity — a strictly no-party girl.”
Nonetheless, Fay King was popular enough with the public for MGM to include her in that 1924 movie, and C.J. Coffman mentions King in his column Analyzing You in 1930: “How perennially the effervescence bursts forth in the work of Fay King, philosopher-cartoonist, beloved of the millions.” And later, in 1936, she is listed in a Joe Palooka comic strip among other celebrities ring-side at a Palooka prize fight. But after that, she sinks from view until the report of her funding Nelson’s funeral in 1954.
The 1954 article is “the last record of King’s existence” according to reddit.com’s author.
Wikipedia says she’s “presumed dead” after the 1954 notice.
Reddit again: “The only potential later reference [to King] was in 1967, when the New York Times produced an article on a dog salon operated by a ‘freelance writer’ named Fay King. This may not be the same person: the article made no mention of her cartooning career.” If it is Fay King the former cartoonist, she’d be 78 at the time, “making it unlikely (but not impossible) that she would be running a business.”
Still, King was fond of canaries — and dogs. She once (at the time of her arrival in New York) owned a wire-haired fox terrier named Tippy, who became lost, prompting King to place an ad in the Evening Telegram’s “Lost and Found” section. That, admittedly, was over 50 years before the dog salon, but affection for pets does not diminish with the passage of time. It is usually enhanced.
Holtz offers an explanation for King’s disappearance in the public prints:
“Fay King gets little coverage mainly because her work straddles two genres. Her cartoon-illustrated column, which she did for many years, was no great work of literature, nor were her cartoons much better than amateur work. However, the combination of the two had an undeniable charm. Her prose was always breathless, like [her description of Girls Will Be Girls] above, but she was so personable in her writings that I’m sure folks of the day felt a kinship to her.
“She was also very up front about her personal life. She certainly kept no secrets about her stormy and at times violent relationship with Battling Nelson, for instance. That sort of thing certainly kept the housewives fascinated when the sat down to read the Mirror.”Reddit reports that “there is no record of an obituary.”
So Fay King passed away without saying “good-bye.”
“What happened to her?” Reddit asks. “Well, in all probability, she was simply no longer famous enough for her death to be a newsstory. There’s almost no known record of her after the 1930s, although she was apparently still drawing comics.”
Or so we assume. We assume that cartoonists go on drawing cartoons. Cartooning defines them; and they define cartooning. And so they go on together.
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Fay King: The greatest woman cartoonist, caricaturist and ‘kidder’ in the world — and where did she disappear to? IF FAY KING HADN’T MARRIED A PRIZE FIGHTER named … Read more
Funnies Farrago celebrates the first African-American to get the Reuben Trophy for Cartoonist of the Year.
The National Cartoonists Society made history on a week or so ago by presenting Ray Billingsley, creator of the syndicated comic strip Curtis, with the Reuben Trophy as Cartoonist of the Year, the cartooning profession’s highest honor. The other historic achievement: Billingsley is the first African American to be NCS’s Cartoonist of the Year.
The coveted award was presented to Billingsley online Saturday evening, October 16, during the finale of NCSFest 2021, the virtual cartooning festival hosted by NCS and the NCS Foundation.
Filmed accepting the Award at his home studio, Billingsley was just a little flustered at the honor.
“Oh my goodness,,” he began, “ — I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this has happened. I’d like to thank everyone who made this moment come true, thank everyone from the deepest part of my heart. I never thought I’d see this day.”
Choking up and saying he hoped he wouldn’t, Billingsley went on: “This has been a huge step for me. And also a monumental step for the NCS, because I’m the first Black guy to win the prestigious Reuben Award, and for that I am very grateful,” adding, “I wish creators like Morrie Turner and Ted Shearer, and Brumsic Brandon Jr. were here to see this.”
The three he named are pioneering Black cartoonists; all, alas, are deceased.
And Billingsley went on to name and thank numerous cherished friendships, cartoonists who have helped and guided him — Charles Schulz, Mort Walker, Arnold Roth, Jules Feiffer, Bunny Hoest, and others. (See ncsfest.com for the online virtual NCS Reubens Weekend.)
Billingsley, like all syndicated cartoonists, lives a life on deadline all the time, but with Billingsley, that life began earlier than most — at the age of twelve — when he was discovered by KIDS Magazine and hired as a staff artist.
After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, he attended the School of Visual Arts on a full four-year scholarship. Upon graduation in 1979, he began an internship at the Walt Disney Studios, but quickly left, having sold his first nationally syndicated comic strip, Lookin’ Fine, which ran from 1980 to 1982 with United Features Syndicate.
After that, he spent the next few years working on various projects in the fields of animation, advertising, greeting cards, clothing design, and magazine cartooning, until 1988 when King Features Syndicate bought his Curtis strip and launched it into syndication on October 3.
Although he was born (July 25, 1957) in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Billingsley was raised in New York City’s Harlem. It was a time when the citizens were plagued by poor surroundings and drug use. It was his older brother, Richard, who sparked his initial fascination with art and cartooning. As a very young child, Ray learned to draw in order to emulate his brother.
“He was really good at portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes,” Ray remembered in telling his life story at his website, billingsleyart.com. “I watched him draw, heard the praises he received from family, school and the church, and one day picked up a pencil. I was seven years old.
“As if in some sort of competition with my brother, I practiced and practiced and practiced, and to my family’s surprise, I got better!”
Billingsley continued by recounting his debut in professional art.
“Recycling was a big deal back in the day. My seventh grade art class was asked to participate in an ecology program. It was our task to construct an 18-foot Christmas tree entirely of recyclable cans in front of a hospital in upper Manhattan.
“By this age, I would draw whenever I could, and it had become common for me to carry a small notepad. While they piled up tin cans, I crept away from my classmates, sat nearby and began doodling. It must have been a slow news day because I noticed some news cameras.
“A woman approached me and asked to see my drawings. Then, she asked if she could keep a couple, one with my name and phone number on it. A few days later, she actually called on me and my family at home. Turns out, she was an editor at KIDS Magazine, and she wanted me to visit the office to see if I could draw a picture to accompany a certain story.
“The office was located on the very busy East Side of New York City and the streets were choked with activity. My mother and I must have looked very out of place, especially with me carrying a portfolio. I made my first sale that very day, and to my surprise, I was offered a job as a staff artist.
“I had to show up every day after school — and on Saturday. They made sure I would show up by sending a car for me. So the car would be parked right outside the school, waiting for me to show up. There’s a driver, waiting. And, of course, my classmates, other kids, don’t find that very cool.
“In the office, I learned how to do filler and do paste-ups, and I was learning story editing, all that. I’d do sketches, read stories, and finalize drafts for a nationally-recognized magazine. This, along with keeping up my class assignments kept my days filled. I guess I was, more or less, ‘discovered.’
“I stayed with KIDS from age 12 until retiring as an Associate Editor at age 18. My father wasn’t too cool on giving me or my siblings allowances, so drawing became an effective way to make money. Legally, that is. The streets in my neighborhood offered a lot of other ways to make money — a lot of money. Luckily for me, a career was blossoming that I wasn’t even aware of.”
BILLINGSLEY WENT ON WITH his autobiographical recitation:
“Art jobs began to take up a lot of my time. In fact, most of it. It wasn’t uncommon for me to work on several projects at the same time, all highly different and commanding different styles. My mother says I used to draw ‘in the air.’
“Trying to have just a normal life, and do what my buddies did was becoming impossible. No one around was into art as I was. They were interested only in things that led to jail, or worse. Playing basketball, fathering children they had no intention of raising, and getting high was the rule. They thought I was weird because I was creative. I thought they were weird because they weren’t. Drawing had become second nature to me and was as easy as breathing. It was all I did. All I knew.
“I was accepted into the High School of Music and Art. It was the first time I was around other people my age who shared a desire to carve their own niche in some aspect of the Creative Visual World. It wasn’t always great when I ran up against an art teacher who was still trying to get published, and this lanky Black teenager was doing so regularly. For reasons such as this, and not being accepted by my neighborhood peers, I became somewhat quiet when it comes to my career. I’m still that way.”
Among the jobs Billingsley remembers doing was a series of graphic posters for the Path trains and transportation.
“They told me they had placed two thousand copies throughout their system, and at the end of a week, only 200 remained. It seems they were being stolen! I felt very flattered. And I wrote and drew a full-color comic book on the Path system, following the adventures of four teenager riders. This was the first time I had to sustain storylines over several pages.”
Crazy magazine provided other opportunities to write his own articles, and not just supply art to someone’s script . He sold his first national magazine cartoon spot to Ebony magazine in 1978. “I became, more or less, a regular contributor ’til today.
“As I grew, so did my portfolio — ” Billingsley said, “in tearsheets, things that had been published. I was beginning to get the reputation around New York publications as the Kid Artist. I sometimes used my age to my advantage. I remember one interview I went to.
“The front office was filled with artists and their portfolios, all angling for the same job. I put on a messenger’s jacket and wore a cap, and put my portfolio in a large envelope. I told the receptionist that I had to give it to the editor personally, or get a signature. Some BS like that. And it worked. When I got in front of that editor, I quickly pulled my portfolio from the envelope and showed it to him.
“He looked through the stuff and said, ‘This is yours?’ And I said ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘You know, you’ve got a lot of chutzpah. I like that. You got yourself in front of me, before everyone else.’
“And he hired me!
“By 16, I had become a seasoned pro with a diverse portfolio and steady clients.”
Among the other jobs he took on were designs for packaging, art for brochures, a line of greeting cards (“they were popular in Europe”), even a line of designer drawers.
The day after graduation from SVA in 1979, Billingsley went to the Disney Studios in Orlando to begin an internship in animation.
“It was quite grueling,” he said. “I would draw all day, had mandatory art classes after work, plus I was still working on my own stuff. It was a good thing that I was already used to such a schedule. I learned to draw ‘Disney-Style.’”
But his Disney career came to a stop pretty quickly: Billingsley had been working on developing a comic strip, and United Feature Syndicate picked it up.
“It was named Lookin’ Fine,” he said. “The title wasn’t my idea. It was the first strip about twenty-something African-American young people. I left Disney to pursue syndication. I signed the contract at age 21.”
Lookin’ Fine ran from 1980 to 1982, appearing in 40 to 60 sixty papers.
“Above everything,” said Billingsley, “I considered it to be a Great Learning Experience. The problem was I was prevented from doing the strip the way I knew it should be done. It was a strip about an African-American family and I was dealing with solely non-African-American syndicate people. They didn’t have a clue. When it was suggested that to boost sales, this family adopt a White kid, I knew it was time to pack it up and walk away.”
SO HE DID, RETURNING TO FREELANCING and doing well. As long as he continued to be diverse, and able to adapt to whatever the job called for, he was still working.
All these antics came to an end in 1988 when Curtis started. Producing a daily-and-Sunday comic strip was a full-time job.
In Curtis, Billingsley focused on an urban African American family of four — father and mother, Greg and Diane Wilkins, with an emphasis on their sons, eleven-year-old Curtis and his younger brother Barry — living in a weathered brownstone in a big city somewhere. Curtis and Barry are emblematic of preteens in the city, navigating their way through adolescence and its delights and dangers.
Other characters in the strip include Gunk, Curtis’ peculiar friend from Flyspeck Island, sweet Chutney (who adores Curtis), and the egotistical Michelle (whom Curtis adores, but she doesn’t return the sentiment). School bullies Derrick and “Onion” give Curtis a bad time, and strict teacher Mrs. Nelson doesn’t make life at school any easier. In the local barbershop, Curtis has a friend in Gunther the barber, although Gunther never seems to remember the boy’s name.
WHEN BILLINGSLEY AND I TALKED a few years ago, he told me he’d been working on other strip ideas back in the eighties: Curtis was one of several.
“I had one called Polly. It was about a fat, lazy parrot who had a really smart mouth. And I started shopping that around. That same year, Garfield started. And when I showed Polly to United Feature, they said, ‘Oh, well, we already have a character that’s fat and lazy and nasty. And more people can relate to a cat than to a parrot.’
“I did another strip called Ma’m, and it was about this Hollywood legend, this woman who had been really big back in the silent era, and she was tryin’ to make a comeback. She was more like BroomHilda, that type of character. She grabbed men, she smoked. She was really raucous. But editors said it was too far over at the time.”
He did a take-off on Tarzan.
“Wizard of Id — that kind of humor. It was broad slapstick. So I tried a gamut of different things before I came back to Curtis.”
“Why,” I asked, “did you decide you were going to go to a Black milieu?”
Simple. He followed the aged axiom — Do what you know.
“And I knew about being a Black kid,” he said. “I’ve been told that Curtis is actually me the year before I went professional — because Curtis is eleven. I was twelve.
“Curtis is actually my middle name,” Billingsley went on. “I did that because of a story Mort Walker told me once about how some guy tried to sue him, saying that Beetle Bailey was his idea — that he had talked to Mort about Beetle Bailey while they were in the service. Come to find out, these two guys weren’t even stationed in the same place, not ever, so he was lying.
“So by picking the name Curtis — ” he continued, “I was making sure there’d be no way someone could say, ‘I gave you this idea.’ Because it’s my name.”
Billingsley told me about an “inspirational dream” he’d had about Curtis.
“I had cartooning in my blood so much that I used to actually dream about different ideas. I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I kept a notepad by my bed. And I’d just jot down a few words and then go back to sleep.
“Well, one night, I had a dream idea about this little character, a little Black kid. At the time, it was new for people to wear their ball caps backwards and for them to leave their shirt tails sticking out. And I sat up in bed and drew this character that way.
“The next morning, when I woke up and looked at the paper, I had drawn — a quick thing — Curtis. It was very rough. I had to do a lot of smoothing out on him. He and his younger brother Barry came along right away. And then the girls — Michelle and Chutney. They changed a lot. In the first incarnation, Michelle was in love with Curtis, and she was chasing him. And then I thought, ‘H’mmm, that’s too usual. I’m going to make her older than Curtis and have Curtis chase her and have her spurn him.’
“And she’d be the only girl in the cast that had money: everybody else was poor.
“Gunk came along last. I needed a character to do things that I can’t do with Curtis. And I thought, ‘I need some odd character who comes from somewhere else.’ And his image and everything, it just came to me. The whole thing about Flyspeck Island. Everything just fit together like a puzzle.”
“Such an unusual concept,” I said, “ — to introduce this complete fantasy character into a strip that’s grounded very much in reality.”
“Right,” said Billingsley. “That’s how I’m able to delve into just about anything I want to do. And King Features gave me that freedom where the other syndicate didn’t. They made me stay with one theme. At least here at King, I could do anything. They had faith in me. And I don’t get bored.”
AT FIRST, THE STRIP was called Curtis and Me, “Me” being Barry. The strip was told from his point of view. He’d be talking about his adventures with his brother, Curtis — which was like Billingsley and his older brother.
“But they suggested that I drop it to just Curtis. That way, Barry doesn’t have to be in everything. He doesn’t have to see everything. Another thing — Greg, Curtis’ father, was a single father at first. And one of the themes of the strip was that he was looking for a wife. And the kids, Curtis and Barry, would either bring a woman along as a candidate and they’d try to pair him up, or if they didn’t like the woman, they’d try to sabotage someone he’d met.
“But for the time,” Billingsley went on, “syndicate editors thought it was a little too risque. ‘Oh, Curtis needs a mother.’ So I had to introduce her. And I did that after the strip had started. In the first few weeks of Curtis, I only showed the father. I didn’t even know what the mother looked like at that point.
“Heck, when the strip first started, I didn’t know what Curtis’ father looked like. I always covered up his face by putting a speech balloon in front of it. Because he wasn’t that important. What he said was important but not what he looked like.”
Curtis appears in more than 300 newspapers these days. In an age when print journalism is increasingly threatened, that counts as a big success.
Billingsley acknowledges that Wee Pals creator Morrie Turner, the first African-American to bring an interracial cast to national syndication, did indeed open the doors for Curtis and other strips of the genre.
And he credits Will Eisner, creator of the masterpiece The Spirit, and also Billingsley’s instructor at SVA, for encouraging him to stretch out artistically.
“He always told me to reach out and do more than I thought I could. He was, and still is, a true creative inspiration.” said Billingsley.
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BILLINGSLEY WAS INTERVIEWED for the fall/winter 2020 issue of his alma mater’s Visual Arts Journal. Hereafter, we’ve reprinted much of the interview.
Visual Arts Journal: Last summer, you went into New York City to join Black Lives Matter protests in the streets. Did you also find yourself thinking about what you might do in Curtis to respond to this moment?
Billingsley: It’s actually always on my mind. Things like this, they affect me personally. So it always translates into my work.
When you started with Curtis, was it your intention to have a strip that would allow you to comment on topical events?
When I was first thinking of Curtis back in the 1980s, it wasn’t that kind of platform. But I started drifting into those sorts of stories, and the audience accepted. I knew just doing gags wouldn’t be enough for me. I cannot do a Beetle Bailey, where Beetle gets smashed by Sarge and is back the next day. I can’t have talking cats and dogs and ducks and things like that.
Instead, you have a strip with Curtis’ teacher, Mrs. Nelson, coming down with COVID-19. It was heartbreaking. That storyline really revealed her relationship with Curtis.
It is personal to me because she’s a real person. Mrs. Nelson was actually my third-grade teacher. One time she called my mother, and I thought I was in big trouble for something, and she just wanted to tell her about this artistic talent that she saw budding, and she encouraged my mother to push me along.
So in the Mrs. Nelson–Curtis relationship, you’re Curtis?
In many ways I was just like Curtis. If something bad happened, everyone in the room would just turn and look at me, because they’d know I did it. I think that actually helped me get through the early days of freelancing. I was a bold young person who didn’t really see boundaries, and that includes all the way up to the School of Visual Arts.
Did you have any “Mrs. Nelsons” at SVA?
There was Howard Beckerman, Harvey Kurtzman and of course my number one instructor was Will Eisner. And Will Eisner pushed me hard. He knew that I had been published, and when I showed him samples of work, he basically shrugged his shoulders and said, “So what else is there to you?” Then he started teaching me the value of learning different styles and being able to really carry a storyline.
Now, Will Eisner always came late into classes he taught. Students were always there before him. So we’d be sitting around, and we’re talking and chatting, and all of a sudden he’d enter the room and there’d be a great hush. If somebody stepped on a marshmallow, you’d have heard it.
Will was so strict on us that by the time half of the semester was over, half of the students had transferred out. They just couldn’t take it. Just imagine, you work all night on a project, and the teacher goes, “Eh. Do better.” A lot of people, their egos were a little too big, so they couldn’t take it. But I found it helpful. All experimentation I credit to Will Eisner. He challenged me to step up my game, stretch beyond what he saw as limitations.
What did you learn from Kurtzman?
Harvey Kurtzman — he was just crazy. He was eternally making jokes and doing these really funny drawings and he just encouraged humor all the time. His class was really a joy to go to. From the time he came in, he was smiling and laughing.
The journalist Richard Prince once wrote that one reason why Black comic strips are usually about children is that strips with Black adults are seen to be threatening.
I found that out the hard way, when I was drawing Lookin’ Fine. I had a chat with Morrie Turner of Wee Pals — he warned me right away, he said, “You’re going to be in trouble.” I spoke about drug use and inequalities in schools and stuff like that. And when you have adults talking about it on a comics page, if you’re next to Ziggy or Nancy or Marmaduke, it’s discomforting. But if a child says the same thing, he can get away with it.
All of us were basically learning on our own. We had to learn what worked and what didn’t, and take chances. Morrie Turner doing the first integrated strip, he took a lot of chances. But you can’t please everyone, so you don’t even try. I’m at the point where I’m basically drawing the strip for me, first. This is my world, if you want to come into it, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.
In one storyline in Curtis, we meet an older Black cartoonist named Quincy Shearer, who tells Curtis about the old days. He’s clearly modeled after Ted Shearer, who created the comic strip Quincy. Did you ever meet Shearer?
I never met Ted Shearer and that was unfortunate. I loved the guy’s artwork, his framing, and he was just a master of line. He had a strip where the composition, the panel construction, just drew your eye to it.
Usually when a Black artist met another one, they were immediate friends because on some level they know what the other one went through. When I first met Morrie Turner, we went and hugged each other, and he started crying. I said, “What’s the matter?” and he just said, “Congratulations.” And then we just sat and talked.
Another older cartoonist was Samuel Joyner. He told me a lot of the stories about cartooning during the time of blackface cartoons. Joyner told me he had to have a white friend bring his work to the editor to try to sell it. There were a lot of startling revelations to this man's experiences.
What was the main lesson that Joyner taught you?
Creativity at any cost. It’s not the money. It’s the need to express yourself and hope that people will like it. He did not seem to be bitter about anything.
Do you ever hear from readers who are unhappy about something in Curtis?
Sometimes it’s the smallest thing you can think of. If I mention a lot of rap music, somebody will complain. I had Curtis eating Rapper Puffs, a cereal, and some people didn’t like that. If someone gets upset at a box called Rapper Puffs, there’s a low threshold out there.
Did you feel a pressure, from yourself or others, to represent a certain kind of Black life in Curtis?
Yes, there is definitely a pressure but moreover a pressure to maintain a good standard. I have to have more hits than misses.
One of the things that was important was a strong Black family unit. In my strip, Curtis is the only one who enjoys a two-parent household. One of the other characters lives with his grandmother; he doesn’t even know where his parents are. A couple times I’ve even had Curtis’ father say, “Curtis, this isn’t one of those strips where the kid outthinks the parent.”
How did you decide Curtis’ personality, what kind of kid he would be?Charles Schulz was a friend. He was like a father figure to me. I was sort of messing with him at one point, I said, “Lucy is the loudmouth, Schroeder plays the piano, what does Franklin do? He doesn’t even get angry at anyone. He’s just a good guy.” [Franklin is a Black kid.]
And Schulz didn’t really have an answer. I knew what Schulz was trying to do. We had the marches, we had the assassination of Malcolm X, and he decided to bring along a very nice character.
But that’s what I tried to get away from. Curtis can be mischievous. It even goes to the way he’s dressed. Curtis made his debut in ’88, and in ’88 you were considered to be a little troublesome if you wore your hat backwards, if you let your shirt come out under your sweater. Curtis did all that way back then when it meant something. And unlike other characters, he had no problems when talking to girls.
What are the challenges for Black cartoonists starting out today?
A lot about the industry isn’t really that inspiring. I don’t have a book deal. I have one company that actually told me that Blacks really don’t read, and they insinuated that Whites wouldn’t buy books about Blacks. So we’re still at that. No merchandise nor animation deals — nothing. Despite my decades-old success, I still feel overlooked, like I have to continually prove myself. It really bothers me.
[Curtis has been reprinted in three volumes so far, all parts of The Curtis Chronicles series: A Boy Named Curtis (Vol.1, strips from 2000), Living on Spongecake (Vol.2, 2001), and Friends, Family & Other Catastrophes (Vol.3, 2002) — all 154 8.5x11-inch landscape pages, b/w; $20.95 (including $3.99 shipping and handling) at Billinsley’s website. I suspect that The Curtis Chronicles is a Billingsley-funded project. — RCH]
One thing I hear from Black cartoonists is that when they are trying to sell a comic strip with Black characters to newspapers, the paper’s editors will say, “We already have Curtis.”
It’s not fair. I’m not the voice. Every voice is different and every voice is welcome. When Baby Blues was coming out, nobody said we already have Hi and Lois. It doesn’t work that way. But it’s the hardest thing to break.
I’m really nobody’s role model. Robb Armstrong, he has a very good strip, his main character is a policeman, very different. Keith Knight has a strip out that’s very different. Barbara Brandon-Croft had a syndicated strip, Where I’m Coming From, written from an African American point of view. There is also Darrin Bell, who won a Pulitzer for editorial cartoons. [Bell also produces two syndicated daily-and-Sunday strips, Candorville and Rudy Park. — RCH] We need people like that. Throughout the web, we see a lot of Black voices, women and men. They can’t sell what they have to say, but with the Internet, they can at least express it. They can have their individual stories told, their own voices and creative experiences.
What do you see as the future for Curtis?
As long as there is some sort of craziness going on in society, I can bring that into the strip. Which is why the strip has survived for so long.
CURTIS IS A FULL-TIME JOB, and Billingsley is a perfectionist, working from his second-floor studio in his Stamford, Connecticut home. He balances his life with his family, the few whom he considers real friends, and his faithful companion Higgins the Basset Hound. Billingsley is low-key and somewhat reclusive, enjoys music and the simple things in life. He still studies, reads classic strips, and likes to travel and explore life (although he hates the hassle of travel, and has a little fear of flying) and is a very good chef.
In producing Curtis, Billlingsley has adopted a traditional cartoony style. He is capable of some wildly inventive artwork, but for storytelling, a certain restraint pays off. In the strip, he deploys a bold line for outlining figures, adding detail with discerning thin strokes. The result is that his characters take possession of every panel, their feet firmly in place.
Curtis is a very human comic strip. It deals in the basic aspects of life in a city as experienced by real people. Billingsley’s figures are gentle exaggerations of actual people but well this side of the “big foot” manner. (While it’s true that Curtis has big feet, it’s actually his shoes that are big, and their size is a satirical comment on teenage fashions.) (Or so it sez rightcheer.) Billingsley’s cartoony approach permits him to explode visuals into wild fantastic pictures that boost the action — and, hence, the comedy.
Drawing from real life, Billingsley blends domestic humor with sometimes startling commentary on topics such as racism and guns in school. And last year, Billingsley became one of the first cartoonists to create a storyline addressing the COVID-19 pandemic when Curtis learned that his teacher was in the hospital with the illness.
Educators and community leaders have praised Billingsley for his thought-provoking and straight-forward handling of such serious social and health issues as drug abuse, crime and asthma. And when Curtis and Barry adopt a crack baby, Billingsley got a lot of mail — mostly positive.
The story began simply enough. One day, the boys’ mother notices that milk is disappearing faster than it usually does. “I just bought milk yesterday,” she says, “ — but it’s gone.”
Curtis notices Barry behaving suspiciously, and when Barry takes some milk out of the house, Curtis follows him. Barry goes down into a nearby basement. Curtis thinks he’s feeding a cat down there, but it isn’t a cat. It’s a baby. Barry had wrapped the infant up in blankets and he was feeding the baby the milk he took from his family refrigerator.
“The mother wasn’t there,” Billingsley said during our conversation. “Once Curtis found out about the baby, he brought his parents in on it, and then the authorities got involved. The police searched for the mother, and when they found her, they saw that she was a crack addict. And so the baby was put into foster care and adopted by a real family.
“And that was a big whoop-de-doo for the time,” he went on. “No one had done anything about crack at all. Child abandonment, things like that — had not been attended to.”
“What kind of responses did you get?” I asked.
“Oh, I got a lotta positive stuff,” Billingsley said. “More positive than negative. And I did get negative mail — along the lines of, ‘This shouldn’t be in a comic strip. This should be a newspaper article’ — something like that. I take it for what it’s worth, negative mail. It may have a little bit of truth in it. So I listen.”
He also listened to the positive reactions. But through all of the ensuing controversy, Billingsley felt he was right to do the story.
“It’s what I felt at the time,” he told me. “It’s what I felt the strip needed to do. I didn’t want the strip to be about Curtis living in the city and everything is wine and roses — because rarely was it ever. It was a tough time growin’ up in the city, and that was my experience that I wanted to bring into the strip.”
He insisted that the strip be an honest reflection of life in the big city — and of life in general.
“Even my core characters, the Wilkins family, they’re not the happiest people all the time,” he said. “I mean, they get into arguments. People have told me that Curtis has been very realistic in the fact that he argues with his parents, and they argue back at him, and they threaten him. And people say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. Parents can’t do that.’
“Of course they can,” Billingsley said. “Parents can do that, and they should do that. It makes the kids become better citizens. I’m not saying that they should out-and-out whip the kids. But what they should do is teach them some sort of discipline. My parents were great believers in discipline,” he laughed.
“That sort of realism — and the crack baby episode — was the sort of thing I had to put in the strip. The crack baby episode was just what was goin’ on at the time. The Black community was decimated by crack. I knew a lot of people who had great jobs, great futures. I’d see them one day, and then see them three months later, and they were begging in the streets because crack had taken them over. So I just felt compelled to do something on it in the strip.”
Billingsley also delved into the rap industry in the strip.
“At one point,” he said, “rap was so controversial that each time a rapper came out, it led to a congressional summit, you know. They were saying that ‘You can’t say this, you can’t say that.’ So I had a good time with rap.
“There was a record store in the strip, and each time Curtis would visit, it was in a different location. It was under a different name. And it was selling this rap music that had been banned by everybody.”
The store moved around a lot because every time parents learned where it was, they burned it down.
“And some of my readers were upset by that,” Billingsley said. “They said, ‘Oh, well, you can’t do that. That’s arson.’ I’m like, ‘That’s not the point, that’s not the idea I’m trying to put across.’ But I got enough positive reinforcement to keep it going.”
In the interest of imparting a certain realism to the strip, Billingsley has had President Barack Obama show up occasionally.
Curtis and Barry attend Obama’s inauguration ceremony, and when it’s over, Barry has disappeared. Curtis spends several days looking for Barry. He is found, finally, by President Obama, who discovers that his daughters have a new playmate — Barry.
For several years, Billingsley has participated in Kwanzaa in the strip, often developing a historical storyline and deploying a different drawing style. Kwanzaa is an African-American celebration that occurs during the Christmas holidays, usually between December 26 and December 31st. And Curtis also recognizes Black History Month every year.
Billingsley’s passion for authenticity in the strip has earned him both awards and praise from interested parties.
In recognition of his storyline in which Curtis tries to get his father to quit smoking, Billingsley has received numerous awards and recognition from the American Lung Association, including the President's Award in 2000 during the American Lung Association/Canadian Lung Association conference in Toronto, Canada. First given in 1983, the President's Award was created to acknowledge an individual, or nonprofit or commercial organization, responsible for an outstanding contribution in an area of importance to the goals of the American Lung Association.
In addition, Billingsley received the Humanitarian Award from the American Lung Association of Southeast Florida in 1999.
And now, the Reuben.
Gratifying though such awards are, Billingsley, like most cartoonists, draws his comic strip because he loves cartooning. The satisfaction it yields is award enough.
“I’m still here to inspire others,” Billingsley says, “— inspire them to forge ahead with their own dreams and to push themselves beyond the boundaries of the status quo. It would be wonderful if Curtis were to be pushed out into the public eye like Peanuts or Garfield, but I don’t see it happening. At least not right now. But maybe one of my students will make the change happen.”
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Funnies Farrago celebrates the first African-American to get the Reuben Trophy for Cartoonist of the Year. The National Cartoonists Society made history on a week or so ago … Read more
The Roaring Twenties and the Essence of The New Yorker: Funnies Farrago Meets Peter Arno.
THE DECADE THAT HAS ENTERED AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY as “the roaring twenties” was created, it is sometimes alleged, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a novelist, and John Held, Jr., a cartoonist. Gratifying as it may be to partisans of the literary and graphic arts to fancy that the social temper of a distinctive period of U.S. history could be brought into being through the power of the pen, life did not really imitate art any more readily in the twenties than it does now.
It’s true that Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise, captured the spirit of disillusioned ennui and impertinent disregard for convention that infected the joy-riding Younger Generation in post-World War I America. And it’s true that Held's drawings of spindle-shanked flappers and bell-bottomed sheiks of a few years later became the iconography of what Fitzgerald had christened the Jazz Age. But another cartoonist, Peter Arno, reflected the spirit of the age, too, in both life and art -- although perhaps more that worn and dissipated sensation that collects at 3 a.m. at the end of a party than the boisterousness that infects the proceedings early in the evening.
The 1920s, however, did not roar because of the ministrations of either novelist or cartoonist. In the beginning, in fact, it wasn't a roar at all that distinguished the period: it was a hum.
A quiet hum at first -- quiet but persistent. A hum that grew in volume until it became a steady drone and then, finally, a thunderous rumble. It was the sound of business enterprise, of manufacturing and commerce. It was the sound of twentieth century America -- an age of mass production, mass consumption, standardization, national advertising, consumer economics, business enterprise, and mass communications and entertainment.
The twenties in America roared with the exuberance of a nation shaking off the fetters of the Victorian era, it roared with the defiance of the Young rebelling against the conventions of out-outmoded mores, it roared with the outrage of the Older Generation at the audacious behavior of their offspring, it roared with the sound of cash registers ringing up sales in celebration of the country's unprecedented prosperity. By 1925 when Peter Arno began his career as a cartoonist in earnest, the roar was deafening.
The din of the endless all-night party the country seemed embarked on was orchestrated by the flapper and the bootlegger, and it was augmented by bathtub gin and other brands of illegal booze, by high-speed cars and hit men, by the screaming headlines of tabloid newspapers that announced the fads and follies of the moment to the waiting world, by frenzied speculation on Wall Street, even by short skirts and bobbed hair and hip-flasks. Contributing to this outlandish cacophony was the clash of licentiousness and repression, of scientific thought and religious fundamentalism, of self-indulgent Freudian theory and self-righteous blue laws.
Prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League's hope for national sainthood, was well on its way to becoming a colossal failure. By 1923, the year Arno abandoned a college education in favor of a bohemian artistic life in Greenwich Village, the supply of illicit liquor was coming into the country in a torrent -- across the Canadian border, from ships lying offshore just beyond the 3-mile limit (in “Rum Row”). Instead of being sainted, the nation was besotted.
Breaking liquor laws was commonplace. And almost universally condoned. Edward S. Martin, writing in the nation's venerable humor magazine Life, reminded his readers that lawbreakers historically were often heroes: “Among the people who did most for human liberty and human happiness is a splendid gallery of lawbreakers.”
Speakeasies were as much a part of urban life as the growing problem of streets congested by automobile traffic. Speaks were different than saloons: since admittance tended to be restricted to those who knew the password ( “Joe sent me”), a secretive clubby membership atmosphere prevailed. Hence, these establishments of the evening's entertainment became “night clubs.” (And the admission fee charged to help maintain the hideaway was called, logically, a couvert charge.) Each night club tended to develop its own unique ambiance.
A one-time movie actress named Texas Guinan made a career as a hostess enlivening a succession of New York's night spots: “Never give a sucker an even break,” she advised. And she greeted her customers accordingly: “Hello, sucker,” she'd bellow from across the room. For a less boisterous evening, the crowds gathered at Helen Morgan's where the bad booze was made palatable by the torch singer's husky contralto. (Illustrator James Montgomery Flagg explained her appeal best: she was, he said, the composite of all the ruined women in the world.)
But if there is any single image that epitomizes the era it is not the funereal Mr. Dry in political cartoons; it is that effervescent bundle of giddy self-assurance, girlish laughter, and unabashed sex appeal -- the flapper. The visual symbol of the flapper did not appear widely until she was an accepted type -- that is, until about 1923; but she had become a familiar social phenomenon long before then. The typical flapper was a nice girl who was a little fast ( “brazen and at least capable of sin if not actually guilty of it,” as Shelly Armitage says in her biography of John Held, Jr.).
The flapper offended the Older Generation because she defied accepted conventions of decorous feminine behavior. Women's hair had always been long; the flapper wore hers short -- “bobbed.” She used make-up (which she often applied in public). She wore tight, short dresses which bared her arms and her legs from the knees down; underneath, she wore as little as possible. And on the beach, she resorted to a skin-tight, single-piece costume that didn't cover arms or legs and that therefore left very little of her figure to be imagined.
But she did more than symbolize the revolution in feminine fashion and mores: she also embodied the spirit of the times in a way no other figure did. Held did more to create this revolutionary icon than anyone else. But Peter Arno, as I said, personified the Age of Flaming Youth in his life in those days, and his art for The New Yorker incorporated its giddy infatuations as surely as Held’s did albeit somewhat more somberly (if we can apply that word to cartooning).
The revolution in manners and morals that characterized the decade was more than a simple insurrection: it had escalated into a way of life for a substantial portion of the population, particularly the Younger Generation. To a generation of parents, the behavior of American youth was scandalous, but by mid-decade, the Young had thoroughly corrupted their elders: fathers and mothers had begun aping their sons and daughters. F. Scott Fitzgerald analyzed the phenomenon:
“The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the [grown-ups], leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken aback. Their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The younger generation was starred no longer.”
The Age of Flaming Youth had dawned and bathed the entire country in its glow, and so the nation became the Land of the Young -- with Edna St. Vincent Millay its poet laureate: “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, / It gives a lovely light.”
And Peter Arno -- musician, artist, party animal -- was in exactly the right place to be drawn to the flame like a moth.
Arno’s cartoons embodied the sophistication and irreverence of The New Yorker, and they appeared in the magazine almost from the very beginning. But Arno’s beginning scarcely suggested he would become one of the nation’s celebrated cartoonists. He was born Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., on January 8, 1904 in New York City, son of a New York Supreme Court justice and Edith Theresa Haynes.
As scion of a prominent family, Curt (as he was called then) was sent to Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and then to Yale College, where he indulged his interest in music and art instead of pursuing the career as a banker or lawyer that his father planned for him. He drew cartoons for The Yale Record and painted pictures on the walls of local restaurants and cafes. (For a long time -- into the 1940s and perhaps even now -- a New Haven eatery called the Bulldog Grille featured an early Arno mural signed Curtis Arnoux Peters that ridiculed the gridiron heroes who give their all for Alma Mater.) And he plunged enthusiastically into the recreations of the day.
In his spare time (which might have been most of the time), Curt formed a nine-piece band called the Yale Collegians, playing piano, banjo, and accordion himself as needed. With a young unknown named Rudy Vallee as lead singer, the group was engaged by Gilda Gray's Rendezvous, one of Manhattan's first post-war nightclubs, where the nightly attraction was Gilda’s performing a sensational shimmy dance.
Quickly succumbing to the taste of the era for night life, Curt was virtually a prototype of the Jazz Age's young man about town: rich with a breezy debonair demeanor, he was tall, urbane, impeccably dressed and multi-talented, and he had the jutting-jaw good looks of a model in the popular Arrow shirt ads of the day. And the lure of the nightlife of the City proved too powerful to resist.
In 1923, he left Yale and the pursuit of a degree, joined the artists' milieu in the Village, and changed his name to Peter Arno in order to separate his identity from his father's (that is, to avoid embarrassing the old man). He wrote music (achieving modest Tin Pan Alley success with a song called “My Heart Is on My Sleeve”), played in his band, painted more murals in bistros and cafes, and submitted drawings, without selling many, to the humor magazines, Judge and Life. He was about to abandon his ambition to be an artist for a musical career with a band in Chicago when he received a check for a drawing that he had submitted to a new humor magazine that had debuted February 21, 1925.
With the publication of this spot illustration in the June 20, 1925, issue of The New Yorker, Arno began a forty-three year association with Harold Ross's journal, his single-panel cartoons helping hugely to shape the magazine's sophisticated but irreverent personality. (The illustration is reproduced at the end of this essay.)
Arno's first success in the magazine was with a series of cartoons about two tipsy middle-aged harridans who were probably charwomen on their night off, which they spent cavorting about town in feathered hats, long formal gowns and muffs, punctuating their incongruously earthy observations of life around them with spirited cries of “Whoops!” Here the old girls are strolling down the street in the rain and talking as they go:
“The hussy,” says one, “ -- she says ‘I’ll give yuh a ring’ -- then she asks me, ‘Is yer phone number under yer own name?’ Lordy!”
“Whoops!” says the other. “Wha’ did she think it was under -- yer bust measure?”
Or, as they both sit, exhausted, on a curb, and one of them, having removed her shoes for the moment, says: “Whoops!”
”What’s up, dearie?” asks the other.
“Oh, nuthin’ -- only it’s kinda nice t’ get yer boots off fer a minute now that th’ fleet’s gone -- Gor!”
Or (yet again) they stand behind a nude statue in a museum and, peering around for a front view, exclaim: “Whoops! It’s a girl!”
Christened the Whoops Sisters, this bibulous pair of dowdy rowdies appeared three times a month for three years and stimulated newsstand sales of the magazine. But it was with his next creations that Arno contributed a vital essence to the character of The New Yorker.
The first of these was an aristocratically mustached old gent in white tie and tails, whose eyes, as Somerset Maugham observed, "gleamed with concupiscence when they fell upon the grapefruit breasts of the blonde and blue-eyed cuties" whom he avidly pursued.
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These same voluptuous damsels kept company with another regular member of Arno's ensemble -- a thin, bald albeit youngish man with a wispy walrus mustache, a razor sharp nose, and an ethereally placid expression who was often seen simply lying in bed beside an empty-headed ingenue with an overflowing nightgown. The other regular was a ponderous dowager, stern of visage and impressive of chest, whose imposing presence proclaimed her right to rule.
This trio was joined by an assortment of rich predatory satyrs in top hats, crones, precocious moppets (one of whom was forever chancing upon his shapely aunt when she was naked), tycoons, curmudgeonly clubmen, fuddy-duddies and barflies of all description -- in short, the probable population of all of New York's cafe society.
This Manhattan menagerie Arno subjected to merciless scrutiny from his favored position well within the pale, and he found something ridiculous and therefore valuable in everyone from roue to cab driver. Arno's cartoons juxtaposed the seeming urbanity of his cast against their underlying earthiness, thereby stripping all pretension away. He proved again and again that humankind is just a little larcenous and lecherous and trivial in its passions and pursuits, social decorum to the contrary notwithstanding.
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Ross, although a fairly uncouth appearing and profusely profane bantering editor, was passionately opposed to sexual innuendo. He particularly hated Arno’s depiction of “tits,” Arno once reported. “But endured my repeated emphasis on the mammary glands of women with weary and tolerant resignation. He’d behold a drawing of mine, featuring a busty young lady or two, and the reaction would usually be: ‘Goddammit Arno! Look at those goddamn tits again!’”
Produced a generation before Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, Arno’s voluptuous beauties and their sex lives were a sensation for their time. But Arno’s contribution to the history of cartooning was more profound and lasting than the way he drew the female chest.
JAMES GERAGHTY, who eventually rose to the August position of art editor at The New Yorker, once remarked that Arno did not adapt to the character of the magazine: rather, he was one of the most important factors in forming that character. Arno also looms large in the emergence of the modern, single-panel magazine gag cartoon.
Arno was often credited with inventing the single-speaker cartoon at The New Yorker, but he specifically denied it (in his introduction to Peter Arno’s Ladies and Gentlemen).
“I like to think that I did,” Arno wrote, “and I have been given credit for it; but nothing so basically simple could be ‘invented.’ It must be as old as Confucius, or older. It was just lying there all the time, waiting to be picked up. I gravitated toward it naturally, and was one of the first to use it consistently, so that it became more or less a trade-mark. ... I suppose it appealed to me because my English grandfather, who was the light of my boyhood years, had taught me that brevity was the soul of wit . ... As with a smoking-room story, the shortest caption, if it hits with a wallop, brings the loudest guffaw, the kind that warms my heart.”
Other cartoonists were doing the so-called “one-line caption” cartoons long before The New Yorker debuted. But not as a matter of routine -- just occasionally. Now and then. The usual form of the magazine cartoon was the illustrated comic dialogue, in which the humor resided entirely in the verbal exchange between several speakers that was printed beneath a picture like a script for a play. Arno describes the circumstance that prevailed until the mid-twenties and how The New Yorker contributed to changing it:
“In the days of the old Life, Puck, and Judge, many an artist drew endless variations of his particular speciality -- boy-and-girl, old-gentleman-and-small-boy, monkey-talking-to-giraffe -- and then some bedeviled staffer would sit down and tack on whatever variation of stock joke, pun , or he-and-she dialogue he could think of. ... Harold Ross in starting The New Yorker cast out the stale joke, the pun, the he-and-she formula; and before long, these faithful old servants were dying everywhere else. ... In their place there developed a humor ... based upon carefully thought-out, integrated situations with picture and caption interdependent.
“This interdependence was the most important element of such cartoons. The reader had to examine the picture before the joker in the caption made its point, or vice versa. The quick revelation of incongruity (actually, the sudden realization by the reader that he’d been hoodwinked) brought the laugh. Or at least we hoped it would.”
Ross did not invent the single-speaker caption cartoon any more than Arno did. But Ross had a good feel for the superiority of the humor in that form. And he insisted his cartoonists work to achieve the effect Arno describes here. At The New Yorker, the single-speaker caption cartoon became, eventually, the preferred mode. And thus Ross’s magazineestablished the form as the most effective for the single panel cartoon. And Arno, as one of the most spectacular practitioners of the form in its earliest manifestations, acquired the reputation of having invented it.
Arno says he thought up his own gags in the early years. “I had to,” he wrote. “I was developing a style and a new kind of format, and there was no way anyone else could do it for me. But as time went on and a distinct pattern for my work was set, it became easier for others to make contributions.”
The same was doubtless true with other cartoonists whose style of humor was distinctive. Even, apparently, as individual a talent as George Price, who, I was startled to learn in Lee Lorenz’s Art of the New Yorker, produced only one of his hundreds of highly idiosyncratic New Yorker cartoons from his own idea. In his account of life at The New Yorker, James Thurber says some cartoonists thought up their own ideas; others used the ideas supplied by staff writers.
“In the early years,” Thurber wrote, “Andy [E.B.] White and I sent [in] scores of captions and ideas, some of them for full-page drawings, others for double-page panels for Gluyas Williams and Rea Irvin. If a caption didn’t suit Ross -- and he was as finicky about some of them as a woman trying on Easter bonnets -- it was given to White to ‘tinker.’ [Wolcott] Gibbs and I did tinkering, too, but White was the chief tinkerer.”
Lorenz agrees that White may be the most influential of the magazine’s writers in shaping and refining gag cartooning. “Polishing captions” was one of White’s first assignments upon joining the magazine’s staff. Brendan Gill in Here at The New Yorker also discusses White’s contribution to the magazine’s cartoons: “It was crucial that these captions be as succinct and colloquial as possible, and White had a fine ear for the natural rhythms of American speech. His seemingly effortless tinkerings brought thousands of drawings back from the brink of rejection.”
Elsewhere, in a discussion of Arno’s development as a cartoonist, Lorenz credits Philip Wylie with creating Arno’s gags.
Arno said that he submitted rough charcoal sketches of his ideas, and these were reviewed by the weekly “art meeting” at The New Yorker. “The ones that seem funny and solid enough are picked out for finishing, often with constructive suggestions for improving the picture or rewording the caption,” he explained. He then executed the final drawing -- a “painful” experience, according to Arno, about which we will hear more anon.
Thomas Kunkel in his biography of Ross, Genius in Disguise, tells the story of an idea generating session between Arno and one-time art editor Albert Hubbell. Hubbell went to Arno’s Park Avenue apartment one afternoon where he found Arno, “a creature of the night,” still in a silk dressing gown. Arno fixed himself a hamburger and sat down to hear Hubbell’s ideas.
“One that Hubbell liked and pitched hard involved a billiard table,” Kunkel writes. “But in no time, Arno was frowning. It turned out that Ross paid him a substantial bonus for full-page cartoons, which presupposed vertical concepts, so a billiard table was altogether too lateral to even consider. ‘Wait a minute, Hubb, wait a minute,’ Arno said, ‘ -- let’s go for those pages.’”
Arno was an admirer of Honore Daumier and Georges Rouault, and his earliest drawings with their simple outlines and grease-crayon shading show the influence of the former, but before long, the Rouault line began to assert itself. Eventually, Arno employed a broad brush stroke to delineate his subject with the fewest lines possible, holding the compositions together with a wash of varying gray tones.
“Each drawing is a painful tooth-pulling experience,” he wrote, “because I insist on including characterization, form, design, chiaroscuro, etc. -- that the reader takes for granted.”
Despite the raw simplicity of his style, Arno researched for his cartoons. Jud Hurd (editor of the venerable Cartoonist PROfiles), reported on a visit he made to Arno’s studio: “I was amazed to find his drawing board piled high with candid photos and sketches made at various restaurants, nightspots, etc., around New York. It was then I realized how painstaking he was with his cartoons. I’ll always remember a photo he’d snapped at some club -- showing a couple dancing in a unique and comical attitude -- a pose that a cartoonist would never think of unless he’d seen it in real life.”
The cartoonist, however, usually pooh-poohed the artistry in his cartoons. He once said: “My art studies have been principally pursued in dark alleys.”
But he worked hard to give his drawings the look of spontaneity. “It must be done rapidly, with careless care,” he once wrote, “so it doesn't look like work. It must look fast and loose, with a drawn-on-the-spot quality.” But, he confessed, “I’ve never been able to achieve in cartoons the artistic level (in spontaneous dash and freedom and draftsmanship) that I have in drawings and paintings for my own pleasure.”
While working, Arno frequently assumed the expressions of the faces he was drawing, lost in the intensity of his concentration. A dedicated craftsman, he customarily rendered a single cartoon scores of times until the combination of artful design and accidental execution felt right. Penciling in the layout, he dawbed at the artwork as often with his eraser as with his pencil. Once he even complained that he used more erasers than all other artists in The New Yorker combined.
Just as he drew quickly, Arno moved quickly, talked rapidly, and ate fast. And he drove as fast as the law permitted. Once he sued an automobile manufacturer because the car he bought would not do 155 mph as advertised.
ARNO INDULGED HIS INTEREST in music as well as art throughout his life. In 1931, he co-authored a Broadway musical satire called “Here Comes the Bride.” It opened in October but didn’t do much else. Percy Hammond, a reviewer, wrote: “Peter Arno in a magazine is from the Mayfair, but in a musical comedy he is from the sticks.” But Arno celebrated the opening anyway. Renting a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, he threw a party that ran up a bill of $1,215.80, a amount he took over three years to pay off and then only when the hotel sued him for the balance of $782.15.
During the thirties, he designed sets for Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox. He dabbled in various businesses -- sports car manufacturing, producing, writing, composing for the theater. Bands. And he painted.
His art was displayed in exhibitions several times in New York galleries. Of the show at the Marie Harriman Gallery in 1938, Lewis Mumford wrote in The New Yorker: “There is nobody drawing in America that I can think of, except possibly Noguchi, who has shown anything like Arno’s skill in sweeping a simple wash across a figure to create life and vehemence in the whole pattern after he has outlined its parts; and no one has dramatized so effectively the elementary battle of black and white, in a fashion that makes a face leap out of the picture like a jack-in-the-box, knocking one in the eye at the same time that the idea of the joke enters one’s mind. His intention is as unflagging as his wicked commentaries, though they both spring out of certain well-defined areas of metropolitan life, half-real, half-fantastic, altogether wild and unembarrassed and exuberant.”
Even Arno’s famous signature attracted the attention of critics. Henry McBride of the New York Sun wrote: “What a super creation that signature is! It’s a complete thing in itself, like a coin; or like one of those crashing chords of Handel that Samuel Butler admired so much; and when the artist smacks it to the drawing up in the skies, as he does sometimes, it’s so very Handelian that I just bow down and worship.”
Composer, painter, entrepreneur -- and all the while, Arno kept on doing cartoons in all-night bouts for The New Yorker. Although he occasionally took lucrative advertising assignments, he generally avoided them because the advertisers normally didn’t give him the freedom he desired. “None of them -- clients or agencies,” he wrote, “understand that to get the value of a creative artist is to let him do it his own way. The general attempt is to hedge him in with inappropriate format, excessive copy, trademarks, inserts, etc.”
Only once, Arno reported, had he enjoyed the freedom he craved with an advertising assignment -- and that was with Pepsi-Cola.
Arno devised a leisurely way of life: he worked only about two days a week, making rough sketches of cartoon ideas and sending them in to The New Yorker. He produced the final drawings in batches, several at a sitting, working twenty-four or thirty-six hours at a stretch. Sometimes he grew worn with the expenditure of nervous energy his method required, and he would take several months or a year off to travel -- to Mexico, Nassau, Europe, Hollywood, and the ghost towns of the American West.
“I’ve never sought great riches,” Arno wrote, “particularly in later years -- but have been satisfied with comfortable affluence -- while I pursued life and work in a way that was independent, satisfying, and deeply rewarding. My goal since the beginning was to have mornings (and days) free, sleep as late as I wanted, enjoy leisurely breakfast [and] several hours to digest papers and newspapers, devour the Times. I think I’ve come as close as possible to a free, untrammeled life without inheriting ten million. I’ve done my work in concentrated, intense periods -- considered work as a means toward the enjoyment of life -- not center of existence -- as well as a fulfillment of living.”
Well-known as a bon vivant for the first decade of his fame, Arno pursued women and was caught twice. On August 12, 1927, Arno married Lois Long, who wrote for The New Yorker under the pen name Lipstick; they had a daughter and then divorced by Reno decree on June 29, 1931. Arno's second wife was a glamorous debutante named Mary “Timmie” Livingston Lansing whom he married in August 1935 and divorced in July 1939.
Arno’s social life was enthusiastically chronicled in the gossip columns, and when, between marriages, he paid too much attention to Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., the resulting altercation with her husband produced reams of newspaper copy for days. Vanderbilt chanced upon Arno at a railway station in Reno and lunged at him. Arno slipped and fell, and before he could regain his footing, Vanderbilt had been restrained. The fracas never amounted to more than the merest hostile encounter, but the tabloid press and society reporters had a field day with it, embellishing it endlessly in the manner of present-day pundits chewing over the latest Clinton would-be scandal.
Mademoiselle magazine once dwelled on Arno’s fashionable appeal: “Your first impression of him is all tans: tan hair, a tan complexion, hazelish eyes, small ears set close to a massive head, a tan tweed jacket, tan flannel trousers, white shoes, and a fetching bit of bare ankle showing above them.”
Even as late as 1941, he was the object of societal admiration: he was voted the best-dressed man in America by the Custom Tailors Guild. Arno’s sartorial splendor was then promptly dwelt upon by the newspaper PM: “Arno, who’s been dressing himself for thirty-two of his thirty-seven years, took his election in his stride. His six-foot-two-inch 190-pound physique may have helped a little. Arno estimates he spends only $1,500 a year on clothes and says he never thinks about them. His general theory of clothes is to be comfortable.”
PM then reported that Arno’s closet contained seventeen suits, fourteen pairs of shoes, three dozen shirts, five coats and six hats -- although he seldom wore hats. And when he worked, he wore whatever he happened to have on at the moment.
But by the late 1930s, Arno had lost the ambivalence he doubtless felt as an insider satirizing cafe society: no longer a devotee of its rituals, he became disgusted with “fatuous ridiculous people.” Said he: “At no time in the history of the world have there been so many damned morons gathered in one place as here in New York right now. I had a really hot impulse to go and exaggerate their ridiculous aspects. That anger, if you like, gave my stuff punch and made it live.”
He gave up his duplex apartment on West 54th Street in Manhattan and moved to a farm near Harrison, New York. His mother joined him, and he spent his last years luxuriating in idyllic seclusion, enjoying music, guns, sport cars, and drawing, and making contact with the outside world only once a week when he telephoned the art director of Ross’s magazine.
Nor did he leave the farm much. “Today’s exasperating travel,” he wrote, “makes it unattractive so I relax on my own peaceful acres with the feeling that I don’t have to go anywhere: I’m already there.
“I’ll do anything rather than draw,” he continued. “Tractor mowing, plowing, chewing up brush and saplings, book-typing, banjo, piano, composing, farm chores.”
Despite his isolation, his subject (and his bemused scorn of it) remained the same as ever. Ill with emphysema, Arno continued to contribute regularly. He was alone when he died from cancer on February 22, 1968; it was an ironic but thoroughly fitting finale, forty-three years almost to the day after the first issue of the magazine his work had so shaped as to be its very essence. That week’s issue of The New Yorker carried its traditional anniversary cover by Rea Irvin, a repeat of the magazine’s first cover depicting the bored boulevardier Eustace Tilley inspecting a passing butterfly through his monocle. It might have been a portrait of Arno. It captured his attitude as surely as he had bodied forth The New Yorker’s.
Arno’s last cartoon appeared within. The cartoon depicts a middle-aged Pan playing his pipes and cavorting before a scantily clad nymph, who, entirely unimpressed, looks at the scampering satyr and murmurs, “Oh, grow up.”
Writing the Introduction to 1979's collection, Peter Arno, fellow cartoonist Charles Saxon reported that only a small group came to Arno’s funeral. “After the service, his daughter Pat showed those attending a fairly recent photograph of her father. Except for herself, Geraghty, and Arno’s devoted nurse-companion, no one had actually seen him for years.”
The New York Times printed Arno’s obituary on the front page, signifying perhaps that in his person and in his work, he had so typified a New Yorker as to be archetypal of the breed. And so he was.
Bibliography. Information about Peter Arno's life can be found in The New York Times' obituary, February 23, 1968, in The Dictionary of American Biography, in Current Biography 1942, and in The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons (1980), edited by Maurice Horn. In addition to his cartooning, Arno wrote a modestly successful song, My Heart Is on My Sleeve, in the 1920s and a novel based upon his first cartoon characters, Whoops Dearie! (1927), and he co-authored a Broadway musical satire, Here Comes the Bride (1931). Several collections of his cartoons have been published: Peter Arno's Parade (1929), Peter Arno's Hullabaloo (1930), Peter Arno's Circus (1930), Peter Arno's Favorites (1931), Peter Arno's Bride for a Night (1934), For Members Only (1935), Peter Arno's Cartoon Revue with an introduction by Somerset Maugham (1941), Peter Arno's Man in the Shower (1944), Peter Arno's Pocket Book (1946), Peter Arno's Sizzling Platter (1949), Peter Arno's Ladies and Gentlemen which includes introductory matter by Arno in which he describes his methods and answers questions about his work (1951), and Peter Arno's Hell of A Way To Run A Railroad (1956). Arno's relationship with Harold Ross and his place in the history of The New Yorker is briefly discussed in Ross and the New Yorker (1951) by Dale Kramer, The Years with Ross (1959) by James Thurber, and Here at the New Yorker (1975) by Brendan Gill.
[post_title] => Peter Arno and the Untrammeled Life
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The Roaring Twenties and the Essence of The New Yorker: Funnies Farrago Meets Peter Arno. THE DECADE THAT HAS ENTERED AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY as “the roaring twenties” was created, … Read more
Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, editor, publisher and comics guru, is the subject of an article in last spring’s anniversary issue of The New Yorker, a review of another in the seemingly unending parade of Stan Lee biographies; this one, True Believer by Abraham Riesman. Just for a few derisive laughs, I’ve posted my caricature of Stan Lee, adorning one of those “blank” comic book covers, this one for Marvel Comics No. 1000.
Riesman’s contribution to the cottage industry of Stan Lee biographies takes the position that Lee isn’t what he appears to be, an appearance Riesman apparently believes that Lee carefully orchestrated in a continuous effort at self-promotion and -aggrandizement (but which I, having more experience at Stan Lee than Riesman, believe to be merely the result of various accidents, which we’ll visit anon).
The review of Riesman’s book is conducted by Stephanie Burt, otherwise an English professor at Harvard, who, judging from her review, is apparently anxious to prove she is with it on comic books. But she stumbles occasionally.
She says Riesman’s book (Crown 2021) is “the first biography completed since Lee’s death in 2018,” overlooking at least two others, both completed since Stan Lee died: Danny Fingeroth’s A Marvelous Life was published in 2019; and Liel Leibovitz’s Stan Lee: A Life in Comics, published in 2020.
Lee went to work in his uncle’s comic book company; yes, but Goodman’s publishing company produced other publications as well — pulps, as they were known, among them, Ka-Zar (a Tarzan knock-off) and Marvel Science Stories, and a title or two aimed at male readers. She says Jack Kirby was known for drawing “dynamic action and far-out costumes”; yes to the first, but probably not the second.
Eager (it seems) to show off her esoteric college-bred knowledge, she drops a couple unlikely foreign terms: kunstlerroman and stakhanovite. The first, in reference to Lee’s life working in an art form, is supposed to remind us of a story in which the hero often dreams of becoming a great artist but settles for being a merely useful citizen. The künstlerroman often ends on a note of arrogant rejection of the commonplace life.
With stakhanovite, she refers to Jack Kirby’s extremely productive life/work style, which, the term suggests, is akin that of a Soviet industrial worker awarded recognition and special privileges for output beyond production norms.
I must point out that I haven’t read Riesman’s tome yet, so my only knowledge of it comes from reading Burt’s review. And it’s difficult to tell, much of the time, whether Burt is repeating Riesman’s opinions or asserting her own in imitation of Riesman.
She is immediately hostile to Lee the creator of the Marvel universe. She begins at once belittling Lee’s achievement, suggesting strenuously that his achievement is a fiction about his prowess that was created entirely by Stan Lee.
Lee, Burt insists, was “a grand self-mythologizer ... He became the face of the company. No one could stop him.”
And she refers more than once to Lee’s apparent need for attention.
The talent-less Lee couldn’t do much by himself, Burt says. She acknowledges his skill at orchestrating the production of Goodman’s comic book operation, but fails to recognize that orchestration is a talent. And Lee did that by himself, giving orders to others.
She quotes comic book writer Chris Claremont (who, I assume, is quoted by Riesman), who “recalls a figure [Lee] ‘good as an editor, equally good as a manager, equally good as inspiration.’ Artists and writers whom Lee would have regarded as his juniors generally paint him in the sixties as bombastic but kind, reliable, fun to work with.”
So Lee isn’t all self-aggrandizement.
In her closing remarks, Burt backs off the posture she’s assumed for most of the article. She’s no longer hostile to Stan Lee:
“The mutant nation [X-men but also, I’d say — speaking poetically — the entire roster of Marvel superheroes] could never have been created — or even anticipated — by the fast-talking, smug, sometimes generous, and surprisingly conventional Lee. But it could never have happened without him.”
SO WHAT, EXACTLY, did Stan Lee do at Marvel Comics? He is usually credited with inventing a team of superheroes that quarreled and bickered amongst themselves, behaving, in other words, like ordinary people instead of super beings.
But that’s not what he intended to do.
In creating the Fantastic Four in November 1961, Stan Lee did not set out to invent a team of superheroes that quarreled and bickered amongst themselves. He set out to concoct a parody of superheroes. He intended to ridicule superheroes.
No one that I know of has arrived at this interpretation. Except me. Until now, Stan Lee hasn’t got away with it: nobody knew the Fantastic Four was a parody because Stan Lee was not a very good writer.
For years, he wrote slapstick comedy, making humor by punning, in Dan DeCarlo-drawn books such as My Friend Irma and other “babe books.” Corny stuff, and Stan was adept at corny. But serious comedy — parody — exceeded his ability. So the Fantastic Four wound up looking like a fresh, new kind of superheroes.
The usual story of the creation of the Fantastic Four involves Stan’s wife, Joan. According to the treasured litany, Stan was complaining to Joan about his latest assignment from Martin Goodman — to create a team of superheroes like the one just recently launched at DC Comics, the Justice League.
Stan was complaining because (as Danny Fingeroth has it) “he didn’t want to just revive the old Timely heroes.”
At this point, Joan interrupts him and tells him “(as she seems to have told him numerous times in an ongoing conversation) that he might as well try to do something different — quit complaining about being forced to churn out formulaic pap — and see what would develop. The worst that could happen is that Martin would fire him ... and he’d been claiming to want to quit anyway.”
So, disliking superheroes and the formulaic pap they wallowed in, Lee decided he’d just ridicule superheroes by showing them to be flawed human beings despite their super powers. He’d write a parody. And he did.
And when readers responded to the “parody” be applauding this “fresh, new” approach — superheroes with normal, human failings — not recognizing it as parody, Stan was surprised. But he was promoter enough to recognize good thing when he saw it: he went on playing to that appreciative audience, only now he wasn’t trying to write parody. He just produced more episodes in which the Fantastic Four interrupted superhero-ing every so often to quibble amongst themselves.
If readers liked superheroes for their superhuman strength, then he’d give them unadulterated strength with the Hulk in the spring of 1962. If readers liked superheroes with feet of clay, then perhaps they’d like a teenage superhero plagued by all the usual adolescent problems of insecurity and self-doubt. So Stan created Spider-Man in the summer of 1962.
By now, Stan was on a roll. He’d long ago given up parody. He was writing superheroes with ordinary human personalities.
And comic books about these kinds of characters were attracting the attention of the mainstream news media. And that’s where Stan stumbled.
According to Riesman (as recounted by Burt), Nat Freedland, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, came to the Marvel office in search of a story about these “new” superheroes. And Stan gave him a story. He demonstrated the “Marvel Method” of producing comic book stories.
Stan had been forced to develop the Marvel Method by the quantity of comic books he was committed to writing. He simply didn’t have time to produce full scripts with dialogue and stage directions in the customary manner of a movie script. So he short-cutted. He’d meet with the artist assigned to a book, and he’d suggest a topic or a storyline, discussing it briefly with the artist, both of them adding turns and twists to the story as they talked.
Then the artist would go off and draw the story, often adding new twists and ramifications as he drew. Then he’d give Stan the penciled pages, and Stan would write captions and speeches that carried the storyline, adding quips and quirks as he went.
When Freedland wrote about Stan’s demonstration of the Marvel Method, he focused on Stan’s role in the “writing” of the stories. Freedland was a writer, of course, and he understood writing; he didn’t understand drawing, so his report didn’t say much about that.
As a result, Stan emerged as the creative powerhouse at Marvel Comics. He was the star of the show.
NOW, I DOUBT THAT STAN KNEW what would be the consequences of his demonstration of the Marvel Method for Freedland. He didn’t deliberately set out to portray himself as the heart and soul, the main creative force of Marvel Comics. He didn’t deliberately leave his artist collaborators out of the process. He was just giving Freedland a story — a somewhat sensational story about how he and his artists created comic books, a story that would promote Marvel Comics.
And comics in general. Until the arrival of the Marvel universe of flawed superheroes, comic books were largely ignored by the general public — if they were not also disdained. Publicity like Freedland would produce — and that others following in his footsteps would produce — would go far towards redeeming comics as an entertainment art form.
That was the over-all purpose of Lee’s demonstration of the Marvel Method. But the demonstration had the incidental effect of portraying Stan as the initiating creative force in making Marvel Comics.
After that, he was suddenly the “face” of Marvel Comics. And he was approached by other reporters, whose reports kept repeating Stan’s role in the process until the artists didn’t seem to be contributing much to the process.
Some of the artists who had descended into anonymity in the public prints began to feel snubbed by their editor/boss. When they started to object, Stan suddenly realized what was happening, and he tried to re-insert artists into the process, naming them when talking to reporters. By then, alas, the mold was set: Stan was the man. He was the story.
But fans began to sound off, labeling Lee as an egocentric show-off who could care less for the careers and fates of the artists he worked with. And there was the example of Steve Ditko quitting (in a huff? everyone wanted to find out). And when Kirby quit, what was that about? More fed up with Stan’s self-promotion?
All of this prompted fans to do more careful research into the relationship between Lee and the artists. Careful examination showed that Lee was the victim of accidental advancement rather than the instigator of conscious plotting.
But it was too late.
[gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="95537,95535"]
In writing his book, Abraham Riesman set out to correct the record, to expose Stan Lee as a fake. He was not the sole creative force at Marvel. As I said, I haven’t read Riesman yet, but I suspect he doesn’t recognize Stan Lee’s rise as largely an accident. Instead (judging from Burt’s review), Riesman sees Stan Lee’s machinations as a deliberate attempt to get the spotlight to shine on him and him alone with Stan making a conscious attempt at self-glorification.
Although much of the publicity surrounding the publication of True Believer claims that Riesman’s treatment of Stan Lee’s professional personality is an expose of huge dimensions, it actually isn’t. Stan Lee has been unmasked by others repeatedly over the last 20-30 years. So there may not be anything new and/or earth-shaking in Riesman’s book, despite the assertions of the publicity department.
We’ll soon find out. Just as I was typing the foregoing, the mail arrived, and it included a copy of Riesman’s True Believer. We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but if we compare Riesman’s cover to Fingeroth’s, what a difference: one cheerful and jocular; the other, grim as death. Stay ’tooned.
[post_title] => Funnies Farrago on Another Stan Lee Biography
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What Stan Lee REALLY did at Marvel Comics Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, editor, publisher and comics guru, is the subject of an article in last spring’s anniversary issue … Read more
I was a little hard on the Cuomo - after all, many funny women may also be guilty of "sexual harassment."
Feeling a bit guilty after my last article, "Win a Date with a Cuomo" on the pitiful New York Governor -- it occurred to me that some funny women may also be guilty of sexual harassment in the form of Jokes!
Yes, there's been lots of dirty old women out there & all were asking for it!
And here's just a few. Take MAE WEST please!
"Come up & see me some time"!
"When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better"!
"Too much of a good thing...can be wonderful"!
"Is that a Pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me"?
MOMS MABLEY
"There ain't nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one"!
"Anytime I have my arms around an old man is when I'm holding him for the police"!
"A woman's a woman until the day she dies, but a man's only a man as long as he can"!
"Help me through the night? If you can make it for half an hour - you're alright with me"!
PHYLLIS DILLER
"I'm 18 years behind in my Ironing"!
"Housework can't kill you - but why take a chance"!
"I serve dinner in 3 phases. Serve the Food. Clear the table. Bury the dead"!
"My body is in such bad shape I wear Prescription Underwear"!
Nah, she's innocent!
DAME EDNA (Everage)
"Hello Possums...isn't it amazing - I brought 3 children into this world yet I have no stretch marks!
"I was just talking to my Gynecologist - I'm still capable of having Grandchildren"!
"I founded 'Friends of the Prostate' in honor of my late husband's 'Testicular Murmur'!
"Years ago I dated Bill Gates & he's still looking for my Mouse"!
And, MARILYN SANDS (1980's)
"My husband says sex is like Golf - you don't have to be good at it to enjoy it - he's telling me"!
"No, he's not romantic - after sex what kind of guy says, 'I'm outta here'?
"But we have an Open Relationship - after sex we talk about the people we just fantasized about"!
"And now he says sex should only be done in bed. I said, "Does that mean no more Stovetop Stuffing"?
Well, you can't say I haven't proven it's a 'MeToo' Movement!
[caption id="attachment_95379" align="aligncenter" width="306"] Me at 13 years old doing 'Moms Mabley!'[/caption]
[post_title] => Funny Women Who Asked for It: Turning the Tables on Sexual Harassment
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I was a little hard on the Cuomo – after all, many funny women may also be guilty of “sexual harassment.” Feeling a bit guilty after my last … Read more
CrockerCon is back, celebrating all things comics, pop culture, and cartoons! Returning for its tenth iteration, CrockerCon 2024 will happen on Thursday, September 12th, 6-9 PM at the Crocker Art Museum in downtown Sacramento.
Cosplay as your favorite character to meet and mingle with cartoonists and comic book creators from across California and beyond. This event is family-friendly.
Part of Crocker's ongoing ArtMix events, it's another fun-filled evening with live performances, DJed music, festive food and drinks, art activities, and more. "Expect the unexpected" they say, and "ArtMix puts the art in party!" is their motto.
Swing by our Humor Times booth and hang out with the publication's editor, James Israel, and meet some of our staff.
At the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street, Sacramento, CA 95814.
[post_title] => CrockerCon 2024: Visit the Humor Times Booth!
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"There ain't nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one"!
"Anytime I have my arms around an old man is when I'm holding him for the police"!
"A woman's a woman until the day she dies, but a man's only a man as long as he can"!
"Help me through the night? If you can make it for half an hour - you're alright with me"!
PHYLLIS DILLER
Me at 13 years old doing 'Moms Mabley!'[/caption]
[post_title] => Funny Women Who Asked for It: Turning the Tables on Sexual Harassment
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