From a distance I can see and understand much that was only dimly visible when I was younger. A community that seemed to me unusually close-knit and welcoming, as indeed it was, also had its share of ordinary human commotion: the family troubles, the money troubles, the dashed ambitions, the chance misfortunes, the good luck that led to bad, the charming foibles that spiraled slowly into conditions with Greek or Latin names. There were members of the group who did not get along very well, and husbands and wives, not married to each other, who got along too well. Although the community reflected its immediate surroundings acutely, and reflected more generally the attitudes of a certain segment of middle-class America, it was hardly a microcosm of the country as it actually was, much less of the country we were rapidly becoming. It was mostly white, mostly male, and mostly accepting of the traditional order of things.
Politically, a majority of the cartoonists would have called themselves liberal. Socially and temperamentally, they were conservative. They believed in the basic American institutions and subscribed to the serviceable founding myths. They were the children of men and women who had been born in the nineteenth century. They remembered horse-drawn milk wagons. Their childhood photographs, featuring sailor suits and Buster Brown haircuts, rendered in sepia, look today like something from a history textbook. They had marveled at Lindbergh’s solo flight, remembered Prohibition, lived through the Depression, served in the war, and emerged into an era of American power and prosperity—and were unapologetically grateful for that. When called to Washington to meet with the president, whoever he might happen to be, they went with excitement and pride. You don’t find much anger or discontent in their work. The ambience of the comic strips was shot through with the cardinal virtues and the deadly sins, rendered with bold brushstrokes and in Technicolor. It was not an ambience of irony, cynicism, uncertainty, despair, or alienation, where the colors are mixed in brooding, complicated ways. There was sophistication and wit in their work, but also a kind of modesty, clarity, and innocence.
This extended to their peculiar form of self-regard. One question that people always asked my father and his friends was whether they considered themselves artists. Cartoonists didn’t find the “artist” question to be a very important or fruitful one. They didn’t go around asking it of themselves, and would have been embarrassed to be seen as putting on airs. They were well aware that some scholars and critics had staked out a case for cartooning as an “art form,” like Hopi dolls or Shoowa textiles, a position that seemed to them oddly ambiguous and a little unfair—endowing the product but not the producers with elevated cultural status. Somehow, in this view, cartoons and comic strips had turned into art unintentionally, even though the makers had only been primitive artisans—the sort of people who might be turned away from the MoMA reception for the art form itself. As it happened, the makers were not much interested in exploring this theory of transubstantiation, and were content to describe themselves with words like cartoonist and illustrator. There was something about the unrelenting dailiness and the deadlines, and the similarity of skills and training among the practitioners, that also pushed the identity into the realm of craftsman.
As for the ultimate significance of what they did, was it anything more noteworthy than bringing laughter (and adventure) to other human beings, while keeping the show on the road? What any civilization mostly needs is not the world-altering legacy of a few but the numberless people of talent who play a role and play it well, and maybe play it a little better than before—sustaining their contemporaries in the brief moment we have together. This is all that most writers and comedians, priests and doctors, ballplayers and musicians ever achieve, and it’s legacy enough. Though in this case there was more to the legacy than that. In cautious and individual ways, without much by way of precedent, the cartoonists of the 1950s and ’60s widened the boundaries of what you could show and say in newspapers and magazines. They encouraged and trained hundreds of young people who wanted to get into the business. And the increasing virtuosity of their techniques, whether in funny strips or dramatic ones, opened a door to the graphic renaissance of today. None of this was really on their minds—they were just making ends meet while doing something they enjoyed. That said, I’ve always suspected that, deep in their hearts, cartoonists harbored a view precisely opposite to that of the scholars and critics: that they themselves were artists of some kind, but that their strips and cartoons might not really be Art, at least not in the high sense of the term. Of course, if the work survived for two thousand years, maybe it would turn out differently. Time loves to play that trick. “Those cave paintings in France might have just been a shopping list,” Dik Browne once told me. Now they’re a World Heritage site.
Whatever it was they were creating—art form, art, Art, ott-woik, or something else entirely—cartoonists did want to see the work preserved, as increasingly it has been. Many thousands of original strips from the Connecticut School repose in the cavernous vaults of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, at The Ohio State University, along with hundreds of thousands of other original strips and more than two million clippings and color pages from the newspapers in which they appeared. The strips lie in banks of flat files. The metal drawers are wide and thin, and you can read the labels—Steve Canyon, Original Sunday Panels, 1957–1958; Eugene Craig, Editorial Cartoons, 1961–1968—as you walk the narrow aisles of the repository. Temperature and humidity are under tight control. The drawers slide out clinically and protective coverings are pulled back—yes, that’s her, that’s Juliet Jones—then noiselessly slide back in.
I once visited a museum that provides a final home for ventriloquist dummies after their owners retire or pass on. In a large room the dummies sit on theater seats by the hundreds, never to speak again. But comic strips can speak, and when they do, they speak in the language of their time. Historians and anthropologists will consult them one day—indeed, they already do. And I consult them, too. In my own little museum, scattered about the house, I have pen nibs, inkwells, brushes, and dried-out tubes of paint scavenged from the old studio. I have pencils my father last sharpened and erasers last kneaded by his fingers. And of course I have his drawing table. On walls or in drawers I keep scores of original strips by members of the Connecticut School along with yellowing sketches dashed off for an imploring youngster on Sports Night or at the Reuben Awards, or on visits to the bullpen at King Features.
A world still lives in all these bits and pieces. It is one where Beetle’s Sarge eternally yells “%$!!&#!!” and where Chuck Saxon’s exurban gentry sip inexhaustible third Manhattans. Where the black footprints of the Family Circus kids loop aimlessly forever around the neighborhood and where Trixie of Hi and Lois is trapped in time with her unutterable insights. Where unseen characters scheme and seduce behind the walls of talking buildings, and thought balloons containing only a “!” or a “?” add endless mystery to Rip Kirby and The Phantom. It is a world where Prince Valiant’s duel with Mordred never concludes, Ming is forever Merciless, and none of the men have nipples.
And where, in a stack of Polaroids bound in rubber bands, the long ago is never far away.
