R. F. Outcault’s antic but observant cartoon character the Yellow Kid, New York Journal, 1896.
Comic strips were not entirely an American invention. Hal Foster, when asked what the first comic strip was, used to point to the Bayeux Tapestry, created in the eleventh century—an embroidered cloth, 230 feet long, that tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England. Foster wrote and drew a strip about the Middle Ages, so of course he would say that. William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century A Rake’s Progress is essentially a comic strip. A little later came James Gillray in Britain and Honoré Daumier in France. Toulouse-Lautrec was in many ways a cartoonist.1 Someone has probably made a claim for the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux as examples of early comic strips. But whatever their forebears, newspaper comics as a mass-market phenomenon are American to the core. They began to proliferate in the late 1890s, when the powerhouse newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst began going head-to-head for circulation and advertising. Advances in color printing gave a home to strips like Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. The medium was new, and comic strips colonized every categorical niche—humor, adventure, history, drama, fantasy, crime, nature, family, sports. It was like the dot-com boom, except there was no bust. Within a few decades, strips like Happy Hooligan, Krazy Kat, The Katzenjammer Kids, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Gasoline Alley, and Little Orphan Annie were syndicated nationally and familiar to everyone. Some cartoonists, such as Sidney Smith, the creator of The Gumps, became wealthy men. In 1922, Smith signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune that gave him a Rolls-Royce and paid him $100,000 a year. In 1935, during the worst of the Depression, the payment was increased to $150,000 a year. On the way home after signing that contract, Smith was killed in an automobile accident.2
a micromanager’s obsession with every last detail
William Randolph Hearst at age thirty-one. Portrait by Orrin Peck, 1894.
Hearst maintained a personal interest in selecting comic strips right up until his death, in 1951, and his telegrams and communiqués—generally beginning with “Chief says” and signed by his secretary, Joseph Willicombe—reveal a micromanager’s obsession with every last detail. Once, when considering a new strip called Dick’s Adventures in Dreamland, in 1945, Hearst sent his top comics editor a string of memos—asking, for instance, “Can we develop anything out of the idea of having Dick be the son of the keeper of the Liberty Statue in New York Harbor?”3 The last two strips Hearst approved were the first one drawn by my father, Big Ben Bolt, and the first one created by Mort Walker, Beetle Bailey. In the family imagination, Hearst initials all the paperwork, mutters “Rosebud,” and drops the snow globe.
Syndication was the engine of the comic strip business, and in our circle, references to “the syndicate” were as commonplace as references to “the Giants” or “the church.” Depending on the circumstances, the references were hushed, respectful, angry, or resigned. The hearings of the Kefauver Committee on organized crime had taken place in the early 1950s, and the notion of “working for the syndicate” had more than one connotation. In my father’s case the syndicate was King Features, the biggest of them all. Other cartoonists were affiliated with United Feature, Universal Press, Field, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, Chicago Tribune– New York News, or one of several others. The syndicates had begun mainly as a way for newspapers to distribute comic strips and other features that the company itself had developed and could treat as its own private property; for the most part, cartoonists on staff had come up with the comic strip ideas and cartoonists on staff wrote the strips and drew them. But a variety of relationships eventually became possible. Some cartoonists had created their strips and owned them outright, and simply cut distribution deals with the syndicate bosses. Some strips were joint ventures between a cartoonist and a syndicate. Many cartoonists worked on contract, brought aboard by a syndicate to keep existing strips alive on a work-for-hire basis. A number of cartoonists were paid employees of a syndicate, doing whatever needed to be done and working out of the so-called bullpen in the syndicate’s office. Whatever category you fell into, you needed a syndicate to market and sell your strip around the country and the world—effectively there was a single buyer for everyone’s product. That’s probably why my father knew the word monopsony.
How you felt about this state of affairs depended on where in the feudal order you stood. The syndicate certainly provided an essential and valuable service. If your strip was appearing in seven hundred newspapers and following the advance of American power on six continents, there wasn’t much to worry about, though diplomatic relations with headquarters could still be tense. If your strip seemed to have achieved cult status mainly at small papers in college towns, then the future was precarious and you really could get rubbed out by the syndicate. When it came time to bring Big Ben Bolt to an end, in the late 1970s, the protagonist, Ben, was literally assassinated in the last episode—shot through the heart while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.4 (By then my father was no longer drawing the strip; he did wonder if Peanuts would end with Snoopy being hit by a car.) Most strips occupied a middle ground in terms of readership. Landing a new paper—The Dallas Morning News! The Orlando Sentinel!—was always cause for rejoicing. Losing a paper was a call to action. Whom do we know in Spokane or Abilene or Youngstown? Can we get them and their friends to complain? A handful of letters and phone calls could persuade local editors to change their minds and maybe even run a sheepish note of apology on the editorial page.
The men who managed the syndicates ran the usual gamut from benevolent despots and nurturing mentors to hard-eyed managers and corporate strivers. Sylvan Byck, the comics editor at King Features for four decades, was revered. His roots went deep—James Montgomery Flagg, who painted the famous Uncle Sam (“I Want You!”) army recruiting poster during World War I, had done a portrait of Byck as a young man—and he was old enough to remember when strips like Gasoline Alley and The Gumps were just getting off the ground. Byck was an editor at King by the late 1930s. Four decades later, he gave the green light to Hägar the Horrible. It was said that he looked at two thousand ideas for comic strips a year. It helped that Byck had started out as a cartoonist himself (he did political cartoons for The Seattle Times), though not of the first rank; like many managers in baseball, his true talent lay off the field. He had plenty of maxims for people wanting to start a comic strip, the most important of which was that “it is better to build around a character than around a job.” When he signed up Beetle Bailey, Beetle was a college student, not an army private. It was the character he had liked.
“better to build around a character than around a job”
That was the advice of longtime comics editor Sylvan Byck (above, in an early portrait by James Montgomery Flagg) to would-be cartoonists thinking about new strips.
Bob Dunn, who drew They’ll Do It Every Time, immortalizes a willing subject in New York, 1951.
Strips were sent to the syndicate under tight deadlines and by registered mail, and if a cartoonist was running late he’d have to get on the train and bring the strips in person to the offices on East Forty-fifth Street, in midtown Manhattan. Once, in an emergency, when I was ten or so, I was sent on this errand by myself like a bonded courier, the strips secured to my waist with twine. I often joined my father on delivery trips to King, afterward going for lunch, perhaps with other cartoonists coming late with their work, at the Pen & Pencil or the Lambs Club. By the time I first met Byck, the sharp features captured by Flagg had settled comfortably into a softer blend of Jean-Paul Sartre and William Shawn, with a leavening dash of Mr. Toad. He smoked heavily and was tall enough to look a fifth grader in the eye. If my father and Byck needed to talk, I’d be sent on my own to the bullpen.
This would have been my destination anyway. Every syndicate had its bullpen, and fundamentally they were all the same. It was an open expanse divided haphazardly into work spaces by dull green wooden partitions and small panes of thick frosted glass—a sort of movie set that had been built for a pittance but would cost a fortune to re-create. Each space held a tilted drawing table and some array of flat working surfaces; a thin cumulus of variable smoke hung over the room, with here and there an angry thunderhead. Look up the biography of almost any cartoonist from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s and you’ll find some version of the words “started out in the bullpen at…” Roy Crane started out in the bullpen at The New York World. Alex Raymond briefly helped his New Rochelle neighbor Russ Westover with Tillie the Toiler before joining the bullpen at King.5 Milton Caniff started out in the bullpen at the Associated Press, where the drawing tables were lined up in a row alongside a bank of windows, all facing the same direction; Caniff’s alone was turned the opposite way, because he was left-handed.6 The bullpen at King was home to perhaps twenty cartoonists, many of them people of enormous talent, and some, truthfully, workaday craftsmen who would unhappily never get a break or happily never seek one. A few of them had started drinking too early in life, or maybe it was just that day. It was an overwhelmingly friendly place whose occupants seemed to have nothing better to do than swivel around from their tables, light a pipe or cigar or cigarette, ask a question or two, curse the Giants and Dodgers for leaving town, compliment your mom and dad, and draw you a picture to take home as a souvenir.
a thin cumulus of variable smoke hung over the room
The bullpen at the New York American a century ago—the kind of environment in which many cartoonists got their start. (Winsor McCay is the man in the boater.)
There was no single bullpen job. The syndicate bullpens had originated as factories inside newspapers, when ideas for comic strips and other illustrated features were generated largely in-house. Krazy Kat and Bringing Up Father and Popeye had all been produced this way. And some of that tradition remained. Bob Dunn, who drew Jimmy Hatlo’s They’ll Do It Every Time, still worked out of the bullpen at King. He was an entertainer and a raconteur, and if you were a youngster he was likely to pull a quarter out of your ear and give it to you. I didn’t know it at the time—and if I had, I would have been too awestruck for even the simplest conversation—but he was also the inventor of the knock-knock joke, and his book of these jokes sold two million copies in the 1930s.7 That Dunn is less well-known today than Einstein or even Praxiteles is because he gave much of the credit to a pseu-donymous collaborator, a man named Enoch Knox.
By the 1960s, the bullpens had mainly become something else. They were organizational brains and production clearinghouses. Hundreds of pieces of original artwork—referred to by the New Yorkers on the floor as “ott-woik”—arrived every day from distant cartoonists. A week of Rip Kirby dailies from John Prentice in Westport. A week of Nancy from Ernie Bushmiller in Stamford. A Prince Valiant Sunday page or two from Hal Foster in Redding. Comic strips on rectangles of bristol board, most of them about one foot high and two feet wide, lay around everywhere, sometimes with coffee rings on the margins. Many cartoonists did their own lettering, and specialists such as the superb Ben Oda did the lettering on a variety of strips, but the task could also fall to the bullpen. Spelling mistakes needed to be corrected in everyone’s work. The men in the bullpen added shading where indicated by the cartoonists, cutting pieces of the overlay known as Ben-Day and carefully pasting it down. Ben-Day consisted of a uniform pattern of small dots that created a sensation of intermediate texture but could be reproduced as a line shot—that is, just using black and white, like type itself—rather than requiring a halftone, as photographs did; these are the dots that give so many Roy Lichtenstein paintings their distinctive look. (Ben-Day came in acetate sheets, but a cartoonist new to the work might be told to go down to the storeroom for “a bucket of Ben-Day dots,” and would return feeling foolish.)8 Sometimes the drawings themselves needed attention from the bullpen—the ink may have smudged, or the cartoonist may have forgotten to finish an eye or a hand. Ultimately the comics editor took a look at everything. Then the strips went downstairs to be prepared for newspapers. The black-and-white daily strips were photographed onto copper plates and then engraved, producing molds that could be turned into printing plates. The color Sunday pages required many additional steps. But the process, from engraving all the way through printing, was largely mechanical, as it no longer is. Albrecht Dürer could easily have adapted to it.
The use of Ben-Day dots, applied in the bullpen. Big Ben Bolt, 1963.
He would also have been familiar with the occasional intervention of a censor. Comic strips raised nowhere near as many eyebrows as comic books did—during the 1950s, comic books were the object of fierce campaigns that included calls for prohibition. When he was finished looking into organized crime, Senator Estes Kefauver turned his attention to organized comics, and prominent cartoonists such as Milton Caniff and Walt Kelly gamely defended their profession—and tried to distinguish comic strips from the gamier comic books—at televised Senate hearings. Questioning Kelly, one senator cited a doctor who had testified to the effect that cartoonists might need psychiatric attention. Kelly replied, “We in the cartoon business sort of cherish the idea that we are all sort of screwball.”9
Magazines laid down in-house standards for gag cartoons, and newspaper syndicates had their own thick codex of rules. Profanity was impermissible everywhere, of course, though you could resort to symbol swearing—#!*$%!&*#!—which was funnier anyway and led quickly down many promising rabbit holes (as when a character in Bill Amend’s FoxTrot stubs his toe and cries, “Asterisk! Dollar sign! Ampersand!”).10 You also had to be careful with politics. A Li’l Abner strip was suppressed in the late 1940s for its derogatory depiction of Congress. In its report on the incident, Time magazine quoted a spokesman for the Scripps Howard syndicate: “We don’t think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks.”11 Drinking could be shown, and even drunkenness, but there was a double standard: overindulging was permitted and even encouraged for some characters (Hägar the Horrible, Snuffy Smith, General Halftrack), but not for others (Hi and Lois Flagston, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant). The human body came with many caveats. You could draw a woman in a bikini, but for some reason you couldn’t show a navel, even on children, and for years the bullpen took an X-Acto knife to the offending squiggles, until Mort Walker began retaliating by drawing extra navels on his characters and gratuitously adding crates of navel oranges into the story line. (The bullpen kept removing them, but now started sending them all back to Walker, who saved them in a jar.)12 The depiction of male nipples was also forbidden, which presented a challenge for strips about prizefighters, cavemen, or barbarians. Another red line, for some mysterious reason: showing dirty socks on a chair. Bud Sagendorf, a bullpen veteran who went on to draw Popeye, remembers having a list of “35 no’s.”13 Race as a serious issue was virtually taboo until the 1960s, which is also when African American pioneers like Morrie Turner found syndicates for their work. (George Herriman, the creator of the classic strip Krazy Kat, which was syndicated from 1913 until his death in 1944, was of mixed heritage, but did not acknowledge the fact and allowed himself to be known as “the Greek.”)14 Religion had always been and remains a sensitive topic. Sagendorf once ran into a religious problem in Popeye, when he showed Olive Oyl foiling a vampire by spreading her arms wide and creating the shadow of a cross on the ground, the crucifix being a well-known deterrent. But her reference in a speech balloon to “a cross” was removed by the syndicate and replaced with the words “a dagger” (though it is common knowledge that a dagger, unlike a cross, will not stop vampires).15 Even if a strip sailed through the bullpen without attracting undue attention, as it generally would, it could still run into trouble down the line, at local newspapers. Miss Buxley, General Halftrack’s lightly clad secretary in Beetle Bailey, was a frequent target of feminists, though Walker would always claim that his own target was really the old goat of a general. But Arab publications sometimes removed Miss Buxley in her entirety, leaving readers in Baghdad or Riyadh to guess at what the joke might have been.16 The Mormon Deseret News, in Salt Lake City, used to remove images of alcohol and tobacco. Characters who might have been holding a martini glass or smoking a pipe would find that the objects had suddenly disappeared, their empty hands now frozen in a stylized pose, as if they had suddenly decided to play charades.17
testified to the effect that cartoonists might need psychiatric attention
Walt Kelly (above), the creator of Pogo, told Senate investigators in 1954 that such a diagnosis was a badge of honor.
Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker at the drawing board in the late 1950s.
syndicates had their own thick codex of rules
Big Ben Bolt, 1951. Male nipples were for some reason forbidden. The prizefighter Ben always entered the ring without some standard equipment.
it could still run into trouble down the line
Before and after—a local editor in Utah removed an offensive object, circa 1940.
* * *
As personalities, the cartoonists and illustrators were as different as individuals in any group of people can be. Some, like Milton Caniff or my father, were outgoing and courtly; either of them would have made a fine ambassador to a country where other diplomats performed the actual work. Some, like Walt Kelly, who did Pogo, performed frequently in public, but were also complicated and private; Kelly, of course, could be lacerating on the page or in front of Congress. Charles Schulz was famously shy. Al Capp, who as a boy had lost a leg in a streetcar accident, could be unpleasant in a way that turned increasingly bitter and corrosive. Yet his brother, Elliot Caplin, who wrote half a dozen comic strips and worked closely with my father for decades, was affable and urbane, and moved easily among people of all kinds. Taken as a whole there was a tilt toward the gregarious. The cartoonists all shared one thing—not so much a characteristic as a condition: The job was solitary. All it required was some heavy white paperboard, India ink, pencils and pens, a few brushes, a few kneaded erasers, and yourself.
a Titian’s workshop of cartooning enterprise
Mort Walker, creator of many strips, outside the barn that became his studio, circa 1965.
Every cartoonist bore a hard callus on the distal interphalangeal joint of the middle finger of his drawing hand. Nothing about the craft had really changed since the Gilded Age, until the arrival of electric erasers and their dental whir. Many of the cartoonists had part-time help. My father employed an assistant—George Raymond, the younger brother of Alex and Jim—who did some penciling and lettering, posed for pictures, and eventually left to run the stationery department at Cartier. He came one day a week. Mort Walker ran what seemed to be a mini empire—a Titian’s workshop of cartooning enterprise—and yet it consisted of only half a dozen people. In terms of economic scale, the Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois industry ran a distant second to that of Peanuts, but Charles Schulz was in California, and by Connecticut School standards Walker’s studio was close to agribusiness, and earned a measure of grousing as well as respect. Walker and Johnny Hart were longtime friends, but in his strip B.C., Hart once included the word mortgage in an installment of the regular “Wiley’s Dictionary” feature, defining it as “A device for measuring one’s tolerance of people named Mort.”
“work” consisted of a man by himself in a room
Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, as he saw (and drew) himself in the 1930s.
For the most part, “work” consisted of a man by himself in a room. Jimmy Hatlo used to keep a mirror taped to his desk—he maintained that it was to help him experiment with facial expressions, but it might also have been for the company. Studios came in many shapes and sizes, as places of worship do, and like places of worship they shared certain features. To begin with, there was a common smell. A parfumier would identify traces of wood and graphite particulate, from pencils being sharpened; notes of resin, paint, and linseed oil; the lingering residue of some form of tobacco; hints of spilled scotch.
The studio, in Redding, of Prince Valiant’s creator, Hal Foster, was a baronial room centered on a two-story leaded-glass window in Gothic style, befitting his subject matter. Foster was a Canadian by birth and an outdoorsman by upbringing. From that studio window he was said to shoot deer, though sadly not with a longbow. Chuck Saxon worked in a cramped loft above his garage in New Canaan, his drawing board positioned under the slant of an eave. Flat cabinets held his originals, including hundreds of unused New Yorker covers, unsalable anywhere else. The studio received little natural light, which in Saxon’s case didn’t matter much; like Bud Sagendorf, Stan Drake, and a number of other cartoonists, he worked mostly at night.18 Mort Walker eventually moved from Greenwich to Stamford, into a studio built by Gutzon Borglum, the man who designed and sculpted Mount Rushmore. An alabaster bas-relief of Beetle Bailey—joining four presidents, Rushmore-style—was set into the bar. Walker’s studio had the grandeur of a royal lodge. But Dik Browne, in Wilton, worked out of his basement, surrounded by washtubs and laundry hanging on clotheslines; the one flourish was a painted mural of God from the Sistene Chapel—features altered to make him Browne-like—an outstretched arm pointing the way downstairs. A few cartoonists, such as Stan Drake and John Prentice, rented rooms above shops in the commercial areas of Westport or New Canaan. Most worked at home.
Hal Foster in his Connecticut studio, 1947, a Prince Valiant page on the drawing board.
Brian Walker, Mort’s son, remembers going to a friend’s house after school one day and asking, “Where’s your dad?” “He’s at work,” came the reply. “What do you mean?” “He’s in New York.” It was Brian’s first inkling that having your father in the house all day was not the usual arrangement. My own father worked on the third floor of our mansard-roofed Victorian until the addition of a new child every eighteen months made the house too crowded. He went on the daytime game show Tic-Tac-Dough in 1958 and reigned on four consecutive days until he was unable to name the American-born British violinist who had recently established a music festival in Gstaad. But he walked away with $7,000 and was able to build a studio at the rear of the property. Ever afterward, the answer to any unanswerable question in our home was “Yehudi Menuhin.”
the addition of a new child every eighteen months
Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, Sam and Silo. Cartoonists frequently made veiled references to one another in their strips. The allusion here was to the Mead Avenue home of the ever-growing Murphy family.
The need for some sort of link to Manhattan was a singular constant, but unlike the investment bankers and advertising executives who populated Fairfield County, cartoonists were free to live as they wished. And with planning, you could even escape the constraint of geography for a spell. For two years in the mid-1960s, our family relocated to Ireland. The move required my father to get many additional weeks ahead on the strip, providing a cushion in the event that artwork was lost in the mail. Against that inevitability, photostats had to be made in Dublin of every strip before the original was sent off. Communication was difficult, in a way that is now hard to imagine. Transatlantic jet service didn’t begin until the late 1950s; almost no one flew routinely between Europe and America. From Ireland, overseas phone calls had to be booked in advance, like restaurant reservations, and cost about $30 a minute; an operator would call you when your three minutes were about to start. Ordinary messages were still sent by telegram, in a clipped, pay-by-the-character style that text messaging would revive. For all that, open an Irish newspaper and the American comic strips were there.
In Ireland, my father was also able to sketch and paint in a way he had not done in years. From the perspective of his children, the most noteworthy work he produced was done in collaboration with the Bank of Ireland. A strike had closed the Irish banks for months, and we had finally run out of checks. How could we get cash? My father went to his drawing board and found a rectangular piece of stiff white paper. With pen and ink he wrote Bank of Ireland at the top in a large Gothic hand, and alongside those words he drew his own fanciful version of the bank’s great seal. Underneath he wrote his name and address in elegant block letters, then drew several horizontal lines that ran the length of the paper. On the first of the lines he wrote, Pay bearer. On the second line he drew a £ sign. He filled in his name and an amount, endorsed the back, and gave the check to my mother, asking her to see if some shop would cash it—as the local newsagent did, without comment or demur. We cashed more and more of these checks as the strike wore on.
This, to us, was a breathtaking achievement. The character Harold in Crockett Johnson’s famous children’s book uses a purple crayon to draw his own reality wherever he goes. My father apparently possessed this very same power. Every cartoonist did, and the boundary between actual and invented could blur in unexpected ways. Sometimes life held a mirror up to art. In the 1930s, after Al Hirschfeld caricatured Groucho Marx by playing up those triangular tufts of hair, Groucho began teasing his hair to more closely resemble the caricature.19 The larger lesson—a very practical one—was that you could create a life out of nothing: it could pretty much be your own invention. This was what everybody in the Connecticut School had done with their sometimes jerry-built careers, each in a different and unpredictable way. My mother was clearly in on the secret. The biblical Parable of the Talents—in which a master gives sums of money to his servants to do with as they please, then punishes the man who merely kept his share safe—was one she brought up often. At holiday times, the only direction she gave when it came to family gifts was: “Make something.” She didn’t doubt for a second that those Bank of Ireland checks were somehow real. All of us in the family took a certain existential freedom for granted. It did not extend to values and manners, where standards were clear, but it applied to personal interests and ambitions, and to the very idea of risk. I can still scarcely believe that, during a visit to Rome when I was twelve, my parents allowed me to spend a day wandering the city by myself.
One defining reality about cartoonists was that although their characters—Beetle Bailey, Snoopy, Prince Valiant, the Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Maggie and Jiggs—were known worldwide, they themselves passed through life more or less without notice. It was an odd kind of fame, now nearly unknown: “anonymous celebrity,” as Brian Walker once called it.20 If you happened to bump into a cartoonist, you’d come away thinking car salesman, golf pro, or village idiot before hitting on the truth. For that reason, cartoonists made great guests on What’s My Line?, the TV show where contestants had to figure out someone’s occupation by playing a form of twenty questions. Unlike actors or sports figures, no one ever stopped cartoonists on the street. Cartoonists didn’t have a “gal” to protect them or “people” to speak for them. Life was interrupted mainly by mundane chores. For most of his life, Mort Walker did the family’s grocery shopping at the supermarket on Saturday mornings. More than a few collectors have bought original comic strips and found notations such as prescription ready or diapers, salami, Chesterfields penciled in the margins.
The working environment of the studio was a private place that took on the idiosyncrasies of the occupant and then, over time, hardened around him like a carapace. There was always a lot of headgear strewn about. Mort Walker kept his old army helmet on a shelf, and on the wall hung a map of the United States with pins marking the locations of all the papers that published Beetle Bailey. Dik Browne sometimes wore a papier-mâché Viking helmet made by one of his sons (and he looked like Hägar even without the helmet). Those who drew dramatic strips, like Rip Kirby or Brenda Starr, as opposed to the humorous bigfoot strips like Hägar and Snuffy Smith, generally kept a lot of costumes around, along with filing cabinets full of scrap. The walls of almost every cartoonist’s studio were hung with original work by other cartoonists and illustrators, sometimes even original classic panels by Winsor McCay or R. F. Outcault or George McManus. Or the work lay flat in studio drawers, a capsule history of the craft implicit in the strata. Most readers of the comics probably didn’t give a moment’s thought to “originals,” and in the eyes of newspaper editors the product that mattered was the few square inches that each strip took up on the page, not the preliminary step of actual artwork, whose dimensions were many times larger. The syndicates did not pay much attention, either. The maintenance staff at King Features was once found to be using fifty-year-old Krazy Kat originals to absorb water dripping from a leak in the ceiling. But cartoonists and a few fans—today a much larger group—cherished these drawings. You could sometimes see light pencil work under the inking. You could see the fine points of technique: an unusual method of crosshatching or a surprising use of brush instead of pen. You might find small notes from the artist to the boys in the bullpen. A cartoonist’s strips would accrue in dense stacks in the syndicate storeroom, each stack about the size of a catacomb niche. Walking down the narrow aisles among the dark shelves felt like visiting a mausoleum. And there were certainly grave robbers. Periodically, batches of original strips would be returned to the cartoonist; when he checked the numbered sequence, there always seemed to be a few missing. Sometimes scores were missing.
sometimes wore a papier-mâché Viking helmet
Dik Browne, who wrote and drew Hägar the Horrible, with a companion, circa 1980.
original work by other cartoonists and illustrators
From the jumble of my father’s collection, a panel from the elegant Bringing Up Father, by George McManus (1884–1954).
Examples of the classic New Yorker “manhole” cartoons by Otto Soglow in the late 1920s—from issue to issue, only the caption changed.
There’s a well-known Ed Koren cartoon in which one of his fuzzy characters stands warily at the center of a throng of admirers. The caption reads, “We were all wondering where you get your ideas.” That was not the most common question people asked of newspaper-strip cartoonists, which for at least seventy-five years has been “How far ahead do you have to work?” (About six weeks for the daily strip, nine weeks for the color Sunday.) “Where do you get your ideas?” was the second-most-common question.21 The lightning-bolt method—a brilliant idea just pops into your head—was known to occur, but was highly unreliable. The New Yorker cartoonist Mischa Richter came by our house in Cos Cob one day and his eye fell on a Victorian shaving stand in the corner of the living room—an ornate, marble-topped set of mahogany drawers on a tall base, surmounted by a face-high oval mirror. He had a sight gag within seconds: a man standing in front of this rococo confection and shaving with an electric razor.
Mostly the process was far more laborious. Johnny Hart could expound at length on the semi-scientific approach to daydreaming that he had devised—inducing a state of creative reverie that some might mistake for wasting time in a variety of ways, such as sleeping. James Stevenson began his New Yorker career as a gag writer—thinking up ideas and giving them to cartoonists like Peter Arno and Charles Addams to draw. This was an actual job and came with an actual office at the magazine; it also came with this injunction from the art editor: “You must not tell anybody at the office or anywhere else what you do.”22 When Stevenson was stuck, he would make two parallel lists of familiar nouns—truck, mother, lightbulb, cat, office, taxi, and many more—on a single sheet of paper and then free-associate as he matched a word in one column randomly with a word in the other.23 Otto Soglow was famous for having generated a long-running series of cartoons in The New Yorker, starting in 1928, based on a single picture that showed one end of a ladder emerging from an open manhole in a city street. The only thing that changed was the gag, capturing the conversation down below. (“No, Joe, Jock’s father was Payne Whitney,” or “The trouble with you, Bill, is you got your head in the clouds.”)24 Dik Browne sometimes sat at his desk and drew a black dot in the middle of a sheet of paper, then stared at it in a spirit of open-ended receptivity. He knew that something about this technique generally produced results, though, not being a mystic or a psychiatrist, he could not say what it was. Mort Walker carried around a notebook and recorded things he saw and heard, but he also applied the insights of the industrial-efficiency experts. He and several of his collaborators—over the years, a variable roster that included Jerry Dumas, Bob Gustafson (who had started out on Tillie the Toiler), and Ralston Jones (who drew Mr. Abernathy)—would gather every month in his studio, each person bringing twenty or thirty gags. The group would rate them 1 for good and 2 for not good enough, with gradations of like or dislike indicated by plus and minus signs.
When he started writing and drawing Hägar, Dik Browne adopted a version of this method with a close-knit group—mainly family members, but also including Ralston Jones—allowing the numbers to go deep into negative territory to capture a fuller degree of loathing.25 He claimed that the record for dislike of one of his own suggested gags was minus 47. Browne could be eloquent when talking about the unusual sort of talent (“if that’s the word for it”) that cartoonists possessed, and the peculiar nature of the business. “Whatever value you have walks on two legs every day and gets a headache every night,” he once said. “It’s you. That’s all. You’re your own liability. You’re your own treasury. You’re self-contained.”26 But Browne had little appetite for delving into the sources of humor too deeply. Doing so, he would say, was like conducting an autopsy on the girl you love.27
Writers of realistic story strips, sometimes known as wrinkle strips, had a different challenge—coming up with some compelling new narrative every couple of months.28 Hal Foster was an avid reader of Greek myths and Norse legends, and of short stories by O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant—these always got him thinking along productive lines. For other cartoonists, events in the news—a political brawl, a jewel heist, a coup d’état, a business calamity, a sensational murder, a spat in the world of fashion—could prompt an idea. You generally needed a mystery or a twist—a MacGuffin, to use Alfred Hitchcock’s term—or you needed to build on some ongoing dynamic in the relationship among characters. And, over time, as readers became more educated and sophisticated, characterization in story strips became more and more important, which demanded visual nuance of a kind that was unprecedented. Sylvan Byck at King Features was skeptical when Stan Drake, my father, and a number of other cartoonists started using photographs to help capture a wider range of emotion. Illustrators had been using cameras for years—Rockwell was famous for it, and before him Maxfield Parrish. From further back, many photographs survive of the great Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne posing for himself with dramatic abandon.29 Byck wasn’t skeptical about the photography; he was skeptical about the emotion. Byck was a wise and far-seeing editor, but when it came to story strips his roots lay in features from the 1920s and ’30s, where action did the talking and facial expression consisted chiefly of mad, sad, bad, and glad. Many of the newer story-strip cartoonists had begun as illustrators, and in their souls would remain illustrators. They knew that a few deft lines could provide a more complex portrait of human feeling: doubtful triumph, reluctant malevolence, pleasurable melancholy. Byck worried that characters were starting to look too much like real people and wondered if readers would stand for it. He once brought the matter up with Drake, who replied, “I’m going to draw people the way they are.”30
illustrators had been using cameras for years
Maxfield Parrish posing for the figure in his finished painting Potpourri (1905).
Norman Rockwell preparing to photograph a vignette that would become A Day in the Life of a Little Girl (1952).
posing for himself with dramatic abandon
The cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910) in a variety of roles destined for pen-and-ink treatment in the pages of Punch.
The cartoonists who did funny strips and gag cartoons were themselves not funny all the time. On the flip side, some of what they were quite serious about—for instance, the proposition that you can’t be funny in pencil, only in ink; or that the funniest letter of the alphabet is k—could strike others as a joke. Mort Walker, shrewd and drily hilarious as a writer, was generally straightforward and midwestern in conversation, though he had his moments. When another cartoonist told him about an unfortunate experience he’d just had with the accounting firm Ernst & Ernst, Walker replied, “Well, Ernst is okay, but Ernst is a crook.” Though his formal schooling ended after a single year at Cooper Union, Dik Browne was a man of parts. For one thing, he could draw cartoons while looking at you and talking. He once offered this definition of philosophy: “Looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat.” (As for religion, he said, “It’s when you think you’ve found the cat.”) Johnny Hart was a man who had found that the cat, and his occasional Christian evangelizing in B.C., overlooked by the eyeshades in the bullpen, sometimes brought him trouble. (One Easter Sunday, for instance, he published a B.C. cartoon that showed a menorah being transformed into a cross.) Hart was known in particular for his subversive visual wordplay. He gave me the original of a strip that begins with the title character, B.C., looking at a sign that says “EXIT.” In the second panel he ponders what it’s telling him to do. In the third panel he’s walking away, and a big X has been painted across the syllable “IT.” If Browne was Socrates and Hart was Noam Chomsky, Jerry Dumas played the role of Jean Baudrillard or Michel Foucault. His short-lived Sam’s Strip was a self-referential homage to comic technique and the great strips of the past. Its characters knew they were in a strip, sometimes second-guessed their creator, and invited characters from other strips into their space. In one strip early on, Sam thumbs through a phone book looking for a new artist and writer. Nowadays we’d call this metatextual. Back then, it just meant not many pins in the map.
invited characters from other strips into their space
Jerry Dumas and Mort Walker, Sam’s Strip, 1961. Sam encounters a comic strip figure from the days of Frederick Burr Opper—the hobo Happy Hooligan.
* * *
My brothers and sisters and I were always welcome in my father’s studio, though a visit posed the obvious risk that some photographs would need to be taken and the next hour would be spent on a ladder with the camera. Or, worse, it might turn out that a panel my father was drawing called for a boy or a girl, and we would be pressed into service as models ourselves, arranged into a tableau by this demanding backyard auteur. (“That’s not ‘happy.’ I want to see ‘happy.’ Let’s do it again. Happy!”) On one occasion, when I was eight or nine, I had to assume the guise of the son of a snake charmer, posing shirtless and wearing a turban fashioned of diapers. Every so often, outsiders would be called in to play roles. My father was always on the lookout for local people who possessed what he called “an interesting face”—in many cases, a face that you yourself would never want to have—and was somehow able to persuade them to come back to the studio and stand in front of the camera. So you might stop by after school and find the new milkman under the tall floodlight holding a garbage can lid as a shield. (“‘Courage.’ I want to see courage!”) Between them, Big Ben Bolt and Prince Valiant captured for posterity a sizable portion of Cos Cob society as it was in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. But in the end my father was always his own best model. I once pointed out to him that some version of his face appeared on about half the men in a big Prince Valiant panel showing a wandering tribe of Goths. He said he figured they would all have been related anyway.
The studio was painted barn red, like the nearby barn itself, and I’ll always think of it as a schoolhouse. A lot of education took place there. Writers can’t really talk or listen when they’re working. Artists can do both, and often want to. My father had never been to college, but he was widely read, and on many subjects deeply informed. His views on art and artists had long since taken firm shape. Among the Wyeths he preferred N.C. to Andrew, but was coming around to Jamie. Howard Pyle was a god. He admired Leyendecker, though greatly favoring the rough oil sketches over the final product. He was a Monet man, not a Renoir man. He admired the Renaissance masters and especially Leonardo working with black or red chalk, but observed that Leonardo couldn’t draw a horse to save his life—“none of them could.” Among the Dutch, he would take Frans Hals over Rembrandt any day, and when the Metropolitan in 1961 paid $2.3 million for Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer—at the time, the highest sum ever spent on a work of art at a public or private sale—he scoffed at the transaction and professed no intention of standing in line to see the painting, as thousands were doing. He would have stood in line indefinitely for Robert Henri, however, and he kept a postcard of Henri’s Bridget in Red taped to one of his easels. Whistler and John Singer Sargent could do no wrong. But Velázquez: “Now there was a master!” He loved the way the technique of Velázquez showed up in paintings by Sargent, and once explained what he meant by using Sargent’s portrait of the Parisian gynecologist Samuel Jean Pozzi, whose red dressing gown was intended to recall a cardinal’s robes, as an example. It was a brilliant impromptu lecture, and when at last he fell silent, the question I remember asking him was “What’s a gynecologist?”
His taste in reading tilted toward biography and adventure. Northwest Passage and Arundel, by Kenneth Roberts, were particular favorites. He had read much of Alexandre Dumas—“père et fils,” he would always stipulate. Not surprisingly, he loved illustrated books. His father had worked at Scribner’s during that period a century ago when N. C. Wyeth illustrated a series of classics—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robin Hood—and he owned a complete set of these sacral texts. A special place in his affections was set aside for authors who could both write and draw. There were not all that many of them. The cowboy writer Will James was one. And of course James Thurber and Rudyard Kipling and Max Beerbohm. And again Pyle. He never took to John Updike as a novelist, but gave him credit for having wanted originally to become a cartoonist. My father had kept (of course) all the adventure books from his boyhood, their bindings frayed, which he pressed upon his children. Some of the books, like The Jinx Ship by Howard Pease, turned out to be remarkably good. Tom Swift should have been a thread of intergenerational continuity—my father had read Tom Swift, too, as a boy—but Tom’s world had changed. My father once took Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster out of my hands, looked at it for a moment, and said, “I remember when it was Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat.” If you had ever asked him for a summer reading list it would have been both outlandish and inspired. At the age of eleven, fed up with Dickens, I asked him for something different, and he gave me The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, which turned out to be mildly intoxicating and the stimulus for a number of provocative conversations. (“What is ‘the pox’?”)
we would be pressed into service as models ourselves
My father with his camera.
Some of my brothers and sisters enduring various states of servitude as characters in Prince Valiant or Big Ben Bolt.
The drawing table in the studio was perpendicular to the picture window. Face-to-face with my father’s table was a smaller one for whichever of us children was out there at the time. Both tables were tilted high, creating an A-frame effect and rendering the people behind them invisible to one another. But from the other side you could hear the scratch of a pen on paper and the splash of a brush in water. You could hear the plink of shavings from a pencil that was being sharpened as they dropped lightly into a pewter ashtray. During my grade school years, this was for me the place of choice on any fall or winter afternoon. It was here that my father taught me to draw and introduced me to basic techniques, such as how to create perspective (“Now you know something the ancient Egyptians didn’t!”) and how to treat the boundary between light and shadow when working in oil. He demonstrated how to transfer an image from tracing paper to a sheet of plain white board, blackening the reverse of the paper with graphite and a soft, cigarlike object known as a stump, and then putting the two sheets together and pressing down on the lines with a stylus. He explained why, when reproducing classical Roman script, the points of the As and Vs must slightly pierce the horizontal plane formed by the other letters; otherwise the As and Vs will seem too small. He elaborated on his view that unfinished works of art are generally more interesting than finished ones, and often better. George Romney’s uncompleted self-portrait was a particular favorite, and he often completed his own paintings in the same casually unfinished way.
His regard for the craft of cartooning was high, even if in some ways it was not what he’d rather be doing. He’d rather be sketching people on the street or taking his paints and brushes aimlessly into the Irish or Southwestern countryside, but a comic strip paid the bills and freed him to paint only what he liked when he had some spare time. He loved the camaraderie of the cartooning tribe, everyone slightly off register and anxious for company. And, anyway, the kind of strips he drew offered great scope for creativity. He would lose himself in the task when creating one of those giant Prince Valiant panels, and he relished adding “John Cullen Murphy” to them as the final act. He was proud of that signature. It had evolved through childhood and young adulthood, and he finally settled on an official block-letter version that betrayed the influence of James Montgomery Flagg. Where Flagg had rendered each M in his name with three unconnected vertical strokes, my father rendered the E in his name with three unconnected horizontal strokes. He often cited the advice that Norman Rockwell had passed along: “Make it large and legible. It’s the only free billboard anyone will ever give you.” Milton Caniff, he said, had once offered the same advice to Mort Walker. It had something of the status of a First Rule of Cartooning, and I remember looking at the funny pages the next Sunday and carefully noting that every cartoonist’s signature was big and clear. “Maybe if you’re Whistler,” my father said, “you can get away with a butterfly.”
always his own best model
John Cullen Murphy, detail from Prince Valiant, 1971. The oxen possibly excepted, every figure displays some version of my father’s face.
In these hours at the studio, from behind his drawing table, my father would also backfill the story of his life. How he had been born feetfirst, “like Sinatra and the Kaiser.” How his father would save the cardboard backing from his laundered shirts so he could have a firm white surface to draw on. How, in the 1920s, Gabby Hartnett of the Cubs had been a lodger in his family’s Chicago apartment. How, in the late 1930s, when he sold his first professional painting, Toots Shor had pulled a fifty-dollar bill from his pocket to pay for it—an example of unthinking largesse that my father still found almost unimaginable. How the hardest thing to draw was hands. How if he couldn’t have been an artist or a ballplayer he would like to have been “a minor nineteenth-century poet.” How he had asked my mother to marry him after dating her for only a month.
He was drawn to family history not for the pedigree but for the perspective. One of his grandfathers had been born while Thomas Jefferson was still alive; he found that astonishing—that the cord of his known family could subtend almost the entire arc of America’s national history. Family lore was also full of near misses: the genetic path to oneself could look very iffy in retrospect. His paternal grandmother, during the passage from Ireland as an infant, was nearly thrown overboard because she was thought to have typhoid. Her fever broke just in time. The lesson he took from all this was that “I” hangs on a long thread, but it is a thin one.
he finally settled on an official block letter version
For any cartoonist, a signature was an advertisement. My father’s had roots in an admiration for Flagg.
sometimes broke into the text with graphic elements
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) was a favorite for its language and its playful intrusions—like this plot diagram.
My father had plenty of advice to dispense, the most common theme being how to behave like a gentleman. Don’t talk about money. The trouser cuff should rest on the instep. Don’t tell all you know. Stand up when a woman enters the room—and if people think that’s old-fashioned, so much the better. Be skeptical of good fortune—his response to happy personal news was generally “Well, it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.” Though his formal education stopped at high school, like many cartoonists my father had a love of words and wordplay. His idea of a perfect name for a law firm was “Gold, Frankincense, and Murphy.” If someone on the radio or television used the phrase “parting shot” he would invariably note that this was a bowdlerization of “Parthian shot,” which referred to the ability of the ancient Parthians to shoot backward from their saddles while galloping forward. The way it wallows in baroque language made Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy a favorite book. (As an added bonus, Sterne sometimes broke into the text with graphic elements: “He could have been a cartoonist.”)31 My father regarded puns as a serious business. After returning from a church fund-raiser, he pronounced the event “a fete worse than debt.” Had he gone to the event just to be able to make the remark? He was partial to the rarely used positive terms hidden inside familiar negatives: ept, ert, gainly, gruntled. And he liked highfalutin words, not for the grandiloquence but for the humor. They could put a smile on a serious point, as when noting that our family was “not an eleemosynary institution.” The word sesquipedalian occupied a place of honor—a visual pun, the physical embodiment of its very meaning.
His reservoirs of arcane knowledge, odd prejudice, and unexpected enmity were astonishing. He could talk with equal authority about the incidence of hemophilia among the Romanovs and the success of Fordham football teams from the 1930s, recalling the scores, game after game, season after season. His store of information about sports was immense. He both hated and loved the Polo Grounds; I remember being taken to a game there during the Giants’ last season in New York, and being lifted in his arms to use the high tin trough that served as a urinal. When he saw someone with bad table manners, he would say, “You can always tell a Princeton man”—an insight passed down verbatim from his own father, and based on nothing whatsoever. He was well aware of the high marks being given to Jackie Kennedy as first lady, and concurred up to a point, but to him Grace Coolidge had set an impossibly high standard—she’d been plucky, outgoing, and a serious baseball fan. (At the other extreme, the standard for perfidy, on multiple fronts, was set by Lillian Hellman, who was “a louse”—the harshest term of disparagement he was comfortable using.) The challenge posed to royal succession by morganatic marriage was, for some unknown reason, a particular specialty of his, and if the names of certain historical figures happened to come up—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to take the most prominent—he would put a hand to the side of his mouth, as if speaking confidentially, and say, “Of course, his marriage was morganatic.” On more than one occasion he warned against confusing the British Indian Army and the British Army in India. (“A frequent mistake.”) His store of knowledge sometimes led to behavior that others considered eccentric, or even mad. There is a moment in Dr. No when Sean Connery, ascending some stairs for dinner with the eponymous villain, does a barely perceptible double take as he passes an oil painting on an easel. Watching the movie for the first time, in 1962, my father laughed loudly in surprise. Silent patrons, possibly including my mother, angled away uncomfortably. The painting, he later explained, was Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington. It had been stolen the year before from London’s National Gallery.
Religion as a topic was hard to escape. Ours was a deeply Catholic household, but not an officiously didactic one, and religion was never thought of as something separate from a life lived in the world. For that reason, my father’s religious reading consisted almost entirely of biographies—of people like Chesterton and Belloc, Joan of Arc, Cardinal Newman. Holding a place of particular honor was Evelyn Waugh’s novelistic Edmund Campion, about a London bookseller’s son who became a Jesuit and, in the violent religious climate under Elizabeth, was drawn and quartered on Tyburn Hill. It was a book he had first read during the war, and he could go on at length about Campion—not so much about the grim details of his execution (sadly) but about Campion as a poet and dramatist, Campion the beloved teacher during his exile in Prague, Campion the penniless man who had walked a thousand miles from northern France all the way to Rome to pursue his studies. What drew him was not theology but the example of Campion’s gentle temperament and the fact that Waugh had written Campion’s life as an adventure story. Walk to Rome—wouldn’t that be something I’d like to do someday? he’d ask. And, by the way, wouldn’t “Drawn and Quoted” be a good name for a cartoon feature?
As we talked in the studio, the black-and-white TV would be on softly, generally showing an old movie and usually featuring an actress unknown to me but invariably described as “a great beauty in her day.” In wintertime, dusk would come long before my father finished work, and as the sky darkened outside, the glass of the picture window gradually turned into a mirror. From my stool I now had an angled view of my father’s hands at work—a picture to go with the ambient sound of pen and brush.
During those long hours in the studio there were frequent stories about his experiences in the war. Lenny Bruce used to say that there was only one “the Church,” and for the Connecticut School of cartoonists there was only one “the war.” Most of them had served overseas during the Second World War—my father for three years in the Pacific, on General Douglas Mac-Arthur’s staff—and it was during the war that many of them had discovered or sharpened the talents they would deploy for a lifetime. In the 1950s, the war was not some distant Waterloo, but an event barely a decade past. Some cartoonists could still fit into their uniforms. Children wore old helmets and ammunition belts and even khaki spats when they played outside. The bowl in which my father dipped his brushes, now encrusted with ink and pigment, was a Japanese rice bowl, picked up in Tokyo during the occupation. A polished wooden box in a corner of the studio bore the name Capt. John Cullen Murphy in gilt letters that still shone, and it opened on hinges to reveal compartments for paints and brushes, pens and pencils, paper and canvas. The box retained a dry, musty smell, like that of mild sandalwood. To me it seemed to possess a talismanic quality, as if it had somehow made possible everything I saw around me. And in important ways, it had.