My father’s portrait of my mother, 1980.
The war in Europe ended in May 1945. The war in the Pacific ended three months later. Most Americans in the armed forces would be home within the year. I have the telegram my father sent to his mother in the autumn of 1946, announcing that he had arrived in San Francisco after a long postwar assignment (sketching, painting, harrying the zaibatsu, attending Mass) in Occupied Japan.
The return to a peacetime economy brought many changes, and for cartoonists the changes were mostly good. Paper rationing came to an end, meaning that newspapers could bulk up. Manufacturers started making consumer and luxury goods again, creating a need for advertising that fattened and enriched publications of all kinds. More magazine pages translated into more pages for gag cartoons and illustration. Since the 1930s, advertising itself had been heavily dependent on comic strip–style presentation—“sequence/picture copy,” in Madison Avenue’s unlovely jargon—which provided a vast and lucrative additional outlet for what cartoonists knew how to do. New York had been drained of most of its young artistic talent when cartoonists and illustrators went off to war. They returned to an environment of pent-up demand. You had to work hard to not find work.
the world’s premier hothouse of cartoon talent
A signature self-portrait by Thomas Johnstone, a co-founder of the Johnstone and Cushing agency, where many cartoonists got their start, 1953.
The newspaper and syndicate bullpens had been a training ground for countless cartoonists before the war. The war itself was a training ground for many others. And for a decade after the war an ad agency called Johnstone and Cushing became the world’s premier hothouse of cartoon talent.1 Among members of the Connecticut School, a disproportionate number could claim an affiliation with Johnstone and Cushing at some point in their lives—not just the comic strip cartoonists but comic book artists and gag cartoonists as well, and even some of the illustrators. The company had started in the 1930s, just as the advertising business was beginning to rely on cartoon art for its graphics. Thomas Johnstone had been a theater impresario—the force behind the Marx Brothers hit I’ll Say She Is!—and a syndication executive before venturing into the world of Madison Avenue. Jack Cushing was the wealthy son of the inventor of the tracer bullet.
Johnstone and Cushing wasn’t so much an ad agency as an outsourcing clearinghouse of cartoon talent to which ad agencies could turn. If Campbell’s Soup or Birds Eye Foods wanted something cartoon-like for its next campaign, the executives at BBDO or Young & Rubicam would farm the job out to Johnstone and Cushing, which had a large and constantly revolving roster of cartoonists on staff or on call. Some, like Milton Caniff, Otto Soglow, Albert Dorne, and Noel Sickles, had worked at Johnstone and Cushing before the war. Scores of others flooded in afterward—Dik Browne, Stan Drake, Ralston Jones, Leonard Starr, Austin Briggs, John Prentice, Neal Adams, Gill Fox. The pay was better than other work could provide, and a lot more regular, and the agency was the ideal place to dip your pen while developing projects on the side, which everyone was doing. It also held out the promise of society—of collegiality—in a field that was by nature solitary. And the agency sometimes allowed cartoonists to sign their work, which had obvious benefits. This wasn’t just free advertising—the big billboard Norman Rockwell talked about. It was advertising that piggybacked on other advertising, national in scope.
The agency’s office, on East Forty-fourth Street, had the feel of a clubhouse loft. It was arranged in classic bullpen style—an open expanse jammed with drawing tables—but far more idiosyncratic. Cartoonists drew on the walls. A baby’s tiny footprints seemed to track across the ceiling.2 When jobs came in, the cartoonists would bid for the work by submitting samples. The job could be creating a product-based comic strip—like Little Alby (to sell Grape-Nuts) and Mr. Coffee Nerves (for a non-caffeinated coffee substitute called Postum)—that would run in the comics pages right alongside the real comic strips. It could be designing new characters to personify a brand. Some of the advertising was of the kind that loudly cries out “1950s” and today is either recalled with derision or replicated with ironic affection. (Husband to wife: “Our guests will love the many uses of Philadelphia-brand cream cheese!” Wife to husband: “And it’s so easy!”) Stan Drake created this kind of ad for Ipana toothpaste. The beautifully drawn and lissome young woman who touts its virtues while wrapped in a bath towel already hints at a different path ahead for Drake.3 A portion of Johnstone and Cushing’s work wasn’t advertising at all, at least not directly. Month after month, the company created and supplied the comics pages that ran in Boys’ Life, the Boy Scout magazine.
A toothpaste advertisement drawn for the agency by Stan Drake, circa 1950.
Dik Browne, who went to work for Johnstone and Cushing right after leaving the army, took on every kind of work there was. He drew The Tracy Twins for Boys’ Life. He created a strip called The Peter Paul Playhouse for the maker of Mounds candy bars. And he came up with the Chiquita Banana brand icon and redesigned the Campbell’s Soup twins. His work on The Tracy Twins—very legibly signed “Dik Browne”—is what got the attention of Mort Walker, who in 1954 took him on for Hi and Lois.4 Even after that strip was successfully launched, Browne worked for years on various Johnstone and Cushing projects. He drew The Tracy Twins until the early 1970s.
The Johnstone and Cushing alumni could look forward to a wealth of possibilities. In the ten years after the end of the war, scores of new comic strips began syndication—Steve Canyon, Pogo, Rusty Riley, Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, Hi and Lois, On Stage, Miss Peach, B.C. At the same time, younger cartoonists stepped in to continue strips that had been going for decades, and whose creators had retired or died. My father got into the business more or less by accident. He was working successfully as a magazine illustrator and had done movie posters for MGM. He was well known for his depiction of sports in general and of boxing in particular. When Elliot Caplin, then a staff writer at King Features, had an idea for a strip about a prize fighter, he came to my father and asked him to draw two weeks’ worth of continuities. Sylvan Byck sent the samples to William Randolph Hearst, who gave Big Ben Bolt the green light. My father launched the strip in 1950. He married Joan Byrne, my mother, the following year. She seems to have understood that he was both an odd duck and getting serious when he took her on a date to Stillman’s Gym, the premier training ground for boxers, and then sent her a telegram that concluded with the words “Love, Whitey Bimstein.” Her family, I suspect, never fully grasped that my father’s work was steady, or even that it was work. He was thirty-two; she was twenty-three. Eight children arrived over the next fourteen years. The faith my parents had in each other, and in the future, transformed what should have seemed precarious into something that always felt like bedrock.
got into the business more or less by accident
John Cullen Murphy, brush-and-ink sketches, 1939. Magazine illustration was my father’s ambition, and horses would get his lifelong professional attention—racing, jumping, jousting, dressage.
well known for his depiction of sports in general and of boxing in particular
The heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, painted by my father for Sport magazine, 1949.
Just about everyone was starting a family after the war. Low taxes, open land, cheap housing, and proximity to New York City made Fairfield County a natural place for cartoonists to settle. At the same time, it was a world away. In 1950, more than three thousand households in the county still used privies. The median price of a house was about $13,000.5 Interstate 95, which today seems an immemorial fixture—ageless and forever crumbling, like the Pyramids—did not yet exist. I remember when it pushed through Cos Cob, in 1958, taking a couple of Colonial-era saltbox houses with it. When the highway hit Westport, in 1960, it earned a New Yorker cover by Arthur Getz. Greenwich Avenue now resembles an easterly version of Rodeo Drive. Back then it was an ordinary Main Street with an Italian barber, an Irish bar, a Chinese laundry, a German funeral home, and a threadbare hotel called the Pickwick Arms, which was meant to be English and whose ambience was certainly Dickensian. The town was provincial, voting in the 1940s to reject a proposal to put the United Nations headquarters there. Opponents stirred xenophobic sentiment by paying a man five dollars to walk up and down Greenwich Avenue in a fez.6
One of his earlier paintings, of an earlier champion, John L. Sullivan.
In the late 1940s, suburban development was just starting in Fairfield County. One of the earliest subdivisions in Greenwich was Havemeyer Park, built by the boxer Gene Tunney—two-bedroom Cape Cods on streets named for Nimitz, Halsey, Marshall, and MacArthur. The most common car was the Ford Country Squire station wagon, now a coveted throwback, but once as common as Toyota Corollas are today. When it came to raising children, the great fears were either apocalyptic or, from a modern perspective, trivial. Air-raid sirens would sound every few weeks, and schoolchildren would practice taking shelter under desks as protection against a nuclear attack. I remember seeing a replica bomb shelter on display for several months in a supermarket parking lot, and for some years in Fairfield County it was the vogue among the affluent to have a bomb shelter dug into their property somewhere. At the other extreme was the hysteria over comic books, which were said to be sapping the moral fiber of America’s youth, and over blasting caps, which seemed to have been strewn everywhere as new homes and highways spread across the land. In contrast, no one was much concerned about cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, or premarital sex, and few foresaw that teenagers would find those backyard bomb shelters ideal for all four.
they began taking an even more elaborate show on the road
In wartime, cartoonists toured military bases around the country—the National Cartoonists Society in embryo. Milton Caniff and Rube Goldberg hold the flight attendant in this 1947 photograph.
The onset of the American Century was in many ways unplanned and inadvertent. It was marked by a certain innocence that at times rose to the level of blindness. Up to a point, comic strips are inherently conservative and take on the characteristics of what’s around them. The first generations of cartoonists had drawn heavily from big-city life, the immigrant experience, and the Jazz Age. The postwar cartoonists were part of the great suburban migration by a more educated and professional population. Their preoccupations reflected that fact. Hi and Lois Flag-ston bought a house in a place called Mammoth Acres, the kind of development described by a King Features ad for the strip as “the new home for millions of young moderns.”7 Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and The Family Circus were inherently suburban. It wasn’t just comic strips that held a mirror up to this expanding world. So did gag cartoons. So did New Yorker covers. The Tunnel of Love, a novel by Peter De Vries, held up a double mirror—it revolved around two characters, a gag cartoonist and a cartoon editor, living in Westport. The New Yorker’s longtime art director and cartoon editor, Jim Geraghty, happened to live in Westport, as did twenty or so of the magazine’s cartoonists and illustrators. Geraghty organized them into a bowling league. Over a span of half a century, artists in Westport produced nearly eight hundred of the magazine’s covers, more than forty of which were of Westport itself.8 For decades after the war, with a handful of exceptions, the cartoonists were also white and male. Dalia Messick, who created Brenda Starr in 1940, took an androgynous route professionally as Dale Messick. Not until the success of Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy (1976) and Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse (1979) would women become a force.
* * *
When cartoonists broke free of the studio, it was like a release from school. Socializing could be intense. Once a month there would be a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society at the Lambs Club, in New York City, with 150 people or more in attendance. The NCS was created right after the war, in 1946, and indirectly had been an outgrowth of the war itself. A group of cartoonists too old or hobbled to serve in the military had spent the war years doing shows at military bases and hospitals around the country for the USO—a version of the chalk talks that my father was doing at the same time for his fellow servicemen in the Pacific. Then, at the prodding of a flamboyant New York agent named Toni Mendez, a Columbia University dropout and former Rockette, they began taking an even more elaborate show on the road, with music and entertainers. It was an easy next step to form a club—mainly because, as the cartoonist C. D. Russell, who drew Pete the Tramp, pointed out during a long flight from one show to the next, undertakers, garbagemen, lumberjacks, and everyone else seemed to have a club. “No—leave us alone; we’re doing fine,” Rube Goldberg objected before eventually giving in.9 Goldberg, as he likely feared he would, became the founding president. The society would name its most prestigious award for him, and he designed the Reuben statuette, a towering jumble of acrobatic nudes topped by an inkpot. Mendez was officially designated the society’s “troubleshooter.” The illustrator Russell Patterson was elected first vice president. Otto Soglow was elected second vice president. (The job of the second vice president was defined as being “to follow the first vice president around.”) It was a perfect sort of club, bestowing an aura of vague organizational sanctity and high-minded purposelessness on people who would be gathering to no good end anyway. In time, the NCS would develop a liturgical calendar, with its important feast days (the annual Reuben Awards dinner, the annual Sports Night, the annual golf tournament) and many smaller events scattered throughout Ordinary Time.
a towering jumble of acrobatic nudes
Rube Goldberg’s drawing of the statue he designed for the Reuben Award.
The founders never suspected that, having constituted themselves into an executive branch, they would be needing a judicial branch as well. But they soon did. The problem arose from a nasty dispute that had begun in the 1930s involving Ham Fisher, the creator of Joe Palooka, and Al Capp, the creator of Li’l Abner. In his day, Fisher was one of the most successful cartoonists in the business, with a strip about a good-natured heavyweight prizefighter that appeared in nine hundred newspapers, inspired movies and eventually a TV show, and endowed the language with an enduring name for an amiable lunkhead.10 Capp had worked for Fisher as an assistant before heading out on his own. How these two hot-tempered and unyielding men ever functioned together remains a mystery; part of the explanation may have been that Fisher’s extravagant lifestyle kept him away from the studio much of the time. When Li’l Abner was launched, in 1934, Fisher was livid—the title character, he alleged, was based on a character of his own invention. Not so, said Capp. Yes, there had been a similar character in Joe Palooka, but Capp had created and drawn that character himself during one of Fisher’s long absences. In the small, rarefied field of comic strip forensics, the competing claims continue to be picked over as if this were the Alger Hiss case. The preponderance of opinion sides with Capp. In any event, Fisher threatened a lawsuit, and Capp retaliated by goading him in a variety of ways, once naming a horse in Li’l Abner “Ham’s Nose-Bob” right after Fisher underwent a rhinoplasty. Attempts at peacemaking by other cartoonists proved unavailing, and the feud deepened.
Self-portrait by Goldberg, dashed off at a cartoonists’ event, 1963.
At a Reuben Award dinner in the 1960s, cartoonists create a living Rube Goldberg machine.
Then it went catastrophically public when Capp, in 1950, wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly titled “I Remember Monster,” about his years working for “a certain treasure-trove of lousiness.” Fisher went unnamed, but everyone knew whom Capp was referring to. “From my study of this one li’l man,” Capp wrote, “I have been able to create an entire gallery of horrors. For instance, when I must create a character who is the ultimate in cheapness, I don’t, like less fortunate cartoonists, have to rack my brain wondering what real, bottom-of-the-barrel cheapness is like.”11 Fisher retaliated by anonymously sending photostats of what he alleged were pornographic Li’l Abner cartoons with suggestive marginalia to a New York State commission that was investigating comics. The source was clear to everyone.12 Fisher had been a founding member of the NCS and was one of the most prominent cartoonists in the business; word of what he’d done made headlines. Now the question arose: How should the NCS respond? In 1955, after a meeting of its hastily formed ethics committee, Fisher was expelled from the society on grounds of “conduct unbecoming a cartoonist.”
There would be more to this unhappy story. Fisher committed suicide in his studio soon after his expulsion; Capp would later cite the suicide as one of his proudest accomplishments.13 But what lingered in the air, acquiring a life of its own long after the precipitating event, was that phrase “conduct unbecoming a cartoonist.” Without knowing the origin, I would hear the phrase used jokingly by cartoonists to describe some recent escapade or peccadillo by one of their number—anything from taking one mulligan too many to serving a watered-down drink. “Conduct unbecoming” was a resonant phrase, by its nature subject to enormous elasticity depending on what followed it. Plug in the words “an officer and a gentleman,” as you might hear in the movies, and it acquired the grave majesty of a military court-martial. Plug in the words “a wabbit,” as Elmer Fudd would sometimes do, and it came across very differently. What the phrase meant when you plugged in “a cartoonist” was anyone’s guess. Was it a high standard? A low one? How does anyone expect cartoonists to behave? In a way, it didn’t matter—the phrase could be applied to almost any kind of behavior and would always come across as a joke. Whatever the red line was, Ham Fisher had certainly crossed it. He remains the only person ever expelled from the NCS for “conduct unbecoming.”
The society was ostensibly a nationwide organization—and is very much one today—but in the 1950s and ’60s, Fairfield County carried enormous weight, matched only by New York City. The Manhattan contingent, with their distinctive accents, included people like Bill Gallo of the Daily News and Al Jaffee of Mad magazine. And Rube Goldberg himself. And Harry Hershfield (Abie the Agent), well into his eighties, always natty in a tweed suit. By then a columnist and toastmaster, Hershfield would tell you if you asked, and often if you didn’t, how he used to run into Mark Twain on lower Fifth Avenue, a story that was actually true. He described himself philosophically as “an optimistic futilist.”
Cocktail and dinner parties at one cartoonist’s home or another were a major outlet—parties not of the Noël Coward variety, but squean-heavy gatherings of twelve or twenty, where Manhattans and old-fashioneds flowed like Perrier and teenagers waited until the adults went off to dinner, then drained what remained in the glasses. A song by Sinatra or the sight of beef bourguignon on a menu instantly brings these gatherings to mind. Cigarettes by the score would be laid out for the guests—a job for the youngest children in the family. The cigarette display was standard at the time for a successful hostess, as my mother was. (She was also prudent, staying alert to the latest in medical thinking and, on doctor’s orders, switching to menthol cigarettes during pregnancy.) Drinking was important. It cut short some careers and, as assistants stepped in, allowed others to get a start. It was both glue and solvent. And it went well with golf, which was almost universal among cartoonists, as was an inability to play it very well. The names of the cartoonists’ home courses evoke an entire world. If the cartoonists had christened weekends the way the Jacobins christened months, time would tick by in a succession of euphonious fairways: Silvermine, Greenwich, Burning Tree, Millbrook, Tamarack, Rockrimmon, Stanwich.
It occurred to me only later that, for cartoonists, recreation didn’t represent an escape from ordinary reality; it was one of the few times that their reality was the same as everyone else’s. Most of their waking hours were spent in an alternate universe with its own swirl of consequential events. How would the Phantom and his trained wolf deal with the looming threat of a missile base in the Deep Woods? Would Steve Canyon ever marry Summer Olson? Had he been foolish to volunteer for service in Vietnam? Could Prince Valiant defend Camelot, or would it fall into the malign clutches of the usurper Mordred? Would Juliet Jones have her suspicions borne out: that she and her sister, Eve, were being two-timed by that lout Tal Chesney? What about Brenda Starr’s love interest, the mysterious Basil St. John: Would he ever run short of the black-orchid serum that kept him alive? What new quasi-legal assignment did the dashing and cerebral Rip Kirby have in store for Desmond, his safe-cracking valet? What if Ben Bolt lost his heavyweight title to that brutal Aryan bruiser, or whoever the next challenger was? Could he possibly win it back? And what should he do about the sad little orphan boy who appeared out of nowhere? Even more important: Would I have to pose for the orphan boy’s pictures?
When you broke it down, the world of the Connecticut School sorted itself into circles overlapping circles—you could see it as a cluster of affiliated subgroups with a high degree of interconnection.14 Sometimes the subgroups had a name. Jerry Marcus, Orlando Busino, and Joe Farris were the nucleus of a group based in Ridgefield known as the Fairfield County Irregulars.15 They met every week for pizza. For a period of decades my father was part of a group of twelve who called themselves the Men Who Are Thursday. They got together for lunch on Thursday every other week. Jerry Dumas was part of it, as was The New Yorker’s Chuck Saxon. The illustrators Jim Flora, Bob Jones, and David Shaw were members, along with the sculptor Reuben Nakian, the screenwriter Herman Raucher, and the novelist Gerald Green. The gathering moved from house to house around the county, and the host would usually add a guest or two, people who lived nearby: maybe Dick Cavalli, who drew Winthrop, or Roy Doty, whose illustrations appeared everywhere; maybe the fabled art director Howard Munce, of Young & Rubicam, or the cartoonist Leonard Starr, who created On Stage and later revived Little Orphan Annie. I was invited to sit in on several of these luncheons, shyness overcome by what had by now become a paternal injunction: “It doesn’t do a bit of harm to get to know these people.”
almost universal among cartoonists, as was an inability to play it very well
Golf outings went awry in unpredictable ways—medical, meteorological—and were memorialized by the participants after the fact. The sketches here, from the 1970s, are by Dik Browne (top) and Dick Cavalli (bottom). The man with the twisted leg is my father.
One discussion began with a reference to Russell Lynes and his famous “highbrow-middlebrow-lowbrow” classification scheme from the late 1940s; it quickly moved to a consideration of unwashed salad bowls, like the one being passed around—according to Lynes, a cultural signifier of a highbrow. What happens, someone asked, when a highbrow signifier goes mainstream—isn’t there an endless circularity involved, where highbrow becomes middlebrow and where lowbrow can in fact become highbrow? “Mark my words,” my father said at one point, “Norman Rockwell will be highbrow someday!” He dreaded the moment, which he knew was inevitable, when The New York Times would endow Rockwell with a nimbus of artistic sanctity, and when those who had sneered would suddenly bow. It would be, he said, like the about-face on the war by American communists after Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (“And don’t get me started on Lillian Hellman.”)
A year or so later, at another such lunch, the conversation tackled the theme of who or what is overrated. The first response (from Reuben Nakian, as I recall) was a resounding, “Well, Bach, of course.” Western civilization was soon in tatters: Hamlet. Fallingwater. Thomas Jefferson. Moby-Dick. France. Brooks Brothers. Death of a Salesman. Robert E. Lee. Renoir (my father’s contribution). And underrated? A. E. Housman (of course!). Jones Beach. Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Albert Memorial. Pencils. Nebraska. Omar Bradley. John Sloan. Grace Coolidge (my father again). It all seems silly, but to the teenager in the corner, these exchanges might as well have been Plato’s Symposium.
For gag cartoonists, look day was as much a social occasion as a professional one. There were conflicting stories about how Wednesday had come to be the day when cartoonists went from magazine to magazine in Manhattan, selling their work. Had it evolved this way because the Cartoonists Guild of America always held its monthly meetings on a Wednesday, at the old Knickerbocker Hotel?16 Or was it because Marione Nickles of The Saturday Evening Post, which bought more cartoons than any other magazine, had decided that this was the day she liked coming to New York? Nickles came by train from Philadelphia, where the Post was based, arriving in the Manhattan office at around 10:30. Heading in much earlier, cartoonists converged from north and east, also by train. At any one time you might find twenty of them in some dingy room—in essence a holding cell—at the Post or Collier’s or Sports Illustrated or True, waiting to show their roughs. The Post would be particularly crowded—the cartoonist Mort Gerberg compared it to the Sargasso Sea: “You expected to get stuck there, sometimes for two hours.” As the wait went on, cartoonists might begin mooing, like penned cattle.17 During the peak years, in the 1950s, as many as a hundred cartoonists would be prowling Manhattan every Wednesday, clumping and dispersing all over midtown throughout the day.18 Riding home to Westport and the other Connecticut townships, in the bar car of what was then the New Haven Railroad, they would try to sell the leftovers to Bill Yates, who had followed Mort Walker as the editor of 1000 Jokes magazine.19 Yates, himself a gag cartoonist, would eventually start his own strip, Professor Phumble. He succeeded Sylvan Byck as the comics editor at King Features.
* * *
Collectively, the cartoonists possessed a great convening power, to a degree that is hard to imagine in a present-day world with so many media distractions. The Hearst newspapers once conducted an experiment, sending out Sunday editions with a section missing to a thousand randomly selected subscribers. One week the main news section would be left out, then the magazine supplement, then the color comics. Only forty-five out of a thousand people complained about the missing news section; 880 complained about the missing comics. Comics had universal cachet, reached everybody, and opened doors. One night, when I was five or six, I went with my father on a surprise trip to the old Madison Square Garden. Rin Tin Tin—not even a reader—was waiting to meet us.
For cartoonists, the biggest gathering of the year was the NCS awards night, when the coveted Reuben was bestowed. The second-biggest gathering was Sports Night, usually held at the Commodore. When the hotel first opened, in 1919, its glass-ceilinged lobby was advertised as the largest room in the world. Sports Night took place in the ballroom, and the great sports figures of the day would be out in force for drinks and dinner. Politicians showed up, too. Once, reaching across the dais to shake hands with Theodore Sorensen, who was running for the Senate, I knocked a glass of scotch into his lap. Had I been a cartoonist, and the act deliberate, I suppose it would have been considered conduct unbecoming (but maybe not). The bonds between cartoonists and athletes were strong, forged by people like Willard Mullin and Bill Gallo in an era when every newspaper had a sports cartoonist, and sometimes two or three.
possessed a great convening power
Rin Tin Tin (with me) at a cartoonist gathering, 1957.
Shows by cartoonists filled ballrooms. Nancy’s Ernie Bushmiller adds Sluggo, Nancy, and a signature to a bathing suit, circa 1950.
massive liver-spotted hands resting atop the curve of a cane
a ticket to one of the biggest annual events on the cartoonists’ calendar.
To autograph-hunting kids, the experience of Sports Night was like setting out to trap squirrels and coming home with the Bronx Zoo. Jack Dempsey was almost always present, massive liver-spotted hands resting atop the curve of a cane. His handwriting was delicate and beautiful, like a nun’s. Casey Stengel was often in attendance. When I was ten or so—he was in his seventies, and managing the woeful Mets—I introduced myself to Stengel. He said, “Murphy, Murphy. I know a Murphy in San Diego.” A brief pause and an angled squint. “Are you him?” One night our dinner companions were Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, united for life by the “shot heard ’round the world”—Thomson’s home run off Branca in 1951, which won the National League pennant for the Giants—and by now companionable in their public shtick. Dinner with Yogi Berra was more of an ordeal. The gregarious malaprop artist of our expectations turned out to be a man of amiable monosyllables. “See much of Whitey Ford?” “Nah, not too much.” “How’s Yoo-Hoo doing?” “Good. Real good.” Only when my father in desperation began to draw his portrait on a napkin did Yogi liven up. That broke the ice, as it had in New Guinea, and Yogi relaxed (“Hey, that’s pretty good!”), permitting himself an exuberant disyllable.
After dinner the cartoonists would summon the immortals—Gene Tunney, Yogi Berra, Frank Gifford, Y. A. Tittle, Rocky Graziano—onto the stage, one by one, and draw caricatures on the spot within a mandated minute, clock ticking, then give away the drawings. It had the feeling of a contest: the ability to draw fast and well, under pressure and with an economy of line, was a highly prized skill. The cartoonists were past masters at capturing themselves—their very first models, and always the most accommodating—and in idle moments would sketch one another on whatever lay close to hand. I have a large rendering of my father, on newsprint torn from a pad, that Chuck Saxon drew in about thirty seconds as I looked on, and another by the illustrator Harry Devlin, drawn on a Reuben Awards program as he quietly observed my father from across the table. In his studio my father kept a painting done by the portraitist Sidney Dickinson, a friend and teacher. Walking down Madison Avenue one day, paint box in hand, Dickinson had noticed through a shopwindow a worn but stylish woman lounging theatrically in a chair. It was like that moment in Moscow when Tolstoy (the story goes) saw a woman’s bare arm through a window and conceived the character Anna Karenina.20 Dickinson stopped on the sidewalk, unfolded a spindly easel, and painted for no more than five or ten minutes, capturing attitude and pose with louche slatherings of color. The next day he gave the painting to my father.
My father and Dempsey that same year.
unfolded a spindly easel, and painted for no more than five or ten minutes
Sidney Dickinson’s oil sketch, done on a sidewalk, 1964. For cartoonists, speed was part of the performance.
Satchel Paige was the speaker at Sports Night one year, and in the end a big success. I learned only later that it had been a close call. Suffering an attack of nerves, he had been discovered in his room minutes before showtime, wearing nothing but green boxer shorts and swigging from a bottle of bourbon. Another year we entered the ballroom to find that a boxing ring had been set up in the middle. The onetime middleweight champion Rocky Graziano was a guest that evening, and in his honor, we were told, there would be an exhibition match. Into the ring stepped Irwin Hasen, who drew Dondi. Hasen, then about fifty, was pudgy and short. He shadowboxed gamely for the crowd. Then the spotlight shifted to his opponent. The man was if anything even shorter. He wore purple satin boxing trunks that were several sizes too large and came up to his rib cage. He was about seventy years old. Pale skin sagged on a sunken chest. His knees were as knobby as a camel’s. With a serene and stately countenance, Otto Soglow parted the ropes and put up his fists.
Portraits of my father by Don Orehek, Harry Devlin, Chuck Saxon, and Gary Gianni.
The sight of Soglow at that moment is indelible, and captures something of the muted us-against-the-world attitude that lurked just below the surface in the sensibility of cartoonists. The attitude was not entirely serious, but neither was it empty of seriousness. It came across in Walt Kelly’s testimony before the Senate, when he noted that cartoonists were screwballs. Not only that, Kelly went on, but he resented the insinuation that they might not be: “This is another thing we fight for!”21 Dik Browne would often note that cartoonists generally got themselves into trouble when they tried to sway minds: “More cartoonists have come a cropper by pushing a political slant than any other single thing. Wasn’t it Samuel Goldwyn who said, ‘Messages are for Western Union’?”22 Despite some notable exceptions—such as Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and, later, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury—most comic strips were sparing when it came to stirring public debate. But there was a stubborn streak and an anarchic streak that invited controversy anyway. For all his cautionary talk about messages, Browne was not above sending one. I have a strip he gave me in which a monk appears with a flickering torch. When Hägar asks him what he’s holding, the monk says it’s the lamp of learning, which will guide humanity toward peace and progress. Hägar replies, “Great. Can you hold it a little closer while I finish this sword?” Charles Schulz (in 1968) and Mort Walker (in 1970) introduced African American characters into their strips—Franklin Armstrong, a schoolmate of the other children in Peanuts, and Jackson Flap, a goateed lieutenant in Beetle Bailey. Both cartoonists took some heat. Schulz remembered hearing from a Southern newspaper editor who said that the character Franklin was fine, just fine, but did he have to attend the same school as the other kids? Beetle was briefly dropped from Stars and Stripes when Lieutenant Flap made his debut, until objections from a U.S. senator, William Proxmire, caused the military to reconsider. In its depiction of clueless officers, wise idiots, and gold-bricking enlisted men, Beetle Bailey was by its nature antiauthoritarian, and it had been dropped once before by Stars and Stripes, in the 1950s. The chief result was an outcry that gained a hundred additional newspapers for the strip and earned a quick reinstatement. Years later, post-Flap, Walker would be awarded the Pentagon’s Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service, and on another occasion, also in Washington, would receive a salute in the reviewing stand as troops marched by at sunset.
parted the ropes and put up his fists
The main event, Sports Night, 1968. Dondi’s Irwin Hasen takes on The Little King’s Otto Soglow.
for all his cautionary talk about messages
Dik Browne couldn’t resist sending one. Hägar the Horrible, 1975.
There was a famous moment at Johnstone and Cushing—one that seemed to loom larger with each retelling—when Browne was seen running through the bullpen in a bloody shirt, pursued by an editor who was brandishing a bullwhip and screaming at him never to submit such lousy work again. It was all a setup, to welcome a new cartoonist to the floor.23 At some point, just about every cartoonist endured the lash of rebuke or the sting of rejection, maybe even Chon Day, the amiable creator of the deceptively gentle Brother Sebastian. That may be among the reasons why they were quick to come to one another’s assistance—stepping in to meet deadlines, for instance, when one of the group was sidelined by illness or accident. Bob Lubbers, who worked on Tarzan and The Saint, among other strips, did all the drawing on Juliet Jones while Stan Drake recovered from the accident that had killed Alex Raymond. When Drake took over Big Ben Bolt for a month as my father battled pneumonia, I remember being surprised that one cartoonist could so closely mimic the style of another, even to the point of crossing genres. This was a chameleonlike talent that many cartoonists had. Drake himself, an acknowledged master of the dramatic strip, would go on to draw Blondie, a classic bigfoot feature, complaining all the while about how much harder it was. He claimed that Dagwood alone had four hundred facial expressions, and he didn’t even want to talk about the hand gestures.24 When cartoonists gathered to mark significant birthdays and anniversaries, they generally brought drawings or paintings in the style of the person being celebrated. You could infer the creators by certain deliberate quirks of identity. At a party for my father I remember Leonard Starr, who drew Little Orphan Annie, bringing a sketch that showed Prince Valiant with those vacant Annie eyes. Fred Lasswell, who did Snuffy Smith, had Prince Valiant smoking a corncob pipe. Mort Walker had Prince Valiant’s helmet coming down over his eyes, like Beetle’s. But each person’s breadth of mimicry was plain.
In the early 1960s, Browne fell on an icy sidewalk and shattered his drawing arm—an accident that left the arm functional but looking as if it had been repaired with masking tape. Henceforward it swung from his shoulder like soggy laundry on a swaying line. His golf swing looked like something that Rube Goldberg had contrived, a twisted elbow angling precisely down the fairway as if to indicate where the ball, in the end, would not be going. After the accident, Browne’s Johnstone and Cushing colleague Gill Fox drew The Tracy Twins until Browne recovered. When Browne was sidelined again for some reason, decades later, the gag cartoonist Orlando Busino drew Hägar the Horrible for several weeks. All of this was done quietly, without fanfare, and indeed under the table. No cartoonist wanted others, meaning primarily the syndicate, to know that he was getting help—or, perhaps more to the point, to entertain a suspicion that his special genius could so easily be replaced. But cartoonists could tell. If Stan Drake had ever been made to draw Nancy, he would have tried dutifully to copy Ernie Bushmiller’s style—but Nancy herself would somehow have acquired an erotic charge. Jerry Dumas remembered calling Busino to tell him what a wonderful job he was doing on Hägar, only to have Busino categorically deny any involvement. Dumas countered that he knew his work down to the smallest pen stroke—and that, indeed, he had recognized a certain distinctive method of inking the letter G—at which point Busino gave in and admitted the truth.25
From time to time, museum curators determine that only the left hand in a certain painting was really by Rubens, or only the eyes and nose in another truly by Tintoretto. Among collectors of comic art, the category of ghosted strips involves similar feats of connoisseurship. Is this one of the Gordo strips drawn by Hank Ketcham when Gus Arriola got hurt? Could that be one of the Popeyes done by Hy Eisman after Bud Sagendorf took ill? Would-be Berensons are everywhere.
* * *
Dik Browne wasn’t a churchgoer, but he exemplified a quality for which the only apt word is “grace.” Physically, he seemed to have very bad luck. When Jerry Dumas told me the story about Orlando Busino drawing Hägar, he didn’t bother to fix a date that was any more specific than “during one of Dik’s medical crises,” as if nothing more needed to be said. But Browne had been blessed with an extraordinarily good nature. He was an odd-looking man, especially when he was younger. I have a picture of him and a dozen cartoonist friends, including my father, taken at Mort Walker’s fortieth-birthday party, in 1963. Most of the cartoonists have that early-’60s Clark Kent–ish look—the black-frame glasses, the carefully parted hair, the square jaw. They could pass for one of those insurance salesmen in a matchbook ad—maybe even done by Johnstone and Cushing—who says, “Think of the security, Bob—and that low monthly payment!” Browne has been stuck in the middle of the group, an all-too-obvious outlier. He wears a suit, but it doesn’t really help. His head is oddly narrow, as if squeezed in a vise. His jug ears resemble those of the Yellow Kid. The neck is already wattled and fleshy. Browne would eventually grow a beard, which some assumed was to link himself visually to Hägar the Horrible, but in fact he stopped shaving after one of his sons told him that he “had more chins than a Chinese phone book.” He was inattentive when it came to his deportment, and his wife, Joan, could often be heard casually saying “XYZ” when he returned from the bathroom, which Dik understood to mean “examine your zipper.” Once, during a party at our house, as hors d’oeuvres were being passed around, Browne took a handful of crackers and put them in his jacket pocket. He said to one of my younger brothers, who had been holding the tray, “You never know. Poverty could be just around the corner.” His eyesight began to fail prematurely, and he would cite his poor vision when suggesting that he’d long been under the impression he looked like Ronald Colman. Self-pity was absent from his demeanor. In a few short moments he could draw a landscape that would transport you to Elysium, where perhaps in his own mind he lived. A child could not approach Browne without departing in possession of a joke and a picture. If an adult wrote to him wanting an original drawing, he would send something off and simply request in return a donation to the Milt Gross Fund, named for a renowned cartoonist of the 1920s and ’30s, which had been set up to assist those who had fallen on hard times.
that early-’60s Clark Kent–ish look
Mort Walker’s fortieth-birthday party, 1963. Walker wears the hat. Jerry Dumas is standing fourth from left. My father is in the front, second from the right. Dik Browne is the man in the middle.
Browne worked for decades with Mort Walker on Hi and Lois. Walker was in many ways Browne’s opposite—trim, tidy, well organized. He was both buttoned-down and buttoned-up. You could infer something about his capacity for control from the way he drew. Unlike, say, Jerry Dumas, whose pen stroke would snag unless he always moved the pen away from himself in a single direction—meaning that he constantly needed to turn the paper in circles—Walker kept the paper stationary and drew methodical strokes in all directions without incident: top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right, right to left. They got the same results, Dumas would say, but Walker made less noise. Walker actually knew how to run things. His expanding web of comic enterprises—besides Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois there was also Boner’s Ark, Sam and Silo, Gamin and Patches, and The Evermores, plus an assortment of comic books and hardcover books and merchandise—came to be known as King Features East. The regular ideas meeting for the various strips was held one morning a month, yielding gags to power the enterprise for the next four weeks. There was a clear division of labor: penciling, lettering, inking. Walker’s work space was an expansive and immaculate domain—located initially in a second-floor loft of the barn behind his Greenwich home, then in the house next door, then in the cavernous Gutzon Borglum studio in Stamford with its medieval hooded fireplace and a granite atrium, three stories high. Walker somehow seemed to be first with everything: the first to build a pool, the first to buy a color TV, the first to acquire a second house just to work in. He was also among the first to collect the original work of other cartoonists in a serious way, and in the mid-1970s, his personal stock would form the nucleus of the Museum of Cartoon Art, located initially near Walker’s home, in Greenwich, and later along the Connecticut–New York border, a few miles north. Framed strips took up every inch of wall space in his study—pen-and-ink originals by his friends in the Connecticut School and classic strips by Frederick Burr Opper, George McManus, Rube Goldberg, and Walt Disney.
departing in possession of a joke and a picture
A typical letter from Dik Browne, this one to Tim Dumas, son of Jerry.
He was a genuinely funny man: the “Titian’s workshop” metaphor, which suggests an assembly line, doesn’t work without an actual Titian at the heart of it. Walker had a special genius, though it usually didn’t show outwardly with him any more than it did with Charles Schulz. In company you might easily mistake him for a pharmacist or a civics teacher. But his mind was configured in a way that couldn’t help but turn sensory stimulus into some sort of a gag, the way a silkworm can’t help turning mulberry leaves into filament. Walker came up with the most distinctive feature of Hi and Lois—using thought balloons to show the unspoken sentiments of the toddler Trixie—after reading Main Street and seeing how Sinclair Lewis used interior monologue.26 It was Walker who devised the glossary of terms for comic strip devices. “Indotherms” are the wavy lines indicating that a pie, for instance, is still hot. “Lucaflects” are the windowlike highlights indicating that a balloon or a Christmas ornament is shiny. “Emanata” are the lines that surround a face registering a state of surprise. “Plewds” are beads of sweat indicating that a character is working hard. All of these were invented as an inside joke, circulating at first in the National Cartoonists Society newsletter. Like so many jokes, they are now an accepted part of reality.
There was a bookish side to a lot of cartoonists and illustrators, and sometimes it came out in the work itself. Walker gave me a Beetle Bailey pencil sketch that I’d liked in which the character Zero asks another enlisted man, Plato, what all his books are for. “They contain all the knowledge of the past,” the brainy but kindly Plato says to his moronic friend, “to guide our actions in the future.” Zero replies, “What happens if a couple of pages get stuck together?” The gruff, marauding Hägar has a son named Hamlet, slight and curious, far more interested in the life of the mind than the manly practice of arms. His ambition to become a dentist is scoffed at by his friends until they learn that it involves pulling teeth. Jerry Dumas was probably the most overtly bookish among the group, and a stylish writer as well. He created illustrated spreads for The New Yorker and drew delicate illustrations for poems. His family memoir about growing up in the 1930s on the east side of Detroit, An Afternoon in Waterloo Park, is quietly haunting, a small classic. Dumas was also a story-teller with a sharp eye for his fellow cartoonists. He had not been to war, but he had been to college, and he had a peculiarly oblique and readerly perception of what passes for the ordinary. This was embodied in Sam’s Strip, which Dumas created with Walker in 1961. The strip deserved more of an audience than it ever got, becoming a cult favorite among comic strip fans only after its demise, which occurred in twenty short months. Posthumous success, as Dumas would note, is the second-best kind. But Sam’s Strip earned a kind of immortality with its forays into the postmodern. The first three panels of the very first strip have no characters in them at all because the characters haven’t been invented yet and are still taking shape behind the scenes. When the title character, Sam, finally shows up in the fourth panel, he is only partly drawn, and the artist can be seen still at work inking him in. Sometimes Sam rented out space to other strips: stunningly rendered action scenes, worthy of Alex Raymond or Hal Foster, might suddenly intervene for a couple of panels. Taking a cue from television, Sam toyed with the idea of selling some of his space to advertisers. Once, after the public announcement that Charles Schulz had negotiated a deal with the Ford Motor Company for the use of Snoopy characters, Dumas had Charlie Brown whoosh by in a Ford Falcon, out of the blue, edging Sam off the road. In the course of its life, Sam’s Strip brought back characters from classic features—Krazy Kat, Hogan’s Alley, Happy Hooligan, most of them by then long gone—to perform in the funny pages again. Humpty Dumpty and the Mad Hatter, from John Tenniel’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, might stop by. Stock images from old editorial cartoons—a battered Planet Earth wearing a Band-Aid—made regular cameos, as did urbane characters from New Yorker cartoons, invited into the strip (as Sam explained) to lend it a bit more class. On one occasion Sam hosted a Comic Characters Convention, the panels overflowing with twenty or thirty figures, from Opper’s Happy Hooligan to Thurber’s famous barking seal. (At the banquet, Sam had to remind everyone that the pies were just for eating.) All of this was drawn painstakingly from scratch—every delicate line of a Tenniel, every goofy stroke of a George Herriman. The Comic Characters Convention sequence, which ran for a week, took three weeks to draw.27
invented as an inside joke
Pencil sketches by Mort Walker—a sample of the tongue-in-cheek terminology he invented in the early 1960s for graphic techniques used by cartoonists. In 1980 it achieved book form—The Lexicon of Comicana.
earned a kind of immortality with its forays into the postmodern
What Dumas produced in his spare time.
Jerry Dumas and Mort Walker, panels from Sam’s Strip, 1962.
stock images from old editorial cartoons
As depicted in Mort Walker’s glossary—and the kind of cliché celebrated and mocked in Sam’s Strip.
If Dumas pushed the boundaries of the comic strip toward the absurdly self-aware, Stan Drake pushed them in another direction, toward unabashed efficiency. Putting three weeks’ work into one week’s output was not, for him, a strategic imperative. Perhaps because several times he found himself between marriages and needed to take on enormous amounts of work just to pay alimony—he frankly admitted as much—Drake was always looking for ways to save time without sacrificing the quality of his work, which he never did. His fascination with cars was in keeping with his interest in modern advances of all kinds. He was the first cartoonist I knew who started using an electric eraser, a gun-metal device manufactured by Bruning that looked like something appropriate for enhanced interrogation. I remember my father shaking his head at this development, as if learning that Daumier had switched to Magic Marker, though he eventually bought an electric eraser, too. My siblings and I established that it was no good for cleaning teeth.
Maxfield Parrish once called himself “a mechanic who likes to paint.” Drake, along with Snuffy Smith’s Fred Lasswell, was an experimenter and a tinkerer in that same vein. At one point Drake was taking medication that had the effect of turning his urine blue; he played around with the dosage in order to make it green on St. Patrick’s Day. Had the science of hair transplants been as surefire then as it is now, Drake would have been at the front of the line; as it was, he resorted to an intricate double comb-over that had a tendency, in a slight breeze, to decouple and produce wings. When he was drawing Blondie and working with a writer who lived in Florida—it was Dean Young, who had taken over from his father—Drake became one of the first cartoonists to use a fax machine. (Actually, it was a Qwip device, that clunky precursor to the fax, which involved having to lay the handset of the telephone into a cushioned cradle that could receive and send an electronic signal.) Early on, when doing The Heart of Juliet Jones, Drake experimented with Xerox machines, discovering that you could take a photograph of, say, the Manhattan skyline, or trees in a forest, or boats in a marina, and by adjusting the setting to high contrast, produce an image that looked like a pen-and-ink drawing. Reduced to proper size, it could be pasted into place as a ready-made background.28 Or it could be used on its own for what is known as a “talking building” composition. This was a venerable compositional technique, used by many cartoonists, which typically showed a facade with many windows, the speech balloons emanating from one of them.29 It was perfect for establishing a location and setting a mood—the reader’s imagination provided the interiors: the Eames chairs and Calder mobiles in a chic penthouse; the glass desk and executive telephones in a corporate office; the rutted mattress and dripping faucet in a Bowery flophouse.
From time to time Drake was known to lift drawings he had done for the strip years earlier—for instance, a generic head shot of Juliet Jones looking happy or shocked—and using them once again, making a photostat copy and pasting it into place. Faces that filled a panel were a time-saver anyway, even if you had to draw them from scratch, because it meant there was no need for any background detail. Drake would ask rhetorically, Do you know how much work it takes to draw a window that looks like a real window? Or what about something as simple as a doorjamb? “It sounds so stupid, but it has to be in perspective, it has to be ruled in pencil, and all the little wood layers in a doorjamb, in order to look real, must be there the way it looks. Then you have to ink all this in—a lot of little tight ruling that has nothing to do with creativity.”30 So he became increasingly generous with the use of head shots, noting that it sometimes saved him from having to draw an entire city block. Besides, he liked drawing faces, especially the faces of attractive women. Back in his days at Johnstone and Cushing, he had honed his skills by tracing the faces of movie stars, thousands of times, until the muscle memory of his fingers could produce “handsome” and “beautiful” without conscious direction. Drake was unapologetic about his shortcuts. He wasn’t crossing some sacred line of purity—“For chrissake,” he would say, “the whole business is make-believe.”
perfect for establishing a location
Stan Drake, The Heart of Juliet Jones. “Talking buildings” can set the scene; head shots save time.
Golf was the athletic activity that united more of the Fairfield County cartoonists than any other, but in the early days they had tried bowling, and some of them, like Charles Saxon, never gave it up. In terms of social class, bowling is just about at the opposite end of the spectrum from the habits and self- perception of the people Saxon satirized in his drawings—people with whom he also lived and socialized. Saxon did play golf, but all his life he bowled on Friday nights with a group that included The New Yorker’s Whitney Darrow Jr. and the writers John Hersey and Vance Packard. He was otherwise tweedy and had the benign, settled, watchful eyes of a whale in a children’s book. His hands, unexpectedly for a cartoonist, were big, like a bricklayer’s; the thick fingers seemed clumsy until they began to move. His friend Edward Sorel, also a cartoonist and illustrator, figured that Saxon got away with poking fun at the people he lived among by maintaining that he was really one of them and was actually making fun of himself.31 Saxon had been born Charles Isaacson to a musical family in Brooklyn; his parents were musicians, and a great-uncle had been the court violinist to Queen Victoria. He himself played drums. Maybe it was the musical background, but more than any other cartoonist I know his line seemed to flow—it was spare and exact, but had an effortlessly aerodynamic quality to it. It was the kind of effortlessness that took work: Saxon would do a drawing again and again, the flaws invisible to anyone but him. By the time he was done, his desk was encircled by crumpled paper.32 Sometimes his style had no ambition beyond beauty and sentiment—as in a New Yorker cover from 1959, showing the lit windows of the New Canaan railway station on a snowy day at dusk. More frequently Saxon sought to gently capture a certain range of attitudes: unearned insouciance, implacable contentment, cozy self-absorption, comfortable smugness. Nor were these attitudes solely the province of human beings. I have drawings by Saxon of a camel (insouciant) and a satyr (contented), but he could endow a flowerpot or wicker chair or croquet mallet with emotion and aspiration. A Saxon geranium wanted its cuttings to go to Yale. Saxon had a fine sense of language and an appreciation for spoken cliché, which were as important to his cartoons as the drawings were. Unlike some New Yorker cartoonists, he wrote his own gags. One of his best-known cartoons shows the usual cast of plump executives gathered around a boardroom table. The chairman says, “Of course, honesty is one of the better policies.” In another, a Waspy father in fall-catalog clothing walks with his young son on a forest path under a glorious autumnal canopy. He says to the boy, “It’s good to know about trees. Just remember that nobody ever made any big money knowing about trees.”
Self-portrait by Stan Drake, 1969.
Saxon was mystified and hurt when changes at The New Yorker—precipitated by the departure of William Shawn—brought a sudden end to what had been a defining relationship on both sides for more than three decades. It was especially painful because there was no other place for him to go—his species of painting and cartoon had flourished in a single ecological niche. Jerry Dumas remembered standing with my father by the fireplace of our home one evening as Saxon lamented that the magazine had bought nothing from him for several years. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Saxon said.33 He suffered a heart attack not long after that conversation, knocking over a table in his living room as he fell. His last words, spoken to the paramedics, might have been a caption for one of his own cartoons: “I guess I’d better die; I just broke our best lamp.”34
would do a drawing again and again
Charles Saxon in his New Canaan studio.
A Saxon illustration for a 1970s ad campaign. In Saxon’s eyes (but no one else’s), this crayon sketch fell below his standards. He started over.
the kind of effortlessness that took work
Charles Saxon, charcoal drawing of a satyr for a party invitation, c. 1985.