A Crowded Life in Comics – Tony Auth

.[sketch by Tony Auth (1942-2014)].

An Auth-entic Friend

by Rick Marschall

This installment of A Crowded Life in Comics will recall a cartoonist whose feet were in strips and political cartoons, in fact Pulitzer prize-winning politicals.

Tony Auth drew for the Philadelphia Inquirer his whole career, subsequent to work as a medical illustrator.  Those first jobs had him drawing medical equipment and examples of procedures for manuals and magazines. On the Inqui, he eviscerated politicians. And as the accompanying sketch shows, he never became squeamish at the sight of blood, or shy of depicting it. Me, I once dreamed of being a tree surgeon, but dropped out of training because I couldn’t stand the sight of… sap.

I had some contact with Tony when I wrote his entry for The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons around 1980. But by the late ‘80s I was living outside Philadelphia, and we were locals, meeting frequently for lunch or phone chats.

I visited him in his studio at the Inquirer, center city, until it became tougher for any visitors to visit any staffers there subsequent to his famous Israel cartoon. After Jonathan Pollard, “American,” was arrested for spying for Israel, Tony drew a cartoon of Uncle Sam being led by the nose… the ring through his nose was in the shape of the Star of David, which ring was labeled “Pollard Spy Ring.” After this appeared, members of the Jewish Defense league somehow made their way into his studio and trashed it in major fashion.

After that, cameras, security measures, and tightly controlled passes and IDs, already spreading throughout society in general, were imposed by the newspaper. Tony Auth admitted to looking over his shoulder occasionally, but was not cowed thereafter. Not his style.

We were on opposite sides of the political fence – or, to fine-tune the metaphor, we were on distant fields on either side of that fence. But fast friends. He was self-effacing and modest in person.

My son Ted was a film major at Temple University, with an interest in making documentaries; and eventually became a TV news producer. He has worked in Orlando, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Seattle, and elsewhere, and interned at MSNBC of all places, contributing to the old Imus in the Morning and Alan Keyes shows. But his first venture as a class project was a studio documentary of Tony Auth, who was very generous with an entire afternoon. I thought its opening was clever: sound effect of scratch, scratch, scratch. Picture comes up, dark studio with closeup of Tony Auth, pen to paper, executing his trademark cross-hatch lines. Pull back, then interview. Nice job; Tony’s niceness came through.

JULES FEIFFER. Once Tony called and said that Jules Feiffer was coming to town, speaking at a temple in Cheltenham, next town from me. Would I like a visit? I raised him one step, and invited them to dinner at our home before the talk. My wife Nancy made a wonderful meal, but the afternoon was spent, first, going through my collection of originals and books and old magazines, all of which fascinated Jules.

I had not seen Jules in years, although we corresponded, and he wrote a Foreword to one of my Popeye volumes. We had a house guest that week, a teacher from France who did not know Jules’ newspaper work, but knew his name from the screenplay for the Popeye movie. She attended the talk too.

Jules was so taken by the cartoon treasures we climbed through that he made frequent references in his talk to the giants of yesteryear, and the great forgotten creations; and my collection. Nobody in the audience knew who I was, but it was nice. One of the reasons to collect!

NORB. Tony eventually broadened his palette, so to speak – to color cartoons in the paper’s Sunday magazine; to children’s books (one written by Chaim Potok, which Tony thoughtfully got inscribed to me); to a comic strip for King Features, Norb, written by NPR humorist Daniel Pinkwater. Later installments in this space will discuss that work, especially Norb, a whimsical strip whose settings even included a Home for Retired Comic-Strip Characters.

The last time I saw Tony… well, I almost saw Tony. He had left the Inquirer around 2012, to pursue “digital artwork,” which he did, but a) he was about 70 anyway; and b) the wave of Journalism Cutbacks – now a tsunami – was asserting itself. It was a couple years later, I was in Philadelphia with my girlfriend and wanted to see Tony again (and show off what cool friends I have) but my call was met with his wife Eliza’s news of his inability to see anyone. One day later I did not have to “read between the lines.” Tony died of brain cancer.

Among the sketches Tony Auth drew was this portrait of a Medieval knight and Unc Sam. He had called me once, needing reference, if I had it, for a medieval joust he wanted to base a cartoon on. Did I have any Prince Valiant material? – he knew already where he wanted to “borrow.” In two hours I delivered all my Val books and reprints and  a stack of old tearsheets. His cartoon (I think an anti-Reagan jab) was printed, and, better for me to see, the material was returned with this sketch. No reading between these lines.

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