A Crowded Life in Comics –

Here Come the Judge.

By Rick Marschall

My father could not draw, and probably never tried. But he was a rabid fan of cartoons and comics. We subscribed to many Sunday newspaper from Long Island to Philadelphia when I was young, so he could read virtually every syndicated strip; otherwise he only read the The New York Times and one or two others. And he saved the Sunday funnies.

On his bookshelves he had what were about the only books then published about comic strips and their history – the books by Waugh, Craven, and Sheridan. These gave me my taste and affection for older strips. How else would I have known Opper, Dirks, and Swinnerton? I started to draw, as well as study. On school vacations I would go to the New York Public Library’s microfilm division and look at spools of Hearst funnies from the turn of the century. When I was a little older, I visited syndicates, where indulgent executives and bullpen staffers would give me encouraging words, and stacks of originals. The good old days.

My father delighted in these activities, and he helped me compose fan letters to Hal Foster, Walt Kelly, Crockett Johnson. Al Smith, who drew Mutt and Jeff, went to our church and became a mentor… with my father’s vicarious presence. The New York area was full of cartoonists, and each artist I met would recommend me to others… and before I could drive, my dad was the cheerful chauffeur. On Florida vacations, the final two days were always spent visiting cartoonists by polite pre-arrangement. Frank King, Roy Crane, Les Turner…

There was one discordant note in this long happy song of ours. As part of his lifelong interest, he read and saved the humor magazines of the day. He bought his first copy of Judge, he always remembered, when he was almost 14. And he kept the issues. Also Life, and eventually The New Yorker and other titles. That commenced in 1929, so there were substantial stacks of the cartoon weeklies.

In 1955 our family moved from half a brownstone in Ridgewood, Queens, to a split-level house on half an acre in Closter NJ, across the bridge from New York. In other words – more room, more space, more corners to fill with old comics and humor magazines.

Counter-intuitively, instead of moving his collection of cartoon journals to a larger venue, he decided, in planning the household move, to sell them. I was only five, not yet having contracted the Collecting Virus. When I did, a few years later, it was original art and (on weekly visits to Book Store Row with Dad) vintage Puck, Life, and Judge magazines of the 1880s and ‘90s.

But soon enough my regrets joined his. So I – we – set about acquiring runs of those magazines, and soon I was happily knee-deep in John Held, Jr., Russell Patterson, Gluyas Williams, Percy Crosby, early Dr Seuss, and early… S J Perelman.

Dad loved to read, too – our house resembled the Trinity College Library – and he was attracted by the text humorists in those magazines. In Judge of the late 1920s, S J Perelman was a fixture, often with a text piece and two cartoons. Yes, he was a cartoonist and a good one. I was just as impressed, almost 40 years after Dad had been, by the insouciant nonsense of the short pieces and the cartoons: surreal, pun-filled, intelligent. This was the work that attracted the Marx Brothers, too, and led to collaborations. Perelman was slow to join The New Yorker, and the Judge material, grown obscure, was prime in my view.

Eventually I assembled a complete run, via auctions, lots, bookstores, and libraries like of that Judge cartoonist (and Oaky Doaks creator) R B Fuller. When I found a duplicate copy of the first issue my father bought as a teenager, I gave it to him (of course he had been borrowing and re-reading all the issues from the past). It was like a Dead Sea scroll, thereafter displayed.

I loved Perelman so much that I proposed to Sid that an anthology deserved to be published. He disagreed about his early material – many fans do not – and seemed wistful that I had a better file of his early works than he did. I got to know Sid’s last best friend, and insightful biographer, Prudence Crowther.

I did collect and edit a book of this material, That Old Gang O’ Mine (Morrow, 1984), conveniently titled after what seemed to me to be one of the book’s funniest feuilletons, as he liked to call them.

And for the cover – to honor Dad and the path he set me upon – I designed it from one of Perelman’s color cartoons, a Judge magazine cover. And I dedicated the book to him.

To Perelmaniacs, it seemed like simple justice… and a Judge was already presiding.

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