Monday, November 11, 2024

Before Terry AND the Pirates...

 ORIGINS:
THE ROOTS OF
MILTON CANIFF -- HIS FIRST PUBLISHED STRIPS

by Rick Marschall



In 1925 Milton Caniff of Dayton, Ohio, was a senior at Stivers High School. He was torn between his creative muses, cartooning and the theater. Young Caniff pursued a dual path until he graduated -- he was an actor in the senior class play "Going Up," about an aviator's romance; and he drew cartoons for the school newspaper.

His major contribution was an ongoing strip starring two students, Chic Woozle and Noodles Dingle. It was a humor strip featuring gags and, about half the time, school activities: sports, plays, trips, etc. Chic and Noodles was the awful eponymous title.

Stivers High School began its life in 1908 as Stivers Manual Training School. It has merged with other schools and had its building renovated, and had its named changed from Stivers High School to is today known as Stivers School for the Arts. Milton Caniff is its most famous graduate, and Milt occasionally paid homage to his alma mater, calling it "St Ivers" in his strips. The school honored its alumnus by naming an adjacent street "Milton Caniff Drive."
 
When Milt attended Ohio State University the next year he continued both activities, and progressed in talent and notice. In a story he recounted many times, he besought one of his heroes, the local political cartoonist with a nation reputation, Billy Ireland. The cartoonist's supposed advice: "Stick to your inkpots, kid. Actors don't eat regular." He acted in campus plays, but also signed up for the mail-correspondence cartooning course, the Landon "School."

In my collection I have a rare reprint book he produced at his own expense, collecting the Chic and Noodles strips. It was in the style and format of reprints books of a few syndicated strips -- Mutt and Jeff; Bringing Up Father; TAD's Silk Hat Harry; Roger BeanDoings of the Van Loons. I also have, and will reproduce material from here in Yesterday's Papers, Milt's college yearbooks (he was Art Editor) and a bookplate he designed.

But here is the cover and three strips from his "professional debut," the Chic and Noodles book. R C Harvey, in his ponderous cinderblock of a biography, nonetheless devoted only a couple paragraphs to Chic and Noodles (spelling it Chick and Noodles in its first reference) and sharing only three strips.

Three strips here, too: one with a self-caricature of Milt (in his mustachioed role in the school play); and a strip in which the two characters unsuccessfully try to outwit a Black sleeping-car porter. Within 10 years Milton Caniff would be depicting other ethnic stereotypes -- and much more: action, adventure, pretty girls, danger, and exotic locals -- in Terry and the Pirates.

  







 

Thursday, November 7, 2024

WHEN ELECTION DAY IS CONFRONTED BY DEADLINE DAY

 

How Cartoonists Addressed Presidential Campaigns' Results...
BEFORE the Votes Were Taken

by Rick Marschall

Appropriate to the theme of this post, I wrote this before the results of the Trump-Harris were known (medical distractions...) and before the votes were cast. The "mysterious" aspect resonates, however. 

Back in B.I. (Before the Internet), voting in America was different than now. There were election days, although some rural areas extended the times to cast ballots. Paper ballots everywhere, excpet for arcane wrinkles -- dropping balls in separate boxes (hmmm... poll watchers could tell who you were and which party you favored); glass "fishbowls (so observers could see your ballot), and so forth. Eventually, the United States adopted the "Australian Ballot" -- private preferences.

Results were, of course, eagerly awaited. Telegraph messages were prized. And for years the New York World cast giant magic-lantern messages with the latest headlines and vote tallies onto the face of their imposing building on Park Row, New York City.

But the staffs of weekly magazines -- especially their cartoonists -- had a tougher challenge. The journals might appear on newsstands the day of the election, or close to it... but conceiving, drawing, engraving, printing, and distributing the magazines obliged the cartoonists to either skip the topics (no way!) or fudge the issue. Somehow. 

Joseph Keppler, the founder, chief cartoonist, and editor of Puck Magazine embraced the challenge. He loved creating cartoon puzzles -- if they could be called that: incorporating faces into the backgrounds, props, peripheral elements of his cartoons. One Christmas, Puck even offered a readers' contest for those who could discover and identify the faces of celebrities Keppler "hid" in his cartoons. In 1880, the political wisdom reckoned that the presidential candidates were neck-and-neck. Republican James Garfield was challenged by Gen. Winfield Hancock. 

How to address the campaign, which would be stale news -- anyway, not "new" when the issue would be on sale? Keppler draw two figured representing the two parties, shaking hands in unity. And he incorporated a great number of contemporary politicians' faces on the trees, rocks, and bushes. Here is the cartoon, from the issue dated 
Nov 3, 1880 -- but drawn and printed several days earlier:



You will find Sen. Roscoe Conkling (after whom the comedian Fatty Arbuckle was named); Sen. James Gillespie Blaine; Interior Secretary Carl Schurz; Marshall Jewell, former postmaster-general; GOP vice-presidential nominee Chester Alan Arthur; former President Ulysses S. Grant, who had contended for the nomination in 1880; Pres. Rutherford Birchard Hayes; Samuel Jones Tilden, 1876 Democratic presidential nominee; Democrat VP nominee William English; Senator John Logan; Tammany Hall boss John Kelly; presidential aspirant Benjamin Butler; Sen. Thomas Bayard; and future New York City Mayor (he would defeat young Theodore Roosevelt in 1886) Abram S Hewitt.

Bernhard Gillam addressed the same challenge in 1892; but he answered in a different manner. Grover Cleveland had been elected president in 1884, the first Democrat since before the Civil War. In 1888 he lost to Benjamin Harrison -- despite winning the popular vote, he lost in the Electoral College... corruption and chicanery winning the day for Harrison in his own state of Indiana. Not unique.

In 1892 the two "incumbents" met. The race was expected to be tight, so Gillam did not feel safe drawing with crossed fingers. His outlet was Judge Magazine. It was a Republican version of Puck, which was generally Democrat. Gillam had drawn the effective "Tattooed Man" cartoons at Keppler's side in 1884, be bolted and made Judge his new home.

Gillam's idea was to draw a political train wreck... and leave blank on his lithographers' stone the pertinent elements until the very last minute! This included the face of the losing candidate. One can discern that he expected, or hoped, that Cleveland would be the loser, because the body on the tracks is more like the corpulent Cleveland than the diminutive Harrison. But... Harrison's bearded and bewildered face was drawn in at the last moment. As were a few other elements, including the annoyed face of The Judge, the magazine's symbolic boss. And -- the elephant with the eye patch? Gillam originally intended that the animal would be a triumphant, rampaging GOP pachyderm.

Two more "in jokes" Gillam managed to fit in: lower left, the bitter face of Judge's publisher and Republican activist James Arkell; and Gillam's self-caricature on an upside-down monkey's body, with an arrow pointing to him from the signature. 

"Honesty is the best politics." 
-- Stan Laurel