Posts
by Rick Marschall
Marschall: How did you meet Brant Parker [collaborator on The Wizard of Id]?
Hart: ... Let’s see – I met Brant when I was in high school. Brant was another working of God, as you know how these things work; I’ve got to tell you this? Like you didn’t know? Brant was from California and he was in the Navy and he met his wife, who was from Endicott [New York, Johnny's home town]. He met her out there; she was standing on a dock when he got off a ship, and she said [whistle] “Sailor!” [laughs] No, no...I don’t know how he met her but anyway they met, fell in love, and when he got out of the Navy he came back here to live with her. That brought Brant to town.
He went to work for the Binghamton Press up here as an artist, cartoonist, photo retoucher, you know, all those things. And somebody asked him to judge a high-school art contest. So he went to judge the art contest and saw my work. There were no cartoons or anything. You didn’t do cartoons in those days, that wasn’t considered art. There was no such thing as cartooning in high school!
Marschall: Still life or something like that?
Hart: Well, I did a drawing of the cemetery at night in charcoal – a couple of charcoal things; I used to love to work in it. Anyway he saw my work and was impressed. I don’t think he should have been, but he was. That’s the way God worked; he called me up and he said I just thought I’d like to meet you, I really like your artwork. I told him about a place in town, a spaghetti place, a place where a lot of other people hung out. Well, Brant came over there and we had a pizza and beer. And we had this wonderful night, talking art, and Brant came home with me. When I got home, there was a note on the table that Muddy left there, that said, “Lemon pie in the refrigerator.” That was my favorite pie at the time; she made the greatest lemon pie. It wasn’t creamy, it was clear lemon, yellow but it didn’t have that mushy, creamy taste. So I put the pie out and Brant and I ate the pie. And that night he asked me who my favorite cartoonist was and all. And I said Virgil Partch [VIP], of course. At that time Virgil Partch was the newest thing in the cartoon world. I just loved Partch’s work and he started on me about Partch. That was his wedge – he got his foot in the door there!
Marschall: He admired his stuff?
Hart: Yeah, he said, “Y’know, I used to work with him out at Disney,” because Brant had worked at the Studio. And I said, “Really?” – they were out there at the same time but I don’t think they ever met – I said, “You knew him?” So he starts telling me Virgil Partch stories. Then he says, “You notice the line he has . . .” and he starts getting out some paper, and he’s drawing things and he’s just pulling me in, drawing me in and he’s talking about the genius of VIP’s art and he says, “You notice when you draw a right angle line like a guy’s elbow, on the inside of the arm there’s a curved line, to complement the right-angle line” and so on. Yeah! That’s Right! Wow! And then we’re going through all this stuff and he’s taking Partch’s work apart, line by line, and showing me the genius in every line. Then he gets into the humor part of it and I am totally hooked.
When Brant went home that night, I was going to be a cartoonist. And he knew it, that’s all he was trying to do. So he sucked me in, he’s the guy, he’s the culprit, the one who’s responsible for all this. But I got even with him. I pulled him in, I created a comic strip just to make him work on it every day of his life.
I believe Brant left the paper... and that must have been when I saw him there. I believe he was getting ready to go back into the Navy because he was having difficulty landing anything and he figured he’d go back into the Navy and serve another hitch. And every time he came home on leave, we’d get together. Eventually, I’d gone to Korea, gotten married and come back. I was selling to the magazines by then and when he came back and I kept prodding him, because he was lazy [laughs], trying to get him to sell to the magazines. Because I said, “You got me into this, and if I can sell you should be selling, too.” And he said, “I can’t do gags.” And I said, “Of course you can do gags! Anybody can do gags.” And he said, “I can’t. I hate doing gags.” So I said, “OK, you’re right, you can’t do gags. If you won’t do gags, you can’t do gags.” I said, “I’ll do the gags for you and you draw them.” And he said, “Would ya?” And I said “Sure, and you send them in.” So he did and he would send all this stuff in. Marion Nichols of the Saturday Evening Post loved his work. I wrote a letter to Marion and sent some of Brant’s stuff: “This is my mentor, my cohort.” She said she’d love to see some of his work. We sent some of his work – and she bought two of them the first time! I said, “Hey!”
She
sends him money and sends all my cartoons back [laughs].
So I went down to New York. I only went [to the cartoon-buying
magazines] two or three times because it usually was all through the
mail; also [agent] Don Ulsh would take them around for me. This one
time I went down and went in to see Marion and she says “Hi,
Johnny! How are you doing? How’s Brant?” She says, “I love his
work! I just love it! I’ve got one of his originals. I’ve got it
framed and it’s hanging on my living room wall.” I said, “Good!”
Marschall:
Oh,
man!
Hart: I kept saying to Brant, “See, I knew you could do it. Send her a hundred of these!”
Marschall: It was probably your gag?
Hart: That’s right! No wonder she loved his work.
Marschall: How much older is Brant than you?
Hart: I’m 63 and he’s 72...I think that’s right.
Marschall: Did he have a drawing style that you liked? Did you pattern your own after his when you were starting out?
Hart: Brant’s? No, that’s a really funny story; we had some of the greatest times together. I don’t know what it is about Brant and me. It’s a good thing he lives in Virginia – no, it’s not! Because when we get together it’s just Wacko Time.
Brant probably makes me feel better than any other human being that I’m ever with because...I just can’t explain it. He brings the wacky side of me out. When I’m with him I’m like a stand-up comic. Like a Don Rickles. Laying out one-liners and he just laughs and laughs. And it’s just something, our chemistry there, and he’ll just make an aside or something, and that just gets me off on something else. The result is that we just laugh and laugh. Poor Brant, he almost expires sometimes. It’s like he thinks I’m the funniest thing that exists. And he just brings it out of me. It’s doesn’t come out of me unless he’s around.
All
you have to do, if you want Brant in a great mood, is remind him of
this early time when we went to New York. We took cartoons down and I
was doing these really grotesque characters with big noses and big
bug eyes. See, I figured I was going to be different than anybody
else, not knowing that the way to sell is to conform, to look like
everybody else. So I wanted to be really unique like Partch was, and
I devised these characters that – when I think about it, it kills
me – had like these big noses with big nostrils on them, and
protruding lips and no chin and just to put a trademark on it I put
the eyebrows on sticks! [laughs]
Really grotesque. And Brant, he was kind. Brant was rather
professional, he had gone to Disney and everything. He had really
decent-looking cartoons.
We didn’t stop at that. We got, we both did this, we got pieces of posterboard and cut out mats for our cartoons to frame them. Because we had no idea what we were supposed to do. And we put all these things in a big portfolio and we took them and went to see Gurney Williams [cartoon editor of Collier’s]. We were sitting in the lobby and the Berenstains were really hot in Collier’s and they had one of their originals laying there. And Brant and I were looking at it and saying, “Oh, Wow! Look at that!” We were studying it and it came our time to go in and they called Brant’s name and the secretary said to me, “Are you with him?” And I said, “Yeah.” I told her my name, and she says, “I’ll look at you both.” I said, “Well, we wanted to show them to Gurney” – Gurney’s sitting right there five feet away with his feet up on the desk, looking out the window – and she says, “He can’t look at your work now, he’s busy.”
So I pull out this stuff and she lays it out in front of her and she’s looking at it. She doesn’t say anything about the frames and all. I can remember it had burgundy-colored posterboard cut out and framed around the cartoons. I’d even drawn a little line around them; I remember one time – by now Brant would be on the floor, gasping for breath, just hearing me talk about this – on one of them I drew a little line around the frame with a couple of little triangles. It looked like those clocks you see that run vertically on old-fashioned silk socks.
Marschall: Argyle? This is what the pros did, of course.
Hart: I had no idea, but I was trying to make it look good for the presentation. It was tackiest, the most awful-looking things you’ve ever seen – mine! Brant had one of my most favorite cartoons that he ever did – a guy standing with two lumberjacks, one’s like the foreman, and behind him is a grove of trees, going up over a hill, but all the trees have been cut down; they’re just stumps. The trees are just laying there. And the whole ground is covered with oranges. He did this with great simplicity! And in the foreground is this guy, the head lumber person, and he’s got an orange and he’s holding it up against the other guy’s nose, and he’s saying, “From here on, Fathead, we’ll pluck them one by one.” I thought that’s the funniest cartoon I’ve ever seen in my life. Anyway, she’s looking at his work and she’s looking at my work, and she turns around and she looks at me and says, “Did you do these?” “Yes,” I said, very proudly. I’m figuring, boy, am I making strides here – I didn’t realize until years later that she was really saying, “Did you actually do this? Is this a joke?”
When Brant and I think back on that day we get to laughing till our noses start to run. I bring it up to him sometimes on the phone and I’ll start hashing through it all about what those people must have thought of us. And sometimes I’ll hear these funny wheezy noises that he’ll make because he can’t get his breath.
Marschall:
If
your style was inspired by VIP – taking it to the nth degree –
was he an early inspiration?
Hart: Oh, yeah, Partch was. This is the reason that I tell kids, young kids that are coming up, to copy the works of the people they like. What I was trying to do there was figure out a way to be different from all these other guys. I had to do something totally different – “I didn’t want to draw noses like any of these guys draw. That’s why the eyebrows are on sticks. Nobody’s done this before” – you know? When I was 15 I sent...I’ve still got this cartoon, I probably ought to let somebody publish it just to show that I’ve got great humility. When I was 15 I drew a cartoon and I sent it in to Collier’s. It was so bad. Like there are kids in third grade now that do better cartooning than I did...probably than I do now, come to think of it. But I can’t remember if a rejection slip came back with it; I can’t remember that part of it. But anyway, it was just such an embarrassment to show that to anybody and let them know that I was that bad. But my wife, Bobby, is always threatening me, kidding me about bringing that out and showing it to people. It’s like, “Oh, no, I’ll do anything, don’t show them that cartoon.”
Marschall: What’s the gag?
Hart: It was a several-panel cartoon. The gag was, the mayor of this town closes his office, and is coming down the road. He’s leaving the town past all the city limits signs and he goes into another town, puts on a pair of noseglasses and he’s standing in line in front of a movie theater and on the marquee it says Stromboli. At that time the movie Stromboli was supposed to be a hot, sexy movie, making great inroads into debauchery, one of those movies. Like the Deep Throat of those times, something like that. In the news at that time a mayor had banned the movie from being shown in his city. And so the mayor was disguising himself and going out of town to see this movie.
That was the gag. And it came back. I couldn’t understand it – it didn’t sell? I thought it was pretty good.
Marschall: At 15?
Hart: I had a whole attic full of cartoons and when my sister moved into my mother’s house, she just threw that stuff out. I wish I still had that now, it was thrown out with all the rest of the stuff. It’s not that my sister doesn’t like me – she loves me very much, it’s just that she was cleaning out the attic of all that old stuff – I did a comic book, you know how a kid will sit down and draw his own comic book?
Marschall: Yeah, mine was an updated Happy Hooligan.
Hart: I was doing a comic book about Dopey Duck. At that time when I was really young, one of my favorite characters was Donald Duck, so I created a duck with a pointed beak, if you can figure that one out. (It had to be different from Donald.) See, I was already trying to figure out how to be different, it had to be me, it had to be mine. I finally wised up later in life and said, like I say to all kids coming up, “You cannot, really, actually copy anybody. But set up and copy the best parts of all the guys you like. If you like a Gallagher nose, and you like Tom Henderson feet, and the way that VIP draws ears, or something like that, look at all the guys you admire and copy the parts you like. Copy them the best you can copy them if you want, but ultimately it will evolve into your own style.”
Marschall: It’s the germ of the style, isn’t it? Because if you like the Cavalli style, there’s something that’s appealing to you in that...You once told me a story about VIP that there was a cartoon pasted to your coal-bin door, or the refrigerator or something like that. And later you saw the original when you visited Partch; when you and Brant visited Partch? It was a Navy gag.
Hart: Yeah, I wish I could see that sometime. I don’t know where I’d ever find it.
Marschall: We’ll find it sometime. It’s got to be around.
Hart:
I’d just like to see it to see how accurately I remember it. You
know how time changes your memory. Like that game where you whisper
something to somebody – “telephone”? – it was in Partch’s
studio, on the wall; Brant and I were visiting, and I was standing
near the door and Virg was sitting there drawing. I was talking to
him and I looked up on the wall beside me and there it was – the
cartoon that had been on my dad’s coal bin door! I was stunned. It
was like being hit in the back of the head with a coal shovel. Even
when I was 19, when I idolized this man, I didn’t connect VIP with
that cartoon in our cellar. I couldn’t believe it. I never noticed
how it was signed or anything. I never paid attention to any of that.
But I always remembered the cartoon, because my mother had cut it out
and framed it. It was probably in the cellar ’cause it had the word
“damn” on it. A big no-no in those days.
Marschall: And of all the tens of thousands he probably did in between, that was on his wall.
Hart: I looked at it and I thought, “Lord, this man, my hero drew that cartoon” and I didn’t even know it. I’m standing there looking at it and he had three versions of it, as I recall. And the drawing was changed in these three takes. It was like just he was working it up. My brain was oscillating in this time warp.
Marschall: It must have been like Rosebud in Citizen Kane.
Hart: Yeah. [laughs] But this was bizarre; I can’t remember what I told him. I think I told him about it, but I never had the presence of mind to even ask him if I could have a photocopy or anything. Or even ask him if I could have one of the drawings. It just didn’t occur to me to do that. It was too spooky.
Marschall: I want to ask you about the other cartoonists in this part of the country. Jim Whiting has told me about the group that used to get together...Were a lot of guys you knew aspiring to get into the business?
Hart: Jim Whiting; Reg Hider from Rochester – he was one of the magazine cartoonists that was selling at the time – Brad Anderson, I met Brad later. Anyway, there was Brant Parker and myself. And Jim Whiting and Joe Daley . . .
Marschall: I know that Orlando Busino came from Binghamton.
Hart: That’s right, he did. Reg and Brad and Orlando were guys that rarely showed up at our little get-togethers. There was a guy named John Goetchius who lived in Watkins Glen with Jim. And a friend I worked with at General Electric, Joe Bohanicki. These two were gag writers.
Marschall: So these would be occasional get-togethers . . .
Hart: It was once a month. We met at a hotel bar and grille. And that’s what it was, a back-slapping group we called the UCLA, Upstate Cartoonists League of America. And we’d bring some of the more recent work we’d done and show it around. And everybody would look at each other’s work and make suggestions, you know, cheer each other on.
The Johnny Hart interview will continue in a near post of Yesterday's Papers.
