A Crowded Life in Comics –

Good Sports

by Rick Marschall

[TOP] Pap

Depicted is the dean of all sports columnists, Grantland Rice. Trivia: I own (or my son does, now) Rice’s golf clubs. Bequeathed to his friend, syndicate pioneer John Wheeler, and passed on to me.

Sports cartooning is, or was, a category of cartooning that arguably can be considered an incubator once on a par with political cartoons, magazine panels, and book illustration. The National Cartoonists Society used to present a category award for Sports Cartooning, and hands out plaques for New Media, Greeting Cards, and On-Line Short-Form Comics… but discontinued the Sports Cartooning honor more than 25 years ago.

This situation surely is attributable to an ossified genre and reduced population as much as the NCS’s institutional distractions.

But some of the finest cartooning talents in history have Protean roots… and indeed some practitioners never “graduated” to other levels of cartooning.

I will share, here, some memories of sports cartoonists I have known  in my Crowded Life.

When I was a kid – I mean so young I had to take buses and subways from our suburban  New Jersey home into Manhattan, and visit cartoonists and syndicates three times a year, Easter holiday, summer vacation, Christmas break – I ventured to the bullpen of the Associated Press.

In those days (obviously the halcyon times of virtually no security in public buildings and newspaper offices) the AP had its own syndicate operation. It was small but significant; and among its “graduates” through the years were Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles, Al Capp, and Frank Robbins.

R B Fuller created Oaky Doaks for the AP, and remained all his life. During the time I am writing about, Ralph Fuller was a neighbor in Leonia NJ. He willed me volumes of Judge Magazine from his time on staff in the 1920s. At the AP I also met Dick Hodgins Jr. I thought him austere in his horn-rimmed glasses and looming height, but he encouraged me by looking at my sketches and saying if I were five years older I could get a job in the bullpen. I never did apply, but in five years or so I was taller than Dick, and learned how affable he was. He became one of my best friends in this business. 

But the end of the row of drawing-tables, in the corner, was Tom Paprocki, sports cartoonist. On every visit I would check in with Dick, and editorial cartoonist John Milt Norris, panel cartoonist Joe Cunningham (“’ham”), and others, before sitting next to “Pap.” I remember two things especially: a warm friendliness beneath his gruff visage; and a stack of his original daily sports-cartoon panels. Added to for who-knows how many years, the pile must have been 40 inches high! Pap gifted me with a few… but I have always wondered what happened to them, ultimately.

The AP was a “service” organization for newspapers, not a true syndicate. As with its news, features, and wire-photo services, newspapers subscribed, or not, and received everything, to use as they wished. Comics, cartoons, columns, and material offering advice to the lovelorn, bridge and poker strategies, kids’ puzzles, and such, were part of the “package.” (It is difficult to gauge, therefore, the popularity or client lists of its comic strips, as editors variable commitments to cartoons and comics).

So Pap’s cartoons were run by major newspapers, many minor newspapers seeking the look of a pro in their pages depicting major personalities and events, and even Sunday color sections for a while. He was a consummate professional indeed, composing this panels in the form associated with (but not originated by) Willard Mullin – a large realistic portrait, realized by aid of a Pantograph, from photo reference; smaller line drawings, often humorous, illustrating facts and stats in an orbit around the star of the day.

Pap

Yes, THAT Ozzie Nelson, later of Ozzie and Harriet; father of Rick Nelson

 Here are a couple of Sports Slants by Pap. The color feature was offered to Sunday supplements; the AP struggled to maintain a foothold in those venues, with minimal success. Nevertheless features like Things To Come by Clyde Barrow; Scorchy Smith by Frank Robbins, Rodlow Willard, and others; Neighborly Neighbors by Morris; and Oaky Doaks ran for some years.

Charlie McGill

Charlie McGill was a local sports cartoonist – local to me in the North Jersey suburbs of New Jersey – and he lived in my town of Closter. The example here is a spot drawing he did for a sports column. McKevin McVey also drew for the Bergen Record, a paper I delivered after school. McVey, who joined the ADK hiking club I belonged to in upstate New York, drew more theatrical caricatures than sports or editorial cartoons.

Ray Gotto “Play Ball! – New York Mets logo

I knew Ray Gotto in several capacities. I seldom read The Sporting News, where his mannered sports cartoons often graced front pages. I was a fan of his two baseball-themed comic strips, Ozark Ike and Cotton Woods. But to many of us Ray’s place in history was cemented as the designer of the New York Mets logo. My hometown team, wherever I have lived; suffering with them today. Ray’s design was their first, in 1962, and is on uniforms and licensing products still.

 Sometime, here, I will share more of Ray Gotto’s artwork, non-sports. Back in the 1970s  Max Allan Collins and I dreamed up a 1930s detective strip, Heaven and Heller, and Ray was one of the artists who auditioned, drawing two weeks of dailies, and a Sunday page. Collins successfully roamed the landscape, subsequently, with premise in various permutations and plain mutations. I have read about them.

Bill Gallo – caricature of Rocky Graziano and Rocky’s autograph

Bill Gallo drew, and wrote (mostly about boxing) for the New York Daily News. Always nice to me, Bill was the old-fashioned “colyumnist” and sports cartoonist – taciturn and cigar-chomping – but warm and congenial very close to the surface. He was a very effective president of the National Cartoonists Society for a term or two (thanks in large part to his great wife Delores). Here is a drawing he did of the colorful boxing legend Rocky Graziano, when we were all at some dinner together.

John Cullen Murphy – caricature of Jack Dempsey and Jack’s autograph

Speaking of sports strips, and boxing legends, I will call up again a caricature from another dinner when I asked John Cullen Murphy – who drew the boxing strip Big Ben Bolt for years prior to Prince Valiant; Al Capp’s brother Elliott Caplin was its writer – to sketch the legendary Jack Dempsey.

Before I leave – I will write more about other sports cartoonists I knew in future columns – no mention of the genre should be allowed with pausing at the greatest of them all, Willard Mullin. (Yes, deserving of a separate column.)

Willard Mullin – “’Tain’t a fit night out for man nor beast...” except in the hands of Willard Mullin

This example, of hundreds that could be called up, shows Willard at his best. Concepts? He was Mr Sports. Likenesses? Thanks to the sports cartoonists’ best friends, Pantographs and “Lucie” projectors – flawless. But Willard was astonishing at his cartoon line-work: casual but impeccable anatomy (figures seemingly in poses impossible to photograph, but invariably spot-on as Willard drew them); arresting compositions; humorous all the time, but never a detour from the subject matter.

Willard Mullins’ pen lines and anatomy and composition all struck me – no matter how unlikely the juxtaposition – of what Russell Patterson sports cartoons would have looked like if he strayed from Broadway and Hollywood to the gyms, camps, and prize fights. I mean that as high compliment to both artists.

More to come. This topic can go to extra innings!

40