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The Captain's Gig

One old fifties newspaper review of a Virgil Franklin (VIP) Partch collection referred to him as “that sex cartoonist” for his work on various men’s magazines.

“Virgil Partch won world recognition as a cartoonist just before and during World War II, when his “VIP’s War” series in a national magazine endeared him to 9 ½ million fellow enlisted men, who, like Partch, never aspired to military grandeur beyond the rank of corporal. Since then, the famous “VIP” signature has become a trademark for inspired pen-and-ink lunacy converted to the level of fine art. Partch cartoons have long been familiar to readers of The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Look, Better Homes and Gardens, Cosmopolitan, Punch, Paris match, Maclean’s and more than 150 other outstanding magazines throughout the world.” - July 5, 1960.

Partch drew two comic strips, “Big George,” which began about May 23, 1960, and “The Captain’s Gig,” begun in 1977. Don Kurtz supplied the original letter and original sketches for The Captain’s Gig.

Milt Gross (1895 –1953)

Screwball humorist Milt Gross was born in New York City March 4, 1895 and began as a copy boy in the art department of the New York American. His first small success came with a comic called Banana Oil, a phrase he found written by a street kid in chalk on his new automobile parked along the curb. He worked for the New York World and the New York Daily Mirror and wrote a regular newspaper column for ten years syndicated by King Features. He drew several features including Dunt Esk, Nize Baby, Looy Dot Dope, The Meanest Man, and That’s My Pop.

His comic strip lingo had a direct effect on American slang, much like that of his major comic influence Tad Dorgan’s. “I imagine it goes back to my childhood days in a Bronx flat where I must have heard a great deal of it and unconsciously absorbed it.”

“At any rate, it’s a literal transcription of the Anglicized Russian Jew; at least I try to make it so. It’s the language of the people -- conveyed at times in somewhat ludicrous character.”

He served in the infantry during WWI, and during World War II campaigned for more powerful “smash” in American propaganda materials. He was returning from a two week Hawaiian vacation when he died at sea of a coronary occlusion on November 29, 1953.

See some great Sunday pages HERE.

*Original sketch courtesy Don Kurtz.

Newspaper Cartoonist's Autographs III

Here’s another selection of cartoonist’s autographed material courtesy of Don Kurtz. Chic Young, H. T. Webster, Clifford Berryman, Dale Messick, Charlie Plumb, Fred Fox, “Ding” Darling, Payne, Willard, and Russell Patterson.

Richard Fenton Outcault (1863-1928)

“Mr. Outcault deserved a longer obituary than the one which was sent out with the news of his passing,” wrote a columnist in the Ogden Standard Examiner under the title ‘Father Of “Funny Paper” Is Dead.’ Richard Fenton Outcault did deserve more than the brief note that appeared in most newspapers at the time. Few people care about “Buster Brown” these days. Outcault is usually perplexingly passed over when it comes to reprinting the old masters. Perplexing because he was one of the best pen and ink men of the period, as good as Opper and much more accomplished as an artist than Dirks, Knerr or Bud Fisher. In addition to 'fathering' the funnies Outcault also ushered in the use of comic characters in advertising and merchandise. The following piece appeared in Outcault’s hometown newspaper.

HE MADE THE KIDDIES LAUGH

[The Lancaster Daily Eagle, Sept. 26, 1928]

The grim reaper in hiss wandering over the land has gathered within his folds another whom Lancaster was proud to lay claim to as a native citizen. We speak of Richard Fenton Outcalt, a cartoonist of national fame who died Tuesday at his home in Flushing, a suburb of New York City.

For some reason or other, when he commenced to ascend the ladders of prominence he added the letter “u” to his name and spelled it “Outcault,” but here in Lancaster where he was born and spent the earlier years of his life we knew him as “Dick” Outcalt.

But what is in a name. It is the individual that counts and as to good fellowship Dick Outcalt stood in the one hundred percent class.

We knew him as a classmate at school and so did others yet living in Lancaster. He would rather draw than do anything else and he would sketch the teacher, the scholars, and any familiar objects around the classroom, while the other scholars were studiously engaged in cramming knowledge into their brains from their spellers, their arithmetics or the other fundamentals of learning to which they were assigned.

He never had much schooling along the line of art, but it seemed to come to him. It was natural for him to draw and he loved the talent with which he was possessed.

At an early day his father established him with a studio in the old Whiley block and later in the third story adjoining the McManamy block on Main Street. But portrait painting was not to his liking. He preferred the kind of drawing that produced laughter instead of tears: amusement instead of sorrow and so he directed his pen along those lines. He obtained a position with a big safe firm in Cincinnati and drew pictures on safe doors.

About this time they were holding a world’s fair in Paris and he obtained a job on the staff of Thomas Edison, the great inventor who was making an exhibit at this exposition.

Coming home he established a residence in new York City and it was along the comic line that his talents were appreciated. He might be given the credit of being the father of the newspaper comic sheet, as it was he whom the publisher gave the privilege of producing a full page of a comic called “Hogan’s Alley,” which had a spectacular run for several years in the metropolitan papers and gave a start to a feature that in the newspaper circles has grown to wondrous proportions. He was also creator of “The Yellow Kid” cartoon and of “Buster Brown” and others* which are still remembered by many of the newspaper readers of today. He made a million dollars and he spent it. He enjoyed the gay life and he had a million friends. The word enemy was not in his vocabulary and its meaning was unknown to him. He loved the bright lights and Broadway to him was a lane of beauty. He also loved nature. The rose to him had a more beautiful color than to anyone else and the grass to him was greener.

His artistic talent ran to the line of entertaining and amusing the juveniles and among them he had millions of friends. His principal characters in the production of “Buster Brown” were his two children with which he was blessed, Richard F. Outcault Jr., who was “Buster,” and the daughter whom he designated Mary Jane. Daily and in Sunday papers he would make the kiddies laugh and when you can amuse the children you can also entertain the elders and this he did for years by his comic strips until about ten years ago he entered the advertising field in which he was quite successful.

But a big man in his particular line has gone and in our local gallery of fame we are going to hang the portrait of Richard F. Outcalt, alongside of Sherman the warrior, Ewing the statesman and Stansberry the jurist and Mike Daugherty the orator and lawyer, as one of the famous men that the good old town of Lancaster has produced and likes to call her own. You were a good old chap, Dick, and we pen these lines with sorrow and regret. You have filled a niche in this world of ours and have made history not only for yourself but to the town in which you were born.

*In 1897 Outcault left The Yellow Kid and Hearst’s employ for James Gordon Bennett’s Herald where he drew L’il Mose and Buddy Tucker. Buster Brown began May 1902 in the Herald, then, when Outcault moved back to Hearst, the Herald continued with a competing Buster Brown under different artists.

*Original “Tige” drawing courtesy Don Kurtz

Early American Picture Papers

The oldest pictorial newspaper in America was “Gleason’s Pictorial” which started in Boston in 1851 and ran until 1854. Next was P. T. Barnum’s “Barnum’s Weekly Illustrated News” of 1853. Ballou purchased Gleason's and changed the name to “Ballou’s Pictorial” on 6 Jan 1855. It lasted until 1859. “Harper's Weekly Newspaper” began in 1857 and folded in 1916. The South seceded from the Union in January of 1861 and on April 12 the American Civil War began with the attack on Fort Sumter. Frank Leslie, who got his start as an engraver on the “Illustrated London News,” covered the war in his “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper” until it ended in the surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper” began on December 15, 1855 and lasted to May 4, 1899. Leslie had formed a friendship with the humbug P. T. Barnum, whose chief engraver he had been in 1851 on “Barnum’s Weekly.” They remained close and hardly a Leslie paper appeared without some mention of Barnum’s doings. In 1891 Leslie published photos of the funeral of his old friend in his newspaper. [Illustration TOP: Frederick Burr Opper in Frank Leslie's Newspaper 9 Jun 1877]

Picture Papers

And The Men Who Do The Designing For Them.

A Process for making Illustrations Less Expensive Than by Engraving -- Leading Cartoonists and Sketch Artists -- The Prices Paid.

[New York Correspondence Feb. 3, 1885]

The New York Star claims the bad eminence of having, in 1870, originated the system of pictorial illustrations in the daily journals now so much in vogue among the otherwise irreproachable and business-like papers on that metropolis. Then the Goodsells introduced in the Daily Graphic the Leggo process for making illustrations quicker, simpler and less expensive than by engraving. The Leggo process was first used in column measure by The Democratic News and when the lately defunct Truth newspaper appeared under the management of The Dramatic News people, cartoons, comics, little grotesques, news sketches and outline portraits were printed. There was a lull in the business of sketches, so far as most of the daily newspapers were concerned; but the Star continued to give pictorial sketches in its “Man About Town” columns, by means of the process, which it had adopted as soon as it became known. When Joseph Pulitzer came to New York about a year and a half ago and bought The World, he revived the craze for illustrated daily journalism by printing a lot of outline portraits with written sketches of the characters of the men and women thus shown. Then The Morning Journal followed suit. Old Bob Bonar and, later, Tom Nast, the famous cartoonist, had furnished in the interim some sketches for Bennett’s Evening Telegram. De Grimm, an importation from Europe, continued the pictures in Saturday’s Telegram and occasionally in The Herald, but he has not done anything that has made his name famous like that of Nast, Wales, Keppler, Gillam, Hamilton and others. James A. Wales, formerly of Frank Leslie’s, and who is now making sketches for The News and Texas Siftings, and for a time for Puck, is even better than Nast. His cartoon of the fifteen puzzle, representing Uncle Sam looking for a presidential candidate, four years ago, was so clever that it made him a reputation. He is corpulent, wears specs, is an Ohio man, and has a weakness for dramatic management.

“Do any of the sketch artists combine journalistic writing ability with their pictorial work?”

“Yes, Gribayedoffe, the Russian, or, as Capt. Aleck Williams calls him “Grabyourheadoff.” He combines reportorial with artistic ability and makes many of those clever portrait sketches you see in The World. He is a partner of Schultze of Frank Leslie’s, and is a strong type of the young go-ahead Russian; is well-educated, about 30 years old, with a colorless, sallow face and blonde hair. I think McDougall takes the lead in the daily newspaper work. He makes sketches for The World and The Judge. Young Flanagan is bright and is rising in the art. He has done some clever work. I think that all the other fellows have outgrown Ramsden, who is, singularly enough, too conventional in his work. Theodore Butler, Crill and Johnson are finished portrait engravers; and do those splendid figures you see in Harper’s and The Century. Then there is Charley Kendrick, who formerly had a hand in Chic; he is a fine sketch artist, who is known for the accuracy of his outlines. He is an Englishman, about 30 years old, wears specs like most of his craft and is a decided blonde.

“What salaries are these newspaper sketch artists paid?” asked the reporter.

“The big sums reported to be made by some of them are a fable. Tom Nast, it is said gets $15,000 a year, and Frank Leslie brought Matt Morgan -- who is a long way ahead of Nast as an artist -- over to this country from London and employed him at a salary of $10,000 a year. Morgan is at Cincinnati, and still does clever work for the newspapers, as well as painting theatrical curtains and scenery and pictures in oil and watercolors. But I tell you the best of these sketch artists do not get more than $50 a week, and many of them not more than $25 or $30. Tenniel, of London Punch, gets about $7000 a year for furnishing a cartoon each week, but no one else gets any such large sum. Joe Keppler, the clever cartoonist of Puck, has an interest in that paper, but I don’t think Gillam and Opper get $1000 a minute for their very clever sketches and cartoons. Of the others of the funny papers ‘Zim’ (Zimmerman) on Puck, Hamilton and Dalrymple on The Judge, Nicholls and a few I cannot remember are good artists but poorly paid.”

*Original Matt Morgan letter courtesy Don Kurtz.

Line and Style

Art instruction books will invariably tell you in the first chapter that “It all starts with the line,” and from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, a mastery of pen, ink and line was essential to the newspaper comic strip. Any chuckleheaded youth with a little talent could land a job on a newspaper supplied with only a pen and a bottle of Indian ink. In those good old days a beginner was expected to do spot work and cartoons for he-and-she jokes, as well as cover fires, accidents, murders and criminal trials. Thomas Nast got his start with Frank Leslie doing sketches of the Heenan-Sayers prizefight and following Garibaldi’s army through Italy. Old-time cartoonists were merely a peculiar species of journalist.

Mass reproduction of pen and ink drawings first became possible in 1888 with the invention of the line process block, which used photography to transfer the artists’ pen drawing to a metal plate and on to the printing press. By 1900 an article in The Studio noted that “Already the cheapest Sunday papers in America are availing themselves of the decorative artist in a more or less crude way. On this side the editors are chary and conservative, but they are bound to follow.”

In the comic books you could get away with bad anatomy, failed perspective, and wooden drawing. A newspaper artist, for the most part, had to draw well under strict rules of reproduction. Style was very important. Style might even be considered the “handwriting” of the artist. Style can be quiet, delicate, free, nervous, violent or rough but every good style is personal to a particular artist. We have the Caniff style (actually the ‘Sickles style’), the Eisner style, the Frazetta style, and the Jack Kirby style. Some artists never move beyond flagrant copies of their hero’s style into a personal identifiable style of their own. Good style is instinctive, not labored.

I opened this post with a perky original crayon drawing by George Lichty. When Lichty retired from his comic strip “Grin an’ Bear It” in 1974 he turned over the cartoon to a young editorial cartoonist named Fred Wagner. In preparation Wagner worked with Lichty for 18 months prior to the changeover, striving to mimic Lichty’s style, until Lichty was able to say “It’s tough to tell the difference myself anymore.”

Thomas Nast’s engraved cartoons for Harper’s Weekly had a foot on the ground solidity that we don’t find in his original pen sketches. His loose sketches lost all the details of careful drawing in favor of the quick impression. Nast’s dogs shown here are not anatomically correct but they are first-rate expressions of dogginess. Freehand ink sketches are often a much more fascinating glimpse into the mind of a cartoonist than a finished drawing.

This Don Herold illustration is finished and it would have been nice to have seen the preliminary sketches that no doubt went into the drawing. This particular cartoon was rather famous and a b&w copy was reprinted in Thomas Craven’s Cartoon Cavalcade (1943). Here we have the original courtesy of Don Kurtz.

I’m an avid sketcher myself although it rarely turns into a finished drawing. I usually find that the spontaneity of my sketches is lost in a finished drawing so I have a suitcase full of dashed off improvisations that form a sort of diary of years of thoughts made visual. I sketch on very tiny 3 by 5 paper books that fit in my shirt pocket, excellent for catching life on the fly and useful for nostalgic purposes on long winter nights. This one, for devotees of pen porn, was drawn with the magnificent Pentel waterproof fountain pen which they don't make anymore. The nib was made out of a hard, white flexible plastic and by varying the force on the nib thick and thin lines (accompanied by occasional delicious squirting of the ink) could be very satisfyingly produced. In this case I grew so excited I flew off the top of the recipe card and spilled over the top of the drawing right onto the table-top.

These days there are far fewer outlets for the artist in pen and ink than at the turn of the century, when even the poorest of artists could make a comfortable enough living to move from garret to boarding-house. When I was in art school the use of the rapidograph for anything other than ruling straight lines was frowned on, today its use in comic strips is the norm. The line is still important but the personal, emotional impact of the individual penman is largely missing in the daily strips. Web-comics can be entirely impersonally drawn with templates and wacom tablets but much of the time all life and personality seems to have leaked out of the drawings. Who knows, perhaps someday pen and ink, like newspapers and print, will have gone the way of the carrier pigeon, and personal line and style will be a historical oddity residing only in private collections and obsolete books poorly preserved on microfilm.

*Lichty, Brickman, and Herold originals courtesy Don Kurtz.

Thomas Nast (1840-1902)

Thomas Nast (September 27, 1840 – December 7, 1902)

Most of these images are from Albert Bigelow Paine's book Th. Nast His Period and Pictures, 1904, Pearson Publishing Co. The photograph of the feared caricaturist, and the original letter below, are courtesy Don Kurtz.

1886

Raeburn Van Buren (1891-1987)

Raeburn L. Van Buren was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1891 and began his career as a sketch artist on the Kansas City Star.

“For the next three and a half years I did an average of 20 drawings a week for the Star, ranging from sports and political cartoons to pictures of fires, accidents, murders, and court-room trials, for the princely stipend of $15 a week.”

He came to New York in 1913, encouraged by a cartoon sale to Life magazine, and shared an apartment with actor William Powell, artist Thomas Hart Benton and caricaturist Ralph Barton, all from Missouri. Van Buren contributed over 700 illustrations to Life, Colliers, Redbook and The Saturday Evening Post.

Abbie an’ Slats was created in 1937, and Bathless Groggins, the unwashed old man of the seacoast town of Crabtree Corners, eventually took over as star of the Sunday strip. Van Buren was 46 years old when he took on the job. Abbie an’ Slats was carried by nearly 400 newspapers until its demise on 30 Jan 1971. In 1958 the artist was named “Cartoonist of the Year” by the Quaker City Lodge of the B’nai B’rith in ceremonies at Philadelphia Pa. Previous winners were Al Capp, Milton Caniff, and George Wunder.

Abbie an’ Slats began 12 July 1937, the brainchild of Al Capp. One of Capp’s obituarists called him the “grey eminence” behind the strip, which sounds a bit sinister. Capp wrote the strip until 1945 and turned the scripts over to his brother Elliot Caplin. The trio of the Capp's and Van Buren were a match made in heaven. The scripts were brilliant, funny and adventurous, and Van Buren was one of the best, and sexiest, illustrators of the comics.

Raeburn L. Van Buren died at the age of 96, following a fall at his home, on Dec 29 1987. He was posthumously honored by the National Cartoonist Society in 1979 (corrected -- 1979 should read 1989) with an election to their Hall of Fame.

*Bathless Groggins original courtesy Don Kurtz