A Crowded Life in Comics

Mell, Miss Peach, Momma… and The Producers

by Rick Marschall

When the New York Herald-Tribune was in its last gasps in the 1950s, it truly was a “gray lady” (the nickname often applied to the New York Times) in view of its stately dignity, rarified pedigree, and, um, imminent demise.

The merger of the New York Tribune, child of the eccentric vegetarian, Republican critic of Abraham Lincoln, and 1872 presidential candidate Horace Greeley; and the New York Herald, the “penny daily” whose Scottish founder James Gordon Bennett sent Henry Stanley to find Dr Livingston, I presume, in darkest Africa, the Herald-Tribune was the legatee of amazing traditions.

The Trib, as it commonly was called even after its 1924 merger, had other limbs on its family tree. When Greeley’s successor Whitelaw Reid was Publisher and Editor he reinforced the power of its weekly National Edition, and the Tribune was regarded as the  mouthpiece of the Republican Party (much as the New York World came to be regarded as the semi-official Democrat organ after Joseph Pulitzer bought the paper). Reid was so active in GOP circles that he was tapped as Vice Presidential candidate in 1892; his ticket, with Benjamin Harrison running for a second term, lost. And Theodore Roosevelt named Reid Ambassador to the Court of St James.

 

April 18, 1959

The Herald was always interesting. Behind its conservative exterior and layout, it was almost as “yellow” as the Journal and the World in its scandal-mongering. It was as enterprising, too: it produced color supplements (on rag paper) and color comics and cartoons before Pulitzer or Hearst joined the game. Buster Brown was created in the Herald; and Little Nemo was born there too. Winsor McCay had been lured to New York by Bennett’s sister paper, the Telegraph. The Bennetts also published the Paris, France, edition of the Herald. Dignified-looking, too, but when I mentioned its “yellow” aspect I submit as testimony the fact that far back as the 1880s – and as recently as 15 years ago in the International Herald-Tribune – classified ads appeared for prostitutes, something shunned by other newspapers. Like “escorts” today, here and there, those ads advertised  companionship, company for the lonely businessman, lovely tour guides, and, well, escorts.

It seems I have gone off on a tangent before the main point of this essay. But… a flavor of what the Trib was in the 1950s. Respected, colorful, and doddering. Many newspapers in New York were in their death throes.

The Trib did not go down without a fight, however. In the 1950s it was distinguished paper with notable writers – opinion, reporting, and features. Tom Wolfe cut his eye teeth there. They were connected to Newsweek magazine, on the rise as it was receding. It was the “voice” of the Republican Establishment: that is, the East-Coast Rockefeller wing. In the early ‘60s I was at a luncheon and sat next to Clay Felker, who was fashioning its revolutionary Sunday magazine, bold in design and editorial focus, that would soon evolve to a life of its own as… the newsstand New York magazine.

In the interregnum, the Trib’s weak sister, the Herald-Tribune Syndicate, having limped along with ancient features like Clare Briggs’ old Mr and Mrs, and merely old features like Harry Haenigsen’s Penny and Our Bill, was about the last syndicate to which cartoonists would submit their strips. Last stop, last try, last chance.

… which means the syndicate could either die, or go one way: up.

And now we get to the nub of this chapter of A Crowded Life in Cartooning. One of the cartoonists who caught fire there in the 1950s. It was amazing, really… and exciting for kids like me who instinctively recognized when new and hip and exciting strips were breaking through.

Johnny Hart sold BC, and it was different. And funny! I think Harry Welker was the name of the syndicate chief then, and he was either wise or lucky. Or both. Johnny’s strip was one of a kind. Arnold Roth sold Poor Arnold’s Almanac; wild. Al Jaffee did the oddly formatted Tall Tales. The Trib landed Peanuts; although from a different syndicate, the paper picked it up when new because no other New York paper wanted it. Suddenly the Trib’s Sunday comics – even when they printed them in black and white during a period of penury – were hip, and fun, and Must-Read.

Intellectual strips, most of them were called. “In the tradition of Krazy Kat and Barnaby. Yeah. And there was the strip with little kids with big heads and scribbly props. Adult sarcasm from their mouths while Charlie Brown was still a blockhead. Miss Peach. By Mell.

Mell? What’s a Mell? Gee, that cast was funny. Kids in Miss Peach’s classroom at the Kelly School. Many gags were single, long panels, with dialog reflecting the kids’ distinct personalities. I wanted to talk like all of them; even Arthur, sometimes.

Miss Peach by Mell Lazarus was an instant classic, and an instant hit. There was a great, early reprint collection, for which Al Capp wrote the Foreword. I learned that Mell worked for him at one time, in the sweat-shop that churned out Li’l Abner comic books and licensed items.

I met Mell a few years after my initial enthrallment, at a National Cartoonists Society meeting I described here recently. He was one of the cartoonists who signed a big poster to me. I remember when I got home that night, my dad thrilled by all the cartoonists’ sketches, but the one that made him  laugh out loud, was Mell’s drawing of Miss Peach and a bunch of the kids. She says: “Say hello to Dick, class!” They say, in unison, “Hello to Dick class!”

Within a dozen years I was Mell’s editor at Publisher’s Syndicate, never ever having to ask him about late strips or content problems. A joy. And… by then he was also drawing Momma, which had more client papers than Miss Peach. A mitzvah. A nicer man and better friend – or funnier one – did not exist in cartooning.

 

August 1, 1959

One story that not everyone knows. When he was a galley slave in the shop of Al Capp and his brother Eliot Caplin, Mell somehow (!) conceived the idea of a conniving pair of bosses who thought they could create an idea, attract investors – in fact multiple and overlapping investors – with a concept so stinko it was sure to fail; and they would keep the “lost” capital. Until…

… until the stinko property was a success. If you find yourself, right now, humming “Springtime for Hitler,” you’re getting warm. Mell’s book was titled The Boss is Crazy Too. A modest success as a paperback book. Nobody ever accused Mel Brooks or anyone else – well, some of us thought it would be justice to make a public fuss – of swiping the concept for The Producers. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, no?

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