A Crowded Life in Comics –

The Other Crime-Strip Cartoonist Gould  

( Red Barry’s Creator )

IDW Publishing, 2016

by Rick Marschall

I have elsewhere told the story of Will Gould and Red Barry. In the first incarnation of Nemo magazine I ran a full daily episode of the hard-boiled detective strip. For Fantagraphics Books in 1989 I expanded the look back in a paperback compilation of four Sunday stories. The nascent revival of Nemo will reprint a number of Will’s garish, Expressionist, tabloid-infused Sundays.

That book also featured an essay I commissioned of Walter Frehm, Will’s admiring but frustrated assistant.

So I have written of Will Gould and Red Barry; and I shall write more of Will and Red, but here I will share a little story about meeting the cartoonist.

I am calling him “Will” here not just because I knew him, but to carefully differentiate between two cartooning Goulds of the 1930s who specialized in detective comic strips. Chester Gould and Will Gould even had another connection – having struggled in the Hearst bullpens of the 1920s. Chet had knocked around the King Features bullpen; drawn Fillum Fables, one of several attempts to topple Ed Wheelan’s Minute Movies at its own game. In a final move he voluntarily drew up episodes of Plainclothes Tracy for the Chicago Tribune, and the rest is history.

Will similarly knocked around – the Bronx Home News; the New York Daily Graphic; the New York Mirror; King Features Syndicate.  Along the way he drew sports cartoons, race-track comic strips, gag strips, illustrations.

Their similarities pretty much ended there. Chet was a WASP; Will (and his brother Manny, a pioneer animator) Jewish. Chet was preternaturally ambitious, even after he was at the top of his game and fame; Will always had a chip on shoulder, a punk attitude of the pool halls and race tracks he haunted. Chet hired assistants to help him with guns, polygraph machines, and backgrounds; Will hired his assistant so he could play golf more often.

Assistant Frehm recalled how Will Gould was practically suicidal, as a “working” cartoonist, after they moved to California, forever late with deadlines and creative with excuses.

The birth of Red Barry, as I said, has and will be told elsewhere. Frustrated that Chet Gould slipped away from King Features and created a big hit – unlike, say, E C Segar, who toiled on the plantation for a decade before Popeye entered the world – KFS President Joe Connolly (and his comics adviser Lee Falk) swamped the field with not one but four rivals.

Secret Agent X-9 was created, with Dashiell Hammett as the writer and, after Will Gould’s art seemed inappropriate, young Alex Raymond as artist. Gould’s own submission Red Barry was launched (one wonders whether the “Gould” signature upped his chances). The local Boston strip Pinkerton Jr was transformed into Sergeant Pat of the Radio Patrol. And, in a junior-league version of Hammett’s X-9, the pulp mystery writer Edgar Wallace was invited to script Inspector Wade, drawn at first by Lyman Anderson, later a close friend of mine who attended my daughter’s baptism.

I have gum-shoed from memories to history. The future Nemo profile will tell the full story; and share full stories. How I first met Will was connected with Bob Weber Sr., creator of Moose (now Moose and Molly) and my first trip to the San Diego Comics Convention, 1976.

A drawing of Moose and Chester Crabtree done for me recently by Bob Weber.

Bob, one of the most colorful of cartoonists, and a cartoon fan himself, loves meeting cartoonists, talking about cartoons, even to the extent that his own deadlines frequently are threatened. In Mort Walker’s reminiscences he told stories of Bob feverishly inking dailies on the train from Westport CT to New York; or inking them in a friend’s speeding car; or finishing the lettering on a counter at Grand Central Station, all to deliver them “on time” to King Features.

Comicon was no different. Bob flew from New York, so not to miss the event; I took the train from Chicago, an interesting excursion, and we met up in San Diego. Sort of. Bob was so late with his strips that he spent almost the entire week in his hotel room, readying them for Special Delivery.

Oddly, or appropriately in Weber-World, Bob was as free as a lark after Comicon. So we snaked our way up the coast for a week, visiting cartoonists, bookstores in Los Angeles (I scored a run of CARTOONS Magazine from the ‘teens at Cherokee) and, basically, watched the clock tick down until Bob was late again on Moose.

Somehow Bob had gotten to know Will Gould, then living in retirement, I think in Santa Monica. It was an apartment or motel, or a former one-or-the-other. Sort of like the modest place that the retired Stan Laurel lived in, also in Santa Monica. So it was easy for Bob to arrange a visit; especially since Will asked us to pick up some groceries before we arrived.

I was coached that Will likely would be a little prickly – or, if not, outright grouchy. That he would pretend to be bothered about “the past”… but in fact loved reviving memories and legends. He was everything that Bob forecast. The grouchiness added to the long afternoon’s colorful memories. Will talked about his brother; he answered questions about the King bullpen and Hammett – who supposedly consulted with him about continuity writing, but wound up preferring to get drunk together – and how he was the first to bestow the nickname “Schnozzola” on Jimmy Durante.

In Will’s telling, it was not enough to brag about originating the famous moniker. He had to complain: “I never got a penny for it!”

Drawing of Red Barry that Will Gould did for me.

Bob pulled out items from his own bag of tricks. He is the most versatile kidder, bluffer, teaser; and his hulking 6-foot-5 (or so) size keeps people from challenging him. Straight faced, only slight smile. I have watched him flummox clerks and wait staff, and have swiped many of his routines.

So, before we left Will’s apartment that day, the cartoonist wanted to share something from the top shelf of a closet, and he asked Bob to get it down. As he did, Bob said, “Will, if you weren’t so extremely short, you could get this yourself.”

OK, maybe you “had to be there.” But Bob knew how to tease and get a rise out of Will – who was not extremely short. He was extremely old, so it was a reasonable request. But, oh, did Will explode. Even as we left the second-floor apartment, after a nice afternoon, Will Gould was still hopping and shaking his fist: “You big hick! I am not extremely short!” Bob laughed for a couple days… as a matter of fact, still does.  The humor was not in “short,” or objecting to the favor, but the use of “extremely.”

On my subsequent solo visits to Will, he remembered that closet-shelf bit too, but without Bob Weber’s chuckles. When all was said and done, however, Will Gould was the type of guy who used to populate Tin Pan Alley, speakeasies, betting parlors, and corners of tabloid newsrooms – he was the “type” because he was one of them – and was kind of happier kvetching than kvelling.

The “edge,” if it can be called that, contributed to the edginess of Red Barry – a lost masterpiece of hard-boiled crime and violence in comic-strip context, of action and extreme characterization, pure film noir, or as close as the comics ever got, including in the hands of Will Gould’s buddy Dashiell Hammett.

💥

27