A Crowded Life in Comics –

Down the Bunny Trail

Rick Marschall

I have just returned from the 14^th annual Symposium of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. I recently was named their Cartoon Archivist, as noted here, and indeed the keynote was a “Cartoon-Off,” with the honorable Clay Jenkinson and myself showing 15 cartoons each, commenting, and inviting the registrants’ votes.

Among many things to which my “mind” raced back was not Roosevelt specifically, but peripherally:

When I was very young I already had twin obsessions – more than a couple, really – but two were Roosevelt and vintage cartoons. My mother’s mother was born in New York City of German parentage. She moved from Manhattan when young and quickly acquired and never lost a Brooklyn accent. “Berl the water” and “Don’t get boined,” were such footprints of speech.

Perhaps her ears were affected, too; or maybe my famously quiet voice, but one day in the kitchen I wanted to ask if she ever laid eyes on Theodore Roosevelt in her youth. An  “excuse me” and a “what?” and “speak up” had me repeating “Theodore”… until she thought I was asking if she attended the theater as a girl.

An unconscious shift to my second interest. Her face lit up, and she recalled being taken to a Broadway musical as a girl. It was one of several musical comedies staged around the pioneer comic-supplement character Foxy Grandpa. She didn’t remember much about the plot or the songs… but she remembered that there were moments so funny that a fat man sitting on the aisle laughed and laughed.

“His face turned so red when he laughed that I thought he was going to pop!” she told me. So that was tattooed on my memory, too, and through years since I cannot think of Foxy Grandpa and his two grandsons without thinking of little Augusta Vagt watching that man almost laugh himself to death.

Foxy Grandpa commenced in 1900 in the color pages of the Sunday New York Herald. The artist was Carl Emil Schultze, who had signed his cartoons in Life magazine with his surname, but his newspaper work as “Bunny,” often beside a furry mascot. His other features for the Sunday funnies were random gags or short strips under the title Vaudevilles, and were collected in a book of that name.

An immediate hit was Foxy Grandpa. Its premise was simple – indeed, a one-gag premise. Oddly enough, the early strips virtually all were variations on a single joke. Happy Hooligan was a well-meaning tramp whose kindly efforts backfired. Hans and Fritz would conspire, execute a prank, and be punished. Little Jimmy was distracted from every errand, with comic results. Buster Brown’s pranks went awry on their own. Maud the Mule kicked people – usually her owner, Si – into the next county to assert her dominance. Alphonse and Gaston’s politesse inevitably resulted in chaos, not order.

… and so on. In all, a remarkable but ironic foundation for commercial successes and a viable and pliable art form. Yet such was the early days of the comics. Foxy Grandpa’s formula was, simply, the mirror-image of the Katzenjammer Kids. The grandsons plotted a trick on the old boy, who predictably outsmarted them in the ultimate panel. It is amazing that for almost 20 years the boys were surprised each week. And each week.

And in various formats, appearances, books, and Broadway musicals. As far as I have seen, or remember (having the complete run in the Herald and Hearst’s American to which he moved amidst much fanfare soon afterward; and ultimately to Munsey’s Sun) neither Grandpa nor the boys had Christian nor surnames. Neither “Little Brother” who eventually joined the cast. No intermediate generation of parents were ever seen, beginning tradition that a homonymic namesake, Charles, continued. (On stage, Grandpa had a name: Goodelby Goodman; and the boys were Chub and Bunt.)

I will share here memorabilia including buttons and songsheets generated by the stage sensations. Not pages nor reprint-book covers here; maybe later.

“Bunny” had a sad ending to his life and erstwhile successful career. He died in poverty in New York City’s West side in 1939, filling his last years with occasional pages for early comic books, a couple of children’s books, and drawing sketches of Foxy Grandpa for neighborhood businesses and kids.

53

A Crowded Life in Comics –

A Mock Feud In the Pages of Puck.

by Rick Marschall.

Show business, sports, and politics are replete with stories of feuds. I say “stories of feuds” because many of them are manufactured for the public’s attention if not enjoyment. There are, of course, bitter and long-running rivalries that have poisoned the wells of comity, certainly within families. In other spheres of life, self-interest or self-preservation usually triumph.

The old Jack Benny-Fred Allen “feud” attracted listeners and gossip for years, but the radio comedians were friends. Likewise W C Fields and Charlie McCarthy; but it is difficult to stay angry at a piece of wood for too long.

And we remember Ralph Kramden’s threat (in The Honeymooners) to a momentary opponent: “When I see you walking down the street, move to the other side!” And Norton’s response: “When you walk down the street, there ain’t no other side!” Somehow the perfect squelch, the mot juste, resonates more than love lines do.

In the supposedly staid Victorian Era, there was an example of “inside jokes,” sarcasm, camaraderie, and a mock feud that is funny today. I will share brief details here.

Puck Magazine commenced as an English-language weekly in 1877, a few months after founder Joseph Keppler launched the German-language edition. It became America’s first successful humor magazine, although dozens had existed, with varied acceptance, since the 1840s. Puck featured lithographic color cartoons – an attractive wrinkle – on its front, back, and middle-spread pages; usually political themes. The bulk of the cartoon work, including black and white social cartoons on interior pages, soon fell to Frederick Burr Opper.

Opper (1857-1937) was a workhorse of incredible talent and native humor who followed Keppler from Leslie’s Weekly, and known to comics fans today as the creator of many seminal comic strips around the turn of the century into the 1930s (Happy Hooligan, etc).

Almost from the beginning, the fecund H C Bunner was the mainstay of Puck’s editorial columns. He wrote the paper’s editorials and provided ideas to cartoonists; he signed poems and funny stories, and contributed many anonymous works; he recruited and trained a host of talented humorists for the succeeding generation. Unjustly neglected and forgotten today, Bunner was a master of the short story in the manner of Frank Stockton (another forgotten genius). The American short story of the day was a wonderful genre, now scarcely commemorated by limp rose petals tossed toward O Henry and Saki, but whose ranks were populated by clever writers like Bunner.

Many of Bunner’s books were in fact collected short stories originally written for Puck, and illustrated by Opper (and, chiefly, by C J Taylor).

In 1884, amidst the fury of the nation’s most contentious Presidential election, Cleveland vs Blaine, Opper and Bunner conducted a sideshow for readers through a mock feud. The national election was in fact mightily influenced by the “Tattooed Man” cartoons in Puck, depicting the Republican Blaine stripped to his skin, on which was festooned his many political scandals and sins.

The editorial fusillades that season mostly were Bunner’s, but the cartoons were Keppler’s, Opper’s, and Bernhard Gillam’s. Opper, relatively young, drew cartoons that sometimes were less than polished. In a letters column – “Answers For the Anxious,”  probably manufactured within the offices – notice was taken of an awkward cartoon by Opper of politicians attempting to stop a water wheel at a mill.

Puck’s reply (surely written by Bunner) thanked the reader but also criticized his spelling and grammar. Opper the cartoonist, however, was defended with faint praise.

In the next issue, “the artist” responded, angrier at the Editorial Office’s weak endorsement than of the critical reader. And the following week, the Editor shot back in mock dudgeon, stating that it was barely worth the time to wallow in matters concerning mere mortals – cartoonists. In subsequent weeks Opper fired his shots through cartoons more than words.

It was grand fun. Claiming the dignity of an Oxford Union debate, it spilled itself before readers like a barroom brawl. As I say, grand fun – no reader would have thought otherwise. But, again, in the stuffy Victorian era, such entre-nous peeks behind the curtain of kidding and elbow-poking sarcasm was rare. Still fun.

Some day, somewhere, I will reprint all the exchanges, insults, and mock threats. Here, however, Opper’s drawing of the theatrical “truce.” Naturally, he cannot keep himself from depicting H C Bunner (with fair accuracy, trademark cigarette and pince-nez specs)  as a coiled viper; and himself as an artiste crowned with a laurel wreath.

Original art from my collection, first the half-finished pencil sketch; and the “finish” as it appeared in the happy pages of Puck through the Summer and Fall of 1884.

RM 52

A Crowded Life in Comics –

A Cartoon Archivist In Our Midst

 by Rick Marschall

Actually, a point of personal privilege, which most of these columns are, after all is said and done (or even before things are said and done).

I have worn many hats and pursued various pursuits in my vineyard toils -- writing, cartooning, editing, teaching; and in fields other than comics: cultural history; criticism; music; publishing; politics; ministry. Something has come along that actually combines several interest areas (or, I would hope to say, specialties).

I have been named Cartoon Archivist at the Theodore Roosevelt Center of Dickinson State University. The connected dots include history, cartoons, and… TR, a lifelong hero about whom I have written two books and many articles. I also serve on the Advisory Board of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, an organization I have addressed at conferences and for whom I write a weekly Facebook column on (surprise) Theodore Roosevelt and cartoons. In addition to all this, I named my only son Theodore.

I am happy with all these associations, pursued with evangelical zeal for a man I consider one of America’s natural wonders and national treasures. I have many thousands of vintage cartoons in which he is featured; and in fact for the TR Center I will engage in a “Cartoon-Off” with other scholars – displaying cartoons, explaining why we think they are significant (that is, good cartoons, not only good history!), and inviting attendees to discuss and vote. Bully!

I am not going to share contemporary cartoons here and now – but might do so in the future; and I invite readers of “A Crowded Life” in Yesterday’s Papers to forward questions, suggestions, and clippings in the Roosevelt category as in all other categories. Today I will just share a couple of TR images that are not cartoons (not supposed to be funny, that is), the “point of personal privilege,” portraits of TR that I have painted. This little corner of my life will continue as offerings for TRA auctions, and exclusively at the Western Edge Gallery in Medora, North Dakota, near Roosevelt’s cattle ranches.

So that’s it from Johnny Not-One-Note, sharing the news of an exciting opportunity. The Roosevelt Center is in the process of completing a remarkable project: gathering all possible Theodore Roosevelt materials – letters, articles, photographs, cartoons, and associated resources – all possible material from all over the world. Digitally. So, scholars will no longer have to trek to Harvard or to the Library of Congress or the Khartoum Institute, if there be such; as everyone, everywhere is digitalizing everything… the Roosevelt Center is arranging to be the go-to source of research material. And not merely as a vacuum-cleaner, but to provide annotation, background data, in fact metadata as much as possible. For this task they are assembling leading scholars, of which I am supposed to be one in the Cartoon Category.

Again, I welcome feedback and suggestions. One of the joys of this new gig is that I work from the office I currently clog; my current projects, and other future projects, will continue unabated; and that among those pursuits are the revival of Nemo magazine and the weekly strolls through this “Crowded Life” series.

No. 51

A Crowded Life in Comics –

Cartoonists Who Paint.

 

[Charles Dana Gibson 1890s]

by Rick Marschall

Well, we have reached the half-century mark! Not myself – I wish – and a couple columns until the one-year anniversary, another milestone; but 50 Crowded Life in Comics peregrinations of events I have witnessed or been party to, and characters I have met, both inky and human.

A little diversion in this encyclopedia of diversions, here. Some items from my walls, the best of friends in my daily “life.”

Many cartoonists are frustrated or aspiring painters – and vice versa, believe me – and many cartoonists paint on canvas, or they sculpt, whether as creative cobweb-clearing pursuits or because they are darn good at yet another form of expression. And we all should be aware, and take encouragement, that artists often tend gardens or master their favorite cuisines, as outlets no less soul-satisfying than painting.

As a collector I have sought pieces in the category of canvases executed by pen-and-ink cartoonists. Following is not all of the ones I have acquired, but ones currently on my walls (therefore… please forgive odd angles and perspectives; and occasional reflections).

CHARLES DANA GIBSON

The creator of the Gibson Girl inspired two generations of pen-and-ink artists who tried their hardest to draw like Gibson (and most who failed before finding their own styles); and a generation of American women and men who tried their hardest to look like Gibson’s characters. His depictions of the Gibson Girl and her circle, 1890s-1920s, freed young adults from Victorian trappings like bustles and facial hair (in, um, women and men, respectively).

The first framed piece is a story illustration, watercolors – rare as a Gibson mode – in the early 1890s. The second is a New Years drawing signed to a friend, 1925.

E W KEMBLE

Kemble was a relatively unknown cartoonist whose drawings appeared occasionally in the New York Daily Graphic and in the fledgling Life magazine, late 1870s and early 1880s, when Mark Twain noticed his work and offered him the job of illustrating Huckleberry Finn. The “fit” was perfect, and Kemble was continually occupied until his death in the 1920s – many more books; comic strips; magazine gags; political cartoons; advertising work. Except for genre paintings, in gouache-grays, for Collier’s ca. 1901-1906, his medium was pen and ink. His work was often classified with that of A B Frost (they both illustrated Uncle Remus stories), and I do not know what this watercolor of a fox hunter was done for.

EUGENE ZIMMERMAN (ZIM)

Art critic Thomas Craven called Zim a “technical cousin” of F. Opper, and so he was; a master of characters, native humor, and comic invention. Zim’s medium was pen and ink… also the lithographic crayon, ink, and brush: drawing on stone instead of paper. Many cartoons appeared in color, but were lithographs, not paintings. This drawing of a rural black fisherman is almost 35 inches high, and in mixed media of chalk or pastel, and watercolor or tempera. I have no idea if it was an elaborate “chalk-talk” piece – that is, created in front of an audience – or was ever published. I am a Zim fanatic, almost a completist, but I have never seen it in print.

  

JAMES SWINNERTON

There are some cartoonists whose color work has lived in our appreciative consciousness. George Herriman’s ink-and-watercolor specialty drawings come to mind. But these mostly were presentation pieces. Jimmy Swinnerton, who was active as a newspaper cartoonist from the mid 1890s to the mid 1950s, maintained a separate career as a painter. His specialty, and honor today, was in Southwest / desert / plein air themes and modes. This is a study, not a finished canvas, done (according to the note over his signature) of the Salton Sea, the man-made (and disastrously designed) lake between San Diego and Palm Springs. As a run-off of the Colorado River, it quickly became a huge, fetid lake. Jimmy did not capture the “Sea,” but the other-worldly desert environs, as throughout the Southwest, is what attracted him. (He was sent to the desert around 1905 because doctors thought he was dying of TB; he wound up outliving doctors and many cacti too). My son has fallen in love with Swin’s desert canvases, and has studies, finished canvases, and sketches.

  

RUDOLPH DIRKS

When the revised and reformed Nemo Magazine 2.0 starts up (consider this a construction sign) I plan an article about the cartoonists of the Armory Show. That 1913 exhibition in New York was the landmark show that introduced America, in large part, to the latter-day French Impressionists, to the Cubists, to early German Expressionism; and (to Americans other than connoisseurs and investors) names like Picasso. It was a revolutionary show in extent and audacity – almost overnight, new artists and new style and modes overtook American art and criticism. What is little known is that many of the ground-breaking American painters had begun their careers (or financed them!) as cartoonists – John Sloan, George Bellows, Boardman Robinson; and among the important organizers were cartoonists like Walt Kuhn and Gus Mager. Further, there were working cartoonists, famous names from the Sunday papers, who exhibited in the Armory Show, and were grateful to be there. Rudolph Dirks was one such artist, with three canvases at the landmark event. This painting is not one of them, but the canvas – nearly seven feet long – combines Dirks’ two lives. Probably done around 1908-1912, the oil depicts woodland sprites in his exquisite Impressionist style; and, on the right, chanching upon the arborial scene (of nymphs, perhaps?) are Rudy’s two iconic young Noble Savages, Hans and Fritz, the Katzenjammer Kids.

As a collector, I classify paintings by cartoonists as Strokes of Luck when I find them.

50

A Crowded Life in Comics –

Derek, Son of Thane –

Hal’s Foster Son

by Rick Marschall

You probably do not know Derek, as a character or as a strip title.

But that was the name of the eponymous King Features proposal that the world knows today as Prince Valiant.

Overhead view of Foster at the drawing board in his Redding CT studio, reference at his side, drawing his Prince Valiant page typically from the bottom up. Most pages took him a full week to produce.

Creator Hal Foster was born this week in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1892. My “mind” raced back in time to several stops along the way with the elegant, distinguished master Harold Rudolf Foster. He once told me that he learned to draw fast in those northern climes because the frigid air obliged him to slip mittens on every few minutes. Good anecdote, especially from a usually reserved man.

In 1921 Hal rode a bicycle to Chicago, where he studied art and drew (and painted) for advertising agencies. It was in Kansas, I think, about a decade later, that Hal was offered  the job of illustrating Tarzan, not for books or magazine, but for serialized newspaper installments. He was less than enthused, but the Depression’s grip was colder than Canada’s wintry blasts; and – paraphrasing the Bible’s account of Esau selling his birthright in Genesis 25 – he said he sold his soul for a mess of pottage. “But pottage tasted pretty good at that moment.”

Advertising painting by Harold R Foster, 1931.

Hal was not the first cartoonist to tackle the strip, which was a substantial hit especially when his Sunday pages attracted attention. Eventually he wrote his own jungle (and non-jungle, for instance Egypt) tales. I once owned – in fact I technically still own – a multi-page typescript account How I Came to Create the Tarzan Stories not by Foster but by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The founder of ERBdom and a keeper of the Burroughs flame, Camille Cazdessus, agreed to trade a Sunday Foster Tarzan for that manuscript. I sent it to him but, for decades, he has not honored the trade nor returned the manuscript. Tracked down in Illinois, no longer Louisiana, he admitted to still having it; and asked that I provide the postage for its return – an infantile and perhaps desperate condition, I thought. But I agreed… and still have not received either element of the transaction. A Crowded Life of Rogues, unavoidable.

Foster put the strip, and himself, on the map along the way. King Features, that vacuum-cleaner of talent, lured Hal with the promise to own his own creation (he received only a salary, no percentage or royalties, from Tarzan) and editorial freedom. Proud of his heritage and a student of history – and an admirer of the storytelling illustrator Howard Pyle – he staked a claim for a Medieval epic.

Its original title was Derek, Son of Thane, as attested here in this King Features promotion from 1936 (long buried in my archives). Myself, I will not attest to the fact that King ever published the strip under that title (although I have seen a reprint page, not a contemporary tearsheet with a Derek title-bar) nor that Foster’s second choice was Prince Arn.

A paragraph from an inside page of the “King Pins” brochure, announcing the new strip by the pride of Topeka.

The full-page Sunday (first a tabloid page) commanded attention, and had immediate impact, a prestige feature for American newspapers. In its early years Hal infused fantastic elements – Merlin was a regular character – and was exacting with visual references like furniture, castles, weapons, and clothing. He bent or condensed history, however, over approximately 600 years.

All that really mattered to readers, about a timeline, was every next Sunday.

The first fan letter that ever produced a response when I was young was Hal Foster’s polite, elegant explanation to me that he could not respond with an original Sunday page. I was making a scrapbook of Val Sundays (with my own running captions beside his!), and told him so. In later years we were Connecticut neighbors – he in Redding; I in Bethel – and was surprised to learn that Wayne Boring, whose work on Superman I considered stiff and klunky, did backgrounds on Val.

A letter from Hal Foster to a 12-year-old fan, 1961…

Around 1971, age and arthritis caught up with Hal and his lovely wife Helen, and they moved to Florida. I still have letters and Christmas cards from them, a long run. My wife and I visited them in their retirement in Spring Hill FL. On one of those visits I asked Hal what he thought – how he would assess – the work of his successor on Tarzan. In probably the most critical but diplomatic statement this gentleman could make, he thought and said, “It always interested me how Hogarth managed to draw all the muscles on top of the skin.”

In my old Nemo magazine I recruited two old European friends to address Hal Foster. Fred Schreiber dusted off an old interview with Hal; and Prof Giulio Cesare Cuccolini analyzed the influence of Howard Pyle. For the German publisher Carlsen I helped produce (with my friend the historian and publisher Andreas Knigge) The Big Hal Foster Book (never yet appearing in the US).

The cover of the book treatment of Foster’s career and Prince Valiant’s place in history. With Andreas Knigge; Carlsen Verlag, Hamburg, Germany.

Hal passed off the production of Prince Valiant to his Fairfield County neighbor John Cullen Murphy. Jack was predisposed – culturally, racially, politically – to be the simultaneous heir to Foster and the good Prince himself. Other artists auditioned, but there was no real competition. At first Foster provided the scripts and penciled layouts; and he finally surrendered all aspects. Murphy, and eventually other family members including his writer son Cullen, valiantly sustained the epic. In recent years other hands have continued.

When Foster died, my friend Bill Crouch proved that he was more than a Pogo fanatic. He and his brother Miller, when younger – I am not sure how much younger; but that might be another column. Or not – used to dress in licensed Prince Valiant pajamas and have mock sword fights. He felt a proprietary interest in Val, and somehow got Helen to share Hal’s King Features’ contract when she was a fresh widow. It turns out that Foster still owned the strip – and its rights and royalties – a rare situation that the syndicate somehow neglected to reference in their Good-byes; and that Helen actually did not realize. How long thereafter she received the surprising royalty checks, or what settlement was reached, I have forgotten.

A detail from “King Pins,” a King Features Syndicate mailer, in 1936. Hal Foster is #9.

Movies (including a 1950s epic with Robert Wagner in pageboy coiff), many reprint books, board games, costumes and, um, pajamas, flourished through the years. At times the strip was more popular overseas, for instance in Germany, than in the US. For me, I remember the first reply from a cartoonist; a warm friendship and visits; a few projects together; and material for a book of my own, the memories of a Crowded Life in Comics.

Also, Prince Valiant is where I first read and learned the meaning of the word Synopsis. 

⚔

49

A Crowded Life in Comics –

Flyleaves

by Rick Marshall

Searching for illustrations for the imminent revival of Nemo Magazine, I have been ransacking my bookshelves. After a crowded life in comic collecting, occasionally I come across books I forget I own, or inscriptions I forgot inhabit their inside front covers or flyleaves.

Some of these were dedicated to previous collectors. Some are sketches or lines to me, and I will share some of them here.

WALT McDOUGALL

has a place in comic-strip history as being in the right place at the right time, more than almost any other cartoonist. He drew for Puck and the New York World in 1884, one of the most contested years of presidential campaigns. When newspaper photoengraving was introduced at the time, McDougall drew front-page cartoons that, by common  consent, helped decide the election. A decade later, he drew some of the first color cartoons in American newspapers. Through the years he drew for Pulitzer, Hearst, the Philadelphia North American and various pioneer syndicates. No less a figure than H L Mencken was an admirer, and a chapter of McDougall’s autobiography appeared in the very first number of Mencken’s American Mercury. In book form it was published by Knopf, and contains valuable material for cartoon historians.

My copy is an “association,” with McDougall’s self-caricature and the signature of the book’s first owner, screwball cartoonist Nate Collier. McDougall committed suicide in 1938.

R F OUTCAULT… III

On a trip to California some years ago I strolled through cartooning’s family album, of sorts. I met and interviewed and discussed possible projects with Mary Jane Outcault, Robert Winsor McCay, and R F Outcault III. Mary Jane was a delightful 96, having been born around the time of the Yellow Kid, in 1896. She married the nephew of Gemeral “Black Jack” Pershing, who led American forces in World War I; her memories were vivid, and salty, about her father, the Yellow Kid, and Buster Brown (and Buster’s girl friend… Mary Jane).

Bob McCay’s great-grandfather was Little Nemo’s father, and he shared family history gleaned from his mother Janet Trinker.

R F Outcault III was the grandson of the Father of the Comics, but did not inherit drawing talent. So he signed, without a sketch, an ancient copy of Buster Brown’s Resolutions.(And I secured another signed copy for Tom Heintjes; we were planning Nemo Magazine at the time.) By the way, Dick maintained that he could not draw, but he attended weekly painting classes… with Ferd Johnson (Moon Mullins) at the next easel!

WILLIAM ALLEN ROGERS

was a respected illustrator and cartoonist. He was on the staff of Harper’s Weekly and the House of Harper in the 1870s, and after the turn of the century he drew daily political cartoons for the New York Herald into the 1920s. His 1922 autobiography A World Worth While is worthwhile mainly for a plethora of recollections about illustrators, cartoonists, and political figures – information that might otherwise be lost to history.

His first “splash” was as a reporter-illustrator in the Wild West. His account of the colorful figure known as “The Voyageur” attracted attention, and it is that figure Rogers drew on the endpaper of his autobiography. Another “association,” as booksellers call it – the inscription is to writer and editor James Leicester Ford (whose own Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop also contains a lot of historical minutia); and is co-inscribed by Clinton Brainerd, president of Harper and Brothers.

GEORGE BAKER

I knew Joe Dennett, onetime assistant on Mutt and Jeff, and resident of the next town from me in New Jersey as a kid. After working for Al Smith he joined the Harvey Studios and drew Sad Sack characters and stories. He put me in touch with George Baker, the Sack’s creator who produced wonderful covers for the line for years. Like Bill Mauldin (subject of another column) this iconic vet drew his iconic army schlump in many books and albums through the years.

ROY CRANE

God bless ol’Jim Ivey, whose Wash Tubbs reprint project (with Gordon Campbell and Tony deLuna) introduced many fans to that great strip by the great talent Roy Crane. … and provided pages for the affable and willing Crane to draw sketches. Here is one of the drawings in my copy of the book. Oboy!

48

A Crowded Life in Comics –

More Than Peanuts 

by Rick Marschall

I am capable of sharing memories wherein I am not a hero but a goat; when “the right time and place” felt like times and places I would have traded for anonymity. But the worst days in the fields of comics and cartoons and history are better than long summer days picking and chopping cotton. Almost as bad, in fact, as that analogy.

The first jobs I had in cartooning were after college, actually during college, too, freelancing – but after a passel of duties on papers in New Jersey and Connecticut where I drew political cartoons and illustrations; edited a weekend magazine; and wrote a political column, I felt it was time to climb the ladder to another goal, to edit comics for a newspaper syndicate.

The late Sid Goldberg was General Manager of United Feature Syndicate. He had been a protege of syndication pioneer John Wheeler, who had lived near me in Connecticut. “Back in the day” for John was ghost-writing newspaper columns for the great New York Giants pitcher Christy Matthewson around 1910; and stealing Bud Fisher and Mutt and Jeff away from William Randolph Hearst. At the time of this story he had just passed away, but I remained close with his charming wife Tee.

Wheeler had mentored Sid at the North American Newspaper Alliance, even so far as offering the avuncular advice during the recent (1972) presidential campaign to rein his wife in; she had committed political tricks like infiltrating the McGovern press entourage. Mrs Goldberg was, and is, Lucianne, who today manages the essential, eponymous political website, and among whose trophies was persuading Linda Tripp to persuade Monica Lewinski to record Bill Clinton’s erotic phone calls and to save her blue dress with his, um, evidence on it. (Jonah Goldberg, of National Review and cable news, is their son.)

End of tangent. Tee Wheeler warmly recommended me to Sid, and I was hired at United Features. Editing comics was only a portion of my duties. I reviewed submissions, edited columns and puzzles, and – not alone – routinely shorted the brand-new computer terminals by unwittingly generating static electricity. Hardly any papers then took electronic submissions, but UFS wanted to be in the vanguard.

One of the thrills of editing the strips (Nancy, Tarzan, Captain and the Kids) was editing Peanuts. The parsing of the word “editing” is what nearly got me canned… almost finished in the strip business before I started.

I had met Charles Schulz a few times, but not to know him. At the syndicate, people said from Day One, “Don’t call Schulz,” “Don’t bother Sparky,” his nickname. I wondered if it were his celebrity – strange, because he was always affable, even modest – and I regularly talked to other artists about gags, typos, deadlines, and such. But Sparky was off-limits.

The reason, it turned out, was that Schulz was then engaged in a battle with United Features: ownership; royalty splits; licensing; merchandising; everything. It had dragged on for 13 months. United might have folded its tent without Peanuts.

A batch of his strips arrived and a Sunday page, a classic baseball gag, featured Charlie Brown instructing Lucy to fold her umbrella in center field; of course she ignored him; a fly ball was hit to her… and it perfectly spiked itself on the top of the umbrella. She calmly walked to the pitcher’s mound and delivered it to Charlie Brown. In classic Peanuts structure, the gag had one more panel – Charlie Brown looked at the reader to say, “I can’t even criticize good.”

The printed version of the first and third versions of the 1975 Peanuts Sunday, April 20, a day that will live in infamy.

After chuckling, I wanted to save Sparky from 10,000 letters from English teachers. Any other cartoonist, I would have made a phone call. “I can’t even criticize well,” I would have said; “no offense.” BUT all those warnings to Leave Sparky Alone rattled in my head.

So I had the bullpen letter the correct word in Schulz’s style… and production began. After the engravings were made, color guides processed, proof sheets – as well as, in those prehistoric days – paper mats and zinc engraving plates, all were sent out to 2000 newspapers around the country. Postal envelopes, not e-mails or even faxes.

A week or so later there was a hubbub in the office, people racing around with frightened looks on their faces. Whispers. A succession of people handing a phone to each other. What happened was that Sparky received his set of proofs out in Santa Rosa. And he was not happy. Like a school principal or a scout master, he dressed down everyone, from the syndicate president to, eventually, me.

Of course I confessed to being the editorial bad guy; I had been fingered by everyone, anyway. Not boastfully but as a supreme logician, Charles M Schulz asked me if I thought he achieved his place in the business without knowing how to write a gag. In that moment I pictured myself as one of the kids in his strip being lectured by a blaring adult trombone – wide-eyed, mouth in a squiggle, beads of sweat flying.

There was no defense – except internally (and rather futilely) at the office – that I had towed the “Don’t call Sparky!” line. The fallout respected the Corollary: “Keep Sparky happy!” In emergency mode, United corrected and engraved the first Sunday page; made new mats and plates; contacted every client newspaper; and sent out, one by one, often Special Delivery, the corrected material. I believe there were several sovereign nations around the world whose national GDP was less than the costs of that correction.

… or, as I might call it, Marschall’s Editorial Dicta – always better to check; Mr Bell invented the phone for a purpose; and… Keep the Sparkys Happy.

Sid understood, indulgent as always. Whether Sparky remembered me as the specific culprit in the episode, I never knew. I never asked him in subsequent years, in many meetings, over several projects. I mean, I am dumb but I am not stupid. If you expected an ending like, “Years later I reminded Sparky of that incident, and we had a good laugh over milk and cookies...” – you will be disappointed. That is not the ending.

But, as Paul Harvey used to say, Now you know the rest of the story.

Later halcyon days. I went on to collaborate on several projects with Charles Schulz. He wrote pieces for books of mine; I interviewed him for the final issue of the old Nemo magazine (and an Italian book, pirated but with our names on the cover) and, pictured in this photograph, I flew to Paris when he was awarded the French government’s Award of Arts, ca 1988.

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