INSIDE LOOK -- THE BULLPEN OF EARLY HEARST CARTOONISTS - III: George McManus

"Let George Do It!"

And McManus Did, 

Many Times Over

We have visited, via rare archival material from King Features Syndicate archives, legendary cartoonists from the protean days of comic strips. George Herriman, Tom McNamara, and editor Rudolph Block thus far. Photographs, specialty drawings, data; the only deficiency -- out of our control, as it was "out of control" in 1917 -- is the insipid poetry that serves as promotion. But, that is why the book was produced, so we must endure. (And there are some valuable facts that leak through...)

It is interesting, and a well-known aspect of the Birth of the Comics, that commercialism played a major role. Comics were weapons in circulation wars between publishers. They received boosts -- creative freedom, vast publicity, and cartoonists treated like stars -- to assist in their acceptance by the public.

The "wars" also featured cartoonists themselves as weapons, objectives, prizes, and goals. many of the great early artists of the Funny Pages switched employers and venues, sometimes dissatisfied with their employers (we have documented that Block seriously annoyed numerous of his cartoonists to the point of their quitting Hearst)... but usually having their services bid and outbid by hungry publishers.

There is a story -- if not true it virtually encapsulates the truth of the times -- that T E Powers spent an afternoon in a Park Row bar, not working for Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World nor William Randolph Hearst of the Journal, but receiving reports from office boys how his salary was going up and up as the two publishers bid against each other for his services. (Hearst won out.)

Frederick Burr Opper drew for the New York Herald (and Puck Magazine) until purloined by Hearst. Rudolph Dirks was hired away from Hearst by Pulitzer; so was Bud Fisher with the assistance of syndicate pioneer John Wheeler. Winsor McCay drew for James Gordon Bennett's two newspapers before Hearst hired him away. George Herriman drew for the World but eventually settled in the Hearst stable. R F Outcault, whose Yellow Kid can be cited for inaugurating this crazy transmigration, worked for Pulitzer, then Hearst, then Pulitzer again, then the Herald, then Hearst until his retirement.

In the eyes of the voracious publishers (benign godfathers they were, when all is said and done; or wet-nurses) there was no bigger star in their constellations than George McManus. He had attracted the attention of Pulitzer in their original working environs of St Louis; then McManus drew for Pulitzer's New York World.

McManus the cartoonist had a short gestation as a struggling stylist; soon his artwork was polished, handsome, mannered... and funny. As a creator, he created multiple strips starring in multiple titles. His premises were funny, and his narratives flowed like stage-plays. In fact his several creations did become Broadway musicals. And his characters appeared on the market as toys and in games.

Probably the most popular of his strips was The Newlyweds, a one-premise strip (as most early comics were) about an obstreperous baby. When McManus switched to Hearst he continued the strip but renamed it Their Only Child!, finessing a sticking-point of other mutinies like Mutt and Jeff and The Katzenjammer Kids whose titles became bones of contention.

McManus created another strip for Hearst, a Sunday page called The Whole Bloomin' Family. It is curious to note that Bringing Up Father, which commenced full-term as a Hearst feature in 1913, never was a Sunday page until six years later. After that it became the major strip among Hearst and King Features' properties for years. It owned the front pages of the Hearst chain's Sunday comic sections until supplanted by Blondie in the early 1950s.

In the 1917 promotion book, McManus was allowed to illustrate the stars in his galaxy including characters he had created, and left, at Pulitzer's shop. We see the eponymous star of Let George Do It; Rosie and her Beau; and Panhandle Pete. In addition, Snookums Newlywed and his parents; the Whole Bloomin' Family; and Jiggs and Maggie of Bringing Up Father. 

 

By the way, and speaking of the Newlyweds and their only child (italics aside), we have a reprint book of daily strips from the New York World. It is from 1907. The strips appeared earlier in the year in the newspaper, not to mention the book collection -- which challenges the convention histories citing Mr A Mutt as the medium first daily strip (November 1907). More to follow in Yesterday's Papers and in the revival of nemo magazine...

AT THE INTERSECTION OF FUNNY AND FUNNY -- CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND BUD FISHER

 AMERICA'S FAVORITE

FUNNY-MAKERS OF THE 1910s MEET

by Rick Marschall

If a poll had been conducted in the early 'teens in America -- and there might indeed have been such surveys -- despite the heavy competition, it is certain that the nation's favorite comedian was Charlie Chaplin; and the nation's favorite comic strip was Mutt and Jeff.

Chaplin burst on the scene in 1914, and was an immediate hit. His tramp character evoked sympathy, affection, a bit of derision, and even identification, all at once. Seemingly overnight he was a major star of the nascent "movies"; there were Chaplin dolls and toys; and there would be two comic strip featuring him as a character (one would be drawn by the newcomer E C Segar, years before Popeye). In 1915 he was writing, producing, and starring in a series of shorts for Keystone; Mutual, Essanay, and United Artists in his lucrative future.

In newspaper comics, Bud Fisher was the virtual father of the daily strip, certainly the first successful one. After Mr A Mutt wowed readers in San Francisco, Fisher moved to New York, was hired by William Randolph Hearst, introduced a second-banana, Jeff; and -- where have we heard this before? -- had a national sensation on his hands. Toys, dolls, sculptures (!), lapel pins, and comics' earliest successful daily-strip reprint books flooded the nation. A coupon-clipping promotion of a Boston newspaper proved that the public would be interested in comic-strip compilations, and the Ball Publishing Company produced five reprint books during the 1910s. 

Here is the cover of Volume 4, published in 1915, the year Chaplin hit it "biggest" in moving-picture theaters... and the year that Mutt and Jeff was so popular that (thanks in part to the legerdemain of syndication pioneer John Wheeler) Bud Fisher slipped away from Hearst and drew his strip for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

In a "meeting of the mirths," we see in my copy of this book that the funnyman Bud Fisher inscribed it to his cinematic counterpart, Charlie Chaplin. (Even though he spelled Charlie's name wring. So, he didn't win any spelling bees...) And the book has Charlie's bookplate! This is how he saw himself at the beginning of his career -- the drawing (alas, unsigned) show the Tramp, rather more bedraggled than usual, as a new arrival in the Big City.

Chaplin recently had arrived in America from England as a member of Fred Karno's music-hall troupe (Stan Laurel, his young understudy) and this indeed might have represented his very first impressions of America. 

CARTOONISTS AT WORK - Bud Fisher

 When weekends are over, we (most of us) get back to work, or think of it. Some of us who freelance write or draw feel like weekends and weekdays are of one demanding sort. Think of cartoonists who draw newspaper strips. Until recently, words like "vacations," "hiatus," and "reprints" were not in their lexicons. (In fact, even "lexicon" was not in many of their lexicons.") More likely, "primal scream" was a term that tempted them.

So I will inaugurate a regular feature in Yesterday's Papers showing cartoonists at their drawing boards. In fact, here and in the imminent revival of NEMO Magazine, I will compile a different sort of trip through comics history -- a chronological compilation of informal photos and snapshots of cartoonists (that is, not promotional photos), sharing what they were like as "normal" (ha) folks; and weaving the narration of comics' growth as an art form. My good friends and great collectors (or vice-versa) Ivan Briggs and Jim Engel will collaborate.

The first subject is almost ironic, for Bud Fisher (Mutt and Jeff) was famous for hardly lifting a pen after the very first years of his strip... except when endorsing royalty checks. Many cartoonists have had assistants; and some abandoned their drawing boards early in their long careers (I will present the case Ron Goulart and I made that Alfred Andriola could barely draw at all, for instance).

Anyway, Bud Fisher was the first major strip cartoonist to employ ghost artists (separate from assistants, which was a rare thing anyway before 1907, when Mutt had his debut). Ken Kling, who later drew Joe and Asbestos, worked for Fisher; C W Kahles ghosted some licensing and ancillary items. Some folks believe that George Herriman subbed for Fisher, but during the few years they worked together Herriman was too big of a "name" to have pitched in anonymously on another strip; it was more likely that Fisher saw another style to swipe. Bill Blackbeard claimed that Billy Liverpool lent a hand, but with no evidence, certainly not in their drawing styles (typically and unfortunately -- for his assertion has made into history books) he admitted under pressure that "Billy Liverpool" was marvelous name that should be enshrined. Trust but verify...

What is true is that around 1916, Fisher hired the B-Team Hearst cartoonist Ed Mack. And Mack thereafter drew virtually every image of Mutt and Jeff -- strips, reprint books, toys and games, ads, merchandise, licensed products -- until 1933. At that point, Al Smith took over the strip 100 per cent. Al (the first cartoonist I ever met, when I was 10 years old; he attended our church, and filled in a lot of history for me) only signed the strip after Fisher's death in 1954.

So... it could be that a photograph of Bud Fisher at a drawing board is a rare thing, or an image of a rare event. 

 

Christmas With The Cartoonists

❄

BUD FISHER

❄

Chicago Examiner

Dec 13, 1913

❄

Eddie Campbell’s The Goat Getters

     

“Goat getting” long has been a favorite stunt of many great ring-men. But I’ve never practiced the art. I’ve never tried by one ruse or another, by trickery or subterfuge, to take the nerve or the confidence out of my opponent. I felt it wasn’t necessary … This “goat getting” is supposed to get a man so excited and so frothy that he loses control of his poise and his calmness, and in his own furious anger swings wildly, and is always off balance because of frantic eagerness to deliver a killing punch. — Gene Tunney, heavyweight boxing champion,  March 10, 1927

     
by John Adcock

MAJOR THESIS. Comic artist Eddie Campbell’s latest book — elaborately titled inside as, THE GOAT GETTERS: A new angle on the beginnings of comics casting a bright spotlight on THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY. And Reserving a Few Mellow Sidelights for The San Francisco Graft Trials, Harry Thaw’s Murderous Crime Of Passion, The Story of the Lemon. ARTISTS: JIMMY SWINNERTON!! TAD DORGAN!! ROBERT EDGREN!! BUD FISHER!! RUBE GOLDBERG!! GEORGE HERRIMAN!! written and designed by Eddie Campbell — is not yet available but already causing some conversation over its major thesis; that the early sporting cartoon, as practiced by men like Tad Dorgan, George Herriman and Rube Goldberg, is the “missing link” in histories detailing the origin of the daily black & white newspaper comic strip.

BIRTHPLACE SAN FRANCISCO. The Amazon blurb (where the reader can sample a chapter or two) in similar fashion presents the book as “a new take on the origin of the comic strip,” while Eddie Campbell claims that the sporting page was the venue for the invention of the daily comic strip, and that San Francisco was its birthplace. Is it a coincidence that the best of these cartoonists, Tad Dorgan, George Herriman, Rube Goldberg, and Milt Gross (once Tad’s office-boy) carried their slang-heavy verbal and artistic slapstick into the most successful of the daily newspaper comic strips? I think not — and each and all of them drew their verbal inspiration from Tad Dorgan.

SPORTING LANGUAGE. Critics like myself do not have to agree with Campbell’s conclusions to enjoy this splendid book, a sprawling epic which aims and succeeds in providing “a reconstruction of the whole picture,” with a focus on boxing, counting the days when the sporting pages — modeled on the British sporting newspapers like Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide (1824) and Bell’s Life in London (1827) — gave several sporting cartoonists ample column space to experiment with vivid language and pictures. The language was the language of the sporting underworld; rich in slang, celebrating the gambler, the pug, the bum, the gangster, and the rube. This was during a period when boxing was illegal in most states and fights were staged on barges, in farmer’s fields, and in sweltering boomtowns in the desert. Ears were torn, eyes were gouged, and tons of blood were spilled. Most of the sporting cartoonists of this era (approximately 1894-1913) not only celebrated this preoccupation with the lag’s life — they lived it. To them it was the most significant and fondly remembered time of their lives.

FIRST TIME. The Goat Getters is the first time an author has attempted to chronicle the entire early days of the sporting cartoon and my hat is off to Eddie Campbell for his superb work in hunting down, cleaning up, and collecting together over 500 illustrations from those far off golden days. Campbell is a marvelous writer too. He brings the natural insight of a cartoonist and a humorist to his observations. Among the many artists covered are Homer Davenport, Jimmy Swinnerton, Tad Dorgan, Robert Edgren, Bud Fisher, Harry Warren, Rube Goldberg, George Herriman, Kate Carew, Fay King, Clare Briggs, Harry Hershfield, A.D. Condo, Nell Brinkley, Dan Leno, Hype Igoe, Robert Ripley, Sid Smith, Pete Llanuza, and a large number of other comickers both famed and forgotten. And oh yes, there are goats, plenty of goats — fifty on the last 4 pages alone.

Front cover title: 

★ THE GOAT GETTERS. Jack Johnson, the FIGHT of the CENTURY, and How a Bunch of Raucous Cartoonists Reinvented Comics, by Eddie Campbell, IDW Publishing/Ohio State University Press (The Library of American Comics), Hardcover, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1684051380 — available May 1, 2018

Looking for Bud Fisher!

     

“Bud Fisher is the John D. Rockefeller of newspaperdom, the highest-paid man who ever drew a picture and perhaps the most envied and most misrepresented fellow in his line. He has made Mutt and Jeff the two best-known comic characters in the world.” — Hugh S. Fullerton, The Highest Paid Newspaper Contributor in the World, in The American Magazine, May 1920

     

by John Adcock

  A. MUTT    I always thought the most notable influence on George Herriman’s (b.1880) drawing style in his daily strips Baron Mooch, The Family Upstairs, and Krazy Kat was Bud Fisher (b.1885). Now I’m not so sure, perhaps it was the case that Fisher was imitating George Herriman.

1915 [1] The Dingbat Family by George Herriman, Oct 31.

“They have been in several of the revolutions in Mexico. They have dallied with the dandies of Paris and Ostend. They attend all the big prize fights for championships, and they never miss a world’s series for the baseball championship.” — “Bud” Fisher – His Life Story, Chapter IV, in Idaho Statesman, July 30, 1915

Bud Fisher’s A. Mutt hit the starting line on November 15, 1907, in the San Francisco Chronicle, and from December 11, 1907, on moved to The Examiner in the same city. There sporting sidekick Jeff made his first appearance (as “Jeffries” after the famous pugilist) on March 27, 1908. Comic strips were never expected to be profound or thought-provoking, they were ephemeral and expendable, primarily designed to sell newspapers. A. Mutt introduced a recurring character and was the first popular daily comic strip to bring in shovel-loads of money to the coffers of the newspapers’ proprietors.

1907 [2] A. Mutt by Bud Fisher, Nov 16.

“There were Bud Fisher playing cards, and Mutt and Jeff statues, and Mutt and Jeff cigarettes, and Mutt and Jeff books, and vaudeville engagements for Fisher.” As his personal wealth piled up Fisher spent much of his time in court protecting his characters from infringement on his proprietary rights by burlesque operators and commercial merchandisers.

1908 [3] Mutt and Jeff by Westover, Jan 27.

  MISSING IN ACTION    The sad truth is that Bud Fisher was not much of a comic artist; his sporting cartoons had been nicely drawn but he had little interest in the comic strip once his pockets were bulging with dough. By February 1908 Fisher was missing in action and for a long period the strips were signed by Russ Westover who would later have a successful comic strip of his own, Tillie the Toiler. Fisher returned to the strip but got wanderlust once again. On August 17, 1910, the last panel of the strip showed Mutt and Jeff rushing for a train to take a vacation. Then on August 18 the comic strip disappeared from the daily newspapers altogether. August 19 it was back under a new title Mutt and Jeff Secure Mr. O. U. Boob to Keep the Space Warm for Them by Peter (possibly Wonder Woman artist Harry G. Peter). Mutt and Jeff vanished and O. U. Boob took over eventually having a fantasy adventure undersea with King Neptune and his daughters. A “critical office boy” comments at the bottom of one panel “Who makes this bum series?”

1910 [4] Mr. O. U. Boob by Peter, Aug 19.

“Mutt and Jeff make the best comic ever put out – my readers never tire of it. Every time a picture is not published in the paper, my desk is buried under letters demanding why we failed the writers and declaring that they had bought the paper just to get this comic.” — Unnamed newspaper editor, July 30, 1915

1910 [5] Inspector Stew by Ed Mack, Sep 12.

The last Boob replacement was on August 26 and Mutt and Jeff were still missing in action. September 3, 1910, a strip by cartoonist Ed Mack appears with a caption reading Pipe! Alphonse and Gaston Join Der Captain in Search for Mutt and Jeff. Next day Jimmy Swinnerton’s characters and Tad’s Bunk join the search. Next day Swin’s dog Violet and Der Captain. Next day Swin’s Laughing Sam. The next day, September 10, Mutt and Jeff were discovered and Fisher signed the strip from Newport. Then on September 12, 1910, Mack is drawing Tad and Swinnerton characters again, in a new search for Mutt and Jeff. September 17 titled Mutt and Jeff on the Job Again, Now that the Big Vacation is Over. I missed Mack and his parade of Hearst characters.

1910 [6] The Hearst Family by Ed Mack, Sep 14.

Ken Kling,  got his start as an unpaid Fisher assistant before the start of World War I. Looking back, LIFE magazine (of July 29, 1946) noted that “Fisher was anxious to reduce his two-hour working day to even less arduous dimensions, and it was not long before Kling was doing all the lettering and all the backgrounds as well as the shadows.” Kling drew in a style based on Bud Fisher’s but was twice the artist Fisher was. His first strip was Katinka, followed by Joe Quince and Windy Riley. His last was Joe and Asbestos.

1923 [7] Joe Quince by Ken Kling, May 7.

“Aggressive hustling men win; and they sacrifice much popularity to win. Being afraid that people will not like you is the next worse thing to false modesty in business.” — Bud Fisher, Seven Tips I Have Picked Up on the Way, in The American Magazine, May 1920

  THE INSIDE    Historian Bill Blackbeard noted in The Forgotten Years of George Herriman (in Nemo – The Classic Comics Library, No. 1, pp.50-60) that he had found that the second daily comic strip had its beginnings in the sports section of the Sunday Examiner on December 8, 1907, in a one-shot strip titled “The Race Track Bug is with Us Once More” which became a daily on December 10, 1907, under the title Mr. Proones the Plunger until its conclusion on December 26, 1907. Blackbeard then notes the “striking similarity between Herriman’s bald, rotund, heavily-moustached, top-hatted Mr. Proones and Fisher’s later Little Jeff of Mutt and Jeff. They are simply ringers for one another.”

“It has been said that the idea of Mutt and Jeff was suggested to Bud Fisher by two characters he knew in San Francisco.

‘Nothing to that,’ he stated, Mutt and Jeff are no one in particular except themselves. They were merely created for amusement purposes and in time came to be fixtures. They ‘growed’ in other words.” — The Story of “Bud” Fisher, in Duluth News Tribune, June 16, 1912

1915 [8] Bud Fisher.

Blackbeard’s intuitions were correct however; in fact the similarities were noted in a long Godwin’s Weekly (Salt Lake City, Utah) article on January 25, 1919, The Inside on Mutt and Jeff —

“Discussion is renewed as to who was the creator of these supposedly humorous characters. Newspaper men from Chicago have told local newspaper artists that A. Mutt was a direct adaptation from A. Piker, one of the creations of Claire Briggs, once of Chicago, but now with the New York Tribune. Briggs is said to have run A. Piker for several months, twelve or thirteen years ago. In the same circles the original of Little Jeff is credited to George Herriman of Los Angeles, now on the Hearst Syndicate payroll as the parent of the entire Dingbat family. Herriman, I am told, ran a Little Jeff series which he later abandoned and Fisher adopted the character as a companion to Mutt. Herriman has never taken credit for Jeff, telling his friends ‘Bud got away with Jeff and I didn’t, so he deserves all the credit he can get out of it.’ I understand Herriman declined the drawing of a substitute Mutt and Jeff series for Hearst.” 

  A. PIKER CLERK    Tad Dorgan (1877-1929), George Herriman (1880-1944), Rube Goldberg (1883-1970), Bud Fisher (1885-1954) and Harry Hershfield (1885-1974) were all making a living as sporting cartoonists in 1904 when Clare Briggs (1875-1930) was drawing a comic strip called A. Piker Clerk for the sporting page of the Chicago Evening American. Moses Koenigsberg, city editor of Hearst’s Chicago-American in 1903, dated the strip to 1904, consisting of “eighteen connected episodes – three weeks’ releases,” however, for unknown reasons; Bill Blackbeard date the strip’s first appearance occurring in December 1903.

R.C. Harvey dates it to late 1903, “short-lived and, in its last manifestations, only sporadic rather than daily.” Eddie Campbell researched the Chicago-American and did not get the idea that it appeared daily, “the sports pages just didn’t work that way.” Generally A. Piker Clerk was published about three times a week in between the Tad Dorgan and Bob Edgren sporting comic imports. Clare Briggs must have thought little of the strip, there is no record of him ever mentioning A. Piker Clerk.

1904 [9] A. Piker Clerk by Clare A. Briggs, Feb 6.

“Series of cartoons are largely accidental. Mine, The Days of Real Sport, originated back in 1910, and When a Feller Needs a Friend started about 1912. The series by which I suppose I am best known is the kid pictures.” — Clare Briggs, May 25, 1919

Briggs started his career in 1896 on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “Coming east after the Spanish American War I spent two years looking for a job, but eventually hooked up with the New York Journal in 1900.” He was sent to the Chicago American and Examiner and stayed there seven years. In May 1907 he went on to the Chicago Tribune where he remained until 1914 when he was invited back to the New York Tribune. Briggs remained there under the consolidation of the New York Herald-Tribune until his early death at 54 on January 4, 1930.

  STAYING POWER    While Fisher’s swiping of Herriman’s character appears to have been deliberate, few people recall Mr. Proones the Plunger today. It was Mutt and Jeff who had the staying power, a continual 75 years of daily and Sunday publication. Mutt and Jeff ended Sunday, June 26, 1983, and strips from the past are still in online syndication. At the end it appeared in about fifty newspapers, twenty in the United States. George Breisacher, 41, at that time an artist for the Charlotte Observer, was told the comic was losing money; to be considered successful a strip had appear in 100 newspapers — 75 at the least.

1907 [10] Bud Fisher sporting cartoon, Aug 4.

★

Thanks to Eddie Campbell who is currently finishing off a lavishly illustrated book of comic history titled The Goat-Getters — A new angle on the beginnings of comics, casting a bright spotlight on the Fight of the Century and reserving a few mellow sidelights for The San Francisco Graft Trials, Harry Thaw’s Murderous Crime of Passion, The Story of the Lemon, and featuring art by Jimmy Swinnerton, Tad Dorgan, Robert Edgren, Bud Fisher, Rube Goldberg, George Herriman and a host of early sporting cartoonists.

Bud Fisher, A Captain of Comic Industry

 

‘A Captain of Comic Industry; And Other Interesting People,’ by John N. Wheeler, in The American Magazine (1906-1956), Vol. LXXXI, No. 5, May 1916, pp. 48-50.

 

The Inside on Mutt and Jeff

The Inside on Mutt and Jeff, Goodwin's Weekly, 7 Aug 1915. Strips on bottom Nov 10-13 1925.

Mutt and Jeff

[ May 2, May 5, and May 6 1930]

When I was a young tad we had a great way of making my dad laugh. All it took was for one of us to say “Mutt and Jeff!” and repeat it every time he took a breath between bellows of laughter. I didn’t really appreciate Mutt and Jeff myself, Al Smith had been drawing the strip since I first picked up a funny paper and it was god awful. All the laughs had leaked out of the comic after Fisher’s death and it was now strictly a commercial concern limping along on its past glory.

According to a MacLean’s article of June 1916 titled Making a Fortune out of Comics, how “Bud” Fisher is Capitalizing “Mutt and Jeff,”: “As soon as the boy was big enough to hold a pencil he began expressing his infant soul in scrawls. His father’s linen collars, off or on, were his favourite drawing boards …” Bud Fisher never took a drawing lesson in his life but his bigfoot style was very influential, most noticeably with George Herriman, author of Krazy Kat. In 1917 a close study of Mutt and Jeff appeared in the shape of Hitt and Runn, by Oscar Hitt, seen HERE.



[April 29 1920]

Harry C. “Bud” Fisher was the unlikeliest person you could think of to draw Mutt and Jeff. John Wheeler, of the Wheeler Syndicate, described him as a belligerent “dapper cocky little guy,” a sun dodger, who hated the daylight. Fisher, along with most of his contemporary cartoonist-journalists pals, enjoyed fights, chorus girls, gambling, and saloons. Fisher liked to shoot up hotel rooms with his pistols, one of which was a gift from Pancho Villa, indoors when he was drunk. His first wife was a Vaudeville showgirl who led a tragic life. In 1927 his second bride, a Countess, charged Fisher with throwing her out of their luxurious Riverside Drive apartment and beating her on several occasions. “Bud” wasn’t present when she was granted separation, he was aboard a ship to Europe.

Wheeler seems to have studied Fisher carefully and concluded, “Fisher’s life was full of crises, most of which he made himself. He was a strange contrast of shrewdness and stupidity about his own affairs.”

Al Smith, one of Fisher’s ‘ghosts,’ told the Associated Press that “Ghosting for Fisher was rough. He fired me three or four times and I quit three or four times.” Smith ghosted Mutt and Jeff from 1932 to 1954, when Fisher died, and Smith took charge of Mutt and Jeff, and created its topper, Cicero's Cat. “I really love doing it. The years have passed so quickly, and Mutt and Jeff have become a part of me. I wake up in the morning, and there they are, waiting for me to go to work.”



[Augustus Mutt's family, Ma, Cicero and Desdemona. June 4 1913]

Look up Bud Fisher on Google and you will find that he was born in 1884 or 1885 in Chicago Illinois, which is probably wrong. According to the MacLean’s article cited above, Harry C. Fisher was born in 1885 in San Francisco and moved with his parents to Portland, Oregon, to Milwaukee, and then to Chicago, where he attended Hyde Park High School.

He attended a brief course at the University of Chicago before drifting west to San Francisco, where he earned fifty cents apiece doing cartoon drawings for tradesmen. His application for a job on the San Francisco Examiner was turned down but he was accepted at the San Francisco Chronicle at fifteen dollars a week. He worked for the Chronicle from 1905 until near the end of 1907. The San Francisco fire ruined the Chronicle offices and he found himself laid off and pounding the pavement again. Fisher moved on to Los Angeles.

“There he ran into a man named Steele, who was getting out an emergency Sunday section for the wrecked Chronicle, on the presses of the Los Angeles Times. Steele could not gat any good artists to work for him, because all the local men were employed by the Los Angeles Examiner, and could not accept retainers from another paper. He offered Fisher fifteen dollars a page.”

“I took him up,” says Bud, “and then I got a lot of the Examiner artists -- who could not work for Steele, but could work for me -- to make me these pages at seven dollars and a half apiece. I cleared the other seven-fifty. At that rate, I didn’t really care how long the fire lasted.”



[October 4 1913]

He returned to San Francisco and the Chronicle with sixteen hundred dollars in his pockets and went back to work at twenty-two-fifty a week. On November 15 1907 A. Mutt was introduced to the sports-page of the San Francisco Chronicle and on December 10 the Examiner, (a Hearst paper,) who years before had turned Fisher away, made him a mighty attractive offer which he accepted. Soon after Augustus Mutt was joined by little Jeff (Mar 27 1908) and Fisher’s reputation spread East, leading to another move, New York.

In 1913 Fisher’s Hearst contract (for $300 a week) would shortly run out. John Wheeler took the opportunity to visit Fisher in his New York office and offer him a guaranteed $1000 a week and sixty percent of the revenue from syndication. Hearing of the impending departure the art director at Hearst hired Ed Mack to ghost a supply of Mutt and Jeff dailies for stockpiling. When Hearst lost the ensuing lawsuit Fisher hired Mack as his assistant. In 1914 Ed Mack drew an obscure comic Sunday for the Star Company syndicate entitled “Living in Lonesomehurst,” drawn in a Fisher influenced style.

By 1916 Bud Fisher was the highest paid cartoonist on earth. He made $150,000 total a year at his peak. He and his ghosts’ drew six comic strips a week, for forty-eight weeks a year, for a total of $78,000. The remainder was made up from Vaudeville engagements, Mutt and Jeff theatrical shows, Mutt and Jeff animated cartoons, an annual Mutt and Jeff comic book and licensing for postcards, plaster statues, and buttons. When leaving the Examiner Fisher had used a subterfuge to gain copyright to his own creations and was now fabulously rich.

[Living in Lonesomehurst,

by Ed Mack, June 26 1918]