A Crowded Life in Comics –

Good Sports

by Rick Marschall

[TOP] Pap

Depicted is the dean of all sports columnists, Grantland Rice. Trivia: I own (or my son does, now) Rice’s golf clubs. Bequeathed to his friend, syndicate pioneer John Wheeler, and passed on to me.

Sports cartooning is, or was, a category of cartooning that arguably can be considered an incubator once on a par with political cartoons, magazine panels, and book illustration. The National Cartoonists Society used to present a category award for Sports Cartooning, and hands out plaques for New Media, Greeting Cards, and On-Line Short-Form Comics… but discontinued the Sports Cartooning honor more than 25 years ago.

This situation surely is attributable to an ossified genre and reduced population as much as the NCS’s institutional distractions.

But some of the finest cartooning talents in history have Protean roots… and indeed some practitioners never “graduated” to other levels of cartooning.

I will share, here, some memories of sports cartoonists I have known  in my Crowded Life.

When I was a kid – I mean so young I had to take buses and subways from our suburban  New Jersey home into Manhattan, and visit cartoonists and syndicates three times a year, Easter holiday, summer vacation, Christmas break – I ventured to the bullpen of the Associated Press.

In those days (obviously the halcyon times of virtually no security in public buildings and newspaper offices) the AP had its own syndicate operation. It was small but significant; and among its “graduates” through the years were Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles, Al Capp, and Frank Robbins.

R B Fuller created Oaky Doaks for the AP, and remained all his life. During the time I am writing about, Ralph Fuller was a neighbor in Leonia NJ. He willed me volumes of Judge Magazine from his time on staff in the 1920s. At the AP I also met Dick Hodgins Jr. I thought him austere in his horn-rimmed glasses and looming height, but he encouraged me by looking at my sketches and saying if I were five years older I could get a job in the bullpen. I never did apply, but in five years or so I was taller than Dick, and learned how affable he was. He became one of my best friends in this business. 

But the end of the row of drawing-tables, in the corner, was Tom Paprocki, sports cartoonist. On every visit I would check in with Dick, and editorial cartoonist John Milt Norris, panel cartoonist Joe Cunningham (“’ham”), and others, before sitting next to “Pap.” I remember two things especially: a warm friendliness beneath his gruff visage; and a stack of his original daily sports-cartoon panels. Added to for who-knows how many years, the pile must have been 40 inches high! Pap gifted me with a few… but I have always wondered what happened to them, ultimately.

The AP was a “service” organization for newspapers, not a true syndicate. As with its news, features, and wire-photo services, newspapers subscribed, or not, and received everything, to use as they wished. Comics, cartoons, columns, and material offering advice to the lovelorn, bridge and poker strategies, kids’ puzzles, and such, were part of the “package.” (It is difficult to gauge, therefore, the popularity or client lists of its comic strips, as editors variable commitments to cartoons and comics).

So Pap’s cartoons were run by major newspapers, many minor newspapers seeking the look of a pro in their pages depicting major personalities and events, and even Sunday color sections for a while. He was a consummate professional indeed, composing this panels in the form associated with (but not originated by) Willard Mullin – a large realistic portrait, realized by aid of a Pantograph, from photo reference; smaller line drawings, often humorous, illustrating facts and stats in an orbit around the star of the day.

Pap

Yes, THAT Ozzie Nelson, later of Ozzie and Harriet; father of Rick Nelson

 Here are a couple of Sports Slants by Pap. The color feature was offered to Sunday supplements; the AP struggled to maintain a foothold in those venues, with minimal success. Nevertheless features like Things To Come by Clyde Barrow; Scorchy Smith by Frank Robbins, Rodlow Willard, and others; Neighborly Neighbors by Morris; and Oaky Doaks ran for some years.

Charlie McGill

Charlie McGill was a local sports cartoonist – local to me in the North Jersey suburbs of New Jersey – and he lived in my town of Closter. The example here is a spot drawing he did for a sports column. McKevin McVey also drew for the Bergen Record, a paper I delivered after school. McVey, who joined the ADK hiking club I belonged to in upstate New York, drew more theatrical caricatures than sports or editorial cartoons.

Ray Gotto “Play Ball! – New York Mets logo

I knew Ray Gotto in several capacities. I seldom read The Sporting News, where his mannered sports cartoons often graced front pages. I was a fan of his two baseball-themed comic strips, Ozark Ike and Cotton Woods. But to many of us Ray’s place in history was cemented as the designer of the New York Mets logo. My hometown team, wherever I have lived; suffering with them today. Ray’s design was their first, in 1962, and is on uniforms and licensing products still.

 Sometime, here, I will share more of Ray Gotto’s artwork, non-sports. Back in the 1970s  Max Allan Collins and I dreamed up a 1930s detective strip, Heaven and Heller, and Ray was one of the artists who auditioned, drawing two weeks of dailies, and a Sunday page. Collins successfully roamed the landscape, subsequently, with premise in various permutations and plain mutations. I have read about them.

Bill Gallo – caricature of Rocky Graziano and Rocky’s autograph

Bill Gallo drew, and wrote (mostly about boxing) for the New York Daily News. Always nice to me, Bill was the old-fashioned “colyumnist” and sports cartoonist – taciturn and cigar-chomping – but warm and congenial very close to the surface. He was a very effective president of the National Cartoonists Society for a term or two (thanks in large part to his great wife Delores). Here is a drawing he did of the colorful boxing legend Rocky Graziano, when we were all at some dinner together.

John Cullen Murphy – caricature of Jack Dempsey and Jack’s autograph

Speaking of sports strips, and boxing legends, I will call up again a caricature from another dinner when I asked John Cullen Murphy – who drew the boxing strip Big Ben Bolt for years prior to Prince Valiant; Al Capp’s brother Elliott Caplin was its writer – to sketch the legendary Jack Dempsey.

Before I leave – I will write more about other sports cartoonists I knew in future columns – no mention of the genre should be allowed with pausing at the greatest of them all, Willard Mullin. (Yes, deserving of a separate column.)

Willard Mullin – “’Tain’t a fit night out for man nor beast...” except in the hands of Willard Mullin

This example, of hundreds that could be called up, shows Willard at his best. Concepts? He was Mr Sports. Likenesses? Thanks to the sports cartoonists’ best friends, Pantographs and “Lucie” projectors – flawless. But Willard was astonishing at his cartoon line-work: casual but impeccable anatomy (figures seemingly in poses impossible to photograph, but invariably spot-on as Willard drew them); arresting compositions; humorous all the time, but never a detour from the subject matter.

Willard Mullins’ pen lines and anatomy and composition all struck me – no matter how unlikely the juxtaposition – of what Russell Patterson sports cartoons would have looked like if he strayed from Broadway and Hollywood to the gyms, camps, and prize fights. I mean that as high compliment to both artists.

More to come. This topic can go to extra innings!

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A Crowded Life in Comics – Al Smith, Jack Dempsey, John Cullen Murphy

Two Champs

by Rick Marschall

Still back in Old Testament days, so to speak, I remember Christmastide 1973. The National Cartoonists Society New York chapter for all intents and purposes was the NCS back then, in terms of number of members and activities, Orlando and northern Ohio and southern California notwithstanding.

There were monthly meetings in the Lamb’s Club, with first-rate panel discussions; the annual Reuben awards festivities invariably were at the Plaza or the Waldorf-Astoria; the officers, workers (for instance, editors of the publications), and the “Scribe” who held us all together, all were New Yorkers; Marge Duffy Devine was a former King Features employee. Many “outside” events were still “close in” to New York City – for instance, the annual bash hosted by legendary bandleader Fred Waring was at his Shawnee Country Club… on the New Jersey/ Pennsylvania border.

(Fred, by the way, whose big band Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians was a middle-level success on stage and in recordings. But his tinkering hobby led him to invent the Waring Blender – the first of kitchen devices of electric mixers, blenders, food processors – and made his real fortune. He could afford to throw the generous cartoonist weekends. Drawings on easels, especially on tablecloths, were saved by Fred and framed and eventually displayed.)

 —Al Smith (1902-1986) NCS Biography —

A different NCS than today. I was in the right place at the right time. Getting to know many of the cartoonists in NYC area, I was a guest at NCS meetings from an early age. Implausible, but true, I was 11 when Al Smith (Mutt and Jeff) brought me in, after getting my parents’ permission. My father, a comics fan, would say no? Subsequently Vern Greene and Harry Hershfield and Rube Goldberg were among others who invited me.

One of those traditional and oh-so-New-York events was the annual NCS Christmas party at Mama Leone’s, the legendary Italian eatery in the Theater District. The year I recall here was 1973, even before I worked for any of the syndicates, but I had become a familiar face; and I was the political cartoonist for the Connecticut Herald. I think I was also writing for Cartoonist PROfiles and other publications.

 —Big Ben Bolt, John Cullen Murphy, Dec 25, 1953 —

 —Big Ben Bolt, John Cullen Murphy, Dec 20, 1956 —

Anyway, these monthly get-togethers not only were populated by the virtual Who’s Who of the top cartoonists… but there were celebrities, too, who were welcomed to crash the parties, or were amateur cartoonists themselves. Like Fred Waring. And another Fred, Fred Gwynne, who actually illustrated several books, and was a regular (prepping around this time for the Broadway revival of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof). Margaret Hamilton – not a cartoonist but a hilarious (!) friend to us all, not typecast as the Wicked Witch of the West after all, a jolly gal – lived on Gramercy Square and was a regular. Will Jordan, when he was in the mood, would join us and, of course, be asked to “do Ed Sullivan,” his claim to fame.

 —Jack Dempsey shows Doug Fairbanks the punch that
took the heavyweight championship from Jess Willard —

Then there was Jack Dempsey (1895-1983). The legendary heavyweight champ, the Mannassa Mauler, was still around (with the help of a cane) as was his great restaurant on Times Square. There are still multitudes of people – I am one of them – who swear that the best cheesecake ever in New York City, or anywhere, was from Dempsey’s.

He was heavyweight champion of the world from 1919 to 1926 (and some say still the greatest) – a bygone era? Yet here he was in our midst. To me this was like strolling around Mount Olympus. Jack was always friendly and happy to recall old times, old boxers, and… old sports cartoonists, which I managed to ask about, despite the hubbub and singing and drinking and the usual boy’s choir from St Pancras Church and their Christmas carols.

 —John Cullen Murphy, August 5, 1961 —

At one point that evening I looked through the cigarette and cigar-smoke haze and spotted Jack Murphy. John Cullen Murphy (1919-2004), the eventual successor of Hal Foster on Prince Valiant, was then drawing Big Ben Bolt for King Features, written by Eliot Caplin, Al Capp’s brother. John Cullen Murphy’s son Cullen, who among other credits like editing at The Atlantic and at Vanity Fair, wrote the Prince Valiant continuities for 25 years. He recently wrote a memoir, Cartoon County, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jack seemed an unlikely artist for a rough-and-tumble boxing strip (“lace curtain Irish,” was Rube’s characterization of him, as opposed to “shanty Irish”). I had an idea for another collaboration.

 —Jack Dempsey and John Cullen Murphy at a National Cartoonists Society party—

I asked Jack Murphy, famous boxing cartoonist, to do a drawing of Jack Dempsey, famous boxer. Both were happy to oblige. Both… remain Champs in every way.

 —John Cullen Murphy Self-Portrait—

❉

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