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Yabba Dabba Jew?  July 8th, 2011

Fred Flinstone turns 50 this television season. We already knew that he was voiced by an expert radio performer, the late Alan Reed, but it came as a surprise to recently learn that he based the stone age character on his own grandfather.

Reed performed often in radio drama. He performed countless roles, but radio fans will know him best as the elegant poet Falstaff Openshaw on Fred Allen’s comedies, and as the repetitive cabbie Shrevie Shrevnitz on The Shadow. (In fact, whenever Fred is called upon in an episode of The Flintstones to disguise himself, Reed often lapses into these earlier characterizations.)

When Hanna-Barbera hired Reed in 1960 to voice the lead character in its prehistoric sitcom, all were faced with a problem. While Fred was obviously based on Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners, no one wanted to mimic actor Jackie Gleason’s voice.

We’re indebted to an article in the magazine Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life. Titled “Yabba Dabba Jew,” it describes how Reed tapped his own Jewish roots to create the character.

Reed, a New York native, was born in 1907 as Theodore Bergman. To survive, his family often had to rely on the generosity of Reed’s maternal grandfather, Abraham Greenberg, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine. He was not overly generous, and Reed later recalled the nightly profanity-laced quarrels.

As Reed built his radio portfolio, his characters “all sounded different, but they had one thing in common: They all had a touch of Abraham Greenberg, Reed’s grandfather,” reports the Tablet. “For all the broad comedy and exaggerated accents, Reed realized that at the heart of every immigrant’s story was buried a deep uncertainty, a throbbing anxiety, a certain confusion about preserving the old world’s values in the new one. As a child, Reed had witnessed these emotions overwhelm his grandfather, and he resented the old man and his ways. As an adult, however, he could turn the maddening into the sublime, recreating one Abraham Greenberg after another and giving his creations the gift of warmth and humor.

“Reed’s Fred spoke in a soulful voice, with a note of hurt quivering beneath each cheerful statement and a touch of insecurity making even the most straightforward lines tremble just a bit. It was a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone living in the outskirts of society and doing his best to pass for one of the guys, a voice Reed had heard so often growing up from immigrants veteran and new. It was, in other words, the perfect voice for Fred Flintstone.”

We entirely agree.

Reed died in 1977. You can read the original article about Fred Flintstone’s Jewish roots at www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/46512/yabba-dabba-jew/print/

- Jay

Posted in animation, history | Comments Off

Onion creator returns “Jim’s Journal” to comics  April 20th, 2011

Before The Onion, there was “Jim’s Journal.” The cult-classic comic strip returns next week on gocomics.com.

Scott Dikkers, founding and longtime editor of The Onion, found his first national success with the feature, which ran in more than 200 college newspapers in the 1990s.

The Chicago Tribune called it “fabulous,” and described the offbeat strip: “There are no punch lines, no sight gags, just quirky observations and a series of unrelated events.” The character was so low-key that when he praised something highly, it was always just “pretty good.”

Among the strip’s continuing fans is Rich Dahm, executive producer and head writer of The Colbert Report. “I like to read ‘Jim’s Journal’ every day,” he says. “It’s pretty good.”

Fans loved the daily diary of Jim’s remarkably quiet college adventures – except for those who didn’t. At Kansas State University, the comic’s pre-Seinfeld brand of “humor about nothing” sparked such rage that a “Kill Jim” campaign was launched, including protests and t-shirts. Other colleges loved it so much that students held “Jim” parties and dressed as the character for Halloween.

“Jim’s Journal” initially ran in The Daily Cardinal, a student paper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, starting in 1987. After the creation of The Onion, it appeared there and in six book collections that hit the bestseller list . It was named by Rolling Stone as one of readers’ top favorites. Some of the book titles went through five printings, and the treasury edition regularly sells on eBay for prices topping $150.

When Dikkers retired the beloved feature in 1997, The Tech, the student paper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted, “When a distant star goes out, it can take many years for its light to stop reaching us.”

For many years, Dikkers resisted reviving the Zen-like comic strip, though fans constantly asked him to do so. “I’ve done so many other things, and I don’t usually like to look back,” he says. “It’s funny. I did The Onion, I made some movies and a ton of viral videos. I started the Dikkers Cartoon Company. But people still come up and say, ‘You did ‘Jim’? I love ‘Jim’!”

The revived feature will make use of the original strips, but will include roughly half all-new material. It begins again as a prequel, with Jim ready to graduate from high school, wondering about his future.

In the end, says Dikkers, he didn’t revive the comic strip because of its staunch fan base, though he appreciates the enthusiasm. “People so often told me they thought of Jim as their friend,” he says. “He’s my friend, too. And I kind of miss him! I want to see what he’s been up to.”

“Jim’s Journal” returns Monday, April 25, on gocomics.com. For more on Scott Dikkers’ animation studio, visit www.dikkers.com.

- Jay

Posted in comic books, in the news | 1 Comment »

Not mad after all: the creator of MAD magazine  March 28th, 2011

In 1987, five years before his death, we had the good fortune to interview William M. Gaines, longtime publisher of MAD magazine. He was also the son of the man who arguably invented  comic books.

Gaines was a dominant figure in 1950s comic book publishing, pushing the medium to its limits with adult tales of horror, adventure and science fiction. The influence of his Entertaining Comics line of titles — for example, Tales of the Crypt – continues today across a range of media.

Entertaining Comics, or “EC,” was founded as Educational Comics by Gaines’ father, Max, who pioneered the first comic books in 1933. As co-publisher of American Comics and partner in DC Comics, he introduced The Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Hawkman. He was also instrumental in launching Superman. Max died in an accident in 1947. His 25-year-old son, William, then took over EC.

Q: What inspired your father to start Educational Comics? Did he really want to educate through comics, or-

A: No, he never — among other things, he had originally been a high school principal. He graduated from the Indiana State Normal School, which is a school of education. In those days it was a two-year course. And my mother did, too. And then by a strange coincidence – because they barely knew each other in college – he ended up a principal in a small Pennsylvania town where my mother was a teacher, and that’s how they met. So he was always interested in education, yes.

So when he had the disagreements with his partners up at DC, he said one day, “Either you buy me out or I’ll buy you out.” And they said, “Okay, we’ll buy you out.” So he sold his whole business to them and started anew with Picture Stories from the Bible, and then he went into Picture Stories from Science, American History, World History, and then he got killed and that was as far as it went.

He had also then started EC Comics, Educational Comics. He was publishing things like Tiny Tot Comics and Land of the Lost, which was a radio program of his day. Real funny animal type stuff. When he got killed . . . I was brought down . . . taken over . . .

I also was a teacher. I had studied to be a chemistry teacher. So I never taught. Instead I became a publisher, and I got rid of the Educational Comics and the Teeny Tot (sic) comics and all the other junk that was costing a fortune, and started putting out Westerns, love comics.

We were putting out love comics, and we had a page of letters, which we made up. Terrible frauds! We made up all these letters and names of them. We had in one love comic, we were Amy, in Advice from Amy. In another love comic we were angry at Advice from Amy. And then we started a Western love comic. Think of that! And we were Chuck, in Advice from Chuck!

(Laughs) And we would sit there at the typewriter and I’m typing these absurd letters and never answering them! (Laughs) And we would do this for every issue of every love comic we ever put out.

Q: What inspired you to start the horror line?

A: Well, we hated this crap we were doing. I think Al (Feldstein) suggested, he said, “You know, I remember these wonderful (radio drama) programs from my youth: Lights Out, Suspense, The Witches Tale. Why don’t we put out some comics with that sort of story in them?” Al wanted to put out suspense-type comics with logical endings. I had been a reader of Wonder Comics, Astounding Comics, Amazing Comics and Weird Tales.

(Gaines likely meant Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, etc., and other cheaply-printed “pulp” short story magazines, not comics titles, as he next notes. – ed.)

These were all pulps. I grew up on that stuff, and I loved that kind of junk. When you tell a good suspense story, I didn’t want a logical ending. I wanted a stupid supernatural ending. If you marry somebody who comes back to life dripping flesh, that’s my kind of stuff. Vampires and werewolves and ghouls. That’s what I was brought up on. And we got a thesaurus, and we first came up with The Crypt of Terror.

We changed the name; the wholesalers screamed. And after we had The Crypt of Terror, we said — we went around — we went to the thesaurus and said, “The crypt could be a vault, terror could be horror,” so we came up with The Vault of Horror. And then we went on a third, so we went back to the thesaurus and we found that a synonym for “vault” and “crypt” is a “haunt.” We think of “haunt” as a verb, but there was a word, a noun, so we came up with The Haunt of Fear. So we had our three horror titles. I think today they’re unmatched, with the horrible, terrible stuff we came up with, out of our fiendish little minds.

Q: If you had known all those years ago, or if again today you would have to go before a Senate subcommittee to defend horror comics, do you think you would defend them as intensely and for the same reasons?

A: I’d defend them even more intensely! I would say, “Go to any movie that’s shown on a Saturday morning anywhere in this country, and you will watch something that is so bad that, compared to this, my stuff is like fairy tales!” And it is. The horror films today aren’t by me. The whole thing is absurd. I think kids love this crap! They sure loved it in my day, and they still love it today!

Q: When MAD started coming out, were you — this is #2, with the hex story (“Hex” told of a baseball pitcher who was given the evil eye. – ed.) – was that intended to make fun of your own comics, or-

A: Oh, sure!

Q: -or was this Kurtzman’s-

A: Well! We started out MAD with the idea of making fun of everything we published. We published love comics, we published horror comics, we published science fiction comics and we published suspense comics. And that’s what MAD made fun of in the beginning. And then we found that was too confining. We should make fun of everything in the world.

So Harvey expanded it to business ethics, television, movies. Anything else he could think of to take on. It just moved on from there. When, as a result of the Senate Subcommittee hearings, we eventually had to give up just about everything I published except for MAD, I just – first, I tried a bunch of other comics, such as Aces High and Valor. Then a comic called Psychoanalysis, a comic called M.D., and a lot of stuff that was way ahead of its time. Which were complete failures.

Q: These were not Picto Fiction books? (A line of heavily illustrated short story magazines published by Gaines.)

A: No. After these failed, we tried Picto Fiction, and they failed, too. The reasons these things failed isn’t because they weren’t good. They were good. But, by this time, all the wholesalers in the whole country were so mad at me, that anything I published, they wouldn’t put out on the stands. So if I would publish 300,000 copies, I would get back about 280,000, because no one would ever get a chance to by them. So I quickly went bankrupt, and that was the end of that.

Except for MAD. MAD saved my tail, because this was the one thing — we weren’t able to publish (anything else).

Oh, they complained about MAD in the beginning, too! But I changed MAD from a comic into a 25-cent black and white, much like it is now. I cannot destroy the myth that I changed it to avoid the Code (the industry self-regulating Comics Code – ed.). This is not true. I wouldn’t have had enough sense, and I was too stubborn to prevent (Code restrictions). I changed it for an entirely different reason.

Harvey Kurtzman, who was the editor, had gotten a much more lucrative offer from somebody else (Pageant magazine; a year later, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner hired Kurtzman to edit Trump, a short-lived humor magazine – ed.).

The only reason I could convince him to stay and not leave was to offer to change MAD from a comic to a magazine, which was something he wanted to do years before, and I wouldn’t let him. So he changed MAD into roughly the format it is today: 64 pages, black and white, sold for a quarter. And it took off. And it was out of the Code, because it was no longer a comic book. So it accomplished that (getting around censors), but that’s not why I did it. And that’s what saved it.

Q: As a comic book, MAD accepted advertising. Why did you decide not to accept it as a slick?

A: Well, MAD accepted advertising in the old days, because we sold the entire group. Until the very end, when we were really desperate for money, I only had three ads in any given comic. This was completely different from the average comic today. Comics have 10, 12 pages in a 32 page book. It’s almost like the advertisements have taken over. I never wanted ads.

Q: I’ve seen the reprints, but I don’t know what it first looked like as a slick. Was it radically different from its format as a comic book?

A: It was much like its format today. MAD #24 looked very much like today’s MAD, only it was 64 pages instead of 28. It had that rim, which you could call that old MAD rim of drawings around the edge (of the cover). Very ornate figures of a man around the edge.

Q: When did you get rid of the sub-title, “Humor in a Jugular Vein”?

A: Oh, right at the point. I don’t recall that “Humor in a Jugular Vein” was in the MAD figurehead, or if it was, it was obscurely somewhere on the side panel or something.

See, all the EC comics – as you can see – had roughly the same format. We had something around the edge. We originally proposed – we sat down, myself and my four editors – and I said, “Let’s do a humor comic.” Now the reason for this was – and this is the real story – Feldstein was doing seven comics every two months. And Kurtzman was doing two. Neither of these persons were on salary. I paid them so much per magazine for editing, so much for writing and so much for drawing. And Al was doing seven and Harvey was doing two.

As almost any college can figure out, Feldstein was making three and a half times as Kurtzman. This made Kurtzman very unhappy! But Kurtzman was very slow. I said, “Harvey!” – he was doing war books at the time. He was researching everything. If a story had submarines, he went down in a submarine. That kind of a thing. It was very time consuming, (and) they weren’t selling as well as the horror books.

So I said, “Harvey, I can’t raise your rates. I can’t afford it. Why don’t you just put out a third comic every two months, make it a humor comic, there’ll be no research, we’ll slug it in between the other two, and your income will go up 50 percent. And that is the only reason there is a MAD magazine today.

Q: He didn’t foresee it as a big seller?

A: No. No. You know, (at the time) I had nine magazines, so now I have 10. So he did that. Of course, Harvey being Harvey, it took him as long to do MAD as it took him to do a war magazine! (Laughs) So he had to drop one of the war magazines from then on, and his income never did go up that way, so we had to devise another device (to raise Kurtzman’s pay). But that’s why there was a MAD.

If Harvey had been faster, we probably never would have published the humor magazine. Which is a strange reason for having created a multi-million dollar magazine, but that’s how it happened.

- Jay

Posted in comic books, history, superheroes | 18 Comments »

The mad founder of MAD magazine, William M. Gaines  February 18th, 2011

In 1987, five years before his death, we had the good fortune to interview William M. Gaines, longtime publisher of MAD magazine. He was also the son of the man who arguably invented the comic book.

Gaines was a dominant figure in 1950s comic book publishing, pushing the medium to its limits with adult tales of horror, adventure and science fiction. The influence of his Entertaining Comics line of titles — for example, Tales of the Crypt — continues today across a range of media.

Entertaining Comics, or “EC,” was founded as Educational Comics by Gaines’ father, Max, who pioneered the first comic books in 1933. As co-publisher of American Comics, he introduced The Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Hawkman. He was also instrumental in launching Superman. Max died in an accident in 1947. His 25-year-old son, William, then took over EC.

In 1955, after Congressional criticism of horror comics, nearly all EC titles were dropped by distributors. William Gaines was left with only MAD, which he had created in 1952 with his brilliant editor, the late Harvey Kurtzman. After the controversy, Gaines quickly moved to remake the MAD comic book into a “slick” – a newsprint black and white magazine with a high-quality color cover.

It’s impossible to overestimate the influence of MAD on the raucous boiling pot of American humor in the 1950s and ’60s. Its early contributors (who were also fans) included comedians Stan Freburg, Bob and Ray, and Ernie Kovacs, who were breaking similar boundaries in radio and television. Terry Gilliam once said of MAD’s founding editor, Kurtzman, “In many ways Harvey was one of the godparents of Monty Python.”

Long-celebrated for his majestic girth and commanding presence, in person Gaines displayed a soft tenor voice. For the most part he spoke kindly and carefully, except when the subject turned to his horror comics, in which case his words were fast, excited and nearly angry, even after more than 30 years since his battles with Congress.

We spoke about his father’s contributions to the comics industry, and we brought along some of the hardcover Russ Cochran reprints of early EC publications, including MAD.

“It’s wonderful,” Gaines said of publisher Cochran. “The newsprint comics will eventually deteriorate, but he’s done it on gorgeous paper.” Since then, MAD has been reissued on compact disk, forever ageless.

Similarly, while newsprint may eventually crumble and vanish, the reputations of Max and William Gaines will never deteriorate.

Q: Of course, in the early days, you never expected MAD to be reprinted again.

A: Oh, no! (Laughs.)

Q: In your Frank Jacobs biography (The Mad World of William M. Gaines), he makes a lot of what he perceives as your idiosyncrasies, your sense of humor, your appetite and so on. The whole idea of course helps the magazine, because it makes you out to be the king of all the nuts at the magazine. But beyond that, what do you primarily see yourself as? An organizer?

A: Yes, yes. That really is my function. I’m an organizer. I pick the people, or I pick the people who pick the people. And so something went right in the beginning, because at EC we ended up with (writer/editors Al) Feldstein, (Johnny) Craig and (Harvey) Kurtzman, and an incredible array of artists that has probably never been matched in the comics industry. And then Kurtzman going on to create MAD, and getting it started the first couple years, and then (my) falling out with Kurtzman, to have Feldstein to pull right in – I was very fortunate in my editors. I’ve been very, very lucky. I always had top people.

Q: Do you think of yourself on the creative end, other than putting your foot down from time to time?

A: Very, very little anymore. I’m in on cover conferences, and I veto covers if I don’t like them. I insist on changes if I want. Other than that, I don’t have time, and I don’t really have the expertise. I’m not really a comic. I think I have a certain flair for knowing when a cover is commercially right. The rest of the staff will tend to get too high-fallutin’ about the art. They get so carried away with the art that they forget that it’s a MAD cover. So every once in awhile I have to go in and fuss about that. But beyond that, everything just runs smoothly. In the editorial department, I have very little to do.

Q: In your last issue, in the table of the contents page, there was a lead-in for ads in the center section. (It was a parody; at the time, Gaines would not allow MAD to accept advertisements.) Is that half-serious at all?

A: (Laughs) No, no, it was a big put on! I didn’t have anything to do with it! The first time I read the book, that’s when I knew about it. But it fooled everybody. It fooled my printer, it fooled them up at (MAD owner Time-Warner). They were so gleeful, because they always want me to take ads, and I won’t. Here they read this thing and they say, ‘Oh, thank God!’ And they turn to the middle thing and they see all this gibberish. And then they know they’ve been had, like the rest of the world. (Laughs)

Q: You surrounded yourself with all these creative people. Did you ever want to create something for the magazine or any of the comics?

A: Oh, yes! In the horror/science fiction days, I came up with most of the plots. But I don’t have that kind of line for doing comedy. I just can’t create it. Every time I come up with an idea, they tell me to get out and mind my own business.

Q: Have you ever wanted to draw cartoons yourself?

A: No.

Q: Not even as a kid?

A: No, no. I have no art talent at all.

Q: Your father frankly invented what we know as the American comic book. Did he have a special love for the medium, or did he see it merely as a publishing opportunity?

A: He was strictly a business man. He’d been in a million businesses before that, some successful, some not. He was in the necktie business, and he put out the “We Want Beer” neckties when we were in Prohibition. I wish I could find one of those. Oh, God! He’d always had some crazy ideas. He did Picture Stories from the Bible. Before he did them in comics, he did them as a great big, gloomy book, I remember, with the text of the Bible on the right hand page and a picture from the Bible in black and white on the left hand page. As I say, it was a gloomy, dismal thing, and I wish I could find one of those. Pop was not archive-conscious, like I am.

There’s so many things he did that are gone because he just didn’t save them. But he was in many, many businesses. As I understand, he was a haberdasher, he was in a munitions place for awhile, working in a place that made ammunition. I don’t know what else he did. Finally, he ended up in the advertising business. He worked for an outfit I recall by the name of Askin Marine, but it went down in the Depression, so nobody’s ever heard of it. (Possibly Askin & Marine Company of Terre Haute, Ind. – ed.) It was while he was involved in advertising that he got this idea of little comic books as premiums, to either advertise products or give away in stores.

That’s what led to the whole comic industry, in conjunction with a binding genius who was – I can’t remember his name, but he created Charleston Binding, which did all the early comics. (Possibly John Santangelo, Sr., or Ed Levy, founders of T.W.O Charles Company, which later became Charlton Publications – ed.) The process was very simple. You take a (Sunday) comic page, and you fold it over once, you fold it over twice, and you print it that way, so that each page is one-fourth of a regular Sunday comic. Then you trim it, bind it, put a cover on it, and you’ve got a comic book.

The early comic books were 16 pages. Then they were 16 pages with the cover. Some were eight pages. And then they got to be 32 pages, 64 pages. And then the story goes that my father put 10-cent stickers on them one day and stuck them on a news stand, and they sold out in a couple of hours. He took the whole idea to Dell Publishing, and that’s how comic books were born.

Famous Funnies Series 1 was the first comic. Famous Funnies #1 was the first comic of the regular run of comics. Famous Funnies went on up into the 100s, 200s (of issues). Meanwhile, he had quit that and was doing other comics like Popular Comics. Finally, he got into publishing comics on his own, with the people who later owned DC Comics. He was partner with them, (in an associated brand) called American Comics. He put out a number of comics. The biggest was Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman was written and created by a gentleman of the name of William Moulton Marston. He was a psychologist who, among other things, invented the lie detector. He came up with the idea of Wonder Woman, and if you see an early copy of Wonder Woman, you’ll see it was written by Charles Moulton. ‘Charles Moulton’ was my father’s middle name (sic) and William Moulton Marston’s middle name. And that’s the fictitious name of the person who was supposed to be doing Wonder Woman. It was written by Charles Moulton Marston and drawn by a gentleman by the name of Peters (Harry G. Peter – ed.)

I used to take the early artwork over to Staten Island on a ferry, where Peters lived, and walked up the long hill in the summer heat, and deliver the letter, the piece of paper, on which Peters would then draw Wonder Woman. Pop also came up with The Green Lantern and The Flash, and I don’t know how many other characters who are still around today. And then one day Superman came to his attention.

In what I like to say that, in the biggest boo-boo of his career, he sent it up to DC, because they needed a feature for Action (Comics) #1. I used to have Action #1 all over the house. I was knee-deep in Action #1s! You know what they go for today? About $16, $18 grand apiece. (Laughs) But we threw them all out! (Laughs) I don’t think he ever saved one.

To be continued.

- Jay

Posted in comic books, history | 3 Comments »

The unspeakable greatness of Henry  January 24th, 2011

One of the most unusual and popular comic strips of all time featured a chubby, bald boy who never spoke.

Henry was wildly successful during the Great Depression. Readers were fascinated, and tried to nail down particulars. The strip’s creator, Carl Anderson, wrote to his fans that Henry was not bald; he was a platinum blonde whose hair had been shaved off. Nor was Henry mute. Anderson said that he just chose not to speak. (Later comic books and animated films featured Henry speaking.)

Carl Anderson was born in Madison, Wis., on Feb. 14, 1865, the son of Norwegian immigrants. At the age of 25, he decided to become a cartoonist. He worked as an animator and freelance newspaper cartoonist in New York for decades.

Hit hard by the Depression, he came back to Madison, to stay with his sisters and care for his ailing father. He largely gave up on cartooning. His plan was to become a cabinet maker.

He still did some cartoon work on the side, teaching a course at the Madison Vocational School. There, in a setting worthy of any Hollywood rags-to-riches musical, Anderson first drew the cartoon that was to bring him worldwide fame.

“One night an eager group of pupils crowded around his desk, all eyes glued on his facile right hand, which was producing the picture of a sway-backed, pot-belled old nag,” recalled the late Don Trachte, one of those students. “A very small boy under the horse was lifting a second boy whose comical bald head was pressed against the horse’s belly. The first boy was saying, ‘Does your head feel warmer now, Henry?’ ”

It became the first of many panels published regularly by The Saturday Evening Post. Soon, William Randolph Hearst wanted the feature for his chain of newspapers. At the age of 69, Anderson had finally hit the big time.

Anderson made Trachte his assistant, and together they reshaped Henry as a comic strip. It first appeared in newspapers on Dec. 17, 1934. Just a month later, a magazine poll named Henry the most popular strip in the nation.

Pantomime strips once were much more common. Besides their natural charm, they allowed very young readers to develop the habit of reading newspapers. The other best known example is probably Otto Soglow’s The Little King. Henry was never completely silent, however; secondary characters sometimes spoke. Still, the strip’s reliance on visuals, rather than words, made it a favorite here and overseas.

“Carl Anderson often said that, for some freak reason, in the worst economic times he’d have his best luck,” said Trachte. “The idea behind it was fantasy, to get people’s minds off the Depression.”

In its heyday, Henry appeared in more than 360 papers around the world, earning Anderson around $1,500 a week during the height of the Depression.

With success like that, it should come as no surprise that Henry even created controversy in political circles. The governor of North Carolina and Gen. Douglas MacArthur argued whether a certain device Henry played with was a slingshot or a bean-shooter.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was finally called upon to make peace. “Of course, different parts of the country have their own names for deadly weapons, as well as for other things,” he said. “But around my neck of the woods, in upstate New York, we used to call the forked stick with elastic bands a slingshot.”

Anderson never married. “He wasn’t terribly talkative,” his niece, Joanna Overn, told us. “But he had a whimsical sense of humor. He felt at ease with kids.”

Henry still runs in around 75 newspapers. It was carried on by Trachte and others after Anderson’s death, in 1948.

Though Henry no longer enjoys the popularity it once did, Trachte was optimistic when we spoke with him. “Humor goes in trends, you know. It’s faddish, like everything else.”

- Jay

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To be or not to be a cartoonist: famous actors’ other careers  January 3rd, 2011

It’s well-known that cartoonists have to be actors. They must be able to create believable characters and convey emotion with a few drawn lines.

 Less well-known is that many actors and directors have been cartoonists. Some were successes, but others turned to film only after their cartooning careers failed.

Even aside from animation, the two media — film and cartoons — have often cross-pollinated each other.

Gary Cooper, star of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, High Noon and countless other classic films, originally wanted to be an editorial cartoonist. Unable to make a living as a cartoonist in his native Helena, Montana, he left to join family in Los Angeles. He looked for newspaper work there, and on the side started working as a film extra.

This amazing drawing of the British TV series Doctor Who was not created by a cartoonist. Well, it was, but by the time that Russell T. Davies drew actor David Tennant facing the Doctor’s many enemies, Davies had instead become a writer and television producer. In fact, it was Davies who revived the popular BBC series in 2005.

Actor Martin Landau, star of the Mission: Impossible TV series, received an academy award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. In the 1940s and ’50s he helped draw The Gumps, a popular comic strip.

David White, who played Darren’s boss on Bewitched, drew Little Lulu comic books.

You likely won’t recognize his name, but the deep-voiced John Dehner was a radio drama star in the 1940s. He also was appeared in countless television shows, including The Rockford Files, The Twilight Zone, Columbo, Get Smart and many, many more. Before he launched his acting career, he was a Disney animator.

Speaking of radio, the old time radio sitcom Fibber McGee and Molly was created by an unemployed Chicago cartoonist, Donald Quinn.

Silent film comedian Harry Langdon began as a cartoonist. On the other hand, George Herriman, creator of the legendary Krazy Kat comic strip, never performed in film, but he drew his strips at the Hal Roach Studio. He often said that Krazy Kat felt right at home with the film studio that hosted Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang.

W.C. Fields came to film after Broadway and vaudeville, where he primarily worked as a comic juggler. For a time, he was also a frustrated San Francisco cartoonist. The constant deadline pressure turned him back to show biz.

“It was a great life, and no mistake,” he recalled of his cartooning days in San Francisco. “And I am glad that it is all over with. Now all I have to do is loaf along and take my own time.”

Frederico Fellini is probably the best-known example of a cartoonist who found success as a film director. He translated his fantastic visions to films such as 8 ½, The Clowns and La Strada. Tim Burton is another cartoonist who turned to directing film, creating his own worlds in Edward Scissorhands, Batman and other features. At one time he was a Disney animator.

Hank Ketchum, creator of Dennis the Menace, was a frustrated actor in his youth. So too was Milt Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.

Oddly, Caniff may have given up acting, but filmmakers never gave up on him. Both Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles were fans of Caniff’s work, which featured moody lighting, deep focus and unusual framing. Welles’ even credited Caniff for directly influencing the look of his greatest film, Citizen Kane.

- Jay

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How Google got to be Google: Its cartoon namesake and Uncle Fred  December 20th, 2010

It’s oddly appropriate that Google, the popular search engine, is named for the comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. One of the oldest newspaper features, it was also one of the most up to date, thanks to the inventive mind of Fred Laswell. Laswell pioneered computer-assisted cartooning for print.

When the feature was created in 1919 by Billy DeBeck, it was named after its main character, Barney Google. The diminutive gambler and his horse, Spark Plug, still show up in papers from time to time. (Oddly, Spark Plug appears on the strip’s official King Features website, but Barney himself does not.) The strip was a wild hit and helped define the Jazz Age, popularizing original catchphrases such as “hot momma,” “bodacious, “great balls o’ fire,” “heebie-jeebies” and “horsefeathers.”

Following DeBeck’s death in 1942, his longtime assistant, Fred Lasswell, took over. He began emphasizing Barney’s mountain friends: Snuffy and Loweezy Smith and their neighbors. Ever since, readers have watched Snuffy spending lazy days playing checkers, pilfering chickens, sipping moonshine and snoozing. Meanwhile, his wife, Loweezy, has spent her hours chopping wood, plowing fields and cooking — in 900 newspapers in 21 countries.

Like Loweezy, Lasswell kept busy with a variety of tasks. He was one of the first to use a computer to help draw a comic strip. It will sound modest today, but at the time it was high-tech: in the early 1980s he linked a Macintosh II and a laserprinter to create a font that recreated his lettering style. Naturally inventive, over the years he also created a mechanical citrus harvester, and a comic book for the blind.

Toward the end of his life he made three videos to help teach young people learn about art. In them, he called himself “Uncle Fred.”

“Primarily, we’ve been selling quite a few (videos) in the elementary schools,’” Lasswell told us from his Tampa studio. “The videos are interactive. What I set out to do was to make little, simple drawings for children that they could follow along, and then to encourage them to use their own imaginations and go from there.”

Can a cartoonist become a good teacher? You bet. His first video won four stars from the editor of Parents magazine, who called Lasswell “a master teacher — energetic, witty, a genius at reducing a visual image to its essence so that school-age cartoonists not only copy his offerings but understand and learn from the principles involved.”

“I want the design to be ultra-, ultra-simple so the children can experience a feeling of accomplishment in a very short time,” Lasswell explained. “We come in through the back door of the education field. We teach them skills and all the fancy words and everything that go with color and hand-to-eye coordination — without saying, you know, ‘Sit up straight and don’t chew your gum in the classrooms.’ ”

It’s a far cry from the career Lasswell might have had, growing up on a rustic farm that had no telephone, refrigeration or indoor plumbing. His family roots were in Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee, and he drew on those memories to script Snuffy.

“I was always a hayseed,” Lasswell said. “I still carry some of that with me. For a while I tried to draw like Billy (DeBeck). It’s a hard thing to do. It takes the zip out of you somehow.”

Lasswell joined DeBeck in 1933, at the age of 17. DeBeck had been playing golf in Tampa when he spotted a poster Lasswell had created for the city’s chamber of commerce. DeBeck offered the young cartoonist a job at $25 a week, and Lasswell joined the strip. A year later, Snuffy was created. The hillbilly stole the limelight from Barney Google over the decades, thanks in large part to Lasswell’s gentle jibes, homespun humor and warmhearted wisecracks.

“It’s more than nostalgia,” he said. “I think the strip touches on a very human type of pure humor.”

It was the simplicity of genius, perhaps, as shown by another comic strip that Laswell drew as a partner feature for Barney Google. It was called Parlor, Bedroom and Sink, and it featured a baby named Bunky who spoke the dialogue of high-flown melodrama. It remains one of the most brilliant comic strips ever created.

Speaking of brilliance, in the late 1930s mathematician Edward Kasner was trying to devise a name for a very large number: 1 followed by 100 zeroes. His nine-year-old nephew, a comics afficionado, suggested “Google.” Kasner changed the spelling and introduced it to the academic world as “googol” in 1940.

In 1998 the founders of an internet search engine were similarly searching for a clever name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin hit on the obscure mathematical term but misspelled it yet again, ironically changing it back to its original form.

Uncle Fred died in 2001. Snuffy Smith and Barney Google are drawn today by John Rose. Summing up his best-known work, Lasswell told us, “It’s sort of bland, you might say, in a way,” referring to its lack of controversy.

Bland? Perhaps. But, every day, millions of internet users around the world pay tribute to Barney Google, DeBeck and Lasswell, without even knowing it.

(The Lasswell videos, Your Very Own Cartoonys, Cartoony Party and Far Out Pets, were released by CBS-Fox. Sadly, they are no longer available.)

- Jay

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The fall and upcoming rise of Classics Illustrated  December 6th, 2010

Classics Illustrated, the favorite comic book of generations of weary students, is coming back.

How many of us thanked God for Classics Illustrated when, as students, we awoke at midnight and realized that a certain book report was due the next morning?

The works of the world’s great authors, from Shakespeare to Twain, were all represented in the Classics line – a full novel in less than 50 pages, complete with biographical sketches and that immortal, unintentional closing joke: “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or public library.”

Right.

Some of us, of course, did get that “added enjoyment” by going on to the originals. But for many of us, the voyage stopped there. Classics Illustrated comics were a beloved, homey safety net.

The titles have an on-again off-again history. The original line of Classics Illustrated was put out by Gilbertson Publications from 1941 to 1973. They sold more than 25 million copies a year in 22 languages in 30 countries. The art, by largely forgettable cartoonists, was static, the adapted dialogue was staid, and the titles were often reprinted. But they were useful study aids, and undoubtedly they did propel many students toward conventional books.

In 1990, the title was revived and new editions were created by First Publishing Inc. and the Berkley Publishing group. It was a notably classy line, with celebrated artists such as Gahan Wilson.

At the time it was hoped that Classics Illustrated would help raise the image of comics in general; they were under attack for graphic displays of violence. The National Coalition on Tevelvision Violence had expanded its mandate to look at 80 comic book series. It found that “comics of extreme and hideous violence are quite common and are having a harmful effect on children, teen and young adult readers.”

In their study, Wonder Woman scored “X-unfit” for perceived sexual and violent content, the group’s worst rating. Even good old Mickey Mouse came in between the group’s score’s of “RV-13 to RV,” meaning that it supposedly had small to considerable harmful violent material.

Once again, the emphasis in the 1990s revival of Classics Illustrated was on follow-up reading.

“If someone picks up our Great Expectations and has never read Dickens, and reads our adaptation and says, ‘Hey, this guy Dickens is pretty cool. I want to read more,’ and then that person goes out and buys one of the originals, well, then our job is done,” said publisher Rick Obadiah.

It was a noble experiment that lasted only a year.

Despite disappearing for years at a time, Classics Illustrated has sporadically continued under other publishers. Since 2008, Classics Illustrated issues have been reprinted by Britain’s Classic Comic Store Ltd., but new titles have been lacking. That’s about to change.

In 2011 the publisher will start issuing all-new titles. The first will be Nicholas Nickleby, in May. Appropriately, in the beginning of that novel, Dickens criticizes “traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of parents, and the helplessness of children.”

And who are these supposedly terrible people? Why, the exact same “villains” that Classics Illustrated has helped students circumvent for generations: school teachers.

- Jay

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And now, our sponsor: cartoon commerce  November 8th, 2010

A Boston studio recently completed an animated film about an unlikely subject: the U.S. Federal Reserve System.

Lineplot Productions wrapped Silver Circle this October. It’s an independent CGI sci fi thriller, but its subject matter instantly reminded us of a classic animated short subject that looked at enterprise, employment and the economy. Yankee Dood It was a Warner Brothers cartoon that featured Elmer Fudd as king of the industrial elves. He and an assistant elf explained the free-market economic system to a shoemaker while gradually, magically turning into mice anytime someone mentioned the word “Jehosaphat.” Naturally, Sylvester the cat was very, very interested in those delicious transformations.

The short wasn’t a laugh riot, but it still sticks with us, which was precisely the intent of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which commissioned the film from Warners. Friz Freeling directed the 1956 cartoon, the third paid for by the foundation. It entered theatrical release and, later, regularly appeared on television.

Yankee Dood It and its paid-for peers — art or commerce, entertainment, infotainment — or just plain advertising? Whatever it is, the postwar Fudd film, meant for returning military personnel who were starting their own businesses, continues to gather fresh audiences. It’s available on Warner’s DVD Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume 6.

Other studios have hidden their commercial work or let it fall aside, forgotten. But virtually every animation house has at some time or another taken on jobs for paying customers. We may not bat an eye when Bart Simpson appears on TV today to enjoy Butterfinger candy bars, but other long-ago clients, and their spokescartoons, are surprising.

The most egregious examples of cartoons’ clients are the integrated TV commercials created by Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s for a certain stone-age family. The series shall remain unnamed here because of the advertisements’ content. These were called “integrated commercials,” because they were indistinguishable from the rest of the program, and they featured the main characters smoking Winston cigarettes. Later sponsors such as Welch’s grape juice and Skippy peanut butter got the same integrated treatment.

Integrated commercials were banned by the FCC in the 1970s, but a certain chocolaty cereal is still pitched by the caveman star – just not on his own show.

(Incidentally, while we cannot possibly defend them, cigarette companies are responsible for some of the most collectible of printed cartoon images. Before bubble gum cards, there were cards included in cigarette packs, often featuring cartoon stars. Among the most popular was the bald, mute boy comic strip character Henry, drawn by Carl Anderson. The cards featured exceedingly fine reproduction in painterly shades, far better than newspaper printing even today.)

Nearly as bizarre as smoking cartoons is Charlie Brown. He and his friends were not first animated for holiday specials. No, the Peanuts gang strangely appeared on television and in magazines to applaud the Ford Falcon automobile from 1960 to 1964.

Long before they were old enough to drive, Charlie Brown lovingly observed the car and told Lucy that he’d sure like to shake the hand of the man who designed it. Lucy angrily replied, “Did you ever consider it might be a woman?”

It’s well known that Jay Ward, who produced The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, also created and animated Cap’n Crunch for the sailor’s cereal commercials. But did you know that Warner Brothers’ star director, Chuck Jones, and UPA, the studio that launched Mr. Magoo, teamed to reelect Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

Hell-Bent for Election was made at the UPA studio by a moonlighting Jones in 1944. E.Y. Harburg, who wrote the songs for The Wizard of Oz, scored the theatrical advertisement. It was paid for and distributed by the United Auto Workers. Considering who paid for the film, it’s odd that it caricatured FDR as a streamlined locomotive.

Jones also worked with Dr. Seuss, long before they teamed in 1966 to create their Grinch Christmas TV special. Theodor Seuss Geisel and Jones both worked in the Warner military short subject unit during World War II, creating training films. Disney did the same at his own studio. Government money allowed filmmakers to survive while lucrative European markets were closed because of the war. Hal Roach Studios, home to Laurel and Hardy, similarly picked up live action military contracts and became so well-known for such work that it was called “Fort Roach.”

Walter Lantz and his Woody Woodpecker didn’t get such contracts; significantly, without a worldwide audience Lantz’ studio had to therefore shut down for the duration of the war.

Even Disney’s very first film, Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, was a 1922 advertising cartoon, created for a Kansas City dentist.

So is it all art, or is it commerce? In some cases, advertisers deserve at least a little credit for preserving popular characters who otherwise would be forgotten. Terrytoons studio characters such as Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle were all but unknown to kids in 2002 — until they reappeared to boost bleu cheese on television for the America’s Dairy Farmers brand.

Incidentally, don’t fear for mousey Elmer Fudd. As Yankee Dood It closed, he turned back into his human self by shouting the magic word, “Rumpelstiltskin.”

- Jay

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Making Disney’s first studio into a Kansas museum  October 8th, 2010

            This Oct. 16, if you happen to be in the area of Kansas City, Mo., you might consider supporting a fascinating project: the preservation of Walt Disney’s first studio.
            Disney founded his Laugh-O-gram Studio in May, 1922, at the age of 20. His silent-era cartoons covered a variety of topics before settling into a series nicknamed “Alice.” Very loosely based on Alice in Wonderland, the films mixed live actors with animated characters.
            In setting up his Kansas studio, Walt Disney recruited former coworkers from the Kansas City Film Ad Company. Many of them would become leading figures in the industry, including animators Ubbe Iwerks  and Friz Freling. Freling later gained fame as a director at Warner Bros. Disney also worked to project the films with theater organist Carl Stalling, who scored almost all the classic Warner Bros. films in decades to come.
            Unfortunately, Disney didn’t recruit his brother Roy, who later would be the business brains of the fabulous Disney empire. As the Kansas City studio started to crumble, to save money and make payroll, Walt moved into its offices, and bathed at a nearby train station. Later he liked to tell of a friendly mouse who made nighttime visits. Supposedly, this became the inspiration for Mickey Mouse.  The studio went bankrupt in 1923.
            Disney moved to Hollywood. Dispirited, he tried to enter live-action film production.  Finally he formed a new studio with his brother, and this one would last.
            The Kansas studio building, at 31st and Forrest Streets, gradually fell into disrepair. By 2004 much of its façade had fallen down, and it was scheduled for demolition.  Concerned citizens formed a non-profit named “Thank you, Walt Disney” to save it.  The former studio is now on the Register of National Historic Places.
            Preservation work continues, with the help of volunteers and a $450,000 matching donation from the Disney family. The future museum’s next benefit is Oct. 16, and features movies, an auction of items donated by the Disney studio, and a variety of other activities. But you don’t necessarily need to attend to help. Thank You, Walt Disney offers memberships and others ways of assisting.
For information on the good work of  Thank You, Walt Disney, visit http://www.thankyouwaltdisney.org

- Jay

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