I’ve come across quite a bit of Hank Ketcham’s work in the pages of my old magazine collection, and every once in a while something really cool crops up - like this very familiar looking kid, who predates Dennis the Menace by about a year. In The Merchant of Dennis, Ketcham describes how he “hauled out the shoebox where[he] stored [his] gags, picked out a dozen kid ideas and feverishly translated them into rough pencil sketches” when he first got “the spark” for the mischievous tyke. Perhaps this kid was one of those that Ketcham referenced.

And check out this Minute Rice model who bears a remarkable resemblance to Dennis’ mom, Alice Mitchell. The strip had been running for only a year when Ketcham created the artwork for this ad.

But most startling of all was this four panel gag from October 1951, a year after Dennis “was born”. How in the world did Ketcham and Collier’s magazine comics editor Gurney Williams manage to slip this one into print?

I mean this might have been perfectly fine for Esquire magazine or Argosy… but Collier’s? You’d think Ketcham would have been asked to strategically draw some bubble bath foam into this rather, erm, tittilating panel.

My goodness, I have so many false impressions of what the acceptable public standards of decency were back in the ’50s, based on old episodes of Leave It to Beaver…

My Hank Ketcham Flickr set.

A year before National Cartoonist Society member John Prentice began his 43 year run on the newspaper comic strip, Rip Kirby, he illustrated the story below for Coronet magazine.

You can find Prentice’s biographical “sketch” here on the NCS website, but I hoped to find some additional anecdotal material… and Tom Heintjes article about the Johnstone & Cushing studio mentions that around the time that Prentice did these pieces, he and “On Stage” creator Leonard Starr were sharing an apartment while both men worked for J&C.

Starr recalls:

“John and I would cover for each other. [J&C Art Director] Al Stenzel would call to ask where I was with an overdue job, and I would be standing next to John while he told Al that I had left 10 minutes ago to turn in the job. Stenzel would yell, ‘Don’t give me that shit! I know he’s standing right there!’ “

Knowing that my friend David Apatoff is a huge fan of Leonard Starr’s work, I asked him if he might also know some additional details about Starr’s old friend, Prentice. What I never expected was that David would speak with Leonard Starr himself!

So today, thanks to David, we are privileged to have Mr. Starr’s personal recollections of his friend, John Prentice:

Johnny and I shared an apartment in Manhattan– it was a dreadful little place– but we were living “la vie Boheme,” making a living as artists (although not a very good one. Whoever received the last check paid for the groceries). We worked for Johnstone and Cushing and other places, but I was shopping around some comic strips to syndicates (including On Stage). Then one day, we got word that Alex Raymond had been killed in a car crash. I received a call from Sylvan Byck, the cartoon editor for King Features. He told me that Raymond had only worked two days ahead, and the syndicate was in a panic.

Could I come right over and take up Rip Kirby where Raymond had left off? I thought about it… Rip Kirby was a sure thing, and it was very tempting, but I decided to take a chance and try my luck with my own strip a while longer.

So I told Sylvan, “You don’t want me, but the very best guy in the world for the job is sitting right next to me.” Sylvan responded, “send him right over!” And that’s how Sylvan met Johnny and Johnny got the Rip Kirby strip.

It turned out, that same day, the head of the Chicago Tribune Syndicate was on a train reading a newspaper, saw that Raymond had died, and got off the train at the next stop to send me a telegram confirming that I would be doing On Stage for his syndicate. He figured that King Features would be looking for a replacement for Raymond. So Johnny and I each got our strips at the same time, and took off from there.

Johnny was a meticulous artist, and when he started doing Rip Kirby he carefully set up his compositions on tissue paper first. I watched him doing it, and I said, “Johnny, if you don’t start working faster, you’re going to starve to death.” To this day, I still don’t know how he managed it. But those first strips he did were beautiful.

Johnny was a Texan, and although he had a very slight build, he had a Texan’s confidence. One day he came outside to find that his car was blocked by a big truck that was double parked. Johnny called up to the driver to move the truck, but the driver said, “my partner will be out in a minute.” Johnny said, “I don’t feel like waiting a minute. You’re either going to move that truck or I’m going to yank you out of there and move it myself.” The driver moved the truck.

My thanks to David - and to Leonard Starr for sharing with us these great personal recollections of his friend, John Prentice.

* There is a tribute page to John Prentice at Keefe Studios.com

My John Prentice Flickr set.

Past president of the National Cartoonists Society (1979-81), John Cullen Murphy, in his own words from his biographical “sketch” here on the NCS website:

“Born in N.Y.C. 1919, raised in Chicago. Studied at Art Institute age 9. Moved east 1930, studied with Booth, Rockwell, Bridgman, Dickson, etc. Did covers for Liberty, Collier’s. Spent 6 years in army, ‘40 - ‘46.”

“After war, illustrations, covers for Sport, Holiday, Look, etc. Started ‘Big Ben Bolt‘ with E. Caplin ‘49.”

John Cullen Murphy, in his own words from an interview in The Comics Journal #253, when asked why he switched from magazine illustration to comic strip art:

“I saw that most of the advertising dollars were being pulled from magazines and going into television. The strip work was steady income.”

When interviewer Brian M. Kane asks how he approaches black and white illustration, Murphy replies, “I look for the drama in the panel. It’s like being a stage director. You’re competing for the reader’s attention so you need to get in some good blacks — some high contrast.”

Kane asks, “What would you say is your trademark? If someone looked at a John Cullen Murphy pen-and-ink piece, how would they know immediately that it’s yours?”

Murphy replies, “I would hope it to be that the drawing’s all there — the figures, the hands, the faces, the emotions.”

You’ll find a thorough interview and plenty of art by John Cullen Murphy at Keefe Studios.com

My John Cullen Murphy Flickr set.

“My formal education got me as far as the seventh grade in elementary school,” Albert Dorne says in Ashley Halsey Jr.’s book, Illustrating for the Saturday Evening Post.

“After which,” Dorne continues, “I immediately became a high-powered business executive.”

Albert Dorne was not only the 1947 president of the Society of Illustrators, he was also a member of the National Cartoonists Society.

His biographical ’sketch’ on the NCS website reads in part, “In 1930 I started one of the first advertising strips - Lifebouy’s B.O. campaign - turning out three or four a week. I created ‘Mr. Coffee Nerves’ for Postum and did advertising strips for Post cereals, Camels, and many others.”

For those of us who are sometimes overwhelmed by our inner artiste’s yearning to get out and express himself, consider these words from Albert Dorne, one of the most prolific, successful and famous illustrators of the 20th century:

“Very early in what I like to refer to as my artistic career, I built up an immunity to complicated techniques that call for (a) reading a lot, (b) experimentation, (c) making a mess of the job because I couldn’t handle the medium, and (d) having to do the whole thing over.”

“All of this may sound like an attempt to excuse my lack of technical knowledge. It is.”

“As far as art is concerned,” says the man Halsey, Jr. describes as “a hefty, extrovert, cigar-smoking business man”, “I have no training whatsoever. As a matter of fact, the very first time I ever saw an art classroom was when I went into one to deliver a lecture on how to be an artist.”

My Albert Dorne Flickr set.

Looking at this 1951 basketball illustration from Collier’s magazine, its no wonder Willard Mullin has been called the greatest sports cartoonist of all time.

With his remarkable ability to imbue the human face and form with a sort of expressive elasticity that enhances action and motion to the nth degree, Mullin provided a template for a legion of cartoonists to follow. One friend commented recently that surely the great Jack Davis, for instance, must have found inspiration in Willard Mullin’s work. No doubt!

In the book, The Complete Guide to Cartooning, author Gene Byrnes accurately described the artist’s ability to portray “violent action” as being “in a class by itself”.

Willard Mullin was born on a farm in Franklin, Ohio in 1902. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was just 6 years old and he went to work in a department store sign shop immediately upon finishing high school.

He stayed for just two years before quitting to take a job with a construction firm. One day on the job he fell from a dam and nearly broke his neck! After his injuries healed he decided he wanted to be an artist after all.

Mullin found work at The Los Angeles Herald newspaper, where he learned a variety of graphic arts skills - those too menial for others in the department to bother with. Gradually, he worked his way up to photo retouching - but not with an airbrush… Mullin learned the more traditional (and far more difficult) manual fashion of painting in thin layers of wash.

He insisted that this meticulous training under the pressurized environment of a daily newspaper deadline gave him his facility with a brush and the ability to work fast.

Mullin stayed at The Herald for twelve years, developing his cartooning abilities at night after putting in a full day at his regular art department chores.

When he finally left for new York, it was at the invitation of Joe Williams, executive sports editor of the World-Telegram. There he produced 6 cartoons a week, month in and month out, and never missed a deadline, even while doing advertising illustrations and pieces like these for Collier’s and other national magazines, on the side.

In spite of the astonishing volume of work he produced, Mullin, the consummate professional, found his job got easier and easier over time. In a 1957 article for American Artist magazine, he told interviewer Norman Kent, “One builds up a background over the years of witnessing sporting events. The unexpected often happens and personalities in sports are always grist for my mill.”

The Brooklyn Bum

In the spring of 1957, American Artist magazine editor Norman Kent paid a visit to the home studio of Willard Mullin. The magazine had requested to witness the artist at work for a step-by-step article for their summer issue. Specifically, the editors had asked Mullin to do for them a drawing of his most famous recurring character: “The Brooklyn Bum”.

Twenty years earlier, during the 1937 baseball season, Willard Mullin was leaving a Brooklyn Dodgers game. He had just watched the team split a double header. By winning the first game the Dodgers had climbed into the upper half division, but by losing the second they fell back where they had been. Mullin was climbing into a cab bound back to Manhattan when the cabbie inquired, “Well, how did our ‘bums’ do?”

It was, for Mullin, an epiphany.

In the pages of the Scripps-Howard newspapers that ran his cartoons, Mullin had already characterized (with affection) the Dodgers as a clown - and now, with a little refining, he decided to recast the team as a ‘bum’. Twenty years later the lovable “Brooklyn Bum” was still going strong, his expressions and attitudes, his circumstances and situations, rising and falling in conjunction with the Dodgers’ fortunes.

While the step-by-step doesn’t reveal anything unexpected (Mullin’s technique and materials were, as Norman Kent described “simple in the extreme”), its still always fun to see the process of a talented artist’s work taking shape.

One interesting note is that Mullin credits his early experience working in the sign shop of an L.A. department store as providing the beginnings of his skill at lettering.

The drawing, an actual assignment for the New York World-Telegram, was begun at 11:00 a.m. that day under the watchful eye of the AA photographer and interviewer Norman Kent.

Kent describes the events of the day unfolding, “over a period of the next two hours, interrupted by conversation, photography, and a pleasant break for luncheon.”

“With the final lettering added to the ‘balloons’ and the papers in O’Malley’s pockets, the drawing was finished. after a few minutes of critical appraisement, Willard added a few penciled notes to the engraver in blue pencil, rolled up the drawing, encased some folding money under a rubber band, and dashed off to the railroad station - a block away.”

“As the 3:50 train for New York pulled in, he handed the drawing to the conductor, who happily removed the ‘fee’. On arrival in New York, the conductor would take it to Western Union in Pennsylvania Station.”

“A few minutes thereafter, the drawing would be delivered by messenger to the engraving department of the paper to be ’shot’ for next day’s edition. It appeared on schedule in the World-Telegram and Sun on Friday, April 12, [1957].”

My Willard Mullin Flickr set.

Because of the intricacies of the contract process involved with securing a syndicated cartoon strip, author Fred C. Rodewald does not go into much detail about opportunities for illustration jobs in that field. His October 1954 article in American Artist mentions only that, “salaried employment for cartoonist, illustrators, letterers and mechanical men” does exist in the syndicate business. Luckily for us, there has been plenty of documentation about this field, and we have the benefit of friends with expert, first-hand experience.

When Noel Sickles gave up his strip, Scorchy Smith, it was because of a combination of “restlessness, deadlines, boredom and money,” according to biographer Bruce Canwell. In an online excerpt of an interview from The Comics Journal #242, Sickles himself mentions that his salary at the beginning of his three-year stint on the strip was $47.50 per week. In spite of his managing to negotiate it to a respectable $125 a week, Sickles quit the strip in 1936 to pursue a career in magazine illustration.

For Sickles’ life-long friend and admirer, Milton Caniff, sticking with the syndicates proved to be the road to spectacular success. The caption under this 1946 photo of the artist at work in his studio reads in part, “the young cartoonist earns $80,000 a year, and will do even better when he drops Terry [and the Pirates].”

Ten years later, the title of another article, this one actually written by Milton Caniff for Cosmopolitan magazine says it all.

Caniff wrote, “Today, 100,000,000 Americans follow at least one comic strip each day.” Successful syndicated cartoonists like Caniff, Al Capp, Walt Kelly and many others were akin to Hollywood celebrities, earning top dollar for speaking engagements, appearing on newspaper society pages and were much sought-after by advertisers for product endorsements.

No wonder so many cartoonists dreamed of landing a syndicated cartoon strip!

* My thanks to Michael Lark for sharing the Noel Sickles scans at top from his private collection.

If you’d like to show your support for your freedom of expression, visit the petition website.

High-resolution images of the stamps are available for media use only by emailing mark.r.saunders@usps.gov

From the US Postal Service:

‘Sunday Funnies’ Comic Strips Get Stamp of Approval

What:

First-Day-of-Issue dedication ceremony of the Sunday Funnies 44-cent Commemorative First-Class stamps. The event is free and open to the public.

When:
10:30 a.m., Friday, July 16, 2010

Where:
The Ohio State University
Performance Hall at the Ohio Union
1739 High Street
Columbus, OH 43210-1393

Who:

• Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee
• Curator and professor The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Lucy Shelton Caswell
• USPS President, Mailing and Shipping Services Robert F. Bernstock

Honored guests available for interviews:

• Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker
• Garfield creator Jim Davis
• Dennis the Menace artists Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand
• Archie Comics newspaper strip writer Craig Goldman
• Calvin and Hobbes Editor Lee Salem

Background:

The Sunday Funnies pane of 20 stamps honors five of the nation’s most beloved comic strips: Archie, Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. The strips, as well as their characters, may have changed over the years, yet each nevertheless remains an enduring classic.

Offering an idealized portrait of American adolescence, Archie existed only in comic-book form before debuting in newspapers in 1946. A typical small-town teenager with a knack for goofing things up, 17-year-old Archie Andrews is often torn between haughty brunette Veronica Lodge and sweet, blonde Betty Cooper.

A military strip with universal appeal, Beetle Bailey first appeared in September 1950. Possibly the laziest man in the army, Private Beetle Bailey is an expert at sleeping and avoiding work. His chronic indolence antagonizes Sergeant Orville P. Snorkel, who is tough on his men but calls them “my boys.”

Dennis the Menace follows the antics of Dennis Mitchell, a good-hearted but mischievous little boy who is perpetually “five-ana-half” years old. His curiosity tests the patience of his loving parents and neighbors, guaranteeing that their lives are anything but dull. The comic debuted in March 1951 as a single-panel gag.

Garfield first waddled onto the comics page in June 1978. Self-centered and cynical, the crabby tabby hates Mondays and loves lasagna. He lives with Jon Arbuckle, a bumbling bachelor with a fatally flawed fashion sense, and Odie, a dopey-but-devoted dog.

Calvin and Hobbes explores the fantasy life of six-year-old Calvin and his tiger pal, Hobbes. The inseparable friends ponder the mysteries of the world and test the fortitude of Calvin’s parents, who never know where their son’s imagination will take him. The strip ran from November 1985 to December 1995.

# # #

THE REUBEN AWARD for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year:

Dan Piraro

TELEVISION ANIMATION

Seth McFarlane - “Family Guy”

FEATURE ANIMATION

Ronnie del Carmen - Storyboard Artist - “Up”

NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION

Tom Richmond

GAG CARTOONS

Glenn McCoy

GREETING CARDS

Debbie Tomassi

NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIPS

Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman - “Zits”

NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOONS

Hilary Price - “Rhymes with Orange”

MAGAZINE FEATURE/MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION

Ray Alma

BOOK ILLUSTRATION

Dave Whamond - “My Think-A-Ma-Jink”

EDITORIAL CARTOONS

John Sherffius

ADVERTISING ILLUSTRATION

Steve Brodner

COMIC BOOKS

Paul Pope - “Strange Adventures”

GRAPHIC NOVELS

David Mazzucchelli - “Asterios Polyp”