But first, while you’re in a Reuben Award state of mind, here are a few trivia questions: See how much you know about the people who have won cartooning’s top honor in years past:

A. Who first won the Reuben Award for a strip featuring a character on active military duty?
B. In 1968, Reuben voting was tied. Who were the two winners that year?
C. Which two cartoonists won (in 1958 and 1974) for work on the same strip?
D. Who was the first cartoonist to win the Reuben Award for a strip starring a child?
E. Who was the first Reuben Award winner born in the Southern Hemisphere?
(Answers below)

NOMINEES FOR THE COMIC BOOK DIVISION AWARD: Amanda Connor (“Silk Spectre”), Evan Dorkin (“House of Fun”) and Bernie Wrightson (“Frankenstein Alive, Alive!”) SHOULD WIN: Wrightson has garnered deserved plaudits for this stunningly crafted sequel to his 1983 landmark. WILL WIN: Dorkin’s smartly self-aware, edgy work appeals to fellow cartoonists, who reward his postmodern perspective on cartooning.

NOMINEES FOR THE EDITORIAL CARTOON AWARD: Clay Bennett, Michael de Adder and Jen Sorenson. The nomination of the sublimely talented Sorenson adds a welcome female perspective to the category. SHOULD WIN: Sorenson’s commentary was razor-sharp leading up to the 2012 elections, with insightful ideas and skillful visual execution. WILL WIN: Bennett, a former Pulitzer Prize winner, has a rare gift for packaging powerfully provocative ideas in an appealing, gauzy exterior, making for effective, often  jarring reading.

NOMINEES FOR THE GAG CARTOON DIVISION AWARD: Roz Chast, Sam Gross, Mick Stevens and Jack Ziegler. (Yes, four nominees.) As seems to be the case almost every year, the nominees share the New Yorker connection. SHOULD WIN: Chast has graduated to practically a brand name, plying her idiosyncratic approach to cartooning structure to perennially strong effect. WILL WIN: We acknowledge this one’s a toss-up, but we’ll give the edge to Chast based on star power alone.

NOMINEES FOR THE ANIMATION FEATURE DIVISION AWARD: Rich Moore (director, “Wreck-It Ralph”), Joann Star (director, “The Rabbi’s Cat”) and Hiromasa Yonebayashi (director, “The Secret World of Arrietty”). Yet another year without a Pixar offering to skew the voting. SHOULD WIN: Yonebayashi’s paean to the beloved Borrower, Arrietty, was an old-school, 2-D charmer. WILL WIN: Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” hits the sweet spot of many NCS voters, with its nostalgically retro-chic take on pre-Internet videogames.

NOMINEES FOR THE TELEVISION ANIMATION DIVISION AWARD: Todd Kauffman (executive producer, “Sidekick”), Alberto Mielgo (production design, “Tron: Uprising”) and Rich Webber (director, Aardman Animation Studios, “DC Nation”). “Tron: Uprising” was on TV for less than a year before getting canceled, not exactly enhancing its chances for an award. SHOULD WIN: Superheroes are all the rage, and “Sidekick” slickly weds superheroes with offbeat humor. WILL WIN: “DC Nation” is a revolving showcase for the company’s iconic characters (Green Lantern, Batman, etc.), and it’s tough to beat a household name.

NOMINEES FOR THE NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION AWARD: Mark Brewer, Bob Rich and Dave Whamond. Bob Rich is nominated after having won this category at last year’s event. SHOULD WIN: We’re big Bob Rich fans, but we think voters prefer to avoid back-to-back winners. WILL WIN: Dave Whamond, who also produces the “Reality Check” syndicated panel, edges out his competition.

NOMINEES FOR THE NEWSPAPER PANEL AWARD: Tony Carrillo (“F-Minus”), Dave Coverly (“Speed Bump”) and Hilary Price (“Rhymes with Orange”). Interestingly, a set of nominees that don’t feature recurring characters. SHOULD WIN: “F-Minus” is a consistently top-notch panel and in any other year would likely take home the hardware, but… WILL WIN: Price takes the prize as her strip comes off a very strong, innovative year.

NOMINEES FOR THE GRAPHIC NOVEL AWARD: Derf (“My Friend Dahmer”), Joseph Lambert (“Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller”) and Chris Ware (“Building Stories”). SHOULD WIN: Ware’s book was an astonishing technical/architectural feat, but its sheer physical complexity could work against it in the balloting process. WILL WIN: Lambert’s young-adult book has already won a raft of awards, and it adds this division’s plaque to them.

NOMINEES FOR THE GREETING CARD AWARD: Bill Brewer, George Schill and Jem Sullivan. SHOULD WIN: Sullivan’s technical prowess and painterly distortions are marvels to behold, and Sullivan took this division’s hardware in 2008. WILL WIN: Schill’s outstanding gag work puts his greeting card work closer to humorous panels, an approach that will appeal to many NCS voters.

NOMINEES FOR THE ADVERTISING AND PRODUCT ILLUSTRATION AWARD: Luke McGarry, Ed Steckley and Wayno. SHOULD WIN: A longtime comic book creator, Wayno’s clean-line style and sharp design sense make his product illustrations stand out on a shelf. WILL WIN: McGarry has many friends within the NCS (his father, Steve, having served as organization president), and members will reward a promising up-and-comer.

NOMINEES FOR THE NEWSPAPER STRIP DIVISION AWARD: Brian Bassett (“Red and Rover”), Jeff Parker and Steve Kelley (“Dustin”) and Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman (“Zits”). Parker and Kelley are nominated again after winning this category just two years ago, and two of the three strips are by teams, a relative rarity. SHOULD WIN: The creators behind “Dustin” and “Zits” have racked up the awards over the years, but Bassett has quietly been producing a wonderful strip. WILL WIN: Scott and Borgman will have to clear more space on the mantel.

NOMINEES FOR THE MAGAZINE FEATURE/MAGAZINE ILUSTRATION AWARD: Barry Blitt, Daryll Collins and Anton Emdin. Emdin gets a nod after taking this category two years ago. SHOULD WIN: Blitt’s work has been clever, ubiquitous and—importantly—consistently provocative in the past year year. WILL WIN: Regularly appearing on the cover of the New Yorker doesn’t hinder one’s chances, and few magazine illustrators made better use of his opportunities than Blitt.

NOMINEES FOR THE BOOK ILUSTRATION AWARD: John Manders, John Martz and Dave Whamond. No one reads books anymore, so we’re told, but this group of nominees produced remarkable work. SHOULD WIN: Martz’s beautifully designed book illustrations, and unmatched sense of color and typography, put him at the top of his peer group. WILL WIN: Martz’s whimsical illustrations are the essence of book illustration, and his unique approach to design and cartooning will appeal to NCS voters.

NOMINEES FOR THE ONLINE COMIC STRIP/LONG FORM AWARD: Vince Dorse (“Untold Tales of Bigfoot”), Meredith Gran (“Octopus Pie”) and Pat N. Lewis (“Muscles Diablo in Where Terror Lurks”) Still refining its approach to embracing online cartooning (much like the rest of us), the NCS this year has split the category into long form and short form. SHOULD WIN: Dorse’s strip evokes a “Bone”-like vibe, which is often catnip to NCS voters, but… WILL WIN: Gran’s strip taps into the contemporary zeitgeist of TV’s hip quotient (think HBO’s “Girls”), and its mordant tales of young people casting about for a meaningful life will resonate with voters.

NOMINEES FOR THE ONLINE COMIC STRIP/SHORT FORM AWARD: Graham Harrop (“Ten Cats”), Jonathan Lemon (“Rabbits Against Magic”) and Michael McParlane (“Mac”) All three nominees remind us how much quality work is being produced, even if it’s not in newspapers (yet). SHOULD WIN: Lemon’s strip, with its stylish art and often dialogue-heavy exchanges, offers much for readers to savor, visually and verbally. WILL WIN: McParlane’s offbeat panel maintains a deeply idiosyncratic humor while retaining its accessibility, topped off with a distinct visual appeal.

NOMINEES FOR THE REUBEN AWARD: In the running for cartooning’s top award (contrary to popular belief, only one Reuben Award is handed out each year; the others are divisional awards) are Brian Crane, Rick Kirkman and Stephan Pastis. Pastis’ Reuben nomination is his fifth. SHOULD WIN: Few have done more than Pastis to expand the mainstream newspaper strip’s acceptance of cursing, bad behavior and overall antisocial nihilism, and Pastis’ successful foray into young adult fiction (“Timmy Failure”) only burnishes his credentials, while Crane and Kirkman split the more family-friendly vote. WILL WIN: NCS voters will reward Pastis’ consistency and envelope pushing with his first Reuben Award. Even Rat will be verklempt.

ANSWERS TO TRIVIA:
A. Mort Walker, “Beetle Bailey”
B. Johnny Hart and Pat Oliphant
C. Frank King (1958) and Dick Moores (1974), “Gasoline Alley”
D. Hank Ketcham, “Dennis the Menace” (1952)
E. Pat Oliphant, born in Australia

As always, shortly after the National Cartoonists Society’s awards weekend, we’ll unveil this year’s online photo album capturing moments both dignified and mortifying, and we’ll let you know here when it’s available. We’ll be live-tweeting the NCS awards on May 25, so start following us today to get the results in real time!

March 24, 1907 (click to enlarge)

Jenny E. Robb and Richard D. Olson examine Madge, the Magician’s Daughter by the little-known W.O. Wilson.

In 1906 and 1907, W.O. Wilson drew Madge, the Magician’s Daughter for the North American Co. The strip appeared regularly as the front page of the San Francisco Call Sunday comics section. It was an exciting strip that combined the two leading characteristics of successful newspaper comics of that period: one or more children who often seemed to get into trouble and some elements of surrealism. Further, given Wilson’s artistic abilities and storylines, it is no surprise that Madge was very popular.

What is surprising, however, is that today the artist, the strip and even the newspaper have become all but anonymous. W. O. Wilson is the invisible man. Almost no biographical information about him has survived, not even his first name. His earliest work seems to be a full-page cartoon on the automobile in the April 6, 1899, issue of the New York Herald. He had other one-shot comics and then drew The Richleigh Family from May 1 to Oct. 23, 1904. Next he created The Wish Twins and Aladdin’s Lamp, which was published from Oct. 30, 1904 to Jan. 5, 1908. The very next week, Wilson started a strip titled Ba Ba, which only lasted until July 26 of that year. Madge, the Magician’s Daughter overlapped the Wish Twins and was published from at least Sept. 2, 1906 to Aug. 25, 1907.

When Wilson stopped drawing newspaper comic strips, he did not abandon cartooning altogether. He contributed single-panel cartoons and illustrations to the thriving magazine market, including Harper’s Weekly, Puck, Life and Judge. His work continued to appear in weekly magazines until at least 1918. The tag “suggested by A.Crawford” or “+a.c.” frequently followed Wilson’s distinctive signature in his magazine cartoons. Arthur Crawford provided gags and ideas to numerous artists in the early twentieth century and acted as an agent by submitting portfolios of cartoons to various magazine editors. He committed suicide after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1922.

Many of Wilson’s Judge cartoons were reprinted by the Leslie-Judge Co. in an anthology series called Caricature: Wit and Humor of a Nation in Picture, Song and Story. In addition to his magazine and newspaper work, Wilson illustrated a book written by Marian A. Hilton called The Garden of Girls: A Story, published by the Tandy-Thomas Co. in 1909.

Madge, the Magician’s Daughter is now an unknown comic even though it was the front-page headliner of a major newspaper’s comic section. The pages reprinted here show an attractive young girl who has difficulties when she tries unsuccessfully to impress her friends by doing magic tricks that she has watched her father perform. As we looked at these pages, we could not help but think of Mickey Mouse in his role as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Wilson’s strip appeared 30 years before the Disney version, which was based on the traditional German fairy tale interpreted as a poem by Goethe in 1779. Perhaps Goethe’s poem also inspired Wilson when he created the comic strip’s central device.

The best-known fantasy strips published at that time, such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, starred boys, but Wilson made his child protagonist a girl and cast her in stories featuring dinosaurs, dragons, mermaids, pirates and Indians—the adventures usually associated with boys. The only similar example featuring a girl was The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead by Peter Newell, but after nine months Newell dropped the fantasy element and transformed it into a strip about children playing pranks. Also, unlike Polly, Wilson incorporated innovative panel formatting that added to the strip’s distinctiveness. Only two of the pages in the sample reprinted here use the same physical layout, although others use the same conceptual schema. For example, the pages with the chameleon, mermaids, dragon and sea monster each use a dynamic center panel to catch the eye, even though the shape varies from a rectangle to a circle to a diamond.

The San Francisco Call no longer exists. According to Faulkinbury, who has traced the history of many California newspapers, it started as the Morning Call in December 1856 and was renamed the San Francisco Call in March 1895. It merged with the Evening Post in December 1913 and became the San Francisco Call and Post until August 1929. At that time it merged with the San Francisco Bulletin and became the Call-Bulletin until August 1959.

Finally, Wilson’s work was distributed by the North American Co., which has also disappeared and should not be confused with the North America Syndicate (formerly called the News America Syndicate), acquired by King Features in 1987.

HA: Al Capp is one of the most famous cartoonists of the 20th century, and he kept a high profile for his entire career. Yet you obviously felt there were enough unanswered questions about him to merit a biography. What was the impetus behind this book?

MS: Well, the obvious answer to the question is that there hadn’t been an Al Capp biography to this point. Elliott Caplin, Al’s brother, had written a book-length memoir, and Capp had published a small volume of short pieces (My Well Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg), but there had yet to be a full-fledged biography. Capp, as one of the most successful and influential artists in comics history, certainly merited one.

HA: Denis, as a publisher you’re best known as a champion of underground and alternative cartoonists. Yet you’ve had a long fascination with Capp and “Li’l Abner.” What’s behind your intense, decades-long interest in one of the most popular mainstream cartoonists in American history?

DK: My fascination with Capp started as a young boy. Like so many, I was hooked on newspaper strips and comic books in the early ‘50s. I loved most available strips, but what I turned to first every day was “Li’l Abner.” The beautiful women and otherwise grotesque cast of characters, the fanciful plots and Capp’s very effective cliff-hangers were irresistible. It remained my favorite until I entered college, about the time Capp made his 180-degree political turn rightward. So as I was developing an anti-Vietnam War stance, Capp was deriding students, hippies, and anything leftward both in personal campus appearances and in his increasingly strident strip. My love-hate relationship was intensified whenever he’d say something really clever, like his set-up of Joan Baez. Then I watched his public fall from grace with his public sex scandals, the primary one in my own back yard in Wisconsin.

An example of the long-running ad campaign featuring Fearless Fosdick (click to enlarge)

But some years after his death, I still loved most of “Li’l Abner” and as a publisher wanted to collect the strips. I published nearly 30 volumes before Kitchen Sink went under. Simultaneously, I was collecting everything Capp-related and swore that someday I’d tell Capp’s whole crazy story. When Mike and I discovered our mutual fascination, the book became real.

HA: Can you discuss some of the biggest challenges in researching Capp’s life?

MS: The biggest challenge was getting to the truth. Capp, as a biography subject, could be very elusive, partially because his memory wasn’t always the best, but mostly because he modified his story to achieve is own purposes. He’d tell a story one day, only to change it significantly the next. He wrote two drafts of an autobiography, and while most of the material was similar, some of it was not. He couldn’t even get the date of his accident (the one that cost him his leg) accurate. Similarly, he couldn’t remember his wedding date. As it turns out, he inherited this trait of fudging the truth from his father: Otto Caplin wrote a lengthy memoir about Al’s childhood, and it was incredibly self-serving and inaccurate. Our job, then, was to sift through all the materials, from the autobiographies to the interviews and such, and find the areas where there was at least partial agreement. On a number of occasions, we were able to corroborate the stories with family members or others we interviewed. At times, it felt as if we were on some kind of archeological dig, finding bits and pieces of information here and there, and then trying to assemble what we discovered into something useful and coherent. There seemed to be a never-ending challenge. When we received Capp’s love letters to Nina Luce, his longtime mistress, Luce’s daughter had separated the letters from their envelopes, and there was the issue of piecing everything together from what we knew about Capp’s life, matching this with what was in the letters. It was quite the challenge.

HA: As you note, Capp was famously malleable in recalling events. How were you able to separate fact from fiction in his retelling?

MS: It wasn’t easy. Denis and I went over and over the events, sorting through the various tellings and retellings, looking for consistencies amidst the inconsistencies. In some cases, we were able to get corroboration elsewhere. In others, we decided that we should present several versions of the story, which let the reader in on how Capp the storyteller would spin a story to suit his purposes. On a few occasions, when a story wasn’t significant, we decided that it would be best to leave the story out entirely.

HA: Michael, you’ve written a number of biographies of creators with complicated personal and professional lives. What research challenges did Capp present you with that were unique or especially challenging?

MS: Aside from Capp’s habit of bending the truth to suit his purposes and the problems that presented us in our research, there were other issues that I wasn’t accustomed to dealing with in my research. In all of my previous biographies, I was able to talk to many, many of the subjects’ family members, friends, co-workers, students, etc. There was a wealth of interview material. That wasn’t the case here. Capp and most of his contemporaries are dead, which made corroboration difficult, and I can only imagine what anecdotal material we missed. Capp was terrible with dates—and he almost never dated his letters—so putting a precise timeline together was more difficult than usual. Then there was the issue of access: with almost all of my biographies, I had access to my subjects’ papers, archives, letters, journals, and so on. I did not have this with [Eric] Clapton, but with the others, this access gave me a terrific into the artistic mind and the process of creation. The Capp family was generous to a point, but they held back a fair amount, including all of Catherine Capp’s journals and papers, and almost all of Capp’s business papers. We obtained some of the business papers elsewhere, but we really had to work to piece together the workings of Capp Enterprises. I admit that I was spoiled by the past. I had complete, unfettered access to all of Allen Ginsberg’s archives. I was given access to all of Phil Ochs’ unreleased recordings and concert tapes. Denis had a wonderful archive of Will Eisner’s correspondence with his editor, Dave Schreiner. These kinds of materials gave me a bird’s eye view of the creative process—a view we did not have with Capp.

HA: Capp’s problem with women is well known. Is it too facile to say that his handicap drove him to assert his masculinity in ways that veered into predation?

MS: That’s hard to say. I agree that it’s tempting to say it’s true, but Capp was a complex individual, even as a child. He could be surly and difficult before he lost his leg, and it’s likely that this was a personality trait that would have been prevalent throughout his life. The same could be said about other aspects of his personality, including his overworked libido. We do know that Capp consciously sought out ways to prove that he was no different from anyone else, and we know that he worried about how his losing his leg might affect his relationships with women. But it’s also probable that he traded on his celebrity status. It certainly put him in the position to meet young, attractive women who would have been out of reach if he were not well known and wealthy. He certainly would not have met Grace Kelly, Goldie Hawn, Edie Adams, and other actresses. It very well could be that he felt a certain entitlement with his celebrity, a misguided notion that he could make aggressive sexual advances that might have been frowned upon under other circumstances. We know of a number of occasions when he tried to force himself on women. How many times was there a successful consensual arrangement precipitated by such advances? And, given such successes, at what point did Capp perhaps believe that his advances were acceptable as part of the sexual “game”? These are not easy questions to answer.

DK: Mike and I, as amateur psychologists, found it very tempting to think Capp was overcompensating for his early loss of a leg. It would seem reasonable to think he was continually driven to prove he was “a complete man.” But Alvin Kahn, a Boston psychiatrist and close friend of Capp’s—though not his personal psychiatrist—told us that there was no medical basis for that assumption. We suspect many readers will speculate similarly, but we couldn’t make such an assertion.

HA: I knew Capp got married to Catherine, but I have to confess that I wasn’t aware that he stayed married. Do you think he compartmentalized his behavior so that his serial humiliations of Catherine were something he could live with? Or was he a sociopath who didn’t need to perform any mental gymnastics to look in the mirror?

DK: Catherine had a hysterectomy fairly early in their marriage, and a family member who did not want to be identified told us that Catherine lost interest in sex after that. That was apparently a common side effect in the era before estrogen pills could be prescribed.

We’ll never know exactly when Catherine caught on to Al’s affairs. But it was clear that the two made an arrangement. Catherine evidently accepted that Al’s sexual needs far exceeded her own and tolerated his womanizing, as long as he was discreet. They presumably also thought it was best to stay together for the children’s sake. Catherine enjoyed the rich social life of a celebrity’s wife and a high living standard. And for Capp there were PR benefits to having an attractive wife and stable home life.

Despite their “arrangement” we think they still loved each other. The surviving daughter assures us they continued to show affection toward each other. But when Capp’s aggressive sexual behavior finally became public, Catherine was mortified. Each talked of divorce but never proceeded there. At the end of his life Catherine attentively cared for him at home. But when Al died she almost immediately married a mutual friend, suggesting there may have been something more to Catherine’s personal life as well.

HA: What sort of person was Catherine? You knew her, and your book depicts her early on as a strong-willed person with a strong sense of herself. How did her marriage to a troubled person like Capp affect her? 

MS: I never met Catherine, but as Denis noted, we know that Catherine was very unhappy with her husband in the later years of their lives together. We also know that Capp considered divorcing Catherine, but he couldn’t bring himself to file the papers. For whatever reasons, Catherine declined a formal breakup of the marriage.

Catherine enjoyed all the trappings that came with her husband’s success, but she was not the extrovert he was. She was more of a homebody who enjoyed being with her children, painting in her studio, and taking family vacations. She supported her husband’s work and even made an occasional public appearance with him at, say, a Sadie Hawkins dance, but she had her limits. When Al announced that he was considering a run for the U.S. Senate, she told him she’d divorce him if he won. She had difficulties with his political move to the right and wanted nothing to do with Nixon, Agnew and that bunch. She had a life apart from her husband, and I get the sense that she liked it that way.

HA: Capp was one of the comics’ great satirists, seemingly with a great gift for insight into the human condition, hypocrisy, relationships, not to mention other comic strips. So he obviously devoted some effort to observing the absurdity of the world around him and depicting it in “Abner.” But how introspective do you think he was? Do you think he ever considered the consequences of his actions on those close to him? 

DK: Our only real clues to this are the surviving letters he sent to his lover Nina Luce in 1940-41. In those we see genuine introspection and concern about Catherine and his young daughters, as well as an almost schmaltzy, romantic side. To be honest, had these letters not surfaced, we could easily have concluded that he was an out-and-out cad, but as we tried to show, he was an enormously complex and contradictory man.

MS: These are tough questions to answer. At first glance, Capp doesn’t appear to be introspective at all. He was, by nature, very funny, brash, extremely intelligent, loud, self-centered, ambitious, cruel, and hyper-talented. He did indeed have a tremendous gift for insight into the human condition, but he seemed to except himself from his studies. He loved to draw attention to himself, and it wasn’t always in a flattering way. However, just when you’re about to dismiss him as the kind of person you wouldn’t want to know, he would show a gentle, sensitive, generous side that seemed to fly in the face of the public persona. There was clearly some introspection there. This was also clear in the confessional tone in some of his letters to Nina Luce, as Denis noted. He could be very hard on himself, and despite the long-running dalliance, he could not leave his wife and kids for her, even though he clearly loved her. In short, one cannot judge this man too quickly or easily.

One of the numerous strips skewering Capp’s former employer and lifelong nemesis, Ham Fisher (click to enlarge).

HA: Capp, of course, had a legendary feud with “Joe Palooka” creator Ham Fisher, who was a cruel, self-centered misanthrope, and you go into their relationship in delicious detail in your book. So were you struck by the irony of his eventually becoming appallingly similar to Fisher in many ways?

DK: Yes, it’s a delicious irony indeed. We determined that Ham had to have come up with the hillbilly concept because Big Leviticus appears almost immediately after Capp was hired literally off the street. So that explained the basis of Fisher’s righteous indignation. But Capp, while maintaining the hillbillies were his, had other reasons to loathe Fisher, and neither ever backed down. Capp was much cleverer and considerably more talented. So it was never an even match. He even crowed over Fisher’s suicide and continued to insert snide Fisher references in “Li’l Abner” long after the death of his nemesis. I think he missed their feud!

MS: Absolutely. Denis and I talked about this from the beginning. There were some differences between Capp and Fisher—Capp was a lot funnier, for one—but they were unbelievably similar. I don’t want to do the “armchair psychiatrist” thing to any great extent, but you can’t help but wonder if Capp took out some of his own self-loathing on Fisher. He was too bright to not have noticed the similarities.

HA: Capp spent many years as a progressive champion, but he famously took a sharp rightward turn in the mid-’60s. Not to get you to rehash the possible reasons behind this shift—his contempt for pampered college-campus activists, his dislike of rock and roll, his support of the Vietnam War, etc.—you observe that “Li’l Abner” began to deteriorate creatively with his attitudinal change. Do you think this is pure coincidence, or was there a cause-effect relationship between how he viewed the world and his creative output? 

MS: I think a distinction needs to be made here: Capp switched from being a New Deal Democrat to being a Nixonian Republican, but he changed very little in terms of his social outlook. For instance, he hated hypocrisy, whether it came from the right or the left. His attacks on, say, Joan Baez were consistent with his lifetime social views, as were his rantings against the student protesters. He changed politically, but his sense of social order remained intact. I realize that it’s is a very fine-line distinction, but it’s one I think needs to be made.

As for the deterioration of the strip, I believe that he let his anger get in his way. Again, a slight distinction: satirists use anger as a fuel for their creativity, but to be successful, they have to know what is funny and what is not. Capp could not make this distinction at times—it should be noted that some of his later strips were funny—and he was further hindered by the public figure he became. He was being paid handsomely for his grumpy invective on college campuses, and he was willing to milk this for all it was worth. I think some of this bled into the strip. Finally, I think it very well could be that he was running out of fresh ideas. He’d been doing the strip for decades, and it might be that he was running out of the sharp, creative ideas that he had early in the strip’s history.

DK: I would add that the deterioration of “Li’l Abner” also coincides with the loss of Al Capp’s two key assistants, Walter Johnston and Andy Amato, in the 1960s. They had been with Al since the late ‘30s. Walter and Andy not only contributed to the strip’s distinctive visual look, but they participated in regular and rowdy bull sessions in the shop. They were close, trusted friends, and genuine collaborators. So Capp was further handicapped to some degree without their input, their back-and-forth on story ideas, and their likely modifying influence. So I think the strip’s downward slide came in good part from Capp being increasingly isolated, from family, old friends and then in the literal sense in his own studio. That made it easier for his usual focus on humorous satire to be superseded by his politics and, as Mike notes, his anger.

HA: During the early years of his persona as a rock-ribbed conservative, he produced a satire of Charles Schulz and “Peanuts.” Whereas Capp had good-naturedly lampooned many comic strips in “Li’l Abner,” his shots at Schulz seemed less than amusing and more ad hominen in nature. Capp was always very forthright in understanding his role as an entertainer, but I wonder if he began to lose the distinction between his strip as a vehicle of entertainment and one of pursuing personal vendettas. 

MS: Capp was exceedingly competitive, and his shots at Schulz were personal, no doubt about it. I don’t know about his using the strip as a means of pursuing personal vendettas. He certainly did this on occasion, as in some of the nasty references he made to Ham Fisher in “Li’l Abner,” but I think it was a general nastiness that took over the strip in later years. (He couldn’t stand Baez, even though he’d never met her, but he hated what he thought she stood for.) Capp was an unhappy man, and it’s very likely that he forgot or stashed away the notion that his strip was entertainment, but I believe that he lashed out as a result of his general unhappiness. The world was no longer a place to lampoon; it was a bitter place and needed punishment.

DK: We know from surviving correspondence that Capp carefully watched the rankings of comic strips. He was always acutely aware of where Abner stood, whether from reader’s popularity contests, by the total of subscribing newspapers or their total circulations, or by the top rates the biggest papers paid. He also fought to get the front page of key Sunday newspaper comics sections. For example, he lobbied relentlessly—directly and via surrogates—to replace “Joe Palooka” with “Li’l Abner” at the the New York Mirror, Ham Fisher’s flagship paper. So there’s no question that as “Peanuts” increasingly became a dominant page-one Sunday strip, Capp viewed Charles Schulz’s ascendance with nervousness and envy. By the time Capp parodied “Peanuts” in 1968 he obviously couldn’t contain his disdain. He poked fun at the rampant merchandising, certainly a hypocritical jab, but he especially seemed to belittle Schulz’s simpler drawing style, as if to say to Schulz, “You may be getting more and more popular, but at least I can draw!”

HA: You obviously received considerable cooperation from Capp’s family, even if they weren’t entirely forthcoming. When they realized your book was going in directions they would have preferred it not, did it affect your relationships with them? You maintain an intact relationship with Capp Enterprises, but was it strained by your research?

MS: Other than to say that I believe that the family—his daughter, Julie, in particular—felt that we were going to deliver a “Valentine’s card” of a biography, I’m going to defer to Denis on this one. I didn’t have the history with the family that he did, so I had no relationship to lose. We had considerable difficulty with the family when the family members realized that we were going to tell the whole story.

DK: It was a mixed bag. I went back many years with the family, starting when Kitchen Sink published the first of 27 volumes of Abner in the ’80s. Capp’s widow Catherine died shortly before we undertook the biography, but she was always reticent to talk about Al. The attorney who represented Capp for many years was too ill and too respectful of client privilege to cooperate. Julie thus became the primary family source and keeper of the flame. I had visited her and corresponded with her for many years, so she probably assumed that our biography would be sympathetic, even when I warned her from the start that Mike and I would be objective and not avoid controversial areas. She gave us free access to her father’s surviving papers, and we are very grateful to her for that. There were many useful things in the correspondence she had, largely business related, and she had many great photos. But at the same time, we were denied access to her mother’s papers and diaries, which would have given us by far the best information about Al Capp’s relationship with Catherine, what she knew about Al’s philandering and when, and perhaps other important insights.

So full access was limited in that sense, and, regrettably, Capp himself ordered most of his papers and archival materials destroyed in his final days at the Boston studio while he was clinically depressed. So much of what we learned that was really meaty came from papers others had, such as Bence’s son Todd, or Nina Luce’s daughter Rita, or from some family members who demanded we be discreet about our source. What surprised me about Julie, a very well-educated and cultured woman, was how little personal knowledge she had of her father’s dark side. Even the public scandals that made headlines were known to her in only the vaguest sense. “I chose not to read that material,” she told me. So you can imagine that when we showed her our draft manuscript, she was shocked in many ways, and disappointed. We thought we had shown Al Capp in an objective manner, highly respectful of his genius, and very sympathetic to portions of his persona, but, to her, we had revealed too much uncomfortable information. She had seen her father through rose-colored glasses. So the process of doing this book with Mike clearly strained some pre-existing relationships, but it also strengthened others. Virtually all of the family had only fragmentary information about the career of their most famous member and are happy that we’ve revived interest in Al Capp’s career. Most appear appreciative that we pulled together all the aspects of his life—for better and for worse!

HA: There must have been instances of Capp’s life that you would have liked to put into print but couldn’t verify. Without asking you to violate the Biographer’s Code of Ethics, what would you cite as an example of something you would have loved to verify but couldn’t?

MS: We had a lot of information—largely from reliable sources—that we did not include because we insisted on corroboration. At times, the sex stories seemed to be endless, and we heard many more than we reported. Part of our reluctance was based on corroboration, part was rooted in the idea of we covered the major stories and really didn’t want to overdo it or be guilty of “piling on.” It was truly unbelievable. Just to give you an example, I was grocery shopping in my Wisconsin hometown one day, and when I reached the checkout line, the clerk, whom I knew, asked what I was working on. I said—and this is a direct quote in its entirety—”I’m writing a book about Al Capp, the creator of ‘Li’l Abner.’ ” The woman standing next to me in line, without missing a beat, said, “That son of a bitch tried to rape my roommate in college.” I was struck speechless. What were the odds of such a thing? Capp’s misbehavior was legend, and we certainly could have gone into much greater detail than we did. I feel that we wrote enough to get the point across, and whether the Capp family wants to believe it or not, we weren’t out to hurt the family in telling the story. We had some tough calls to make, and we made them.

DK: I laughed out loud when Mike told me his grocery store anecdote, but I had my own. I mentioned to a young local freelance designer that I was working on a biography of Al Capp. He immediately said, “Al Capp? My mother grew up on the same street in Cambridge. She wasn’t allowed to play outside when Mr. Capp was home!” So those kinds of unexpected and spontaneous incidents give a clue as to how only the very tip of the iceberg of his darker side could make our book.

The most tantalizing tidbit to me was a letter between a former Capp assistant and Capp’s attorney in which the assistant confirmed destroying many boxes of archival and personal material at the last studio on Beacon Street. The assistant wrote, “Al told me to ‘throw out everything,’ meaning boxes of old originals…correspondence, tape recordings, newspaper and magazine clippings going back years, books, phonograph records, carbon copies of things he’d written…[and] photographs, the latter of which items we shall mention no further.” Clearly there was something sinister about a stash of photos that both the attorney and assistant knew about, but the details remained unspoken. Was it “merely” a pornography collection? Compromising photos of women he had dalliances with? Perhaps blackmail material related to Ham Fisher? We’ll presumably never know.

You’re unlikely to stump any reasonably knowledgeable comics fan with that question. (If you don’t know that the response to that question is “Ernie Bushmiller,” you need Hogan’s Alley more than you thought.) The creator of Nancy’s aunt, Fritzi Ritz, is a less commonly known piece of comics trivia. Larry Whittington created Fritzi Ritz in 1922 for Press Publishing Co., the syndicate company of the New York Evening World.

Whittington’s work reflected his journeymanlike but undistinguished talent; his Fritzi Ritz was rooted firmly in the idioms of the era. Flapper humor was one of the pop-art signatures of the Jazz Age, and strips showcasing attractive ditzes—notably, written by men working in an industry almost completely bereft of women—were commonplace, from Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals to Chic Young’s Dumb Dora (and Blondie, which initially starred a giggly, jiggly, golddigging flapper) to Edgar Martin’s Boots and Her Buddies to John Held Jr.’s Merely Margy.

Whittington produced Fritzi until 1925, when William Randolph Hearst’s organization staged one of its notorious talent raids on the Evening World. With Whittington now ensconced in the King Features fold, he began producing Maizie the Model, a feature that failed to confer lasting fame on its creator. The creation that Whittington abandoned, however, was to meet a different fate. A young cartoonist named Ernie Bushmiller took the reins and went with his strength: the simple gags that would forever earn both the scorn and admiration of millions of comics fans. Bushmiller chose to move Fritzi into the background of the surreality that he was constructing. The movie-star aspirations she once held were behind her; in Bushmiller’s world, Aunt Fritzi functioned as a cipher who occasionally disciplined her niece.

But Hogan’s Alley is re-presenting Whittington’s work, not Bushmiller’s; the latter already enjoys cultlike adoration. What is perhaps most remarkable about Whittington’s Fritzi Ritz work is how unremarkable it is: It never rose above the craftsmanlike and was most often merely there. All of which begs the question: Why reprint it at all? Surely, you say with justification, forgotten gems of yesteryear exist that deserve preservation in a Hogan’s Alley reprint section more than Whittington’s Fritzi Ritz does. And you would be correct. But Whittington’s work has rarely been seen by modern eyes. (This issue’s section likely constitutes the most extensive reprinting of his work to date.) As a result, few readers have ever seen the work that formed the conceptual wellspring of the franchise known today as Nancy. Also, Bushmiller’s singular work on the strip represents one of the very few times that a successor inherited a strip and wrought more creativity with it than its originator did. His work is cited by those who rebut the argument that comic strips should not be inherited by other hands. (Of course, the refutation to that argument is that Bushmiller would have created Nancy eventually anyway; he simply used Fritzi because it was his first break and shunted quickly the nominal star off to the background.) Debates of Bushmillerian inevitability aside, we hope you enjoy what is likely your first (and last) exposure to Larry Whittington’s work. Here, you can see some pre-Nancy Bushmiller work. —Tom Heintjes

Click on the thumbnails below to see enlargements of full strips.

This article originally appeared in Hogan’s Alley #7 (pictured above). To order a copy, click the Paypal button below.

Buck Biggers

The story behind the Total TeleVision studio—birthplace of Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo, among many other characters—has contained more questions than answers. Mark Arnold talks to Buck Biggers, one of the studio’s founders, to set the record straight

Note: This interview was originally published in Hogan’s Alley #15. Biggers died on February 10, 2013.

The Total TeleVision productions (yes, with a capital “V” and small “p”) story is not well known and, for various reasons, has been confused over the years with Jay Ward Productions, Yet its best-known creations—Tennessee Tuxedo and Underdog—are as fondly remembered as any other major animated stars. The company’s founders got their start after branching off from their account executive positions at General Mills’ advertising agency, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. Buck Biggers worked with Chet Stover, Tread Covington and artist Joe Harris to create animated commercials for General Mills breakfast cereals. But the men left the agency to form Total TeleVision. TTV’s first show was King Leonardo and his Short Subjects, which debuted on NBC on Oct. 15, 1960, and was the second color cartoon series on the network’s Saturday morning schedule.

The Mexican animation studio Gamma Productions animated King Leonardo and its fellow TTV travelers, and here is where the confusion sets in. Gamma also animated the various Rocky and Bullwinkle incarnations and its other segments, as well as Jay Ward’s follow-up series Hoppity Hooper. When these series went into syndication, many segments from TTV series ended up in Jay Ward series, especially Tooter the Turtle and Commander McBragg. To confuse matters further, when the Bullwinkle’s restaurant chain opened in the 1980s, Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, Tooter, Baldy and others TTV characters where there alongside Rocky and Bullwinkle and all of the other Jay Ward characters, creating a Gamma mish-mash. And now, Classic Media owns both Jay Ward and TTV’s assets, again blurring the distinction.

One could argue that if the series is funny, then it is a Jay Ward one, but TTV had a charm all its own. Whereas a Jay Ward series might stoop to cheap belly laughs from corny puns, a TTV series would compensate with good storytelling. (Granted, TTV series could be considered highly repetitious, but the same could be said about countless animated cartoon series.) Though not as bold an advertising vehicle as the forthcoming Linus the Lionhearted (not a TTV show), where the animated stars actually appeared on the boxes of Post cereals, King Leonardo had a similar segment with an elephant named Twinkles, who was the namesake of a long-gone General Mills cereal that featured a fold-out storybook adventure on the back of every box. The Leonardo segment featured good King Leonardo the lion and his faithful companion, Odie Cologne, a skunk. Leonardo’s chief nemesis was Biggy Rat, whose sidekick, Itchy Brother, was indeed Leonardo’s brother.

King Leonardo

Other short subjects on the show included The Hunter, a dog detective pursuing a fox character, appropriately named The Fox. The Hunter worked for Officer Flim Flanagan. Tooter the Turtle was a daydreamer who consistently went to see his friend, Mr. Wizard the lizard, who placed him into a new occupation. By the end of the episode, Tooter finally accepted who he really is and asked to be changed back. (This segment was used in future TTV shows, but more on that later.) King Leonardo aired on NBC through Sept. 28, 1963, when it was syndicated in reruns under the title The King and Odie.

TTV’s next series was Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales. Veteran stand-up comic Don Adams lent his unique voice and delivery to the ever-confident penguin. This series debuted on CBS, ironically, on the same day that “King Leonardo” last ran on NBC.

New segments included The Singalong Family, Klondike Kat and The World of Commander McBragg. The Singalong Family was similar to the old bouncing ball cartoons that Fleischer and Famous/Paramount had used: a story told in song, with on-screen lyrics. Klondike Kat featured a Canadian Mountie cat (not dissimilar to Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right) who was always pursuing a mouse named Savoir Faire, and his faithful dog companion Malamute, who never spoke. Klondike worked for Major Minor at Fort Frazzle.

The inspiration for Commander McBragg was British actor C. Aubrey Smith (1863–1948), who specialized in playing rotund military officers. McBragg can be traced more specifically to the 1939 movie The Four Feathers. McBragg spun tall tales about his prior escapades, usually to an uninterested friend.

As for Tennessee Tuxedo, a viewer could receive a fairly decent education from the factual information presented every time Tennessee and his pal, Chumley the walrus, escaped from the zoo to visit their friend Mr. Whoopee, who discussed many a topic via the 3DBB (three-dimensional blackboard). Tennessee Tuxedo ran on CBS until Dec. 17, 1966.

TTV’s next series was definitely its high-water mark: The Underdog Show premiered on Oct. 3, 1964, and ran on NBC or CBS until Sept. 1, 1973, although production of new episodes ceased in 1967. One new backup segment the show introduced was Go Go Gophers, which featured two Native American characters, Ruffled Feathers and Running Board, who are constantly being pursued by Colonel Kit Coyote and Sergeant Okey Homa in a battle of territorial rights. So popular was this segment that the gophers received their own series in 1968. Repeat segments of Klondike Kat, Commander McBragg, Tooter the Turtle, The Hunter and even Tennessee Tuxedo were added to the gophers’ mix. (Adding to the confusion mentioned previously, sometimes Jay Ward’s Fractured Fairy Tales and Bullwinkle’s Corner segments were spliced into The Underdog Show, although this occurred after the series went into syndication.

Underdog was a humble, lovable character named Shoeshine Boy, who became Underdog by eating a super-energy pill. His girlfriend was Sweet Polly Purebred, a news reporter for TTV. Many villains did their worst on Underdog, but the most recurring were Simon Bar Sinister, who used the phrase “Simon Says” when performing a dastardly deed, and Riff Raff the wolf, a typical gangster type.

TTV’s next series, The Beagles, is barely—if at all—remembered. Capitalizing on the success of The Beatles, The Beagles was actually a duo named Stringer and Tubby that more closely resembled The Smothers Brothers with a guitar and giant slap bass. The show debuted on Sept. 10, 1966, on CBS. It was repeated the following season on ABC and then quietly canceled, despite the release of a record album from the show titled Here Come the Beagles.

The next part of what happened at TTV is the sketchiest part. According to Wikipedia’s entry, “Total Television folded when General Mills dropped out as the sponsor in 1969.” Apparently, TTV had trouble selling another series after The Beagles. The next known project that TTV tackled was The Colossal Show. Prior to this interview, whether any animation was produced for The Colossal Show was unknown, although a single spin-off comic book appeared in October 1969 from Gold Key. As General Mills’ sponsorship ended, so did any prospects of continuing with this or any other series.

Unfortunately, most of the materials don’t exist from this era. The operator of Toontracker, an animation history website, includes this information: “Joe Harris [the former Vice-President, Supervisor of Animation for Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample Advertising, who left DFS in 1959 to found Total Television Productions with Treadwell Covington and writers Buck Biggers and Chet Stover] sent me the following regarding “The Beagles”: “Now there’s a sad story. The editor who worked on that series died while at work on them and apparently all the editing materials including the master negs were tossed out by his widow. I’ve tried through John Gartenberg, the former archivist at Golden Books Publishing, to find out if the trail to those masters was still traceable but he came up with nothing. He was able to locate the masters on all but a very few of the rest of the TTV productions but drew a blank on the Beagles. I not only have the characters but the storyboards, although unfortunately on stats. I have no idea where the original boards are; possibly they went out with the rest of the materials. The Beagles were entirely TTV properties which makes it doubly painful to have lost them.”

But don’t fret. You’ll find that the story has a happy ending.

TTV’s characters were licensed frequently during the 1970s as a number of items featuring Underdog, Go Go Gophers and Tennessee Tuxedo were produced. The last Underdog comic book rolled off the Gold Key/Whitman presses in 1979. During the 1980s and 1990s, further attempts were made to publish TTV comic books. According to Wikipedia, Biggers, Stover, Covington and Harris sold their creations to Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who later sold the rights to Little Golden Books. Currently, Classic Media wound up owning the TTV properties when it purchased Golden Books.

Apart from the information in Biggers and Stovers’ book How Underdog Was Born, the TTV story has been shrouded in mystery…until now. And now, here’s the rest of the story.—Mark Arnold

Mark Arnold: Who formed Total TeleVision?

Buck Biggers: I did.

Arnold: OK, because the way the book read is that it was kind of sketchy, like it was you and Chet [Stover] did it, and then it seemed like Gordon [Johnson] did it, and…

Biggers: Well, Chet was there from the start. The point, as it says in the book—actually, it doesn’t say much in the book about Cape Cod—but one of my driving forces was in 1959. I visited Cape Cod and told my late wife that we were going there to live. I didn’t know how, but when I got back to New York very shortly thereafter, Gordon called me into his office and asked me to go find a creative team so that he could help keep [Jay] Ward and [Bill] Scott on the straight and narrow, and I took that as kind of fate.

Underdog

Yakkety Yak

Tooter the Turtle

The Hunter

Arnold: How did that differ from Leonardo Productions? Sometimes I see on a copyright “copyright TTV-Leonardo,” so what’s the difference between the various company names?

Biggers: Leonardo was actually P.A.T., or Producers Associates for Television. That was Peter Pieche’s company and also Gordon’s company, and they were almost always co-producers with us. They handled Mexico [Gamma Productions].

Arnold: So Leonardo was P.A.T.

Biggers: Yes, it was.

Arnold: Looking through a recent Life magazine book collection about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I saw a blueprint that showed the Underdog balloon. It said that your address was at 366 Madison Avenue in New York. Was that always the case for Total TeleVision?

Biggers: That was just a mail drop and a place where you can go up and use the conference room if you want to. It was not a real address. We finally did have an office address, but I’m not even sure where it was. That was Tread, the great guy that we brought in to front the company, because we couldn’t. He became our New York rep and our man for recording soundtracks, so he was the only one who was there, so if you think about it, our address was wherever we were.

Arnold: Speaking of Tread, you’ve confirmed in this book that Treadwell Covington is a real person…

Biggers: [laughter]

Arnold: and the only reason I ask is because there have been rumors he’s fictitious, like Jay Ward’s “Ponsonby Britt.” He has a rather unique name.

Biggers: Yes, he does. He sounds and kind of looks like his name. He’s tall and had gray hair even then, He’s very dignified looking, and he’s from Chapel Hill, N.C., and speaks with almost a British accent. I knew he’d be very impressive to Gordon, and he was. He was a very good one to present to Gordon. We couldn’t do it ourselves, so we chose Tread, and he went in and showed the first scripts and first models.

Arnold: What did he do after you got established? What was his role?

Biggers: He recorded all of the soundtracks. He’s a very good man in the booth, and he did all the New York recording of soundtracks. You understand that a lot of the tracks were done wherever a person was. Wally Cox could go in to a studio out in Hollywood or wherever and record his part. The actors seldom worked together. They’d go in and do their parts. Don Adams would go in somewhere and then ship that tape in, and then it would be put together with others. The New York sessions, Tread supervised.

Arnold: So, if someone would do a reading, would they do a number of episodes all at once?

Biggers: Yes. Usually, though, we were doing two a week.

Arnold: Reading through your book, it seemed that everything was done with a lot of martinis? Was that a joke or was that true?

Biggers: [laughter] Nancy [Biggers’ wife] said that to me! I just spoke to a writer’s conference on Tuesday and they were a wonderful audience. When I got off the podium and we were driving home ,Nancy said to me, “Maybe you ought to go a little softer on that martini business.”

Arnold: [laughter] Well, the impression I got is that everything was created in a drunken haze and that’s how the creative juices flowed.

Biggers: [laughter] Probably was! We’d get there about nine o’clock and work till about 12:30, touching up the writing we had done during the week individually and then plotting the two new or four new episodes: couple Hunters, couple Tennessee Tuxedos. We’d plot those, and then our work was really done, and so then we’d go to lunch. Then we’d come up with all sorts of ideas, some of them very good. We kept notes on our lunch. We had to, because a lot of times we’d change opinions. But they were always three-martini lunches. Always the same thing: double shrimp cocktail and three martinis!

Arnold: [laughter] It just all seems so foreign today.

Biggers: Oh God, yes! Very outdated! And that was it. We only met once a week, it wasn’t like something we did every day. It was a fun time. We laughed like hell! When I say we should have paid people to let us do the work, I mean we really had fun!

The Fox

Sweet Polly Purebred

Tennessee Tuxedo

Simon Bar Sinister

Arnold: What about Joe Harris? I saw him recently on the Underdog DVDs that Classic Media put out. Are you still in communication with him?

Biggers: Oh, yes. Joe is a fine, fine storyboard man. Excellent!

Arnold: Did he design all of the TTV characters?

Biggers: On our first series, Chet did the models. Chet is more of a painter than a cartoonist, and then Joe took those models and made them more “cartoony.” Then Chet would work with him on each of the model sheets. In truth, we would say, “We want a penguin. Don Adams is a penguin, because we thought he looked like a penguin or we want Wally Cox as a dog,” and so forth. So, he would do initial models and send them in, and Chet and I would look at them. He originally thought that Underdog got larger muscles when he made his change from Shoeshine Boy, but we explained that the 98-pound weakling remained a 98-pound weakling.

Arnold: Riff Raff’s henchman, Mooch, looked a lot like Walter Matthau. Was that a conscious design decision or just a fluke?

Riff Raff

Riff Raff’s namesake, George Raft

Biggers: No, it wasn’t [a fluke]. Actually, Riff Raff started out with a last name that was originally R-A-F-T, after George Raft, the old gangster character in Hollywood. It was from him that we started, and then we had worked on super characters and had a wolf in there, and Joe drew that. And Riff Raff just kind of grew out of that.

Arnold: You came from an advertising background and were working at Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample for a time.

Biggers: Yeah, that’s no longer in existence. It’s now Saatchi and Saatchi.

Arnold: At the time you were still with DFS, did you have a hand in creating some of their popular cereal characters like the Trix Rabbit and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, or was that after you left?

Biggers: Trix Rabbit was not after we left, but we didn’t have anything to do with it.

Arnold: Originally the character had the same voice by Delo States, who did Stanley Livingston, so I thought maybe you had some sort of hand in those things.

Biggers: I wish we had. I was an account executive and one of my brands was “Twinkles”, a cereal that no longer exists, and Chet was the creative director on all of the cereals, but we didn’t have anything to do with the development of the characters.

Arnold: So that was completely separate, and you never did the animation for those either?

Biggers: No.

Arnold: Who did? Was that the TV Spots Company?

Biggers: It was just different people, different guys. That stuff was mostly farmed out by General Mills.

Arnold: I see similarities, and it seemed like everything happened at the same time.

Biggers: What happened was, cartoons were mushrooming on TV at that time, so all of that did happen all at the same time.

Arnold: Your book goes into great detail about King Leonardo, Tennessee Tuxedo and Underdog and their related segments. One segment you missed was The Sing-a-Long Family. How did that come about? Were those original tunes?

Biggers: Yeah. I wrote the music and the words. It’s just that we had a need for some more 1:30s [cartoon segments of one minute, 30 seconds in length], and you remember from the book that we created Commander McBragg as a 1:30 element because all we had at that time was Bullwinkle as “Mr. Know-it-All.” They needed more, so we did Commander McBragg, and then at some point they wanted 13 more. I don’t know if we did the whole order or not, but however many Sing-a-Longs were done, we did them.

Arnold: You raised a question about the 1:30 spots, and this is a source of confusion because some people just seem to clump all the Jay Ward and TTV material together. Was that always an issue? Did you always have episodes of “Bullwinkle’s Corner” or “Mr. Know-it-All” in your shows at the same time?

Biggers: Not originally, but later on in years since then, they did just about anything they wanted to. I don’t remember seeing any combined, but I’ve heard people say that they were. And you know, General Mills owned them outright, and they could do any damn thing they wanted.

Arnold: To the best of your knowledge, Commander McBragg was originally only in TTV shows?

Biggers: That’s right. I don’t think any of our shows would have had Jay Ward material in them as much as their shows might have had ours because more of our shows were ordered than theirs.

Arnold: Your work used so many catchphrases like “I’ll make mincemeat out of that mouse!” and “Confound it!” and “Tennessee Tuxedo will not fail.” Is this due to your advertising background, or did you feel catchphrases would be more memorable?

Biggers: We did it on purpose from the very start. For example, King Leonardo used to say, “That’s the most unheard-of thing I’ve ever heard of.” We did those things from the beginning because kids love repetition. That’s one reason why we could get by with doing only 17 shows and repeating them three times in a year, because kids love repetition. They almost love the repetition more than the original time because they almost like to know what’s going to happen and even talk with it and almost say the lines. So when you have repeat lines like that it also helps when they play make-believe and they pretend that they are your character. If they don’t have anything to say like, “There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!” it’s very hard for them to imitate the character. We wanted that because that’s the stuff that will help build your show’s ratings. So we purposefully went after that.

Jay Ward

Arnold: Did you ever meet Jay Ward?

Biggers: Oh, yes. Only met him in person once, talked to him two or three times on the phone. He was a very gracious and a very nice guy and a terribly creative guy.

Arnold: Did you ever sense that you had a real rivalry or creative differences, or was it, “We’re all in the same boat. We’re making some great shows”?

Biggers: I don’t think I felt either of those things. I don’t think for a long time he knew who we were or wanted to know who we were.

Arnold: He was just interested in his own stuff.

Biggers: That’s right. He kind of kept himself apart in a way. Very creative guy.

Arnold: Your book ends with the creation of Underdog. I was curious about what happened beyond the creation of Underdog. It was kind of sad that you didn’t have quite the same success after that. The next project was The Beagles. What was the story behind that series, and why don’t you see it today?

Biggers: Well, that was a huge ratings success. I have somewhere a telegram from Fred Silverman congratulating us as the initial ratings came in for the show and how great it was doing. But this was the first show that we had not sold to General Mills. It’s the only show that we still own. The only show we ever owned. We sold all the others outright to General Mills, and this show we leased to Deluxe Toys, which was also a client of Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. They bought what amounts to nine half hours, but those nine half-hours were combined with stuff from General Mills: “King Leonardo,” anything like that, to make a full 18 minutes. That’s all the half-hour shows were. The rest was filled up with titles and bridges and stuff like that and six minutes of commercials. So we only did the nine half-hours in the first year, and the CEO of Deluxe Toys absconded with all the company’s money, nine or ten million dollars or something. And that was it; we had no sponsor.

Arnold: Wow!

The Beagles

Biggers: We had nothing, and I don’t know whether that association spoiled The Beagles, but the point was unless someone was going to buy more, you can’t do a hell of a lot with nine half-hours. As much as kids like things repeated, nine half-hours is just not enough. So we had no real place to place them.

Arnold: But do they exist?

Biggers: Oh, yeah.

Arnold: Could they come out on DVD?

Biggers: They’re supposed to, but they aren’t out yet. In fact, we were in the process of trying to make a deal with the company that bought Underdog to see if we can do something with them.

Arnold: You’re quoted on the Toontracker website saying that the materials for The Beagles were all thrown out. Is that true?

Biggers: I thought they were, but P.A.T. had them. They were the ones that handled all of the shows for General Mills. They had everything. When it came time for us to sell the shows—not The Beagles, but all the others—to Broadway [Video], we figured we go into the lab and give them The Beagles. Well, we couldn’t find them; they were gone. But Joe Harris found them at Golden Books. Unfortunately, they are not in combination; they are all separate pictures and tracks, and it costs money just to put them together. A lot, so nobody’s anxious to do that unless they’re going to use them for something. We’re still dickering around. I don’t know if anything will come of it.

Arnold: You mentioned Producers Associates. What’s their basic history? Do they still exist?

Biggers: When we sold all our properties, it was a co-deal with them when they sold all their properties to Broadway Video, and parts of them we were selling together because we were both producers. It’s kind of like Total TeleVision productions: It’s out there, but it doesn’t do anything.

A Colossal Show comic book from 1969

Arnold: I have a Gold Key comic book titled The Colossal Show, and on the cover it says, “copyright by Total TeleVision productions.” How did that end up being just a comic book and not a show?

Biggers: We had an agent named Jack Sobol, a very good agent, and he was the agent for some top comedians. He became our agent after the General Mills thing stopped and we were still trying to keep in the cartoon business. Now, you had to sell shows to the network. That’s what changed. No longer could a company like General Mills buy a show and then put it on and now, thanks to Fred Silverman, primarily. The networks were buying their own shows, and we didn’t have the contacts there. And we also didn’t have a factory. They wanted their people to have a factory like Filmation instead of being people like us, hat in hand, where we had to go Mexico or Australia or someplace to get the animation done. They wanted someone primarily with their own animation house. We took Fred to 21 [a New York restaurant], and he loved our presentation, loved our shows, but he never bought any. One of the pitches we made was to NBC, Bud Grant I think it was, and someone who was over him named Larry White. Anyway, we pitched _The Colossal Show_, which had a lead character that had the voice of Phil Silvers—an imitation of Phil Silvers as Bilko—and each show there would be a different guest character doing a celebrity voice impersonation each week. On the pilot it was an imitation of Jack Benny. It was our typical stuff, a comedy with Roman people, and we took it to them and they loved it. They laughed. And the plan was they wanted to buy it. We had another meeting and a handshake, and they bought the series. With that handshake, Jack Sobol went to his friends at the comic-book company and told them to quickly get a comic book out to take advantage of the debut. Then, when the comic book was already in the works, NBC backed out of the handshake. We never knew quite why that happened. It was nothing to do with the show, because nothing had changed.

Malamute

Klondike Kat

Itchy Brother

Horrors Hunter

Arnold: Does anything survive of that show? Was anything even shot?

Biggers: There was a pilot, but I don’t know where the hell it is.

Arnold: And that was animated at Gamma as well?

Biggers: No. I think we did that at Terrytoons. I’m not sure.

Arnold: Would it have had a different look to it, or would it have looked about the same as your other series?

Biggers: I don’t think it looked quite the same, but it was close.

Arnold: The comic book looked a bit different. I don’t know if it was one of your regular artists who was handling the comic book.

Biggers: Oh, they did all their own stuff.

Arnold: Were there any other projects then or before that never made it? I know you mentioned one in your book.

Biggers: Parrot Playhouse was the one that was mentioned; that was the one where we did a pilot called “Spoofs and Saddles,” which was a takeoff on Gunsmoke.

Arnold: Were there any other projects like that, even later on?

Biggers: We did a fun pilot, which was really a sales presentation, where we introduced the characters and showed little bits of episodes. This was called Noah’s Lark. It was a billionaire who built a spaceship and set out for planets and had all these people on board.

Arnold: Was that animated or live action?

Biggers: No, it was animated. Different kind of animation totally from anything we’d done.

Arnold: And why didn’t that go anywhere?

(click to enlarge)

Biggers: We were kind of in a vacuum. We hadn’t been out there. We should have been out there doing something, developing contacts, but we had no reason really to expect things to change like they did and we weren’t worried about anything and then all of sudden—wham! Then we tried to get out there, and then when word gets around that you’re not getting any sales, you really don’t get any sales.

Arnold: Oh, yeah. I know how that is. I have a sales background myself. What events led to the closure of TTV? It wasn’t really a closure, because you kept Total TeleVision going as a company until you sold it. Is that correct?

Biggers: Sure, we kept open. In fact, we had a bit of trouble with the IRS because they claimed that we couldn’t file as chapter S, I think it was, and we had to file as a corporation, and it was going to cost us an arm and a leg because we hadn’t done something. Well anyway, we managed to get that all right. We sold the stuff, and since selling the stuff about the only thing we’ve done is taken some option contracts of DVDs for The Beagles, something that we’d all sign.

Arnold: What really happened to Gamma, then? You’re saying Colossal Show wasn’t done by Gamma, and I know Jay Ward didn’t do George of the Jungle through Gamma. Did it just kind of fall apart after The Beagles?

Biggers: As far as I know. I can’t really speak for it, but that’s my general thoughts. They tried to do commercial work and so forth, and I think it just collapsed.

Arnold: So by the time you did Colossal Show, it was collapsed already?

Biggers: No, I don’t think so. Not by that time. It took a while.

Arnold: Did you read the Jay Ward book by Keith Scott [The Moose that Roared]?

Biggers: I’m going to be honest with you. I liked the book and I read it, but I never got past the middle. Not because of the book; it was business things that took me away.

Arnold: He said Jay Ward was really disappointed with the animation that came out of Gamma. Were you as disappointed with Gamma’s animation?

Biggers: There were a couple of major occasions where we were, but I think the difference is that Jay Ward had had hit series before he ever got to Bullwinkle, before he had ever got to Gamma, so he had done all different kinds of animation. He knew what he wanted and he knew what he liked. We only knew Gamma animation. I had been the one responsible for getting the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows ready for the network. That’s the kind of animation I looked at and realized that’s the kind of animation we would have to work with if we were to do anything, so we got what we expected.

Arnold: Why did you go with Gamma? Why didn’t you go to say, Hanna-Barbera, as they were already established?

Biggers: We didn’t have any choice. We came up with the series to sell to General Mills, and that meant you had to use Gamma.

Arnold: So they had the connections?

Biggers: They had put them in business. That was what we were created for. In other words, Ward and Scott were giving General Mills trouble, or Gamma trouble, and so we actually came into being because we could be somebody to keep Ward and Scott from doing so many dirty jokes for kids.

Arnold: [laughter] You mentioned that it was hard getting another sponsor after Silverman. Did General Mills drop you? Wouldn’t it have been easy to find another sponsor due to the success you had?

Simon Bar Sinister

Sergeant Okey Homa

Savoir Faire

Ruffled Feather

Biggers: No. We made some pitches to some other companies. They were all very nice, but not a lot of them wanted to get into the business. They didn’t want to get into the business of having somebody create shows. It’s another business. General Mills got in there quite by accident at a time when there was nobody doing it, so they were willing to do it. Later, companies just weren’t interested.

Arnold: So were the last shows you made The Beagles or Go Go Gophers?

Biggers: I think they were The Beagles.

Arnold: After you arguably “closed your doors,” since you didn’t really close your doors, what did you and Chet and Treadwell and Joe do next? Did you just go your separate ways and just have this company around or what?

Buck Biggers (left) and Chet Stover in the 1970s (click to enlarge)

Biggers: Chet and I stayed together. We had a two-year contract with CBS Enterprises to develop shows for them and developed one at Terrytoons. We developed a series called The Hatfields and the McCoys and developed it for Fred with his blessing, but he never would commit at the last minute.

Arnold: And that was also animated?

Biggers: Yeah.

Arnold: There was a lot of merchandising during the ’70s and the ’80s with Underdog. Did you handle all that?

Biggers: We didn’t handle any of that. We got half the rights. Even now, somebody just put out a new set of glasses for Underdog and a new statue of Underdog, but you go to those companies and you sign with them and they just take off. You don’t do anything.

Arnold: So you didn’t handle merchandising or licensing?

Biggers: No. P.A.T. was handling it. They were called Leonardo at times. I don’t know which ones, but the offices were called P.A.T. and Peter Pieche, and we got half the money.

Arnold: There was resurgence in popularity of Underdog in the ’70s. Did you ever think, “Maybe we should do some new episodes”?

Biggers: Well, in the book, it talks about when Peter came to us and wanted to see if we could sell a new Underdog series. In there is a write-up for that, with new plots and stuff like that. I don’t know what year that was. It didn’t sell, but we came close.

Arnold: How did you feel about the censoring in the ’80s and early ’90s of Underdog episodes where they removed the scenes where he eats the Super Energy Pill for fear of teaching kids about drugs?

Biggers: At the book signing on Tuesday, a guy who asked us to sign a book for him said, “I probably shouldn’t have loved Underdog as much as I did. It made me very sick. I had to have my stomach pumped because I ate a whole bottle of aspirin.” He used them to put in his ring. Mothers wrote in about that, and I suppose all things considered we probably wouldn’t have put that in. But it was a great gimmick because we were looking for an Achilles’ heel. Underdog was too damn perfect! And just like Superman has his Kryptonite. No, it didn’t bother us.

Arnold: I have to admit when I was growing up, I used these little candies called Smarties. Those were what I considered my “Underdog Super Energy Pills.”

Biggers: You were pretty safe! And you probably got energy from the sugar! [laughter]

Arnold: [Laughter] Yeah, I probably just wanted to admit that it did have an influence on me, but not in a negative way! Did you know that there was a Bullwinkle’s Restaurant during the ’80s and early ’90s?

Biggers: No.

Arnold: They had little robot characters, like at the Disney parks, with Bullwinkle on stage. They had Underdog playing a saxophone.

Sweet Polly Purebread ad (click to enlarge)

Biggers: I’ve heard about stuff like that, but it was all P.A.T. Somebody just sent me a menu from a small restaurant in New Jersey that has an “Under Dog on Sweet Polly Pure Bread”! [laughter]

Arnold: [Laughter] That’s pretty good!

Biggers: We didn’t sanction any of that stuff.

Arnold: You sold your properties to Broadway, then Broadway purchased Golden Books, then Broadway sold everything to Classic Media. So now, Classic Media is making a live-action Underdog film with Jason Lee.

Biggers: Right. It’s in Providence, Rhode Island. I think they’re wrapping. Nancy and my daughter visited the set. I was invited, but I didn’t go with them. They went to the set a couple of times, and I don’t have any idea what kind of movie it’ll be or whether it will be a success, but I hope it is a success. At least we get the rights from music, so…

Arnold: That was my next question. Do you still get a piece of the action?

Biggers: Just the music from ASCAP.

Arnold: There’s a Tennessee Tuxedo and a Go Go Gophers DVD out, and they don’t put the theme songs in. On the Tennessee Tuxedo one, they put in a demo version of the theme song. Is that because of paying royalties?

Biggers: That’s all it is. Yeah.

Arnold: I found that disappointing and even told them so.

Biggers: That was pretty shortsighted of them.

Arnold: The theme songs are almost the best part. They were very well written.

Biggers: I appreciate that. I had an enjoyable time writing them.

Arnold: Did you write anything musically before doing all of these shows? Like, did you write any jingles for commercials or anything?

Biggers: I did some jingles for commercials.

Arnold: Which ones?

Biggers: They never got on! I had written a musical and all kinds of stuff, but nothing that had been performed or published, so one of the reasons I enjoyed doing the company is so that I could do the music. I had a lot of ulterior motives in forming the company!

Arnold: Is there a complete listing of all the TTV shows of what aired originally and when?

Biggers: It doesn’t exist as far as I know. If it does, it would have to be General Mills that would have it. They scheduled any way that they wanted to, and they did it station by station any way they wanted to. Underdog was the one on the network longest. Nine years on the network. That set a record for kids’ shows on Saturday morning. Most of it was syndicated. So I doubt you’d find schedules. If you found them, you wouldn’t be able to read ’em.

Arnold: Underdog was usually a four-part story, but I’ve seen some single episodes. Why was that?

Biggers: I don’t remember any single-part episodes, but there were some two-part episodes. That was so that you could end at a certain place, so that they could end when they wanted to so you could get out in two episodes.

Arnold: Are you still in contact with all the people you worked with who are still around? Obviously you are with Chet. Is Treadwell still around?

Biggers: Yes. I don’t talk to him much anymore since he moved to Long Island. He’s in real estate, and I think he wanted to get out of the hubbub. I’ve talked to him I guess once in the last year, and I’ve talked to Joe a couple of times.

Arnold: Are you in touch with some of the voice actors who are still alive?

Biggers: No, because Tread handled the voice tracks. We would decide who we wanted and either have preselected them or have Tread do some auditions and also tape some selections. But we practically never went in there. We talked to the voice people, but they didn’t know us from a hole in the wall. Allen Swift was our first voice selection. We always used him. He was always great. He did Itchy Brother and Odie Cologne on our first show.

Phineas J. Whoopee

Officer Flim Flanagan

Odie Cologne

Malamute

Arnold: Do you think he was the longest-lasting, most consistent voice you used for all the series?

Biggers: Absolutely. We were so used to using imitators that when we dreamed up the Hunter, we were going to use a Kenny Delmar impersonator. It was Tread who said, “Why don’t we call Kenny Delmar?” And we called him and he leaped at it. In the movies, they always did a chicken of him [Foghorn Leghorn] and always had some imitator’s voice [Mel Blanc]. He always got sick of that. So, we used Kenny Delmar, and he became a voice of other characters as well.

Arnold: Yes, I know he did McBragg.

Biggers: Right!

Arnold: You tried to always tie in to a celebrity even if you didn’t have the actual celebrity. Are you an old-movie buff?

Biggers: No. There are two things there that go together. One is that when we did our shows, there were mostly one-TV homes. You didn’t think of five TV sets in the house, you thought of one. And you thought we’ve got to do something here that not only appeals to little kids, but also to bigger kids, or they’ll take the TV away from the little kids. And you’ve got to do something if you can that has some appeal for adults. And also, we had to sell to adults. You might not think that’s important, but if they don’t laugh, they don’t think it’s funny, you understand? You can say to them, “Kids will love this!” and if they don’t laugh themselves, they don’t think it’s funny. So, in dealing with those things, we found out that it’s wonderful if you use voices that mothers or fathers had seen in the movies. In other words, not the person but their voice, it gives them a feeling of familiarity and they kind of enjoy it. So we found that was true. It was also easier with older kids, so we developed that and used it, whether they’d seen it on TV or seen it in movies or whatever.

Commander McBragg

Arnold: For me, it became like a history lesson after a while. I’d have to say that I saw the original Four Feathers a couple of years ago. I said, “There’s Commander McBragg!”

Biggers: [Laughter] C. Aubrey Smith! The other thing was, I did the original presentations for the account executives who were handling the shows for Gordon. I didn’t do them like I was with the company. It was mine. So, I did the presentations, and we had to use voices that I could imitate reasonably, so that was the reason for Ronald Coleman and Eugene Pallette, guys like that, who I could actually imitate. So the first person we got who I can’t imitate was Wally Cox. But it didn’t matter, because everybody knew Wally Cox’s voice so well that it didn’t make any difference.

Arnold: When I was a kid Wally Cox was on Hollywood Squares, and I said, “It’s Underdog! [laughter]

Biggers: He’s been Mr. Peepers and Hiram Holiday, so he’d been on TV a lot. His voice was well known to a lot of people. The other thing was, in that same vein, how we chose names. We had a series called The Hunter. We found that when kids read about a hunter, they thought about The Hunter! That’s where Tennessee Tuxedo got his name. Every time they saw Tennessee in the books or in school or heard about it on the radio, they thought about our character. That’s called “top spin,” and that’s how Underdog got his name. America loves an underdog. It’s hard to read a sports section of a newspaper without seeing the word “underdog”. You hear it on the news all the time.

Arnold: It worked! When I was a kid, I thought that the reason he was called Underdog was that he was wearing his underwear [laughter]. In fact, my brother even called him Underwear Dog!

Biggers: [Laughter] I never heard that one before! That’s even better!

Arnold: Before I knew what it meant, I wondered why he was “Underdog”…why isn’t he “Superdog”? I understood the “dog,” but where does this “under” part come from?

Biggers: Champion of the underdogs of the world!

Mark Arnold notes that author royalties from How Underdog Was Born go to the nonprofit organization Victory Over Violence.

Also Over Underdog

An Interview With Chet Stover, TTV Writer

Mark Arnold: Your book covered everything up to and including the creation of Underdog, but it didn’t talk about later creations like The Beagles or The Colossal Show. What was your participation in everything?

Chet Stover: Well, we were equals. Buck did the music.

Arnold: I know that you’re an artist because you included your artwork in the book, but did you do any of the character design, or did you leave that up to Joe Harris?

Stover: The way that worked was, I talked to Joe Harris. I brought him into the company, and he and I worked together. I would tell Joe exactly what we wanted. For instance, sketching Underdog. And then Joe would do a whole bunch of sketches, and since we worked so far apart, he would mail them. Then Buck and I would go over them and make any corrections. I remember sometimes putting some of his drawings up on a window in a hotel we used to work in, and we’d trace on them, making changes, and then we’d send them back to Joe.

Arnold: Where was Joe located?

Stover: Long Island.

Arnold: When you worked for DFS, did you work for any of the other cereal characters, like Trix Rabbit?

Stover: Well, the Trix Rabbit was a commercial, and I was the creative director on that. Joe designed the Trix Rabbit, too.

Arnold: What animation house did you use?

Stover: I’m not sure. Maybe we used somebody in New York.

Arnold: I remember reading somewhere that the earliest King Leonardo episodes were done through a company called TV Spots. Does that sound familiar?

Stover: No, it doesn’t. I’m not familiar with that at all. On King Leonardo, I did the original drawings, but they’re very crude [laughter]!

Arnold: [Laughter] Aw, they’re not that bad! Did you have a hand with any of the later cereal characters for DFS, or by the time you got Total TeleVision were you totally split from that end of it?

Stover: Yes, yes. I had left the agency, and Joe did too.

The Underdog balloon from 1979′s Thanksgiving Day parade

Arnold: In a book from Life magazine about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, there was a picture of the Underdog balloon with a blueprint, and it lists Total TeleVision at 366 Madison Avenue. Was that a real address or just a mailstop?

Stover: Well, when we were still working at the agency, you could rent office space for just a day, or you could have it as a mail drop, so that’s what we did a number of times.

Arnold: It seemed like all of the shows were created in sort of a drunken haze. Buck and I had a laugh about this. What is your take on that?

Stover: You sound like my son! They read the book and said, “My God, you did everything with martinis!” [laughter] That was an era in the industry when Madison Avenue lived on martinis.

Arnold: Nothing wrong with it. It’s just foreign today.

Stover: Yes, it’s incredible. I know for a fact that there were times in the agency when there was no use to talk to some guys after lunch because they were out.

Arnold: Did you guys equally create the characters, as you say in the book, or did one person say, “I’ve got this great idea for a show” and everyone just agreed?

Stover: We worked as a team. We created the shows, created the characters.

Arnold: Even the secondary segments like Go Go Gophers?

Stover: Yes, it was all done by us.

Arnold: When I was a kid, I got a comic book called The Colossal Show. On the cover it was copyrighted by Total TeleVision productions. What are your thoughts about that show?

Phil Silvers

Stover: Actually, I’ve never heard of a comic book about it, but we did present a show to NBC. Mr. Colossal was “Sgt. Bilko”. It was a Phil Silvers type voice.

Arnold: There was one issue of a comic book published through Gold Key or Western Publishing, and it says “Brand New” on the cover.

Stover: I don’t remember doing that at all. We may have had a deal with Western while at DFS. DFS had a deal with Golden Books and all that stuff. I’m very vague about all that stuff.

Arnold: Buck explained that you had a deal with NBC and that at the last moment they backed out.

Stover: Yeah.

Arnold: He mentioned that there was pilot actually produced through Terrytoons and not Gamma.

Stover: Yes, Terrytoons. I don’t know how they got involved with that. They operated somewhere out of Westchester County. I remember going out there to do a joint venture with somebody, and they were looking for a way to get back into television.

Arnold: Terrytoons was doing Tom Terrific for television. Did you have any involvement in that?

Stover: No, but I do know that with Tom Terrific there was this guy named Jules Feiffer. He was involved with Terrytoons also, I believe, and that was the only time I met him.

Arnold: How did you get into Terrytoons instead of Gamma? Was Gamma closing its doors at that point?

Stover: I don’t know. I don’t remember how that happened. We didn’t go looking for Terrytoons. It was a whole network sort of thing. Buck and I had an agent who somehow got involved with Terrytoons. I think that’s the way it worked.

Arnold: Buck confirmed that you and Jay Ward were separate companies, but you both shared P.A.T. [Producers Associates for Television] and the Gamma animation studio. I don’t know if you read the Bullwinkle book written by Keith Scott, but he said that Jay Ward so disliked the Gamma animation that by the time he got to George of the Jungle, he had it animated in Hollywood. It seemed like the same thing happened with TTV, but more like by default.

Stover: Gamma was put together by General Mills, and DFS had a hand in it. We had nothing to do with it.

Arnold: After this, you pretty much stopped TTV.

Stover: We had about five or six fully storyboarded presentations, and we never sold anything more.

Arnold: Was it due to not being able to get a single show sponsorship, as Buck implies?

Stover: No, I think basically the networks didn’t want to have anything to do with DFS or an advertising agency, and we had “advertising agency” stamped all over us. That was the day when the agency and the client told the networks what they would draw. The networks didn’t approach us with King Leonardo or Underdog. It worked the other way ’round. We gave the presentation to the agency, and then General Mills went to the network. With the clout they had, they could spend the money on Saturday morning TV and tell the networks what to put on and in what time slot. They worked out some kind of a deal. When Freddy [Silverman] came in, he didn’t want to have anything to do with this, so we had a tough time after that.

Arnold: You weren’t willing to budge and become more like Filmation or Hanna-Barbera?

Stover: We wouldn’t have minded being like Hanna-Barbera, however! [laughter] No, we were sort of settled in the way that we did things.

Arnold: Buck went on to work for NBC after the Total TeleVision days. What did you do?

Stover: Oh, I went on to do a number of things. I worked for a couple of years over at Milton-Bradley and did a couple of their commercials.

Arnold: Did you design any of the toys?

Stover: No. I did all of their advertising.

Arnold: Did you form your own agency?

Stover: No, they had a house agency. I also flew out to Australia and did a series called Around the World in 80 Days. It was a cartoon. I did that for General Mills directly, and it was animated down there.

Arnold: That wasn’t Total TeleVision, either?

Stover: Oh, no.

Arnold: In the ’70s, there was a lot of merchandising of Underdog. You didn’t have anything to do with it, but you received residuals?

Stover: Right.

Arnold: Were you in contact with the voices?

Stover: Occasionally. That was something Treadwell [Covington] handled. We decided on who the voices would be and got their agents to do that. We didn’t get involved with that. I went down for a couple of sessions.

Theme Main Event

A good theme song transcends its origins, and the great ones survive their host programs. As Underdog is not the only cartoon character with a swinging theme song, we recall some of our other favorites from animated shows (sorry, Batman).

Sammy Lerner, musical director at Paramount Studios, wrote the Popeye theme song for a 1933 Betty Boop cartoon titled “Popeye the Sailor,” which marked the sailor man’s film debut. Indeed strong to the finitch, generations of children know the song even if they haven’t seen the cartoons. It’s become part of our DNA.

The sly, slinky horns perfectly complemented the sly, slinky Pink Panther, whose Henry Mancini-written theme introduced the 1963 live-action movie with a title sequence directed by Friz Freleng, who then went on to direct the animated shorts.

Far from prehistoric, the Flintstones theme, with its insistent percussion and horns melding perfectly with a very modern melody, was the 1960 brainchild of composer Hoyt Curtin, who also wrote theme music for cartoons including Jonny Quest, The Jetsons and Hong Kong Phooey. The memorable lyrics were by studio honchos Hanna and Barbera.

Hands down, the best song ever with “radioactive blood” in its lyrics, the 1967 Spider-Man theme song is arguably a case where the theme music is more entertaining than the show that followed. Academy Award winner Paul Francis Webster wrote the lyrics, and Bob Harris composed the music. On their last album in 1995, the Ramones knocked their cover of the song out of the park.

In 1989, Matt Groening approached composer Danny Elfman about composing the theme to his new cartoon, The Simpsons. Groening gave Elfman some examples of the musical feel he sought, including the  theme from The Jetsons and a Remington electric shaver jingle. Elfman recombined these influences and wrought an instrumental theme that has remained fresh and exuberant for nearly two decades.

Honorable mention: SpongeBob SquarePants, Gigantor, Josie and the Pussycats, Jonny Quest, Speed Racer and Care Bears (just kidding about that last one).

To purchase Hogan’s Alley #15, where this feature (and so much more, pictured at right) first appeared for only $8 postpaid, click the Paypal link below!

(Note: This article first appeared in Hogan’s Alley #16.)

In the early 1950s, “My Friend Irma” was everywhere, blaring from radios, causing lines at movie theatres, flickering on early televisions and shining brightly on the newsstands as an Atlas comic book written by Stan Lee and drawn by Dan DeCarlo. “Irma” seemed to conquer each new media she tried. Who was “Irma,” you ask? “My Friend Irma” started out as a 1947 summer-replacement radio show but soon became a hit in its own right. Irma Peterson was the dumb-but-sexy blonde with a heart of gold. She caused all sorts of trouble for those around her, especially her roommate, Jane, who narrated Irma’s hijinx. Irma was played by Marie Wilson, who had made a specialty of playing innocent-but-dumb blondes since the mid-’30s. Wilson, whose wide-eyed face and well-endowed figure barely seemed to age over the years, had started out as a Warner Bros. starlet starring alongside James Cagney, Pat O’Brien and others. She also had a featured role in Satan Met Lady, a later adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, but her career hadn’t fared well for a time. Spotted performing live in Earl Carroll’s Vanities and cast as Irma, Wilson was soon back in the big time as Irma. The radio show, which ran until 1954, spun off a My Friend Irma movie (1949)—which also launched the screen careers of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—and its sequel, My Friend Irma Goes West (1950).

(To view the images, click on the thumbnails.)

The year 1950 also saw the start of the successful five-year, 48-issue run of Atlas Comics’ My Friend Irma comic book, every issue done by the team of Lee and DeCarlo. DeCarlo, one of the undisputed masters of comics cheesecake, was the perfect artist to draw the innocently sexy Irma. Then in 1952, while continuing on radio, Irma moved to television for a two-and-a-half year run, memorable among other aspects for Wilson’s ample and well-displayed endowments, which were a real wake-up call (at least for this author) that there was something alluring about girls.

So, what’s missing from this history of success upon success? The one place Irma tried to conquer but failed was the newspaper comics page. In 1950, Mirror Enterprises Syndicate launched a My Friend Irma daily strip, written and drawn by Jack Seidel (see below). Who? Obviously not destined for bigger and better things in the comics world, Seidel proved unable to write a joke and, worst of all for a character like Irma—so personified in the public’s eye by the curvaceous Marie Wilson—couldn’t draw a pretty, much less sexy, girl. After two years the syndicate made the wise move of bringing in Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo from the hit Irma comic book. Lee’s jokes were snappy and much more in the tone of the character, and DeCarlo’s art was, as always, fantastic cheesecake. Unfortunately, it was a case of the right idea done too late, and it was too late to save the strip, Lee and DeCarlo’s run lasting about a year.

(Below are examples of Seidel’s work on Irma. To view the images, click on the thumbnails.)

While the My Friend Irma comic books are pretty easy to find, though getting tougher and pricier, the newspaper strip has remained pretty much unseen, even among DeCarlo’s biggest fans. I was lucky enough to stumble across a one-month run of dailies a few years back, and these strips are the only ones I or other DeCarlo fans I know had ever seen. The strip couldn’t have been in many papers in its later days, but

perhaps more survive. And was there a Sunday Irma? A friend of mine asked Lee himself recently, and he couldn’t even remember having done the strip version. I asked DeCarlo before he died in 2001, and he couldn’t remember if a Sunday version had been syndicated or not. If any Hogan’s Alley readers have further information or material, please contact us.

Despite the unanswered questions, here is a truly rare strip by two of comics’ greats—a glimpse of a now largely forgotten pop culture phenomenon.—Andrew Pepoy

Andrew Pepoy has drawn the Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip and currently works on comic books including Jack of Fables for DC Comics and Futurama for Bongo Comics. His website is pepoy.com.

Note: For those interested in more about Marie Wilson, the author recommends Charles Tranberg’s Not So Dumb: The Life and Career of Marie Wilson by Charles Tranberg, published in 2007 by Bear Manor Media. For more on My Friend Irma, many of the radio shows survive and can be found through various old-time radio show dealers such as www.otrcat.com. The television series, being done live, is almost entirely lost, and only three episodes are known to have survived as kinescopes, though a short bit with the Irma cast can be found on “Stars in the Air,” a 1952 special celebrating the opening of Television City in Hollywood and available at www.otrdvd.com. The two movies, conveniently, were recently release as a double-feature DVD by Paramount.

Bonus: What About Willie?

Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo also collaborated on the Willie Lumpkin newspaper strip, which began and ended in 1960. (Willie later gained comics immortality a few years later when Lee reincarnated him as the Fantastic Four’s affable mailman.) We are pleased to present a sampling of this little-seen strip (click the thumbnails to see enlargements).

To purchase a copy of Hogan’s Alley #16 (pictured above), where this feature—and so much more, for just $8 postpaid—first appeared, just click the Paypal link below!

Note: This article originally appeared in Hogan’s Alley #9.

An early character sheet (click to enlarge)

The dawn of a new century marks the arrival of middle age for The Flintstones, one of television’s most enduring families. Making their debut on a Friday night prime-time series on ABC in September 1960, the celluloid citizens of Bedrock circa 1000,000 B.C. have since sunk roots that reach deeply into the popular culture. And those roots grew fast: The program was an immediate—and to many, a surprise—hit with its target audience: adults. (Right away, it made itself at home in the rarefied air of the Nielsen top 20.) The Flintstones were the Simpsons of their era; though its satire of suburbia seems gentle by today’s standards, it was cutting-edge then. Though animation had long been associated with children’s entertainment, The Flintstones audaciously insisted otherwise. Fred and Wilma hold the distinction of being television’s first couple shown sharing a bed, a television taboo not even Lucy and Ricky Ricardo at their stratospheric peak of popularity dared break. Undoubtedly, being animated offered advantages. Bedrock’s best began receiving award nominations and helped establish prime-time animation as a viable vehicle for entertaining adult audiences, a reliable assumption that continues to benefit network programmers.

The Flintstones remained the most financially successful network animated franchise for three decades, until the appearance of The Simpsons. The Flintstones engendered a global merchandising phenomenon. Cartooning from its inception had been used as a means of moving merchandise (no less an august figure than Richard Outcault himself set up shop at the World’s Fair to hawk Buster Brown licenses). The Flintstones presaged today’s marketing strategies by being the first cartoon series to originate characters solely for the purpose of selling licensed products. It’s an eye-rollingly ubiquitous method today but was a radical concept in an era when popularity preceded merchandising rather than today’s inverted approach.

Early drawings

Establishing a trend still flourishing in later programs such as The Muppets, The Simpsons and King of the Hill, the era’s top Hollywood celebrities, such as Tony Curtis and Ann-Margret, guest-starred and provided voices for animated versions of themselves. ABC even pioneered some programming cross-pollination, pressing The Flintstones into service to promote the fledgling series Bewitched, with Stone Age versions of Darrin and Samantha Stephens guest-starring (perhaps coincidentally, Darrin and Samantha were television’s first live-action couple shown sharing a marital bed). In 1964, a nationwide poll of newspaper readers placed the comic-strip version of the animated series at number three, fending off stiff competition from the likes of Blondie, Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon and Li’l Abner.

Some animation historians speculate that without The Flintstones there may have been no animated Peanuts specials, no How the Grinch Stole Christmas and certainly no Simpsons. The effect of The Flintstones on viewers’ evolving attitudes toward animation as entertainment was subtle but important. Their immense popularity not only made it acceptable for grown-ups to watch a cartoon—they made it cool.

To salute this pop-culture juggernaut, durable through both good times and lean, Hogan’s Alley contacted some of the original creators and their artistic heirs to hear their reminiscences. What emerged were personal reflections that provide unique insights into the development and existence of Hanna-Barbera’s most popular franchise. Though The Flintstones’ bloom has long been off the rose, the inimitable power of yabba dabba doo remains robust despite two critically disappointing forays into live-action films and a latter-day comic strip that quickly lost circulation once deprived of studio guidance. A Broadway adaptation that has been kicking around for years holds open the possibility that prehistory may conquer yet another entertainment form. The long-lived appeal of the Bedrock bunch, suffice to say, long ago surpassed the imaginings of the people who birthed them. The Flintstones are passing into the hands of the third generation of creators who will escort the modern Stone Age family into the new millennium with a new feature film that the Cartoon Network will release later this year. Soon, just as when we first met on that autumn night so long ago, we’ll once again be invited to come and ride with the family down the street through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet. I’m calling shotgun, and make my bronto-burger medium rare.—John Province

Ed Benedict

ED BENEDICT

Benedict was a Hanna-Barbera character designer and layout artist from 1957 into the 1970s and was one of the original Flintstones character designers.

An early Benedict sketch of Fred and Barney

“I don’t remember much; it was a very long time ago and I don’t understand why people are interested in this kind of thing. It’s a lonely profession, sitting at a table drawing all day, and there’s often not much to relate of any interest because nothing happens. When I was told the studio was coming out with these new characters set in the Stone Age, I thought about it for a while and tried to imagine what the family and the neighbors would look like, maybe like Mutt and Jeff or Alley Oop. They were cave people, so I sketched up some characters carrying clubs and wearing long beards, with scraggly, unkempt hair and in slightly distorted, hunched-over shapes; UPA-like is what I had in mind. Joe [Barbera] didn’t like that much, so I tried another approach, which was much more similar to the way we see them today. I straightened them up, took off the beards and make them look more neat and clean-cut. I worked on the the loincloths so they would hang properly. Barney as originally designed had a strap over one shoulder, and when he turned he had a bare shoulder. It just didn’t look right, so we had to correct that. I was told they had a pet, so a dinosaur seemed appropriate, and that’s all Dino is: a small dinosaur.

“Joe continued to make minor changes on my designs, removing a curl here and or line there, making continuous, tiny but meaningful changes and tightening them up. I suspect he was thinking in terms of removing unneeded detail and making them easier to animate. I had six spots on Fred’s loincloth and remember exactly that it was reduced to four [laughter]. I continued to add little things, like the necktie on Fred and the stone necklace that Wilma wears. Joe just continued making very small changes, bit by bit. Joe was going more for a neat, cute look, but not cute for its own sake.

An early drawing of Fred

“I’d like to say for the record that he was right in that respect and that he was way ahead of me. He was thinking about the look of the characters in terms of the stories we could put them into. My characters might have lasted two generations. His will last ten.”

GENE HAZELTON

Hazelton worked on The Flintstones newspaper strip from 1961–1984. Since 1988 he has produced Flintstones serigraphs and studio concept pieces.

Gene Hazelton

“The Flintstones, you ask? Yes, I know ’em! I worked for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera for years at MGM doing layouts and designing and styling characters for theatrical cartoons. In 1955, when MGM thought they had enough cartoons to shut down the animation department, I was kicked out along with some tremendous creative talents, like a fella I also worked with named Tex Avery. By 1961 I had been in advertising for some time producing TV commercials with two former MGM colleagues and was working nights on the Yogi Bear syndicated daily and Sunday feature for the McNaught Syndicate, when they proposed a strip based on The Flintstones television show. I brought the syndicate together with Bill and Joe and it took about a year to make the deal. Under full-time pressure to leave advertising and come aboard as director of the comic-strip department, with a bonus and complete control, I was back with Hanna-Barbera and never felt so needed. They felt I could devote part of my time to the syndicated features as well as animated commercials, and this made my workload quite heavy.

Gene Hazelton (top) and Dick Bickenback, 1950s.

“It was quite a job to take The Flintstones from television and put them into print. I was taking the designs and adapting them to another medium. Newspapers editors were hesitant to run a Flintstones comic strip. They were from television; TV was hurting newspapers and they were very worried about competition. It was on my shoulders because Bill and Joe were up to their necks producing more animation per week than any other studio in town. They had no interest whatsoever in the comic strips and were not experienced with newspaper syndicates: the time involved, gags, inking, deadlines, shipping, etc. They were in the animation business and that’s where their attention was. I never took work to them for their judgment. It was my responsibility and I felt duty-bound to produce what they expected of me when I signed on.

“The strip really took off. We had a worldwide syndication, despite the fact we were distributed by McNaught, which was one of the worst outfits in the business. At one time The Flintstones was voted one of the top five comic strips in the country, and I’ve always been very proud of that.

“In the early days, some of the secretaries at the studio thought Wilma was plain and actually a little homely. For the strip, I put a ribbon in her hair and gave her more of a shape and perked her up a bit. All the characters changed over the years and became more lovable and cute. I recall the Ideal Toy Co. coming to Hanna-Barbera saying there was great potential if Wilma had a baby girl and they could make a lot of money selling dolls. I worked with them and came up with a good number of models. The Pebbles with the little bone in her hair was chosen as the winner. Ideal made dolls for many years with that.

Pencils of a Hazelton Sunday Flintstones page (click to enlarge)

“I’m happy they had Dick Bickenbach draw the model sheet for the animators. Bick was not only a neat guy, but in my mind much of the character styling at H-B showed Bick’s ability to keep them in the Hanna-Barbera format, just as he kept Pebbles in the style that I designed her. A couple of years later when Barney and Betty adopted a little boy, I did the character designs for Bamm Bamm, who was modeled after my son Wes. The sketch I’ve provided was one of my very first concepts, but with a few additional treatments we had a nice-looking little kid. Again, Bick drew the animators’ model sheet, adding as he did that star quality to little Bamm Bamm.

A Hazelton drawing done for Hogan’s Alley (click to enlarge)

“I had very definite ideas about how concepts could best be worked out and I checked and rewrote most of the material before it was put to Strathmore. The Flint-stones had to be squeaky-clean. I could sometimes take topical subjects and place them in prehistory, but any time I did a gag that smacked of something children shouldn’t know, the roof fell in on me. It had its limitations as to the kinds of stories I could do. A lot of gags took place around the house, and Wilma and Fred needed someone else, so I created Fred’s grandfather, ‘Pops.’ He was a jivey little guy and made a valuable addition. In the TV show, Pebbles only said ‘goo goo da da’ which would have bombed in print. I developed her into more of a character and worked her more by giving her thought balloons, and she improved 99 percent. Complicated subjects coming from the mouth of a baby quickly shot her into a starring role. I did the same with Dino: Bark bark bark would have reduced the family pet to a sleeping dog, but with thought balloons he became a very [central] member of the family and no situation was beyond him. Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty became even stronger characters with Pebbles and Dino giving them input.

“I penciled and wrote the strips and with my assistants was turning out a lot of work: 14 pieces per week—six dailies each of Yogi and The Flintstones and a Sunday page each. It was suggested that I send the strips upstairs for the secretaries to ink, but I never did that. I felt the type of inking I wanted to make the strip look good had to be more professional, and working at the studio I had access to some very talented people who knew the characters well after years of writing and animating the TV shows. I would tightly storyboard the pages, so complete and detailed that they almost became miniature Sunday pages themselves. My help appreciated this and it was a load off of them with their regular TV work to produce as well, but it was also my assurance of a good final product. My Disney training came in handy. I could never just draw a simple straight line for a background like some strips do today. If you’re going to do it you should make it look like you put something into it, so I’d always draw a few trees, some birds or a squirrel, maybe some rocks and flowers and a maybe a cloud or two; I’d dress it up and make it look nice. I really put a great deal of myself into it and we did a careful job.

Hazelton daily strips (click to enlarge)

A Bamm Bamm model sheet (click to enlarge)

“Who were these cartooners? Harvey Eisenberg and his son, Jerry, Dick Bickenbach, Iwao Takamoto, all top guys in the business. Then there was me doing what I thought both Hanna-Barbera and the syndicate wanted. Writers Dale Hale, Mike Maltese, Warren Foster and other studio people worked closely with me to make sure the characters were maintained as they appeared on the highly successful TV show. For years I worked at the studio, but after a while I was able to make a deal with Bill and Joe where they allowed me to work at home. By 1984 I’d kind of had it and wanted to retire, and McNaught took it back and passed it on to their contacts; how good or bad I don’t know. Tons of my originals never came back and I’m sure they were used as an example for others of how to do the strip.

“In the late ’80s through the early ’90s, I was occasionally called upon by the studio to produce original concept pieces for development and release as limited-edition serigraphs that were signed by Bill and Joe and sold in galleries all over the world. Some of these were tremendous jobs, such as “Circus of the Stars,” involving as many as 45 characters. Just as I did with the strips, I put a great deal of work into them. Several sold out quickly and are now collectors items, such as ‘Paws Applause,’ featuring the Hanna-Barbera dogs. ‘First Kiss’ with Pebbles and Bamm Bamm seems to be the most popular, though. Women particularly respond to Pebbles, for some reason.

“Some time ago I began to realize that the Flintstones are part of American culture, along with Mickey Mouse and the Peanuts characters. The other day I saw a cartoon in the newspaper of two stone bowling balls. One had ‘Fred’ chiseled in it and the other had ‘Barney.’ The Flintstones are a permanent part of American culture, and it was a yabba-dabba-dooooo long ride. My many thanks to those who helped make it a happy trip.”

Roger Armstrong

ROGER ARMSTRONG

Armstrong worked on The Flintstones newspaper strip and comic book.

Armstrong dailies (click to enlarge)

“My experience with The Flintstones comic strip was a very thin slice of my career, which included years drawing syndicated features such as Napoleon, Ella Cinders, Bugs Bunny, Little Lulu and the 10 years I spent on the Scamp strip, but I drew the first two or three weeks of The Flintstones comic strip. At that particular time, though, I was looking for work and got a call from my ex-assistant, Joe Messerli. He was at Hanna Barbera and told me there was a new comic strip they were working on called The Flintstones and that I should go over and show them some of my samples.

“I went over and the guy I interviewed with was a fella named Gene Hazelton. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me, but we talked and I submitted my stuff and he said fine, he liked it. I was given some model sheets to work from and Gene sent some strips to me to letter and ink. I took a lot of liberties and took it a step beyond and put a lot of myself into it rather than just slavishly following the pencils. Like so much art by people who worked in animation, it was penciled very roughly, and I did what could be called an approximation of Fred Flintstone; the gags every once in a while reminding the audience that they were reading a comic strip. A feature called Sam’s Strip is what I actually had in mind at the time, and I thought I had a job.

“I had to go back to New York for two weeks for some reason, and when I came back expecting to go on with the strip I was told they had decided to go with someone else. There were a lot of fellows who followed me on it over the years—Dick Bickenbach, who did the Sunday pages and who just passed away recently, and Harvey Eisenberg, a great cartoonist. Dale Hale worked on it and Gene did it for quite a while. The comic-book work came a couple of years later. I got a call from Chase Craig. He said Western Publishing Company, for which he was the West Coast Comic Editor, had the contract to do the Flintstones comic book and he thought I’d like to do it. I worked on that from the inception, then Hanna-Barbera took back the contract and went with Marvel, and I was called back to do it for them.

“As for The Flintstones’ continuing appeal, I understand it about as much as I understand the continuing appeal of Mickey Mouse. Mickey is an icon but without a doubt one of the least interesting characters to ever come out of animation. Like The Flintstones, he has ceased to be any kind character and has become a corporate trademark and a cultural symbol rather than a vehicle for entertainment or any kind of redeeming value. I think it has mostly to do with their longevity more than anything else.”

Dale Hale

DALE HALE

Between 1961 and 1971, Hale was a storyboard artist and gag man on the animated series and a gag writer and penciler on the newspaper strip.

“When I first came to Los Angeles, I had just finished working for Charles Schulz and was trying to break into the studios. One of the things I did was go over and meet Joe Barbera as well as Alan Dinehart, who was doing animation voices and working with the writers and was in charge of things at the time. I penciled storyboards for some of the first Flintstones animation programs. My first job was the episode starring Hoagy Carmichael. They felt they needed someone who had a feel for music, which I don’t think made much of a difference; I just drew it and put some gags in, but that got me doing that.

“I wrote for the Flintstones comic strip for at least eight years starting in the mid-’60s. I wrote all the Sunday pages and, when I had time, some of the dailies as well and the Yogi Sunday page. I’m really a visual gag man, and though I did write shows, visual gags are really my field. I love visual comedy with no dialogue. Doing visuals, to me, is really the challenge.

A Dale Hale Flintstone Sunday strip (click to enlarge)

“Part of my job as a storyboard guy was to stick in gags such as using the animals as household appliances and things like that. I’m fairly inventive and I was always able to do that. It was a lot of fun. I would rough the strips out in storyboard form; thumbnail sketches, very loose with a lot of slips. I worked at home and so did Gene [Hazelton], who lived near me. I’d then take a load of them over to Gene on Monday and present them to him. He was a very nice man, easy to work for and he never “went Hollywood” like some of the studio’s guys. We’d spend an hour or so going through them and looking at the ideas. He’d decide on the ones he wanted. If it needed cleaning up, I’d take it back home and work on it some more and get the finished stuff back to him on Friday. If it didn’t need any work, he’d take it from there.

“Gene would pencil and ink some of the time, but while I was with him I believe he would them send them off to Harvey Eisenberg, who was doing a lot of the finished inking at that time.

“Everyone will deny it, but I think I was the one who came up with the idea of putting a little baby in there and came up with the idea of focusing on the merchandising that could come from that. It’s sort of like at Warner Bros., where everyone takes credit for inventing Tweety Bird. You mention ideas in meetings and nothing happens and then some time later someone says, ‘Hey, I have a great idea!’ In 1971 my own feature called Figments began, but I continued to write gags for The Flintstones. Comic strips kept me busy for many years but these days, at the urging of my agent, I’m occupied with my website at www.DaleHale.com.

“The characters, popularity, merchandising and money are what it’s really all about; no two ways about it. The idea for the show supposedly got started when someone at Hanna-Barbera commented how much they liked Johnny Hart’s B.C. and that they should get him to do a show for them. I know Johnny Hart came to the studio at one point and worked on some project they had in mind, but it went nowhere. They decided to go with another style or something. Someone figured that they really didn’t need him and that they would just do something like it. I’ve heard this from more than one person. It’s an occupational hazard in the cartoon business, taking someone else’s idea and making it your own.”

Scott Shaw!

SCOTT SHAW!

Shaw! has worked on The Flintstones in a variety of capacities since 1978, including writing and drawing Flintstones comic books, designing characters and storyboarding for Flintstones animation and working as art director for promotional work.

“When I was a kid, until Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Flintstones, there was really nothing in the way of TV animation for our generation. What was on TV was mostly old Terrytoons from the ’30s, like Farmer Alfalfa and Gandy Goose. They were great old cartoons but nothing we could really relate to. As a kid, I loved animation. My other consuming passion was dinosaurs. Then here comes The Flintstones, and it was everything I liked in one cartoon. I always told people growing up that my Dad looked like Jackie Gleason. He was heavy-set and sort of jowly, and my mother who was a redhead looked like Lucille Ball—so, in fact, The Flintstones looked pretty much like my parents.

“Even at that early age I had a love of that UPA hard-line design look that came from Ed Benedict and was later refined by other people, and I absolutely fell in love with the show. It came out on September 22, 1960, and for the first Halloween there was no Flintstones merchandise—the popularity hadn’t caught up with them yet. So I made my own Fred Flintstone suit for Halloween. I was proud of liking The Flintstones because it was a pretty hip thing. I remember adults talking about it and seeing them on the cover of TV Guide and the fact that it was shown at night. Some of my best collectibles are things like ashtrays and shot glasses, where the licensing was picked up by companies that didn’t have kids in mind at all. I’ve always thought one of the reasons those cartoons were so successful is that Hanna-Barbera came along at the time when other studios were closing their animation units, and they were able to cherry-pick top talent like Mike Maltese and Warren Foster from Warner and animators and designers from UPA and MGM. Hanna-Barbera was condemned for years for bastardizing animation, but their stuff had great production value because they had guys who knew how to make the cartoons funny whether the characters were moving around a lot or not. When Pebbles came along, the series began to change and it became cute. They began putting in characters aimed at kids like The Gruesomes and The Great Gazoo; it was more about the flavor of the week than Honeymooner types trying to get along, and the humor lost its edge. Unfortunately, most kids who see the Flintstones today think of Fred and Barney as those two guys who are always fighting over cereal.

The first four Flintstones dailies by Gene Hazelton, from 1961 (click to enlarge)

“I followed the strip almost from the beginning, and when I was a little older I met Gene Hazelton and visited him quite a number of times. He would take time out for me and looked at my drawings and was very generous and wished me well. We spent almost the whole day together right before I moved to Los Angeles to try to get into the business. My first actual Flintstones job was inking Pete Alvarado’s pencils for a Flintstones story that appeared in a Yogi Bear comic book. “Chase Craig was the editor and had an office at Hanna-Barbera and was trying artists out. I recall inking some of Dick Bickenbach’s comic-book pencils as well, though Lee Hooper was doing most of his inking for him. I also inked a lot of Owen Fitzgerald’s stuff in those early days. This led to me eventually not just inking, but penciling, then writing. They needed huge amounts of material for the overseas market, so sometimes I was writing, penciling and inking entire stories myself. I enjoyed being a freelancer and really didn’t have an interest in working at the studio until 1978, when I found out that they were doing a new Flintstones series called The New Fred and Barney Show. Then it was like, How soon can I get there?

“I came in having never worked in animation and was made a supervisor, presumably because I knew so much about the characters. It was like going to school working with all the great old cartoonists who had either worked on the original show or on the comic books or the strips: Alex Toth, Doug Wildey, Tex Avery. It was really the last hurrah as far as having the original guys around. The series segued into my working on the Flintstones TV commercials, and at the same time I did presentations and art proposing new ideas about possible Flintstones shows. I did artwork for advertising showing The Flintstones with fast food or cereal. Around 1982 I began doing work for the Pebbles cereal TV commercials and continued into the late ’80s, when I began working on The Flintstone Kids show. In the early ’90s I left the studio and became art director for the ad agency that handles all of the Flintstones commercial accounts. That led to my doing the box art and the premiums. I also worked on The Flintstones Christmas Carol TV special a few years ago. And I’m still doing all of that to this day.

Hazelton’s first Flintstones Sunday page, from 1961 (click to enlarge)

“The reason I think they’ve been so popular over the years is that, when you think about most cartoon characters, people think of cute, lovable little animals. The Flintstones aren’t lovable and, like The Simpsons—who coincidentally I work on as well—really play up the imperfection of the average person. Fred and Homer are both, at best, jerks. They don’t even necessarily have good intentions. They’re greedy, scheming, venal dopes who, despite all of that, you still kind of like. They’re both scoundrels, particularly Fred, who is not only a scoundrel but obnoxious as well. Like Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners, which The Flintstones was modeled after, Fred strays very close to spousal abuse. Today that’s funny because it’s shocking and politically incorrect, and we’re not saying these characters are wonderful. They’re like people you know or might be yourself. With The Flintstones, their world is a character as well. It’s one of the very few animated series where you can show just a background to an audience and they can tell you who the characters are who live there. The prehistoric gadgets and the cars and the animals doing the household chores in a begrudging manner—people never get tired of seeing that stuff. I think it appeals to people’s enjoyment of that Rube Goldberg cause-and-effect kind of humor. They’ve been tried in live action, but the look of their world has never been captured.

“I don’t think animated cartoons should be made into live-action films in general. In animation they already have a movement and a color and a voice. I detest the Flintstones live-action movies. I know the director and he loves the characters, but trying to recapture cartoon gags in live action, like Fred tip-toeing while he’s bowling or jumping up and yelling ‘yabba dabba doo’ just looks really stupid. Taking something from print is different. You’re not doing something that is literally alongside of it. Its a big jump from print to live action, but live action and animation are so close that inevitably they’re not going to match up.

“As far as their future, the Flintstones definitely haven’t been exploited as much as I’d like to see. I don’t get the idea that Warner, who now owns them, is anxious to exploit any of the Hanna-Barbera characters with the exception of Scooby. Doo who came along around 1970, just about the time I lost interest in what was coming out of the studio. The first Flintstones live-action film was hyped to a degree that people got sick of hearing about them, and there’s still some negative fallout from that. I realize we’re selling cereal now, and it’s to kids, not to adults. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of that, but at least they’re not advertising Winston cigarettes anymore. The new production from Cartoon Network might help, but I don’t know what the demographics are concerning adults who will watch it. I think with the right people and the right approach, the potential is certainly there. One of the great things about The Flintstones is that no matter how much time passes, you can always use them to mirror what’s happening in society today.”

JUNE FORAY

Foray was the voice actress for the series’ 1959 pilot, The Flagstones.

 “I had worked for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera when they were still at MGM doing Tom and Jerry cartoons. It was probably in 1959 I did a demo with Daws Butler for a new series still in development called The Flagstones [watch the video above], which was later changed to The Flintstones.

“Daws played both Fred Flintstone and Barney, and I played Betty. They submitted our tape, but apparently whoever was in charge—the network or someone—turned down both Daws and me. I was terribly disappointed, and when my agent talked to Joe Barbera, he said they wouldn’t even let me come in and retest for the part or any of the others. Joe was extremely thoughtful, though, and said he felt very bad. He

June Foray

asked my agent if I would come and do some other things for them. I was so upset I said I would not and didn’t want to go through that again. Jean Vander Pyl, who later played Wilma, was a radio actress and had done some things. Bea Benadaret, who played Betty, had been in radio and was a TV star, so she was a natural. My only other experience was several years later, when I was in A Man Called Flintstone playing a nurse or someone sitting at a desk. But I do remember being terribly disappointed at not getting to play Betty.”

CHRIS SAVINO and DAVID SMITH

Savino is a director on a new Flintstones animated feature from Cartoon Network. Smith is co-director on the feature.

Chris Savino: The name of our feature is The Flintstones: On the Rocks, and the release date is tentatively November 2001. It’s undecided if it will be a video release first or TV, but I’m pretty sure it will be TV. It changes from day to day.

(Watch three TV commercials with the Flintstones peddling Winston cigarettes:)

David Smith: The characters are based on Ed Benedict’s original designs. Anything from 1970 to present day we did not look at. Craig Kellman, our character designer, was so inspired by Ed Benedict’s original work and he based his redesigns on that.

(Below are Smith and Savino’s updates on the characters for their adaptation. To view the images, click on the thumbnails.)

Savino: There were some similar designs done six or seven years ago for merchandising of the thirty-fifth anniversary of The Flintstones. The merchandising did not do too well, but at the same time those designs were never used for anything else. We thought this was a perfect opportunity to use them again and bring back the look and feel of what The Flintstones originally were. We feel the original Flintstones as they appeared in Episode One in 1960 was not a kid’s show, but a sitcom dealing with adult relationships and marriage. Over the years The Flintstones became very iconic. Fred was no longer a fat loudmouth. Barney was no longer a short idiot. They became very contemporary, even-tempered and unappealing. We treat our film as though 1961 has rolled around again and are taking it from there. We’ve neglected Pebbles and Bamm Bamm as though they didn’t exist, or maybe they do exist and are grown up and have kids of their own, but it’s up to you to decide. We don’t touch on that at all. We focus on the problems of marriage and deal with that 1950s era where the woman stayed at home and the man was the breadwinner. We don’t reinforce that idea in any way, but we’ve kept Fred in that traditional role and have given Wilma more of an update, which causes them even more conflict.

Smith: It’s traditional hand-painted animation. There’s no digital anything in this. We specifically wanted it to look exactly or as close as possible to the original. We had a background painter from the original series, a gentleman named Don Watson. He started around Episode 113 of the original first run. It was an incredible experience to work with him. His knowledge and experience worked well with our ideas and it was a privilege to have him with us. He really brought it back to 1960 for us. The backgrounds are probably the closest thing to the original series, because we’ve really ripped them off.

Savino: If you look at one of the first sequences of our film, you’ll see there are obviously differences from the original, but what we’re going for and have said all along is, this is how you remember The Flintstones: You’ll get the feeling of what it originally was. We’re using Hoyt Curtin’s original music, but since we’ll be taking Fred and Wilma into a Latin American country, we’ve added some Latin American music.

Smith: We hope we’re not doing something with these characters that has been done for many, many years, which is ruin them. We could be doing it and don’t know! [laughter]

Savino: I’d also like to point out that there were four people who wrote and storyboarded this: myself, Dave and a married couple, Cindy and Clay Morrow. We were all born in the ’70s and are not of the 1960s era. I think it’s kind of funny that we’re taking an existing product like The Flintstones and bringing back the nostalgic feel, even though we were never part of that filmmaking time.

If you’re interested in owning a copy of Hogan’s Alley #9 (cover above right), where this article first appeared, just click the Paypal link below!

By David Irvine

Comic strips aren’t always funny—sometimes they can even carry a serious message.

Terry and the Pirates, Dec. 25, 1944 (click images throughout the article to enlarge)

During World War II, Milton Caniff interrupted the story line of his comic strip, Terry and the Pirates, to offer a Christmas tribute to the pilots ferrying supplies from India to our Chinese allies. On Dec. 25, 1944, his strip was titled “White Christmas—Himalayas Version.” It pictured a transport plane flying between snow-covered peaks. Caniff wrote that the pilots were doing their job so the folks back home “can look at the American sky and see nothing more dangerous than snow.”

That was the start of an annual tradition. Each year, Caniff devoted the Christmas installment of Terry—and later of his other creation, Steve Canyon—to a special message. He combined pictures and words into a continuous theme of support for our troops, acknowledging their sacrifices and remembering those who died–and relating it to the meaning of Christmas.

After the war, Caniff’s Christmas messages focused on returning veterans and those who didn’t return. In 1946 he pictured a wife gazing at her distracted husband and cautioned: “Don’t be too surprised if your particular good joe seems to be thinking of something else at times today. … But it is on occasions like this that the swiftly fading faces of men, who will never see another Christmas tree or hear a kid laugh, start to parade across his memory. … Give him the present of a little time with old friends who are being forgotten all too soon.”

Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1951

Then suddenly there was another war–the Korean War–technically not a war at all, just a “police action” by the United Nations. But men were dying, even on Christmas Day. The Dec. 25, 1951, Steve Canyon strip shows four soldiers struggling through the snow. They tell us: “Our situation today is like when a big fire breaks out in a small town. … There’s a fire going on in the world right now and we happen to be the age group that gets the nod to answer the alarm. … Okay, that’s the way it goes. We’ll make it.”

Then between wars, Caniff turned to the fallen. On Christmas Day, 1955, he pictured a military cemetery and indirectly connected it with the Savior who was born and died years before: “These men would not have wished to dim your Christmas with sombre thoughts! They wanted you to be happy and free from fear. And wasn’t that the mission of a certain other Person who perished violently on a mountainside long ago, far from the town of his birth?”

And Caniff remembered those soldiers who survived the wars but were still dealing with the aftermath in veterans hospitals. In 1957 he wrote: “The men who are still paying off on the human price we paid for victory in the past would be grateful to know that they are not forgotten. … A visit from you to the nearest VA hospital will buy a lot of silver to line what can often be a very gray cloud.”

(To view the images below, click on the thumbnails.)

Terry and the Pirates, Dec. 25, 1946	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1947	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1948	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1950
Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1951	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1952	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1953	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1954
Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1956	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1957	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1959	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1961
Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1962	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1965	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1967	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1968
Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1970	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1971	Steve Canyon, Dec. 25, 1974	“Steve Canyon,” Dec. 26, 1965 (image courtesy of OSU’s cartoon library archives)

During the Cold War, Caniff honored the men and women carrying out lonely duties far from home. Addressing those service people on Dec. 25, 1959, he wrote: “How shall we ever know the number of Sarajevos, the Pearl Harbors, the Koreas that have been prevented by the mighty host of such lonely men as you, too many miles from all precious things at this holy time? Man can endure wracking tortures if he has hope. Just as this day is a symbol to great masses of devout Christians, so is the American flag and uniform a beacon of friendship to millions.”

Caniff also remembered the widows, the sometimes forgotten casualties of war. In 1962, he pictured a woman who lost her husband 20 years before: “You’re pretty good at keeping a company face, until some wisp of song or half-forgotten phrase unlocks old dreams.” Those are dreams they never had a chance to share.

And then still another war, this one in Vietnam. It became America’s most unpopular war, and anti-war sentiment caused a loss of readership for Steve Canyon, which featured a career-military leading character. But Caniff’s focus was on the people serving in the military, not the political issues.

Men were again dying to defend the nation in 1965 when he wrote: “For the missing faces at our festive board we’ll sound a Requiem, even as we do for another Warrior, who fought so long ago—and died violently—that men could Go In Peace.”

Caniff died in 1988. He didn’t live to see America at war in the Middle East. But many of the sentiments he expressed in his “comic” strips relate to the present. They can speak to us on this day, helping us remember our service personnel—those who returned whole or not so whole and those who didn’t return at all–even as we celebrate Peace on Earth.

Contact the writer at dirvine@hendersondispatch.com.

(Note: This interview originally appeared in Hogan’s Alley #13. Blake passed away on December 26, 2005.)

A Blake self-caricature from 1972

AS ANY ARTIST can tell you, it’s one thing to have fans, laypeople who love the work that you do, but it’s something entirely different when counted among those fans are your fellow artists. And when those artists look at your work and claim you to be an artist’s artist, well, that’s among the greatest accolades one could ask for. Those artists know what you go through. They know about the hard work, the lack of vacations, the need to be “on” for 365 days in a row, year after year after year. But it’s more than that. All artists have access to the same tools. Anyone can buy a Windsor & Newton series 7 brush, a Gillott 170 pen nib, a pen holder, a bottle of Hunt’s India ink, pencils, watercolors and Strathmore paper, but not all artists can provide the magic. Not everyone can make those little black lines on paper dance and sing as if someone has breathed life into them. Fellow artists recognize that magic in the hands of the artist’s artist, and they remain in awe of it. Bud Blake created that magic on paper for more than 50 years, with nearly 40 of them devoted to his wonderful comic strip Tiger.Bud Blake was born on Feb. 13, 1918, in Nutley, N.J. His father, George Blake, was an art director at the Batten Company, a forerunner of the famed advertising firm BBD&O (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn). The elder Blake was an accomplished painter and did many illustrations for well-known ads including the Dutch Boy character for Dutch Boy Paint. George Blake died at the age of 42, when Bud was only seven years old. His mother, Hazel Blake, ran a boarding house to support the family, but times were difficult for a single mother of three. Due to the financial hardships, there was at least one occasion when Bud had to live with friends. Bud attended school in both Nutley and New York City and had various jobs along the way, from soda jerk to swimming pool lifeguard. (The latter job didn’t last all that long, as he was caught letting some friends sneak in to swim.) Bud later studied art at the National Academy of Design, and in 1937, at the age of 18, he began working as a paste-up boy at the Kudner Agency in New York. He married Doris Gaskill, who worked at the Book-of-the-Month Club, in 1939. Bud worked at Kudner until 1943, when he was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. Pvt. Bud Blake spent most of the three years at the Infantry Replacement Training Center in Macon, Ga. His duties included creating silk-screen instructional posters for such activities as learning how to fire a machine gun. Upon his return from the army, Bud resumed his work at Kudner, working his way up to the position of executive art director. The stresses of the job, though–the traveling, meetings, commuting and administrative work–took their toll and Bud abruptly quit Kudner in 1954, leaving what he called “good men and good pay” behind him. Bud yearned to get back to the drawing board, so he developed a panel cartoon feature titled Ever Happen to You?, which he sold to King Features in 1954, shortly before moving to Spain with his family. Bud continued working on Ever Happen to You? for 11 years, at the same time doing freelance work for various advertising accounts and major magazines, such as Family Circle and Business Week. In 1965, Bud pitched an idea for a daily and Sunday comic strip to King Features. Tiger, which was based upon his observations of neighborhood kids as well as his own children, first saw print on May 3, 1965. It started with a healthy circulation of 400 newspapers and a strong publicity push. Bud won the National Cartoonists Society’s Award for Best Humor Strip in 1970, 1978 and 2001. Doris and Bud Blake had two children, Marianna and Jay. Doris passed away in 1988, after 49 years of marriage.The humor in Tiger was based largely upon the gentle observations of kids doing kid things. The characters in the strip would explore together, wrestle, play ping-pong or simply talk about things that matter to children. Punkinhead was often the catalyst of these conversations, questioning anything and everything in wide-eyed innocence. Tiger itself was set in a more innocent time, when kids still played together without arranged playgroups; before the isolated distraction of GameBoys and computers. In that regard, Tiger harkens back to some of the classic kid strips of old: Smitty by Walter Berndt, Reg’lar Fellers by Gene Byrnes and those wonderful panel cartoons by John McCutcheon and Clare Briggs. The one element that those strips had that Tiger didn’t, was parents. The strip might have alluded to parents off-camera somewhere, but this world was truly one that belonged to the kids, with few parental restrictions raining down upon their magical parade.

There is no doubt that the gentle humor in Tiger was an integral part of the strip’s charm, but the real show-stopper here was the drawing. Simply put, Bud Blake could flat-out draw. He drew with a graphic verve, one that created a rollicking rhythm of energy throughout the strip. Creating that energy in the finished work had a great deal to do with the process of drawing the comic strip, which was vital to Bud’s work on Tiger. He started out with lively preliminary drawings, pencil ramblings that had a Daumier-esque quality. In this part of the process, Bud was able to set up spaces, move characters around, get both figural and facial expressions but, most importantly, form the attitude of the drawing. That attitude was filled with energy, vibrancy and immediacy, like the best gesture drawings. After the preliminary pencil sketches were drawn, Bud would sometimes go over them with marker, in an effort to tighten up aspects of the drawing a bit. Most times, though, the pencil prelims would go straight to the light box, where he laid a piece of one-ply Strathmore paper on top of it, which would help to preserve that energetic quality that Bud strived to maintain. He then proceeded to work his magic with India ink. Contour lines–those lines that help define both the outer and inner edges of forms–got laid in first. In Bud’s case, those lines had wonderful thick and thin variations, much like you see in calligraphy or Asian brush painting. You can see where Bud might speed up a line or slow it down, turning it this way or that way in an effort to maintain the liveliness of the drawing. Bud also managed to create a real weight in the characters and forms that he drew. By creating such variation in his line work, he alluded to weight with very little shading. Sure, you’d see a small bit of feathering here and there, on Tiger’s baseball cap or a background tree, but by and large that weight was created through Bud’s expressive line. It’s the weight of the lines themselves that gave the weight to the forms. After the contour lines were drawn in, Bud typically added the masses of blacks to create a rhythm in the strip. Take a look at a Tiger comic strip. Look at any one at all. Notice how those black shapes, in conjunction with the contour lines, pull your eye around the panel, leading you from one frame to the next. It might be Punkinhead’s hair that leads you to Stripe’s spots, which direct your eyes to Hugo’s black shirt and on to Tiger’s dark cap. All of these elements, the lively line work, the weight of forms and spotting of blacks, combine to create a comic that is full of life. It is sheer mastery of drawing and design at work.

“Ever Happen to You?,” Aug. 3, 1959 (throughout the interview, click images to enlarge, but owing to a new quirk, click the thumbnail and then click THAT image to see the enlargement)

Bud Blake, after 39 years of drawing Tiger, recently retired from the comic strip. He has given newspaper readers 50 wonderful years of charming and innovative comic-strip work. Those magical little black lines are not so easily duplicated.—Rob Stolzer

Rob Stolzer: I thought you might get a kick out of seeing this. [Stolzer is holding an early Bud Blake watercolor painting.]

Bud Blake: Holy gosh!

Stolzer: I was wondering what it might’ve been done for.

Blake: I have no idea, but the colors have faded some. Some of the flesh tones have faded. That isn’t bad for me.

Stolzer: It’s wonderful work! Do you have any idea when it was from?

Blake: Probably ’60 or ’65. That would’ve been done for Pictorial Review, which is a King Features publication. It came out every week, like a Sunday supplement. I think I did 20 or 30 a year. I don’t quite remember this particular piece.

Stolzer: It’s all brushwork?

Blake: That’s all brush, and I haven’t used a brush in 40 years, because, well, comics are a different matter. I’m rather proud of the piece!

Stolzer: When I first saw it, it reminded me a little bit of William Steig’s kids.

Blake: Bill Neely was the agent for that work. Neely Associates is probably still going. Agents at that time made 25 percent, which doesn’t seem fair. On the other hand, they usually got you 25 percent more than if you took your own work in yourself, which isn’t a good idea. The agent could dress you up better than you could dress yourself up. I forget what they paid…$350…$400…something like that.

Stolzer: Which was good money back then.

Blake: Oh, you bet! Anything over $100 was big!

Stolzer: So you were doing that in addition to Tiger at the time?

Blake: I’m not sure that Tiger began at that point. No, that would’ve been before ’65. I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else. Once I started Tiger, I was also doing that panel I showed you [Ever Happen to You?], and there just wasn’t time. That other work was freelance. That was for kids in college, because I had two in college. Admittedly it’s not what college costs now, but it’s all relative. My wife usually made more money than I did, particularly early when we were married. But when we had children, she just quit.

“Ever Happen to You?,” Jan. 30, 1963.

“Ever Happen to You?,” Oct 31, 1963.

“Ever Happen to You?,” Apr. 13, 1962.

“Ever Happen to You?,” Aug. 18, 1958.

Stolzer: What kind of work did she do?

Blake: At the time, she worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club. She was the head of correspondence. It’s when they answered letters. Doris was perfect for that era. She sat at a little platform with the correspondence and stuff. I’d have to wait outside. I was still a paste-up boy at the time, so I’d be cutting mats for layout presentations while I waited [laughter]. I’m not sure who the heck cuts mats anymore. We used guys from Art Center [Art Center College of Design] out in California. They had pretty much taught their graduating class what an art agency would hire them for. Other places, like Pratt, were teaching kids how to do 24-sheet posters. Kids aren’t going to do 24-sheet posters. They should’ve been teaching them about ruling pens.

Stolzer: They’d start out by cutting and pasting, wouldn’t they?

A public service ad Blake produced in 1989.

Blake: Well, we worried about that because kids were coming in with their samples and their samples would be of book covers and things that you knew kids weren’t going to do for another 10 or 15 years. It made it harder to pick them out. It was much easier to pick the kids from Art Center, who all came out east to get jobs. They all had good skills. I hired Warren Rogers over someone else because Rogers’ solution to a particular problem was better than the other guy’s. But more than that, Rog had the personality that would work on the client. Remember, we [Kudner] were a New York agency. Our clients were Goodyear in Akron, Ohio, and Buick in Flint, Mich., and GM. We had to pick, at the time, young men who could go out and talk to the clients. Not all artists and art directors are going to do that. We had to pull some of them and give them jewelry accounts or something like that. It’s tricky.

Stolzer: You had to find people who could make the sales.

Blake: You don’t want to lose the account. You have to worry about the guys in Akron or the guys in Flint. It was quite a problem. My best friend had a hard time with it. I told him that if he gets another job, take it, because he was too good for where he was. He became the head of some agency in Chicago.

Stolzer: The firm you were with was Kudner?

Blake: Yes, I worked for Kudner. They went defunct. Once you lose Goodyear, the big one, the other ones go too. Oh, the whole advertising business…I quit. I literally quit at 35.

Stolzer: Had you always had aspirations of comic-strip work?

Blake: No.

Stolzer: How did you go in the direction that you did, toward advertising and comic strips?

Blake: My father, when he died, left me all his stuff. I had to do something with it [laughter]. It’s true. That’s why I say that you don’t know how lucky you are when your father leaves you something. My father left me all of his brushes and stuff. But he also left me the ability to do something. That’s exactly what’s going on. Maybe he could leave you the plant or the factory, but maybe he left you something better: the ability. You know, even before the advertising work, I was doing art. Remember, when I was a kid I went to state fairs as a wood carver.

A Tiger paperback collection cover

Stolzer: I read about that. You were doing balsa wood portraits?

Blake: “9-to-90,” that’s what the sign [advertising the demonstration] said. It’s embarrassing to think about it, but they paid me something like $30 a week and all expenses. To a kid, that was magnificent. Think about it, Rob–a block of wood…it’s white balsa, which was just like cutting soap. You had to do it quick, because people were watching. From this block of wood, which you had to buy from the Ideal airplane company, you’d build a caricature head and then you painted it. But you’d leave it on the block of wood. It was more interesting that way. That’s what I did. The old guy, who was always loaded and who was working with me, had a long white beard. He did the little ships in a bottle. He hated me [laughter].

Stolzer: How old were you at the time?

Blake: I would’ve been around 10, 11 or 12, somewhere around there. But they fired me when I started shaving. I did different expositions; places like the East States Exposition, the Texas Centennial and Atlantic City. We didn’t sell anything. We gave away pocket knives.

Stolzer: You were doing these as demonstrations?

Blake: Yes, for Dupont or whoever was making the knives.

Stolzer: How long would a caricature generally take you?

Blake: They wanted you to do them as fast as you could. An hour or so. It wasn’t artwork. It was any-kid-could-do-it kind of stuff. And you were supposed to use Remington knives. Razor blades worked much better, but you were promoting knives. Remember, the old guy was doing boats in bottles, chains…really tricky stuff. He was really a good carver. I was a child.

Stolzer: How do you think that experience affected your cartoon work?

Tiger pencils (click to enlarge)

Blake: Well, you cared about the back of stuff, when you think about it. You spend your life just drawing the fronts of people in cartoons. Damn few showed many backs.

Stolzer: So, when you were a kid, which comic strips did you enjoy following? Which were your favorites?

Blake: All of them. I loved ‘em all.

Stolzer: Do you remember J. Millar Watt, a British cartoonist who drew Pop?

Blake: I vaguely remember it.

Stolzer: He used a very fine line and he would often have his gag fall into the second-to-last panel, letting the gag sink in in the last panel.

Blake: That would’ve been in Punch?

Stolzer: It was syndicated in the States by the Bell Syndicate.

Blake: I did get Punch for while and it was great. The British cartoonists were so different from the American cartoonists. There was some intricate work.

Stolzer: I brought along some artwork by some of the old Punch guys. Here’s one by Phil May, from the 1890s.

Tiger pencils (click to enlarge)

Blake: [Looking at the May drawing] My goodness. Isn’t it funny about styles of drawing? This is very nice. These are almost not cartoons in a way. Looks like a bit of Norman Rockwell right there, in the faces. Where do you get pieces like this?

Stolzer: From dealers, or auction sites on the computer.

Blake: See, that’s all new to me.

Stolzer: The computer has changed everything. It’s made the world a lot smaller. You can correspond with collectors in Europe on a daily basis.

Blake: I would get more letters from Europe than anywhere else. I quit answering letters, but I can’t throw them away. It’s too bad, because I used to answer every one. My wife would, too. She would carefully answer every one. But when I was in the hospital for six months, the letters accumulated and I never got around to doing anything about them. [Blake stops to look at what Stolzer's son, Isaac, is drawing.] What are those last ones? What are those?

Isaac: Some monsters I like to draw.

Tiger pencils (click to enlarge)

Blake: You’re crazy about those monsters! The world is full of stuff. You made the clarity of some little person’s line here. Usually they do not. But draw stuff! Draw everything! Tables, lamps, chairs; not just one thing…everything! Once you draw a chair, the next time you need one, you’ll remember how to draw it.

Stolzer: I do love how you would draw furniture in the comic strip. There was a real sense of…

Blake:…old fashioned! [laughter]

Stolzer: Not necessarily old fashioned. You had a beautiful sense of space. A lot of times today, a comic strip will consist of a figure in a blank space.

Blake: They’re filling it up; trying to find a way to fill blank space. I don’t think that is necessarily helping the whole comic world. I want to see more of this [pointing to some old originals Stolzer brought] and less of the copywriters, which is what we’re getting. We’re getting more copywriters’ stuff and less artists’ stuff. But that’s part of what the syndicates do, and we’ve got to have them. I’ve had my arguments with them. I’ll tell you a good one. “Come with me” or “take me.” We had an argument about this one for some reason. You see, my wife was nuts about words, and I argued that “come with me” is much nicer than “take me,” but the syndicate wouldn’t leave it alone. I mean, it doesn’t mean a thing, it won’t get you one more reader, but there is a difference. “Come with me” is kind and sweet. It had to do with Tiger saying to his little brother “come with me,” not “I’ll take you.” My goodness, you wouldn’t believe the discussion on the phone between here and New York.

Stolzer: It’s about your love of language.

Blake: I’ve had my discussions with King Features and some of the big shots there, which have caused some…moments [laughter]. One time a big-time King Features salesman called up. He wanted me to come to New York because they were going to give me a prize or something, but I said, “No, it’s too long a trip.” “Oh,” he said, “You’ll like this.” I said, “If you really want to do something nice for Tiger, why don’t you promote it a little bit?” That didn’t go over well [laughter]. I remember having a discussion with Frank Springer, and at one point he says, “You big-foot people,” like I have some sort of disease [laughter]. I know what he means when he calls me a big-foot fella. Of course, my argument is “What are you talking about? You’re talking about cartoonists when you’re an illustrator.” I really feel that way. Guys like Springer are really illustrators, and there is a difference. Looking at what this guy did [pointing to a Phil May “Guttersnipes” drawing], I would say that guy is more an illustrator than a cartoonist.

Rough for the Oct. 12, 1997, Sunday page.

Stolzer: Or an illustrator doing cartoons. It’s sort of like Hal Foster. Was he an illustrator or cartoonist? Or an illustrator working in the cartoon field?

Blake: I’d say Foster was an illustrator, like Noel Sickles. There were a bunch of them that did that same style. Let me show you something. This is the last job I did for Kudner [pulling out some drawings]. That’s a series for Goodyear. They’re pastels. Do you remember Peter Helck? He did the automobile ones. Al Dorne did one of them and Noel Sickles did the other one. Oh, I was so proud.

Stolzer: They’re beautiful pieces.

Blake: Those are the roughs.

Stolzer: Really?

Blake: Yeah, those are my roughs. But I got four of the best guys in the field to do the finishes. And you have to realize that these guys weren’t always anxious to work for you. They were making pretty good money. When Al Dorne came in, he wanted 2,000 bucks apiece, which at that time was big money. Eddie Owens, the account man, grumbled about it and said “That’s too damn much.” He said he wanted to meet this Al Dorne. Now I don’t know if you ever met Al Dorne, but Dorne looked like a gangster. He looked tough and talked tough, a real New York type. So Al Dorne comes in. We’re all sitting around, waiting for the big account man to come in and talk him out of two thousand dollars a shot. So he comes in and the first thing Dorne says is, “You Eddie Owens?” And Owens replies, “Yeah.” Dorne asks, “How much do you make a year?” Bang, he had ‘im [laughter]. Al said, “It’ll take me this long. I make this much. That’s what I charge.” He got his price. In those days the art director could only pay that price by taking the same picture that you paid two thousand dollars for and put it in other ads. That’s part of being an art director. I remember it vividly. I was so much in favor of Al Dorne. He was so quick. He didn’t fool around. I remember being on the side of the artist. Now, how many artists have the guts to say, “That’s how much I make and you’re going to pay me that”? I’m only saying this because I was so proud that I was getting guys that were that good to do this stuff.

Sunday Tiger rough

Stolzer: As the art director, you were getting the top talent.

Blake: Well, that’s what made me feel so good. I got good guys! That’s [the rough] from 1952, which is an awful long time ago…a hundred years now [laughter].

Stolzer: Fifty-some years. Now, you started with Kudner in the late ’30s, didn’t you?

Blake: ’37, I think. Kudner had just begun. When you think about advertising agencies, think about this one. Kudner was an off-shoot—Art Kudner was the boss—of Erwin Wasey, which was another agency. Erwin Wasey’s logotype was a little sailing ship. When Kudner started his agency, his logotype was a little steering wheel. It was typical advertising thinking. You know, “We’re taking a wheel.” I think I started there when it began. Nobody knew what they were doing.

Stolzer: And were you the art director when you started?

Blake: Oh no, I was the paste-up boy for two years. In those days, that was fine. You cut mats, you mounted, you used the photostat machine, you ordered material. They don’t teach most of that stuff in school. Maybe they don’t do it anymore.

Stolzer: Most of those processes are gone.

Blake: But later you moved onto a board. And then you’re in the room with the bullpen, which was anywhere from five to ten guys. And you’re sitting next to a guy doing different work. And it’s good for you. You can say to the guy next to you, “What do you think of that?” Whereas when you work alone, that’s probably when you show it to your wife. She might say, “That’s nice, dear. Dinner’s ready” [laughter].

The Sept. 19, 1982, Sunday strip

Stolzer: How long did you work as art director for Kudner?

Blake: Oh, 17 or 18 years. I quit at 35 years old. I started around 17, because I didn’t go to school. In those days, when the old man died, the kids went to work. They ran errands or whatever. I worked in a drugstore, and at a city pool in New York City. I had a good time. Also, I carved wood before that.

Stolzer: Did the art [wood carving] pretty much start as a hobby for you that turned into a career?

Blake: No, I think they were being nice to my father. It was an agency thing. Remember, my old man was an art director for George Batton. They eventually became BBD&O, which is a big joint. They handled the Remington account, which was Dupont. I think they were looking for something for this little orphan to do. What the hell. They tried to peddle these heads that I would carve, but nobody bought them, so they found something else for me to do. But I had a whole bunch of them. They looked like those waxwork kinds of things. They were all caricatures presumably, most of them of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Stolzer: She made for a good caricature.

Blake: Oh, she was such a patsy [laughter].

Stolzer: So when did you become art director at the agency?

Blake: Like everyone else, you worked your way up. As I mentioned before, they want to be sure that you’re not going to embarrass anybody or lose the account. So they watched you, and I don’t blame them. I’m a company man and agree that that’s probably the way to do it. The sequence then was that you were bullpen material, and then you became an assistant art director, which meant that you were under another art director, doing trade ads and other things while he did the big ads. You did the paste-ups and stuff that he didn’t want to do. He in turn could look at new artwork and see agents. And then, when that’s done, you get to be an art director and get your own accounts. You get to see your own clients, get your own rug and get the key to the toilet, all the perks. At that point, if you owned the agency, you’d be pretty careful who you sent to see the clients, because back home in the office, maybe 20 people were dependent on that account. I used to be scared to death, coming back from Flint or somewhere thinking, Holy cats, if you didn’t have that deal all sealed, 15 people may lose their jobs. I couldn’t stand it. Remember, there was a company plane and I don’t like flying much anyhow, so that didn’t help. And my wife would tell me to get out of there.

Blake, 1964

Stolzer: So there was tremendous pressure on you.

Blake: She told me to just get out. I didn’t get home much. I left the business and we took the kids to Spain to live.

Stolzer: Really? For how long?

Blake: Well, it didn’t work out. We landed in the rain and they both had mumps. Can you believe it? Anything that could go wrong went wrong. We thought it would be good for them and even with the experience, I think it was good for them.

Blake: [To Isaac, who’s drawing] How about lettering? Do you fool with lettering at all?

Isaac: Not really.

Blake: You will. If you don’t, you will. Some of it is fascinating. One of the things that Kudner did was to send me to school. They sent me to any school that I wanted to go to, at night. They sent me to Cavanaugh, which was a lettering school.

Stolzer: Where was that located?

Blake: New York City. And that’s where they taught chisel-point rendering, with those carpenter’s pencils. That was all the rage back then. The chisel-point guy worked for a sterling silver company, and he could draw the most beautiful shiny spoons in black and white. It was really beautiful. But Kudner paid for it.

Stolzer: It benefited them as much as you.

Blake: Well, I worked cheap [laughter].

Blake, 1972

Stolzer: I had asked you before about the comic strips that you read when you were a kid. Did you prefer adventure or some other type?

Blake: Edwina was one. Do you remember Edwina?

Stolzer: I happened to bring an original with me, just in case.

Blake: She’s got to be getting on in years . . .

Stolzer: Well, she passed away a few years ago.

Blake: There you go. That’s called getting on. [Looking at an original Sinbad page from Life] Yeah, she’s good. That dog is wonderful. I know how tough this took, to do this with a dog. I mean, I’m not good at animals, and she is good. Now, where the heck did you get this original?

Stolzer: That piece belonged to a good friend of mine for years and years. I bought it from his widow after he passed away. He treasured it, as do I. The cartoon ran in Life, where she was doing the ink wash pieces.

Blake: I remember seeing these cartoons when I was a kid. Where did she live?

Stolzer: I’m not sure, but I believe in the Midwest. It might’ve been Ohio.

Blake, 1988

Blake: The dog is great! I don’t care much for her figures, but the dog is great!

Stolzer: I also brought some of the older kid strips, like Reg’lar Fellers and Smitty.

Blake: [Looking at a Reg’lar Fellers daily] You know, this guy wrote a book once. I’m in it!

Stolzer: I think Gene Byrnes did two books, one on cartooning and another on illustration and painting.

Blake: It was before I started cartooning. I did a hula dancer for someone that was in the book.

Stolzer: I’ll have to check my copy.

Four Tiger daily strips (click to enlarge)

Blake: It’s interesting to see the lettering in these strips to see how much space they wasted. It’s funny; we all use the same gags! [laughter]

Stolzer: Byrnes’ characters always reminded me of city kids, leaping over fire hydrants, playing leapfrog, doing kid things.

Blake: See now, Punkinhead, who’s one of my characters, was not my idea. That was King Features. And I see here that we have Puddinhead [in Reg’lar Fellers]. They didn’t like my name, so they gave me Punkinhead. They liked their name. But I guess when they’re giving you the money, you say “go ahead.”

Stolzer: Charles Schulz ran into the same thing. He never liked the name Peanuts.

Blake: It ain’t bad! [laughter] 1929, eh? [Referring to a Reg’lar Fellers daily] Whatever happened to Reg’lar Fellers?

Stolzer: I think when Gene Byrnes passed away, they ended the strip, even though Byrnes employed a lot of ghosts to draw the strip. If you take a close look, you’ll see that the panel lines and signature are pre-printed on some of them. He had them all set for his ghosts.

Blake: I’ll be…[looking at a Billy DeBeck Parlor, Bedroom & Sink topper] Now Billy DeBeck is funny even before you look at it! [laughter] I mean, he’s pure.

Stolzer: What do you mean by “pure”?

Blake: Look at any of the things in this strip and they’re funny. The figures are funny. Look at the movement. It’s funny from the get-go.

Stolzer: His figure work was brilliant.

Blake: His compositions stunk, but that didn’t matter! [laughter] It’s interesting to see the changes people make. His lettering is very hard to follow, but what the hell! The little child there is funny as all get-out!

Stolzer: That’s Bunky. The strip ran as a Sunday topper to Barney Google.

Blake: Great stuff!

Stolzer: I’d like to get back to your advertising career for a bit. So you had enough of the business?

Blake, 1996

Blake: Yeah, I quit on my thirty-fifth birthday. Kudner was very good to me. I wasn’t mad at them. They couldn’t believe that I was quitting. I can’t give you the details, but they offered me a hell of a lot of money. They offered to do things that really surprised me. They were more than kind. By then, I had seen the clients, and then this happens. And the client might say, “Whatever happened to that fellow Bud with the glasses?” I can see that the company would be concerned once you had your clients lined up, but I had had enough. And I guess that’s how it is. I didn’t have a lot of money or anything, but I was an owner of the company. There were ten of us who owned it and they literally gave me my tenth, because I didn’t have the money to buy it. So how that works is that they give you the stock and the bank holds it. Remember, I was there since I was a paste-up boy, so all of the receptionists and secretaries called me “Little Buddy.” Even when I was the owner, they’d call me “Little Buddy.” My wife would call up and say that she’d like to talk to Mr. Blake and they’d say, “You mean ‘Little Buddy’?” Of course it drove my wife nuts! [laughter] Anyhow, it was all very nice; very fun.

Stolzer: So how was it that you turned to comic strips from there?

Blake: Remember that panel that I showed you, Ever Happen to You? I heard at that time that H.T. Webster had died, so I thought that there would be a couple of hundred papers sitting around, wondering what they were going to put in his space. His assistant had died too, so I thought there was probably a market. I had been doing, as you saw, those American Weekly and Pictorial Review pieces, which were both Hearst/King Features, which was naturally where I went, ‘cause they knew my stuff. So I went to the office two or three times before I saw Mr. Byck, who was a very nice fellow . . .

Longtime King Features comics editor Sylvan Byck

Stolzer: Sylvan Byck?

Blake: Sylvan Byck, yes, a very, very intelligent fellow. He used to be a cartoonist and was a pretty good watercolorist. He was kind of on your side. His criticisms were intelligent. At that time, the head of King Features was the guy who wrote Lady and the Tramp, a Disney thing. His name was Ward Green and he was a very intelligent man. I mean, this was my first adventure with a syndicate. He was very nice and kind, and bingo, I started. I said, “By the way, I’m going to Spain”. Oh boy…[laughter] you know, Spain is no place to mail things, but I went anyhow. I won’t say that I worked for my wife, but she wanted to travel, so we traveled. As I said, we got there. My wife had a miscarriage and the kids had the mumps. Name it, it happened. And then the mail…I started mailing the strips by the week, and then I decided that they’ll lose half of them, so I started mailing them by the day. They lost almost all of them. I figured that I’d make a couple of thousand a week with the strip. When we got home, my first month’s pay was twenty-seven dollars. I had two kids and a house…the whole shmeer. Oh, was I stupid. But I had done the panel and it went to maybe a hundred papers. Ever Happen to You? originally had a rotating title for different gags, but they changed that. I think I could’ve made a living on the panel, but I couldn’t send two kids to college. So I was freelancing at the same time, doing the kind of work that you see here, to eke out enough money to pay for the house and college. Anyway, I’m trying to think of the name of the company that had the 24-sheet poster of the little kid getting her bathing suit pulled off. That big company…Coppertone! They hired me to do a comic strip for their calendar, which they gave away. They wanted a teenage strip, which I did. So as long as I had it, I took it up to King Features to see if they were interested. But they said, “No, we have Ponytail, but try a kid’s strip.” When they mentioned kid’s strip, at that point, you think Peanuts. Jeez.

Stolzer: Do you think that they wanted some competition for Peanuts?

Aug. 20, 1967 (click to enlarge)

Blake: Yes, that’s what they were after. So I did the characters and four or five weeks of gags. I could even tell you every gag. The syndicate said to have five white kids and one black kid. Then they threw the black kid out and told me to do a little brother. They did do some good promotion. Tiger started with 400 or 500 papers, which was very nice. It is not in 400 papers now.

Stolzer: What was the highest number of papers that it ran in?

Blake: Well, I don’t check ‘em and I don’t ask. You can tell by the money you get, though.

Stolzer: Tiger started in 1965?

Blake: Yeah. Remember, we fooled around for five or six months. They [the syndicates] always do. And I was doing the panel, too. But I told them that I couldn’t do the panel anymore, and they agreed, but the panel was more fun.

Stolzer: Why was that?

Blake: Well, it’s you. I mean, I could draw adults and situations. I haven’t drawn an adult in 40 years.

Stolzer: I guess you could vary the situations more.

Sept. 26, 1982

Blake: That’s right. That’s why I’m fascinated with certain small children, although they’ve changed. I mean, their games and attitudes have changed. They seem more adult than they used to me. It may be that box [referring to Isaac’s GameBoy].

Stolzer: You drew Tiger for almost 40 years.

Blake: Just about 40 years.

Stolzer: That’s a lot of strips. How did you do it?

Blake: Well, I buy some gags, and I do some gags. Most gags are switches, you know, when you switch a gag around to work it again. I had a gag the other day that pleased me to no end. Just had a kid ask, “Why are you bare foot?” “Because I have no socks and shoes on,” says the other kid. That’s what I like. The kid is telling you the truth! [laughter] But you do get nervous sometimes, wondering if you’ve seen the gag somewhere before. It’s not always easy to tell.

Stolzer: I noticed that a lot of your gags seem like gentle observations.

Blake: That’s all they are. I have a fella, who I’ve never met, out in St. Louis, who does a lot of gags. He must have another job. He’s very taciturn or something. As I say, I’ve never met him, which is great. When you work with another guy doing gags, he’ll say, “Why didn’t you do this or that?” It’s all very hard to explain why you didn’t do this or that. It’s almost impossible. I mean, I’m back to standing on that stage at Goodyear, telling them why I’m using ol’ Sickles here instead of Norman Rockwell. I don’t know. Because I felt like it! [laughter] But you can’t get away with that!

Stolzer: How did you entertain yourself for almost 40 years?

Blake: I don’t know. I had no vacations or time off. They always tell you to get ahead, but you can’t. So this is the first vacation I’ve ever had, outside of my time in the hospital.

Stolzer: Some vacation.

Blake: Yeah, well, I should have been dead. Whatever they did didn’t work.

Nov. 19, 1967 (click to enlarge)

Stolzer: Do you missing working on the strip?

Blake: Sometimes. I mean, I have gags going on in my head and nowhere to put them. Frankly, I keep thinking that I’m going to go back and do that panel again, because old people aren’t having enough fun. Then there’s a friend I had named Reamer Keller. I don’t know if you know of him.

Stolzer: Sure.

Blake: I think he was the mayor of somewhere. Anyway, he told a story about going to an art supply place in Florida and asking for crow quill pen points, but they never heard of them. So he wrote me and asked if I’d send him some, because they didn’t have any. All they had were ballpoint pens and other disposable ones.

Stolzer: I remember talking with Rick Yager some years ago. He needed a particular Gillotte nib, but he wanted the brass ones, so he asked if I could help him out. He said that the new ones didn’t last for more than a few days. I can’t remember if I had any luck.

Blake: Well, Gillotte is one of the main brands. I went into one of the art stores up here and asked for some one-ply paper. She said, “We have two-ply, but they don’t make one-ply.” “Well”, I said, “You can’t make two-ply without making one-ply!” “Well, we don’t make one-ply. We only have two-ply,” she said. Round and round. I said, “When the boss comes in, tell him about that.” Pretty soon they call up and say, “We found some one-ply.” What I’m getting at is that’s all two-ply is. If they make two-ply, they have to have one-ply. And I like one-ply because you can see through one-ply on the light table.

Stolzer: Two-ply is just a one-ply sandwich.

Jan. 9, 1983 (click to enlarge)

Blake: That’s all it is! [laughter]  What I’m getting at is that the guy who used to run the store is an old pro, but he went to Florida and sold it to ladies who now deal in crafts more than artwork. I have nothing against crafts, but it’s not what it was. [To Isaac] What are you drawing now? More snakes! You’re crazy for snakes!

Isaac: Uh huh.

Blake: You’re talking to a guy who used to own a boa constrictor.

Isaac: Really?

Blake: I got it from a boarder at our house who ran an import and export business. One day he came home with a baby boa constrictor that was on a ship from South America, among the bananas or something. So he brought it home. I was more or less Isaac’s age. We got a box with a glass top and holes in it. We had it in his bedroom. My mother, of course, went nuts. My job, as a little boy, was to get either a frog or a mouse once a month and put it in the box with the boa constrictor. If you’ve ever seen a mouse in a tank with a boa constrictor, then you’ve seen fear. We all felt sorrier for the mouse than anything else, because then we had to feed the mouse little pieces of cheese, since the boa wasn’t always ready to eat. But it made me a big kid on the block. “Hey, you want to see my boa constrictor?” [laughter]  So this guy paid me so much per mouse to feed the boa, and the kids would pay me to look at the boa. So it all worked out. However, he got killed in an automobile crash, so my mother had the room vacant, looking for customers. It had a four-poster bed in it, with those curls around it. I can remember being with her when she took a new customer up to show him the bedroom he would use. And here the snake had gotten out of his box! [laughter]  That was a shock, to say the least! All what I want to say is that when we sold the house, or had it taken by the mortgage people, I had the boa constrictor and they wouldn’t let me take it to the apartment, so I let it go in the backyard. Twenty years later, I still worried about those little children in the schools! [laughter]  But I doubt that it made it through the winter. Twenty years later, he’d have been pretty big. [laughter]

Jan. 28, 1996 (click to enlarge)

One of the reasons that my marriage worked so well was that my mother had a boarding house and her mother had a boarding house. So we all knew about it; what you had to do, and the troubles and all that stuff. We were married for 50 years. Sure, we fought. Who doesn’t? But we got along pretty well. She was smart. And boy, when I sent Tiger in, there were no proofreading problems, ever! I mean, she went through it, and boy did I need her, because I can’t spell worth a damn.

Stolzer: I noticed that one of the things that you seem to enjoy in Tiger is to play around with space and perspective.

Blake: I loved doing that. I would say that almost anything that I’ve drawn isn’t original, that I must’ve seen it somewhere. But you don’t know. Is it original? I don’t know, but as new people come along, you get original ideas.

Stolzer: What kind of reference material would you use for the strip?

Blake: Of what?

Stolzer: Reference material to work from. I read that all Gaar Williams used was a Sears, Roebuck catalog.

Blake: Oh, I used Toys ‘R’ Us. But I didn’t use much of it, because they changed so much. But I’m cornball in what I used. A lot of the toys have changed a lot, but some haven’t. I would think, looking at Dennis the Menace. By the way, I was buddies many years ago with Ketcham, before he became a big deal. [laughter]  Ketcham used to live next door to a friend of mine, in Westport, Conn. Happily, I was able to give him some business, for Goodyear hoses. He did his first commercial cartooning for Goodyear hoses.

May 7, 1978 (click to enlarge)

Stolzer: Would that have been in the late ’40s or so?

Blake: Yeah, it would’ve been around that time, maybe earlier.

Stolzer: You mentioned Ketcham. I see as a real similarity between your styles in terms of line work. So much of it is about a lively line.

Blake: Yes, that’s something that he fooled with for a long time. In the early stuff, he didn’t do that so much. It was a flatter line. The guy who’s doing it now is pretty good.

Stolzer: That’s Marcus Hamilton who’s doing the daily panel.

Blake: Well, he’s doing a pretty good job. See, they tried another guy on Tiger a couple of times, and I realized how difficult it is to ape somebody.

Stolzer: Both you and Ketcham used a calligraphic sort of line, with a lot of thick and thin variation. There was also a beautiful spotting of blacks, causing your eyes to travel around the strips.

Blake: The Pogo stuff, particularly early Pogo, was awfully good. I can still, in my head, see those roots of the trees. They’re so good! [laughter]  I believe that after Kelly died, his wife did some of the strips. I thought they were pretty good. I wonder sometimes about the amount of papers strips are in. In one of my books, it says that H.T. Webster’s strip was in something like 200 papers, while Blondie was in 3,000 or something. I have an awful lot of Webster and Briggs books. They weren’t in that many papers, but they were bigger cartoonists. I don’t know how they charged for their work. Maybe larger markets.

Stolzer: I had mentioned before about gags that were more like observations, and both Briggs and Webster were that way. Their work was a lot about observing life and commenting on it.

A 1954 “That Sinking Feeling”

Blake: That’s right.

Stolzer: There’s also that purity of drawing that you talked about.

Blake: Well, you still have to know how to draw, to arrange the compositions and to know values and all that. There are tricks to drawing and anyone can learn them. You just have to spend time.

Stolzer: In the end, I consider myself a line guy. I especially love pen and ink because you can’t hide from ink. It’s all right there. Whether it’s guys like Russell Patterson, A.B. Frost or Winsor McCay, there’s a real purity to their line. You’ve managed to maintain this really lively line in your work for over 40 years. How did you do it? How did you manage not to become bored by it?

Blake: Frankly, I still like the pencils better than the finishes every time, because they have more spirit to them. Remember, that kind of layout is what I did for years before doing comics. [Blake goes into his studio to get some roughs.] What do they say? “With warts and all.” I must have 10,000 of these roughs. But you can see what I mean. I love the pencils. Even with the mistakes, I love them.

Stolzer: They’re beautiful. The line work is so lively.

Blake: When I do pencils, I think, “This is how to do it. I’m the greatest thing in the whole world, blah, blah, blah.” What do they call that? Psyching yourself up. I think you have to do that.

Stolzer: The line work is gorgeous. They have a great rambling quality about them.

Blake: You’ll find that I move them around when I ink.

Stolzer: How do you approach the inking?

Blake: I put the roughs under the one-ply and draw them one more time on the light box.

Stolzer: Do you start with the contour lines, or do you lay in the blacks first?

Blake: I put in the blacks last, because I’m not sure where they might wind up.

A 1956 “That Sinking Feeling” (click to enlarge)

Stolzer: Creig Flessel once told me that he sometimes laid in his blacks first to get the rhythm of the piece.

Blake: Oh, sometimes I’ll do that, lay in the blacks as a pattern.

Stolzer: One of things that I so admire about your work is that the line is working with those black areas. You’re actively causing the viewer to follow the rhythm of the piece.

Blake: Look at some of the blacks that Ketcham used. I sometimes want to say, “Take it easy. Don’t make the background more important than the front.”

Stolzer: You must’ve really enjoyed doing these little fight scenes, with the kids wrestling, shoes and buttons flying around . . .

Blake: I enjoy that stuff. Hell, I enjoy it all. But when you run out of joy, you don’t want to continue.

Stolzer: I love the sketches.

Blake: There’s something about them that I just like. Maybe it’s because of the work that I did at Kudner all those years, all those roughs.

Stolzer: I remember a story about an artist who had done a 30-second figure drawing that someone wanted to buy. When they asked about the price, the person was shocked that the artist would ask so much for a drawing that took so little time. The artist replied that although it took him only 30 seconds to do the drawing, it took him a lifetime to get to the point of being able to do the drawing.

Some originals on Blake’s drawing board at the time of this interview (click to enlarge)

Blake: My father had a similar line about that. He said, “I charge for the paintings, maybe 20 percent for the equipment, 20 percent for blah, blah, blah and 60 percent for knowing how.” I find that perfectly logical. He died at 42, which was very unfortunate. He could draw anything but figures. Figures bothered him.

Stolzer: Before, in your studio, you talked about Willard Mullin.

Blake: Yes, his work was magnificent. I think his drawings of the boxers were great. And I was a kid. That’s how long ago it was when he was doing sports stuff for the World-Telegram. Even as a kid I bought the paper just to look at his stuff. Kids who are 17 don’t do that.

Stolzer: He would do those portraits on the Coquille paper and then would have those little figures around it. They might be Yankees or Dodgers or boxers. He was one of those guys, as Alex Toth has put it, who was a real ink slinger, a guy who could really throw the ink around.

Blake: Well, I think he was one of those guys who could draw to order.

Stolzer: Talk about great figure artists . . .

Blake: Boy, was he good. I got a letter from him once, out of the blue, and he wanted a drawing from me. That’s how I got that piece on the wall in my studio.

Stolzer: That’s a wonderful Bum drawing.

A “Bunky” strip (click to enlarge)

Blake: One of the things that I made a little money on was selling roughs to the Saturday Evening Post, among other places. I didn’t sell many, but I sold some. In other words, you did a little rough drawing that you think would be cover material and you rather hope that they’ll say, “Oh, fine sonny, why don’t you do this and we’ll run it as a cover.” But they never do. They would say, “Who should we give this to?” It always killed me. They’d give it to Gordon Utz or somebody. I did one of the railroad station at Red Bank, N.J. There was a train full of commuters with their hats and stuff. And running down the station platform in her nightie was an obviously young wife, holding up her husband’s briefcase. The drawing I made showed the inside of the train, with all of the smoke and gloom. And out of the window was the wife, really the star of the piece. So they changed it around and showed her in the front instead. Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. But they paid me $150, so swell. I can’t complain. [laughter]  I wanted to argue about the drawing, but they gave me the money, so I had to shut up. The same thing applied to paperback books. The paperback book covers were a good source of money. A famous book about a mouse came out, titled, The Mouse That Roared. What I’m getting at is that it was me versus someone else. So I did a cover for them. Not a big deal, just a cover. They paid me something like $300. The book sold like crazy. It sold millions of copies. And then they came out with a whole bunch more, using the same picture. My argument was that I should’ve been paid extra, but my agent said, “No, don’t do that because we’ll lose our business with Bantam Books.” I was thinking that everyone else is making money, so why can’t the guy who drew the picture? Remember, I wasn’t whining or being greedy. I just felt that they should pay if they were going to use the picture again. This happened at least three times. They also used some various spot illos that they never paid me for. Still burns me up.

Stolzer: I recall reading an earlier piece about you, from maybe ten years ago, where you talked about Jimmy Hatlo. You referred to Hatlo as a “dirty cartoonist.” What did you mean?

Blake: Yes, well think about DeBeck. It’s the same thing. He’s not going to draw just any character. It’s going to be funny, with a big nose and a pot belly. He can’t leave it alone. He’s a pure cartoonist, which I’m not.

A “Bunky” strip (click to enlarge)

Stolzer: Why do you say that?

Blake: I have to think about it too much. [laughter] DeBeck looks very much like Hatlo to me. Not the same line or anything, but if you look at the characters, he wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t funny to him. And Hatlo was the same way. You know what he’s going to do. If he showed you an office, you knew what was going on in it. It’s a little old timey . . .

Stolzer: But there’s a lot of character in the work.

Blake: There sure was.

Stolzer: I also wanted to ask you about the Tiger comic book from the early ’70s.

Blake: There were a couple of them, but they didn’t sell.

Stolzer: Did you have much input into them?

Blake: No. They let me do a cover. They gave me instructions, but they let me do it. One of the problems that I had with the whole experience was that I was never able to buy any copies of the comics. I lived in New York and went through the stations and stores and could never find any. So they didn’t sell, and I can tell you why. There were distribution problems. I would’ve bought a bunch of them, but I couldn’t find any. So I took it up with King but got nowhere. You know, when you do a comic, you think about to whom you’re going to sell it. I don’t know enough about syndicates to know which are bad and which are good, but I know about the deals with the syndicates. Guys like Caniff had a 75/25 split, rather than a 50/50 one. If you can get away with it . . .

Blake’s brushes, near his drawing table (click to enlarge).

Stolzer: Caniff left the Trib Syndicate over ownership rights with Terry.

Blake: Then he came to King and made his deal with Steve Canyon.

Stolzer: What do you think are the biggest changes that you seen in the comic-strip field since you started?

Blake: I would say that there are more gimmicks than there used to be. If I say something, it sounds like I’m picking on them, but I’m really not. I think some of them aren’t really comic strips at all but are a copywriter’s gimmick. I don’t think it helps the world. I get the Bangor paper, which is a good one, but some of the comics aren’t all that good. Who was the guy who was so popular who did a panel? He just up and quit. You know, he was very funny and did cows . . .

Stolzer: Gary Larson.

Blake: Right! Now they got a guy doing something similar. I don’t know. Gary Larson had a macabre sense of humor that worked very well.

Stolzer: He saw the world through different eyes.

Blake’s final “Tiger” strip, on his drawing board at the time of this interview (click to enlarge).

Blake: This guy just does odd things. I can’t really tell you why I object. They’re just not funny.

Stolzer: Are there any cartoonists today whose work you admire?

Blake: Oh, I think Zits is very well done. Borgman’s a hell of a cartoonist. I don’t know if he’s going to kill himself or not. Just think of what he’s doing. I know, just from my own experience, he’s doing a hell of a lot of work. And I wonder if he isn’t burying himself with it. Shoe is very well done, even by the new guys. They’re very good. I’m very appreciative of it, because I know it’s not easy to follow someone like Jeff MacNelly. Both of those are pretty good strips. I think King Features has done a very good job with Hi and Lois and Hagar. Hagar was a wonderful strip. And it’s still pretty good. There’s one that’s in our Sunday paper that I just don’t get, by a guy who’s a wonderful cartoonist. I just don’t get what he does. It’s just very complicated. It’s very well done, but it’s just, what’s the word I’m after? “Rarified,” my boy would say. [laughter]  I make no bones about it. A comic is a comic is a comic. It is to amuse. How it amuses…it shouldn’t be too much trouble. [laughter]  I’m no expert, but sometimes strips have too much going on.

Stolzer: It’s also hard to do a story strip today.

Blake: I do think that story strips are done by illustrators and comic strips are done by cartoonists, but it all kind of runs together.

Stolzer: I’ve got one last question for you, Bud. You mentioned those last drawings on your drawing board that you didn’t send in. How did you know that that was it? How did you know that you were done with the strip?

Blake: When you have a lot of problems, you get awfully tired for no reason. The constant you’d-better-be-ready-to-mail-by-Monday-morning wears on you, and I’d been mailing every Monday morning for 40 years. So I thought that it would be nice not to have to do that. I’ve done enough. I don’t think it was going any better.

Stolzer: But the one sitting on your drawing board looks awfully good.

Blake: Well, could I do more? Sure, I could keep doing it. But I can’t. I’ve had enough.

To purchase Hogan’s Alley #13, where this interview first appeared (with even more artwork!), just click the Paypal link below (only $7, which includes postage) and we’ll mail it to you!

(To view the images below, click on the thumbnails.)

Nov. 23, 1942	Nov. 24, 1942	Nov. 25, 1942	Nov. 26, 1942
Nov. 27, 1942	Nov. 28, 1942	Nov. 30, 1942	Dec. 1, 1942
Dec. 2, 1942	Dec. 3, 1942	Dec. 4, 1942	Dec. 5, 1942
Dec. 7, 1942	Dec. 8, 1942	Dec. 9, 1942	Dec. 10, 1942
Dec. 11, 1942	Dec. 12, 1942	Dec. 14, 1942	Dec. 15, 1942
Dec. 16, 1942	Dec. 17, 1942	Dec. 18, 1942	Dec. 19, 1942
Dec. 21, 1942	Dec. 22, 1942	Dec. 23, 1942	Dec. 24, 1942

For the second part of our holiday extravaganza, we are proud to present the Christmas card art of Roy Doty:

This collection of the Christmas card art of Roy Doty was our Christmas gift to Hogan’s Alley readers four years ago, but we want to present it on our new site, for those who have yet to view them and those who want to enjoy them anew. Doty, who has been a freelance cartoonist and illustrator since 1946, also that year drew a Christmas card to send to friends and colleagues, and he has drawn one each year since. Masterpieces of intricate design, the cards are both fascinating to study and compelling in their restless invention. We spoke with Doty about his yuletide labor of love, and we’re pleased to present the conversation here.

Hogan’s Alley: The first impression upon looking at your cards in one sitting is that producing these cards represents an enormous effort! When do you begin working on each year’s card?
Roy Doty: I really start thinking about them in September, with the constant fear that there is no new idea for a Christmas card. The right, or wrong, idea usually goes concrete about Nov. 1, then I go to work on the card until it’s finished. I try to avoid doing any kind of “gag” card–I’m really not a gag cartoonist, though I’ve done them many times. I try to design something new that is funny, enjoyable and different and has some design value. Sometimes I make it…sometimes I don’t. Never really happy when I’ve finished, but I try. Come to think about it, I feel that way about most of my drawings.
HA: When you began creating these cards more than 60 years ago, you probably had no idea what a monster you were creating!
Doty:When I did my first card in l946, the year I started freelancing in New York, all the artists did their own cards at Christmas. It was a tradition to do so. Over the years fewer and fewer cartoonists do them, though there have been more of them lately now that they can print them out from their computers.

Roy Doty

HA: Now it’s something of a privilege to be on Roy Doty’s Christmas card list. How many correspondents are you up to each year?
Doty: Well, the list keeps growing. I guess most of the people on my original list are dead now, but new friends and clients grow every year. One of the problems is both a sad and a joyful one. Many cartoonists die, and before the next Christmas I get a letter from their widows that they’ d like to be kept on the list. I love that–then the widows have passed on, and I get requests from their children to keep them on the list. So it grows and grows. This year’s list is just over the 500 mark, and I’m an old fashioned type: I still address them by hand like my mother told me to do with Christmas cards. Printing and postage are killing me, but it’s a wonderful feeling. One of the joys of Christmas.
HA: Of course, intricacy and detail have always been hallmarks of your work. Are there any cards that stand out for you in terms of the ambitiousness of their design or rendering?
Doty: No, I don’t have any favorite one. I just wish some of them had been better.
HA: You always stay plenty busy. Has there been a year when you confronted the possibility of just not being able to produce a new card that year?
Doty: I wouldn’t dream of not doing a card in the coming year ! Even if I only had a mailing list of twenty or so, I’d do a new one. Why should I give Hallmark more money? They never gave me any.
HA: You’re about to send out your 2008 card. How long until you start noodling out an idea for 2009? I guess that’s the price for beginning a cherished tradition–you have to keep it going!
Doty: Well, my mind already has an itch way back somewhere in my cerebellum sort of tinkling with a thought about next year’s card. I hope nothing jells…it might be better than this year’s card, and then I’d really hate myself.

(To view the images below, click on the thumbnails. And we strongly urge you to zoom in on these images to scrutinize them; the detail is breathtaking.)

1950	1954	1955	Undated
1958	Undated	1961	Undated
1963	Undated	Undated	1964
Undated	1965	1966	Undated
1968	Undated	1971	1974
Undated	1976	1978	Undated
1979	Undated	1981	Undated
1982	1983	Undated	1984
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1987	1988	Undated	1989
1991	1993	1995	1996
1997	1998	1999	2000
2001	2002	2003	2004
2005	2006	2007	2008
2009	2010	2011	2012

Now that you’re in a holiday frame of mind, buy some comics-themed Christmas cards from Hogan’s Alley this year!