Indiana Cartoon News 2019-Part Three

The worlds of comics and cartoons lost two Hoosiers in 2019. Cartoonist Tom K. Ryan of Tumbleweeds fame died on March 12, 2019, at age ninety-two. Writer, comics historian, and critic Tom Spurgeon died on November 13, 2019, at age fifty.

* * *

Thomas Kreusch Ryan was born on June 6, 1926, in Anderson, Indiana, to Francis Gavin Ryan (1898-1931), a real estate agent and a U.S. Army veteran of World War I (he was a corporal in an aero squadron), and Katherine (Kreusch) Ryan (1896-1981), a housewife. On his birth certificate, Ryan was named Tommy, an ironic diminutive given his adult height of six feet and three inches. He had a younger sister, Mary Francis Ryan. Ryan's father died when he was just five years old. His mother remarried a widower named Earl Fay Smith (1894-1982). Ryan and his sister grew up in a household that included Smith's three children from his first marriage.

When he filled out his World War II draft card, Tom K. Ryan was working for the Coca-Cola Company in Muncie, Indiana. He also worked in an office, as a furniture salesman, and as a telephone lineman. Ryan studied business at Notre Dame University for a year and spent two years in a liberal arts course at the University of Cincinnati, but he never completed his degree. On February 12, 1947, he married Jo Anne Faulkner (1928-2005), and by 1950, they had had their first child. Ryan was then working for a wholesale metal producer, presumably his stepfather's business.

During the 1950s, Ryan worked for an advertising agency as a commercial artist. He also sold a few magazine gag cartoons. Later in the decade, he fell ill and was bedridden for a time. He passed the time by reading Zane Grey Westerns and "fell madly in love" with the genre, which was then so popular on the nation's television screens and drugstore paperback racks. Ryan began developing his own Western comic strip, and on September 6, 1965, Tumbleweeds, syndicated by Lew Little, began as a daily feature. Tom K. Ryan was then less than a year short of his fortieth birthday.

Tumbleweeds was one of a new kind of comic strip in American newspapers. Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, and B.C., by Johnny Hart, were predecessors. Others of this kind included The Wizard of Id by Hart and Brant Parker, Animal Crackers by Roger Bolen, and Broom-Hilda by Russell Myers. These new comic strips practiced a different kind of humor than their predecessors. It was often ironic or satirical or wry, also sophisticated and sometimes psychologically probing. They usually involved the individualized and often quirky personalities of large casts of characters. Although Tumbleweeds is the main character in his eponymous strip, there are more than forty others sharing its spaces, not including those who make just one or two appearances, such as the winners of the Indian of the Week award given out by the Chief of the local Poohawk tribe.

Grimy Gulch, the place that Tumbleweeds calls home, has a population of 62 or 56 or 47. That's not many for a town but an awful lot for a comic strip. Seemingly every one of that populace makes his or her way through the panels of Tumbleweeds. Every character--major, minor, or somewhere in between--is precisely drawn and delineated, every one of them is instantly recognizable, and every one has his or her own unique and hilariously comic name, from manhunting Hildegarde Hamhocker to pompous Judge Horatio Curmudgeon Frump to undertaker Claude Clay ("You plug 'em . . . I plant 'em") to the less-than-savage Poohawk Indians Limpid Lizard and Lotsa Luck.

The characters in Tumbleweeds possess tiny bodies and outsized heads. Drawing them that way may have been necessary for their creator in an era of reduced comic-strip dimensions. However, their tiny bodies, the tiny pistols and shovels they carry, the diminutive tables and chairs that furnish their tiny rooms, the toy-sized buildings and teepees in which they live and work, their overall tiny settings (remember that Grimy Gulch has fewer than one hundred denizens) seem part of Tom K. Ryan's purpose, which was to reduce the grand and epic Western story to comic--as well as cozy and maybe even fantastic--smallness. And maybe his comic version of the Western is ultimately more accurate than the large and heroic narrative so prevalent in our popular culture. I should add that Ryan not only drew with great precision but that his lettering is also very precise, as are his word balloons and his Western-style panel borders. In graphic terms, Tumbleweeds is a joy and a pleasure to behold.

The first Sunday Tumbleweeds showed up in newspapers on October 29, 1967. The strip gained in popularity, eventually to run in hundreds of newspapers. Fawcett Gold Medal Books began issuing mass-market paperback collections in 1968. Nearly two dozen of these appeared from then until the 1990s. Tumbleweeds was also reprinted in foreign translations in Brazil (where the title character was called Kid Farofa), Italy (il Colt), Germany (Heisse Colts), and the Netherlands (Jippie). There were also Australian editions, as well as two American animated cartoon adaptations, a high school stage play, a Las Vegas stage show, and one or two theme park attractions. I was pleased to find and bring back to America two Italian-language editions when I was in Italy. I was also pleased to find that reprints appeared in Frontier Times magazine as early as March 1967.

Jim Davis, later of Garfield fame, assisted Ryan from 1969 to 1978. Ryan had other assistants as well. I don't know when it happened, but at some point, Tom and Jo Anne Ryan moved their family of four children to Florida. After forty-two years as a syndicated cartoonist, Ryan brought Tumbleweeds to an end on December 29 (daily) and December 30 (Sunday), 2007. His wife had died two years before that. Even after the strip came to an end, there was a Tumbleweeds website. Ryan lived in retirement in Venice, Florida, and died there peacefully on March 12, 2019, at age ninety-two. He was buried at Venice Memorial Gardens.

I have always loved and admired Tumbleweeds. For years it was my favorite comic strip, and I would copy the characters over and over again as I was learning to draw. In high school printmaking class (Miss Lois Jackson was my teacher), I made a print of Limpid Lizard. I still have a mockup of a mass market paperback that I made of clippings from the Indianapolis News. Tom K. Ryan was Irish, his paternal grandfather having been born on the Emerald Isle. We have Ryans in our family, too. Maybe he and I are cousins. I'm happy that he lived and drew for so long and sad that he has died. I send my condolences to his family, but I will add that they and we should be happy that he gave us all so much in the form of great--yet diminutive--comic art, so many funny characters, and such wonderfully good and witty humor.

* * *

Writer and critic Thomas Martin Spurgeon was born on December 16, 1968, in Muncie, Indiana, to newspaper editor Wiley Whitney "Bill" Spurgeon, Jr. (1933-2001) and Sunny (McFarren) Spurgeon. He graduated from his hometown Northside High School in 1987. He was class president, a member of the debate team, and on the staff of the school newspaper. He also played high school football. Spurgeon attended Washington and Lee University, receiving his bachelor of arts degree in history and politics in 1991. He also studied at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, for two years.

Tom Spurgeon is well known for having written on comics and cartoons for The Comics Journal. He also created the award-winning website The Comics Reporter and authored or co-authored three books, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book with Jordan Raphael (2003); The Romita Legacy (2011); and We Told You So: Comics As Art with Michael Dean (2017). Spurgeon was also editor of a series of collections of the comic strip Pogo, by Walt Kelly. From 1999 to May 12, 2002, Spurgeon wrote the script for a syndicated newspaper comic strip, Bobo's Progress, later retitled Wildwood. The art was created by his friend, Dan Wright, whom he had known since about 1979.

In 2015, Spurgeon took over the executive directorship of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, an annual festival of comics and cartooning held in Columbus, Ohio. It is because of that situation that I met Tom Spurgeon, though at a different comics-related event in Columbus. I talked to him only once and only for a short time. Tom Spurgeon died suddenly at his desk on November 13, 2019. The place was his Columbus home. There was a memorial service held for him at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University on December 14, 2019. Again, I send condolences to his family, friends, admirers, and coworkers at the death of a man that came entirely too soon but at the end of a very accomplished life.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Backdated to December 26, 2019.

Christmas Cartoons by Eugene Craig (1916-1984)

Eugene Craig was born on September 5, 1916, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He graduated from high school at age seventeen and went to work first for a sign painter, then for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. He stayed with the Sentinel until 1951 when he took a job with the Brooklyn Eagle. From 1955 to 1981, Craig drew cartoons for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.

Craig was known mostly for his editorial and political cartoons. From 1950 to 1962 he won six Freedoms Foundation awards for his cartooning. He also created the design for a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the Battle of Brooklyn (below). From 1961 to 1974, he drew a syndicated cartoon feature called Forever Female. Above is a sample from the Columbus Dispatch from December 14, 1969, fifty years ago this month. Eugene Craig deserves one more credit, an unusual one: he helped to introduce a young Gray Morrow (1934-2001) to the world of cartooning and comic art.

Eugene Craig died on March 18, 1984, in Winchester, Ohio.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Cartoon News 2019-Part Two

Mitch Daniels on Political Cartooning (and Political Cartoonist Gary Varvel)

In July of this year, Mitch Daniels, current president of Purdue University and former governor of Indiana, wrote about political cartooning in the United States, more specifically on the decline of a once great form of graphic art:

The digital age, for all its beneficial wonders, has left some regrettable casualties in its wake. No loss has been more troublesome for many of us than the decline of print journalism as our principal medium of information. . . .

With that development, we’re losing something I have always appreciated almost as much. The political cartoonist, an influential voice in public debates for centuries, is among our most endangered species. According to "Drawn & Quartered," a history of American political cartoons by Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, 2,000 editorial cartoonists were employed a century ago; estimates of the number of staff cartoonists working today range from about two dozen to maybe 40. [Boldface added.]

The Indianapolis Star lost its own political cartoonist earlier this year when Gary Varvel retired after nearly a quarter of a century at his post. President Daniels called Mr. Varvel the cartoonist he will miss the most.

You can read Mitch Daniels' piece, "Political Cartooning Is Becoming a Lost Art," originally published on July 31, 2019, on the website of the Washington Post, but if you don't have access to that site, you can probably find it just about anywhere, for it was widely reprinted in the nation's surviving newspapers.

(Maybe we should note that the onetime dean of American political cartoonists, John T. McCutcheon [1870-1949] of the Chicago Tribune, graduated from Purdue University in 1889. This year, then, is a nice, even anniversary year of the founding of Purdue University [1869], McCutcheon's graduation from that institution, and his death.)

Cartoon Controversy at Indiana University

A cartoon controversy erupted at Indiana University in November when the Center for the Study of the Middle East (CSME) sent out a newsletter and flier in which it reprinted a cartoon by the notoriously antisemitic Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff (b. 1968). There were of course objections to the use of the cartoon, which was distributed on Monday, November 4, 2019. The next day, the director of CSME, Feisal al-Istrabadi, sent out an email message apologizing for the use of the cartoon.

On November 8, the Indiana Daily Student published a letter to the editor entitled "How the Israel lobby at IU suppresses speech for Palestinian rights," accessible by clicking here. A letter in response, entitled "Response to Palestine Solidarity Committee," appeared on November 13. Click here to read that one. In between those two dates, on November 10, the Indiana Daily Student published an article called "Center for the Study of the Middle East apologizes after circulating flier with alleged anti-Semitic image," explaining the affair. That article is by Grace Ybarra, and you can read it by clicking here.

One of the problems with this and similar cartoon controversies might actually be described as a meta-problem: we can't see the offending cartoon for ourselves, even in this Internet Age in which just about anything can fly around the world at light speed. I despise the leftism and antisemitism that animate people like Carlos Latuff, but that doesn't mean we should not be able to see his cartoons. In fact, the whole purpose of freedom of speech and of the press is so that people with whom we might disagree may still express themselves freely. I guess my question is this: are our feelings and sensibilities really so tender and sensitive that we may not look upon the things that might offend us? And when a cartoon becomes news itself, are we not permitted to see it or consider it?

Incidentally, Mr. Latuff has contributed to Mad magazine--the Brazilian version--about which I wrote a few days ago.

Paul Gray Still Cartooning at 89

Turning to a happier topic, I would like to write about Paul Gray of Carlisle, Indiana, who is still cartooning at age eighty-nine. His art career began at age three when his older brother taught him to draw. Mr. Gray continued drawing while serving in the U.S. military in Germany during the 1950s. A high point of his career was his fourteen years of contributing gag cartoons to The Saturday Evening Post, from the 1960s to the 1970s. He also contributed to Pentecostal Evangel, the weekly magazine of the Assemblies of God.

Paul Gray became a pastor in 1961 and spent more than half a century in that position, finally to retire in 2015. Since 2002, he has drawn a weekly religious cartoon, Shades of Gray, for the Sullivan Daily Times in Sullivan, Indiana. You can read more about Paul Gray in the following articles:

• "89-year-old Carlisle cartoonist, minister still hard at work," dated October 31, 2019, on the website of WIBQ radio, here. 

• "Drawing Inspiration" by Eric Tiansay, dated December 6, 2019, on the website of Assemblies of God, here.

• "'Shades of Gray' brings a hint of sunshine to local papers," date unknown, on the website of the Sullivan, Indiana, Daily Times, here. You will need special access to read it.

I will have two more pieces of news, sad news and yet in some ways a celebration, to end the year.

Original text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Cartoon News 2019-Part One

A roundup of news stories from 2019:

25 Years of Speed Bump

Cartoonist Dave Coverly celebrated a quarter century at the helm of the syndicated single-panel cartoon Speed Bump this year. Born in 1964, Mr. Coverly grew up in Plainwell, Michigan, and received degrees from Eastern Michigan University and Indiana University. He cartooned for the Bloomington, Indiana, Herald-Times, and has also sold cartoons to Esquire, the New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, and USA Today.

Speed Bump went into syndication in April 1994 and by 1995 was well enough on its way that Dave Coverly was able to leave the Herald-Times to devote himself to his new creation. In the time since, he has drawn by his estimation about 9,000 cartoons. He has also won four awards from the National Cartoonists Society (NCS), including the society's highest, the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, in 2008.

Dave Coverly lives in Michigan now. On May 26, 2019, Michigan News Live posted a long article, a dozen images, and a three-minute video on the artist. It's called "After 25 years, Speed Bump creator finds cartooning remains a funny business," and you will find it by clicking here.

Congratulations to Dave Coverly.

Gary Varvel Retires

Born in 1957 in Indianapolis, Gary Varvel cartooned for the Indianapolis News and Indianapolis Star for forty-one years, beginning in 1978. His last drawing for the Star came on January 2, 2019, the same day on which he publicly announced his retirement with an article called "Varvel: IndyStar's cartoonist says thank you and farewell," which you can read by clicking here. Like Dave Coverly, Mr. Varvel has been extremely prolific as an artist. He estimated that in his twenty-four years drawing for the Indianapolis Star, he created nearly 8,000 cartoons. After having reached this major milestone in his career, he continues drawing and, like Dave Coverly, is now with Creators Syndicate.

Known for his teaching and community service, Gary Varvel put on two cartooning workshops at Taylor University, located in Upland, Indiana, in June 2019. The workshops were part of the Summer Clubhouse Program, sponsored by the Foellinger Foundation of Fort Wayne and designed to encourage "positive social, emotional, and academic development" in the youth of Fort Wayne and Allen County. You can read more about Mr. Varvel and the program in an article called "Cartoonist Gary Varvel to Conduct Two Workshops on Taylor Campus Next Week," on the website of the Hartford City News-Times, dated June 19, 2019, here. You can see his own website at this URL: 

https://garyvarvel.com/

Congratulations, too, to Gary Varvel on his retirement.

Jim Davis' Paws, Incorporated, Sells to Nickelodeon

In August, Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, became a third Hoosier cartoonist to reach a milestone during 2019 when it was announced that Viacom, through its subsidiary Nickelodeon, had acquired Mr. Davis' company Paws, Incorporated. This followed several other big changes in his life and in the life of his company. 

Born in 1945 in Marion, Indiana, Jim Davis is one of the most successful cartoonists of all time. He is the creator of the daily and Sunday comic strip Garfield, which first went into syndication in 1978 and eventually became the world's most widely distributed comic feature. Mr. Davis established Paws in 1981 to manage his Garfield property and the publishing and licensing that go with it. There probably isn't a living American who has not seen a Garfield comic strip, book collection, storybook, toy, puzzle, game, figurine, poster, stuffed animal, or other product during the last forty years. Garfield's creator has had a great run. Now that he is nearing the three-quarter century mark himself, I suspect that Mr. Davis is looking towards transition in his life. Beyond that, times, as they say, have changed, and a business model from thirty or forty years ago may not work very well this late into the twenty-first century.

Paws was located on Jim Davis' farm about halfway between Muncie and Albany, Indiana. Its current headquarters, built in 1989, once employed on site forty-five to fifty people. In January 2019, it was announced that Paws would transition to a work-from-home model. This came after the gift shop at Paws closed in late December 2018, and the property itself was acquired, also in December 2018, by Cardinal Properties, Inc., of Muncie, which "accepts and manages real estate, interests in real estate, & tangible & intangible personal property for the benefit of Ball State University Foundation." Jim Davis is an alumnus of that university. Incidentally, there has always seemed to be a secret as to the location of Paws, Incorporated. I'm sure that locals always knew about it. Now I can tell you that the property is located at 5440 East County Road 450 North, Albany, Indiana 47320, or, for surveyors, foresters, and other people engaged in arcane work, on County Road 450 North, just to the east of County Road 320 East, almost exactly in the center of Section 19, Township 21 North, Range 11 East, in Delaware Township, Delaware County. Not that knowing any of that will get you anywhere, for Paws has pretty well stopped being a place and is now mostly, simply, a concept. There must be some sadness in that for past and present employees.

So, the story thus far can be told in a series of articles:

• "On the prowl: Behind the scenes at Garfield HQ" by Mickey Shuey, dated August 29, 2015, on the website of the Indianapolis Star, here.

• "Garfield’s Moving; but Muncie Remains Home" by Mary Eber, dated January 29, 2019, at the website of the Ball State Daily News, here.

• "Garfield Home Studio Paws, Inc. Moving Out Of Albany," dated January 31, 2019, on the website of WFYI, here.

• "Paws Inc. Closing Indiana Headquarters," dated February 4, 2019, on the website of Licensing International, here.

• "Viacom Acquires Comic-Strip Cat Garfield" by Brian Steinburg, dated August 6, 2019, on the website of Variety, here.

• "New 'Garfield' Series Set at Nickelodeon" by Rick Porter, dated August 6, 2019, on the website of The Hollywood Reporter, here.

• "Viacom Puts Its Paws On 'Garfield' For Nickelodeon Portfolio," dated August 7, 2019, on the website of Forbes, here. (I am not able to access this article, but I'll provide the link anyway.)

• "Viacom, Hungry for Hits, Gobbles Up Garfield," dated August 12, 2019, at the website of the Wall Street Journal, here. (Again, I'm not able to access this article.)

According to Wikipedia, Jim Davis will continue to draw the Garfield comic strip. I hope that his gang of artists (which has included Scott Nickel, about whom I wrote the other day) are able to go on working for Paws, now that it's owned by Viacom. If not, I hope that they will have success in their next endeavors.

Original text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Hoosiers Cartoonists in Mad Magazine

We heard around the middle of this year that after nearly seven decades in print, Mad magazine is ending in a way that things end only in the twenty-first century: it's only kinda, sorta ending. Mad began in 1952 under editor Harvey Kurtzman. After 550 consecutively numbered issues, it began again in June 2018 with issue number one. The renumbering coincided more or less with a move from New York City to Burbank, California. On July 3, 2019, The Hollywood Reporter did its thing, reporting that with issue number 10 (which was released on October 16, 2019), Mad would be available only in comic book shops, and that with number 11 (which evidently has not yet been released), there would be no more original content, except for year-end specials. See what I mean by only kinda, sorta ending? Or as Billy Crystal would say, "There's a big difference between all dead and mostly dead." Maybe Mad is only mostly dead, or maybe not even mostly.

Anyway, I wish I could say that there have been lots of Hoosier cartoonists who have joined the ranks of the usual gang of idiots and contributed to Mad. Instead I have only two. There may be more, but without an Internet Mad Magazine Database (IMMDb), searching for Hoosiers who have contributed to the magazine might take me years, while I have just twenty-five days before my blogging year ends. Anyway again, here they are, Kevin Pope and Scott Nickel.

Kevin Pope was born in 1958 in Carmel, Indiana, and attended Warren Central High School in Indianapolis. While studying art at Indiana University, he did something that nobody of college age does anymore: he got married. After graduating in 1981, he followed his wife Kim to Chicago, where she had found work, in 1983. Mr. Pope drew cartoons for Campus Life, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Outside, and Playboy, among other publications. From October 1985 to January 1988, his single-panel cartoon Inside Out was syndicated in as many as thirty newspapers. After that, he drew designs for greeting cards and calendars and published two collections of cartoons, The Day Gravity Was Turned Off in Topeka (1985) and The Dance of the Seven Veals (1991). His other clients have included Anheuser Busch, Bloomberg News, Coca-Cola, Computerworld, Dunkin Donuts, Fortune, Frito Lay, Kellogg’s, KFC, the Los Angeles Times, McDonalds, NBC, the New York Times, Paramount Pictures, Pepsi-Cola, Rolling Stone, Sony, Spin, Sports Illustrated, and the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pope has also of course contributed to Mad. His website gives a Smithville, Indiana, address. For those unfamiliar with extremely small, unincorporated places in out-of-the-way Indiana, that's located in Monroe County, in the south-central part of the state.

Born in 1962 in Denver, Colorado, Scott Nickel had Hoosier-ness bestowed upon him by his being employed at Paws, Incorporated, the cartooning factory where Jim Davis' Garfield and countless pieces of Garfield-related merchandise were produced. (You will see the rest of that story pretty soon, right here in this space.) After having lived in California, Mr. Nickel moved to Indiana in 1995. Besides working at Paws, Incorporated, he freelances his cartoons, comic strips, jokes, and writing to Boys' Life and Reader's Digest, among other publications. He has written and/or illustrated more than two dozen children's books and graphic novels. On his blog, called A Nickel's Worth, Mr. Nickel wrote in 2012 that he had made his twentieth contribution to Mad Magazine, this one to issue number 515. I suspect that he contributed more before Mad mostly-died (or not) this year.

Here are some websites (click on the words):

• Mad Magazine

• Kevin Pope

• Scott Nickel

You might want to have a look.

Copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Updates at the End of the Year

My writing has fallen off pretty desperately this year. I will try to cram in some entires during this last month of 2019 and bring the total for the year to the usual twelve. I'll start by letting you know that I have revised and updated several entries:

• Robert K. Abbett (1926-2015)
• George C. "Bob" Bales (1920-2016)
• Dennis J. "Dee" Bonner (b. 1942)
• Thomas R. Funderburk (1928-1999)
• Josephine Hollingsworth aka Jo Poulson (1903 or 1904-1964)
• Robert Indiana (1928-2018)
• Stan Lee (1922-2018)
• Florence G. Parsell (1891-1978)
• Herman Stoddard Vice (1884-1956)

Stay tuned. There is more to come.

Copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

E. Algerd Waitkus (1914-2000)

Edward Algerd Waitkus was born on January 13, 1914, in Gary, Indiana, to Justin and Emily "Minnie" (Colnitis) Waitkus. His parents were born in Lithuania, and his father ran a grocery store. In 1940, Waitkus was counted in the U.S. census working in the family business. Two years later, on November 25, 1942, he entered service in the U.S. Coast Guard.

E. Algerd Waikus was a watercolorist and also worked in oil. His art seems to have been purely representational, and he seems to have specialized in landscapes. Among his awards and exhibitions:

• Chicago Tribune Art Competition, "Sunday on Mackinac Island," Chicago, 1953
• Old Town Holiday Fair, Arlington Heights, Illinois, 1961
• Dyer Public Library opening, Dyer, Indiana, 1962
• Art Fair of Park Forest Art Center, Park Forest, Illinois, 1963
• Local Michiana Art Exhibition, first prize, representational oil, "The Resting Place," South Bend Art Center, South Bend, Indiana, 1963
• Hoosier Salon, Kenneth M. Kunkel Memorial Prize, "The Dune Cottage," Indianapolis, 1964
• Northern Indiana Art Salon Patrons Association, second place, "Sunday Morning Sunshine," Hammond, Indiana, 1965
• South Bend Art Center, award, representational watercolor, "Indiana Duneland," South Bend, Indiana, 1965
• Indiana State Museum, "Dunes Cottage," Indianapolis, 1969

I discovered the late Mr. Waitkus in The Ford Times Cookbook (ca. 1968). For those who are not familiar with it, Ford Times was a travel magazine issued by the Ford Motor Company. One of the highlights of the magazine were its watercolor depictions of people and places throughout these great United States. I feel certain that Mr. Waitkus had other watercolors in Ford Times, but the one I have illustrates the interior of the restaurant at the Honeywell Center in Wabash, Indiana (see below).

Algerd Waitkus was married to June M. Waitkus. He died on November 16, 2000, at age eighty-six and was buried at Bay Pines National Cemetery in Bay Pines, Florida.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Casimer Norwaish (1919-2008)

Casimer Joseph Norwaish was born on December 31, 1919, in Gary, Indiana. His parents were Lithuanian immigrants by the name of Alex Norvaisis, Norvaisha, Norvaish, Norvish, or Norvick (1887-1963) and Monica "Minnie" Venslovas or Wenslovas (1888-1981). Alex was a baker and ran his own shop and delivery service. Once in the lake region of northern Indiana, he and his wife seem to have remained for the rest of their long lives.

Casimer, nicknamed Cas or Cass, was the middle born of their children. He had an older brother, Alex Norwaish (1918-1981), and a younger sister, Veronica Norvish (b. 1924), who I believe died in infancy. Casimer attended Horace Mann High School and Tolleston High School in his hometown. In 1939, he graduated from the Fort Wayne Art School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and during World War II served in the U.S. Navy. On June 17, 1947, he married Dorothy Snapp in New York City.

Although he worked as a commercial artist and advertising artist, Casimer Norwaish has come to my attention as an illustrator. The first credit I have for him is his cover illustration for The Great Lockout in American Citizenship (1937) by William Albert Wirt (1874-1938), a teacher and educational innovator in the Gary schools. After the war, Norwaish worked for Bonsib Advertising, a firm established by Indiana artist Louis William Bonsib (1892-1979) in Fort Wayne. Bonsib served as president of the Fort Wayne Art School in 1948-1949.

I discovered Casimer Norwaish just this week when I found a paperback mystery at the local secondhand store, entitled The Kidnap Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine (Bantam, 1948) and with cover art by Norwaish. Unlike so many paperbacks from the 1940s and after, this one has something about the artist. Opposite the title page are these tidbits:

About THE COVER

     Artist Casimer Norwaish, who painted the tense scene on the cover, claims it's absolutely authentic. To get an accurate picture of Philo Vance, "Cass" copied photographs of S.S. Van Dine. Seems he was a dead ringer for his own description of Vance. To create Madelaine Kenting, the frightened woman Vance is questioning, "Cass" says he simply drew the picture of a beautiful blonde that every artist has at the back of his mind!

Norwaish created the covers for at least three other paperback mysteries, Murder Cheats the Bride by Anthony Gilbert (Bantam, 1948), Come and Kill Me (originally Brat Farrar) by Josephine Tey (Pocket Books, 1949), and So Young a Body by Frank Bunce (Pocket Books, 1951). His illustrations also appeared in and on the cover of The American Legion Magazine in 1951. I suspect that he created still more paperback covers and magazine illustrations for which he did not receive credit. As a commercial artist and advertising artist, he would have been anonymous or almost anonymous, and so we have very little that is known to have been his work. That's a shame, for Norwaish was an accomplished illustrator who worked in a classic mid-century style that is so much missed today.

Like others in his family, Casimer Norwaish lived a long life. His came to an end on March 24, 2008, in South Bend, Indiana, and though his family was Catholic, his body was cremated.

Above and below: Casimer Norwaish's illustrations for "The Ship the Nazis Had to Get" by James H. Winchester, from The American Legion Magazine, August 1951. Two months after its publication in magazine form, Winchester's article was read by Ray Milland on the NBC radio show The Cavalcade of America on October 16, 1951. Note the spelling of Norwaish's name as "Norwaist."

Above: Norwaish's illustration for "Our New Privileged Class" by Eugene Lyons from The American Legion Magazine, September 1951.

Casimer Norwaish as a student at Horace Mann High School in Gary, Indiana, 1935.

This year, 2019, marks the hundredth anniversary year of the founding of the American Legion, as well as that of Casimer Norwaish's birth. So, Happy Birthday to both.

Original text and captions copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

May the Fourth Be With You! 2019

We're in the last year of Star Wars movies but on this Star Wars day--May the Fourth--I'd like to look back and remember two who have left us.

Peter Mayhew died last week, on April 30, 2019. Star Wars fans know him as Chewbacca, Han Solo's sidekick and co-pilot. Born on May 19, 1944, he was not an actor at all until George Lucas cast him as Chewbacca in 1976. The three main actors get lots of credit for the success of Star Wars, but can you imagine the original or its two sequels without Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca? It's a sad thing to contemplate.

Strangely, Chewbacca began life as a pointy-eared alien. Only later was he softened into a furry and lovable creature. The artist who first depicted him was a Hoosier, Ralph McQuarrie, who was born on June 13, 1929, in Gary, Indiana. McQuarrie wasn't in the movie business, either, until shortly before George Lucas hired him to create pre-production artwork for Star Wars. He went on to work on many more movies. A great deal of the look and mood of the Star Wars universe is based on his work. Ralph McQuarrie died on March 3, 2012.

As it turns out, Chewbacca's final appearance was inspired by the works of another artist and another writer. The writer was someone you might have heard of, George R.R. Martin, who wrote a story called "And Seven Times Never Kill Man," which was published in Analog in July 1975. The artist was John Schoenherr (1935-2010), who illustrated Mr. Martin's story and provided a painting for the cover of Analog that Star Wars fans will, I think, find very familiar. (In addition to Chewbacca, think Ewoks.) Michael Heilemann tells the full story on his very fine blog Kitbashed: The Origin of Star Wars, here.

Early promotional poster artwork by Ralph McQuarrie, dated April 1, 1975. The tall, pointy-eared alien is an early version of Chewbacca. Note the resemblance of the Luke Skywalker-like character to George Lucas and the golden robot to the figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. You can see why McQuarrie's pre-production paintings of Star Wars helped to sell Twentieth Century Fox on the project. It must have been this version of Chewbacca to whom Carrie Fisher referred in her audition for Star Wars.

Here's a sketch of the new, furry Chewbacca. The body and the getup are mostly the same. It's the head and arms that have changed, based on inspiration by science fiction artist John Schoenherr from 1975.

Here is Chewbacca with the other principals on Tatooine. Painting by Ralph McQuarrie.

And here he is again on the Death Star in another of McQuarrie's famed panoramic paintings.

Original text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley, with acknowledgments to Michael Heilemann for his research on the origins of Chewbacca. 

Buffleheads by Mac Heaton (1925-2002)

February is the month in which migratory ducks return to the Midwest--if they weren't already here in January--and one of the cutest and most fun to watch is the little bufflehead. Buffleheads are diving ducks, and where they dive is in our big rivers and lakes. First you'll see the bright white head of the male. Then you'll see him plunge, only to come up again somewhere close by. In its issue of January 1964, Outdoor Indiana had buffleheads on its cover in a portrait by Mac Heaton (1925-2002). If you're lucky and you look hard enough this late winter, maybe you'll see the real thing.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abe Lincoln and Garo Antreasian

Today, February 12, 2019, is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. He was born in Kentucky, but in the late fall of 1816, just a few weeks before Indiana became a state, he came with his family to the future land of Hoosiers. Abe spent fourteen years in Indiana before moving on to Illinois. That state may rightly claim the title of "the Land of Lincoln," but it was in Indiana that he grew up.

Outdoor Indiana, the magazine of the Indiana Department of Conservation, now the Department of Natural Resources, featured Abraham Lincoln in its issue of June 1963, one hundred years minus a month after the twin Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The art on the front and back covers is from a design by Garo Z. Antreasian of Indianapolis. As you can see, the cover design is actually a photograph of a mosaic mural made from over 300,000 pieces of imported Murano glass, set by Ralph Peck and Mrs. Charles Pitts. It is located in the Indiana Government Center North, then called the Indiana State Office Building.

Garo Antreasian was born on February 16, 1922, in Indianapolis to parents who survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He attended Arsenal Technical High School, which was known for its programs in arts and graphics, and the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. (1) During World War II, he served as a combat artist with the U.S. Coast Guard. Afterwards he taught at Herron before moving on the teaching jobs in Los Angeles and New Mexico. Mr. Antreasian retired in 1986 and died only recently, on November 3, 2018, eight days before Veterans Day. He was ninety-six years old. So today, in the month of their birthdays, we honor Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, but we may also honor another man of greatness who honored him.

Note
(1) Arsenal Technical High School, usually just shortened to "Tech," got its name from its use as an Civil War-era arsenal. The arsenal was closed in 1903. The school was opened in 1912.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The International Day of the Cartoonist 2019

Today is what I call the International Day of the Cartoonist. It was on this day in 2015 that five cartoonists working for the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were murdered for their art. They called themselves Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Charb--respectively, George David Wolinski (1934-2015), Jean Cabut (1938-2015), Philippe Honoré (1941-2015), Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015), and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015). Their murderers were adherents to a totalitarian ideology, one of many that I suspect will forever be a plague on humanity.

There is an organization devoted to defending cartoonists from those who would wish to silence them. It's called Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI), and every year since 1999 it has given out its Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning. The most recent winner is Pedro X. Molina of Nicaragua, who has drawn cartoons in opposition to President Daniel Ortega and his regime. Mr. Molina received his award in 2018.

You can read more about Pedro X. Molina and CRNI at its website:

https://cartoonistsrights.org/

By the way, Hoosier cartoonist Joel Pett serves as president of CRNI.

Copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley