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.
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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.
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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.
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