Tom Floyd (1928-2011)

Cartoonist and commercial artist Thomas Wesley Floyd, Sr., was born on July 13, 1928,* in Gary, Indiana, to William Webster Floyd (1894-1936), a laborer in a steel mill, and Alice James Floyd (dates unknown), a housewife. Tom Floyd's parents came from the South, William from Wetumpka, Alabama, Alice from Mississippi. They were married on March 1, 1923, in Crown Point, Indiana.

Tom Floyd was their fourth child, but only three of those four showed up in the census of 1930, Tom, his older sister (Mary) Juanita, and his older brother James Frederick. All three were born in Indiana, and the family lived in Gary, the largest American city founded in the twentieth century and one known for its steel mills. In the census of 1940, Tom and his siblings were living in the household of their maternal grandparents, Walter and Ollie James. Walter James died in 1945.

Tom Floyd graduated from the University of Illinois in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in commercial art. He ran his own advertising business in Gary and worked as a designer of visual aids in the training department of Inland Steel Company, also in Gary. By 1971, he was vice president of W.V. Rouse & Associates of Chicago, a management consulting firm engaged in minority relations. Over the course of his career, Floyd also worked as an editorial cartoonist, single-panel cartoonist, comic strip artist, and comic book scriptwriter.

Race and minority relations were a continuing theme and interest in his life and work. He is best known for his cartoon collection Integration Is a Bitch! (1969), subtitled "An Assessment by a Black-White Collar Worker," but he also wrote and drew the cartoons for a second book, The Hook Book . . . The ABC's of Drug Abuse . . ., which he self-published in 1973 under his own firm, Tom Floyd Visuals of Gary, Indiana. It's a cute book on a serious and deadly subject. I stand with the late Mr. Floyd in his opposition to drugs and drug abuse, which has helped to ruin not just black people but all kinds of people in America and the world over. Integration Is a Bitch! won the Book of the Year Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews in 1971.

In 2012, comics historian Allan Holtz published a monumental work, American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. In the index of authors and cartoonists, there is a single-name credit, "Floyd," for a person who created three comic features for the Chicago Defender during the 1960s. I don't think there can be any doubt that the artist in question was Tom Floyd. The three features credited to "Floyd" are:

• At the Brink with J.J., which ran from December 11, 1965, to February 3, 1968 (It was renamed King Freedom. I don't have dates for that title.)
• Color Cuties, which ran from December 11, 1965, to March 30, 1968
• Integration Chuckles, which ran from December 11, 1965, to March 23, 1968

I have a sample only of the first title (shown below). Comparing a sample of Integration Chuckles with the cartoons in Integration Is a Bitch! might be all the evidence we need to show that "Floyd" and Tom Floyd were the same person. (A comparison of signatures, also shown below, makes pretty good evidence, too.)

Beginning in the 1960s, Floyd was involved in a project for which every comic book fan, especially every Hoosier comic book fan, can shout Yay! The project was a comic book about a black superhero called Blackman, who flies by pulling on his own bootstraps and who likes to eat peanuts. (We should remember that Floyd's parents were both Southerners.) Blackman finally made it into print in 1981 as a one-shot comic book pencilled by Eric O'Kelley and inked by Danny Loggins working from Floyd's script. It was published by Leader Comics Group, which is supposed to have been based in Indiana. I would like to think that that makes Eric O'Kelley and Danny Loggins Hoosier cartoonists, as well. By the way, Tom Floyd developed a supergroup that included Blackwoman, The Brotherhood, and The Big Dunker. 

In the 1980s, Floyd drew editorial cartoons for the Gary Post-Tribune. One of his drawings was included in the 1984 edition of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, edited by Charles Brooks. (See below.) Tom Floyd married Wynona Marie Gibson, a native Illinoisan, on February 25, 1956, in Cook County, Illinois, presumably in Chicago. They had three children. Thomas W. Floyd, Sr., died on September 22, 2011, in Gary, Indiana. He was eighty-three years old.

*Although his year of birth is everywhere given as 1929, Tom Floyd's birth certificate states clearly that he was born in 1928.

A cartoon from Integration Is a Bitch! by Tom Floyd. Floyd's book was published more than half a century ago, yet many--if not all--of his cartoons are still pertinent. This is one of my favorites--". . . And this is our Negro!"--an outright acknowledgment of a kind of tokenism that is never supposed to be spoken of or noticed. Note that one of the people applauding is a clergyman. I take that to be a poke at the virtue-signaling liberalism of mainstream religion in America.

At the Brink with J.J. by "Floyd" from the comics page of the Tri-State Defender, Memphis, Tennessee, July 9, 1966.

The cover of Blackman #1, a one-shot comic book written by Tom Floyd, penciled by Eric O'Kelley, and inked by Danny Loggins.

An editorial cartoon by Tom Floyd from the Gary Post-Tribune from 1984. Note the signature on the upper right and its resemblance to the signature in the comic strip At the Brink with J.J. from 1966. The same signature is on the cartoons for Integration Is a Bitch!

A photograph of Tom Floyd with his comic-book superhero, Blackman, in an article from 1995. Photograph by Milbert Orlando Brown.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Black Hoosiers in Animation

Ours is a cancel culture in which art is permitted to serve a political purpose or none at all. In other words, any art that is not propaganda is to be censored, bowdlerized, suppressed, cancelled, eliminated, or destroyed. Right now it is statuary that is bearing the brunt of the anti-art, anti-history, and anti-culture movement in the West. Once the destroyers are done with sculpture, they are certain to move on to other forms. Museums and libraries are likely targets. The nation's cultural and educational institutions should probably start thinking about how they're going to protect their collections. After all, it's a lot easier for a single destroyer to slip into the stacks and burn everything there is about Andrew Jackson or Christopher Columbus than it is to topple a statue. The act might not be as public or ostentatious, but it would be effective nonetheless. If the goal is to destroy the past and all knowledge of the past, then words and images must go into the memory hole in the same way that statues are decapitated, burned, dumped into lakes, or dragged through city streets like an American serviceman in Mogadishu.

Movies, too, are being cancelled. Gone with the Wind (1939) has joined Song of the South (1946) on the list of forbidden works. Never mind that it includes a performance by Hattie McDaniel, the first by a black actor or actress to win an Academy Award. We cannot be permitted to see it. Other movies and television shows can't be far behind.

Animated film hasn't escaped the wrath of the cancelers and destroyers. Hank Azaria, an American of Sephardic Jewish extraction, can now no longer provide the voice for the South-Asian character Apu on The Simpsons. Instead, Apu and other characters in animated series will have "race"-appropriate actors speak in their voices. It is one of the absurdities of our age that actors, who are in the business of pretending to be something they are not, will not be permitted to pretend to be something they are not.

One of the cancelled film performances is by James Baskett, a chemist, chiropodist, mortician, and newspaper columnist who was of course best known as an actor. He won a special Oscar for his performance in Song of the South, making him only the second black actor and the first black man to win the the award. In Song of the South, he played opposite the first black woman to win an Oscar. By my estimate, Song of the South was the first movie to feature two black Oscar winners. (Mr. Baskett's winning the award was of course still in the future when the movie was being filmed.) Nevertheless, we cannot see his or her performance.

In addition to appearing in the live-action sequences of Song of the South, Mr. Baskett provided the voice of Brer Fox in the animated parts. He had previously been the voice of Fats Crow in Dumbo, released in 1941. As far as I know, he was the first black Hoosier to appear in animation or to provide the voice for an animated character. I don't know of any black Hoosier artist to have worked behind the scenes as a storyboard artist or animator. 

James Franklin Baskett was born on February 16, 1904, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Baskett (1869-1921) and Elizabeth Baskett (1879-1961). The death of his older sister in her infancy (before he was born) left him an only child. His parents, both native Kentuckians, lived close to downtown Indianapolis, including on Douglass Street, the same street on which members of my dad's family once lived. Douglass Street is no longer in existence. It was cleared to make way for the Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis campus, possibly also for the Lockefield Gardens Apartments. Mr. Baskett grew up in Indianapolis, but he left his native city in the 1920s to work on the Broadway stage, then in Hollywood. He appeared in fewer than a dozen movies, with Song of the South being his last. James Baskett, also known as Jimmie Baskett, died on today's date in 1948 and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis with his father. His mother was also buried at Crown Hill. May he and they rest in peace. The image above is from Uncle Remus Brer Rabbit Stories, published by Golden Press of New York in 1977.

In 1968, the Hong Kong flu ravaged the world. A couple of years later, a kung fu craze swept across America like a contagion. Combine the two and you might have the beginnings of Hong Kong Phooey, an animated TV series produced by Hanna-Barbera and broadcast from 1974 to 1976. The title character, as any culturally literate person knows, is a dog who knows kung fu and sings scat for his title song. That's convenient because the voice of Hong Kong Phooey was done by none other than Scatman Crothers.

Born on May 23, 1910, in Terre Haute, Indiana, Benjamin Sherman Crothers was a singer and actor who appeared in movies and TV shows from 1950 until his death in 1986. His parents were Benjamin Crothers (1873-1938) and Fredonia (Lewis) Crothers (1871-1937), both of whose families had come from the South. Scatman Crother's paternal grandfather at least, named Abe Carothers or Caruthers (ca. 1844-1907), was born a slave.

Scatman Crothers performed on the radio in Ohio during the 1930s. In 1937, he married and moved to California. He continued to sing and play guitar in front of live audiences, on radio, and on records. As a member of the group The Ramparts, he recorded "The Death of Emmett Till" in 1955. By then he had made his movie debut. Two years later, in 1957, he made his first appearance in a television series, in an episode of The Adventures of Jim Bowie entitled, strangely enough, "Quarantine." The Adventures of Jim Bowie, by the way, was based on a  book by a fellow Hoosier, Monte Barrett (1897-1949) of Mitchell, Indiana. Barrett also created and wrote the script for the long-running newspaper comic strip Jane Arden.

Although there were only sixteen episodes of Hong Kong Phooey, the character proved very popular. There were Hong Kong Phooey children's books, comic books (above), lunch boxes, and other merchandise. A few years back there was talk of a Hong Kong Phooey movie. I'm not sure how good it--or anything else--could be without the participation of Scatman Crothers. He died on November 22, 1986, in Van Nuys, California.

Scatman Crothers also did the voice of Meadowlark Lemon on The Harlem Globetrotters cartoon series produced by Hanna-Barbera and shown on Saturday morning television from 1970 to 1973. Like Hong Kong Phooey, The Harlem Globetrotters was a very popular  show and spawned its own line of merchandise, including the stickers shown above, which, if you were lucky, you would have found in boxes of General Mills cereal in 1970.

The Jackson 5 were also from Indiana. They were Jackie (b. 1951), Tito (b. 1953), Jermaine (b. 1954),  Marlon (b. 1957), and Michael (1958-2009). All are natives of the city of Gary, the largest American city founded in the twentieth century. Like The Beatles before them, they were immensely popular. Like The Beatles, too, they had their own Saturday morning cartoon series, The Jackson 5ive, produced by Rankin-Bass and Motown Productions and broadcast in 1971-1972. The brothers didn't do their own voices except in the songs on the soundtrack. Voice actors took their place, including Edmund Sylvers, later of the group The Sylvers.

If you don't have to be born in, work in, or live in Indiana to be considered a Hoosier, then maybe we can still call people imprisoned within the state Hoosiers. Cartoonist Clyde Lamb (1913-1966), for example, a native Montanan, served time in Michigan City. Upon his release, he became a magazine gag cartoonist, then had his work syndicated in American newspapers. It seems pretty likely to me that Mike Tyson would rather just forget about his Indiana years. My including him here might be in pretty bad taste. But I would like to consider him a Hoosier, too. Since being released from an Indiana prison in 1995, Mr. Tyson has had his ups and downs. I would like to think that he considers the animated television series Mike Tyson Mysteries, in which he plays himself, one of the ups. Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, it has been on the Cartoon Network Adult Swim since 2014. Because of it, Mr. Tyson's form and image have been turned into an action figure (above), which is really just a miniature statue. I dare anyone to knock this one down.

Vivica Fox (b. 1964) of South Bend has done voice acting in Unstable Fables: Tortoise vs. Hare (2008), Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright (2013), and The Sky Princess (2018). The still above is from Sofia the First: Carol of the Arrow, from 2015.

Born in Evansville, Indiana, Ron Glass (1945-2016) did voice work on Superman: The Animated Series and All Grown Up! His most prominent voice-acting role was as Randy Carmichael on the Nickelodeon series Rugrats.

Finally, Kenneth Brian Edmonds (b. 1959), a native of Indianapolis and better known as Babyface, was a producer on the music soundtrack of The Prince of Egypt, released in 1998. Ironically, The Prince of Egypt was banned in several countries, including of all places Egypt. As always, the non-artists of the world, the intolerant and the iconoclastic, the haters and destroyers, the oppressors and censors, seek to deny us a look at any art they deem inappropriate. When will it ever end? How will it end? Not as the destroyers expect, I think, because the true artist possesses an irrepressible and indomitable spirit.

Text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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.