Jane Arden and the Vanished Princess

In 2021, with the coronavirus still haunting people's thoughts, I went to just one very small comic book convention, I think. It actually happened in the driveway and garage of a comic book dealer and college professor. I bought only a few things, but I wanted to show this little treasure, a Better Little Book called Jane Arden and the Vanished Princess by Monte Barrett and Russell Ross (1938). It appears here at about original size.

The writer, Monte Barrett, was Percy Montgomery Barrett. Born on June 19, 1897, in Mitchell, Indiana, he was a journalist and novelist with historical novels and mysteries to his credit. He died on October 8, 1949, in New York City.

Jane Arden began in the comics on November 26, 1928. Frank Ellis was the original artist, but he was replaced by Russell E. Ross in 1933. Ross continued with the strip for twenty years. After appearing in movies and comic books, as well as having her own radio drama, Jane reached her end in 1968. This Better Little Book was just another one of her multimedia appearances--a word that of course didn't exist at the time.

Text copyright 2022, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Gray Morrow in Funky Winkerbean

It isn't often that a Hoosier cartoonist is named in a present-day newspaper comic strip, but that happened this summer. Read on . . .

The first comic strip about comic strips was probably Sam's Strip by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, syndicated in the nation's newspapers from 1961 to 1963. They didn't have fancy words back then. Now we call them metacomics--comics about comics. Metacomics have become increasingly common. It's rare now that a week or a month goes by in the comics in which there isn't a reference made in a comic strip to another comic strip.

The comic strip Funky Winkerbean has been around for a long time. An Ohioan named Tom Batiuk puts his name to the strip, but I have a feeling that at least some of the continuities are the work of a ghostwriter. And I have a feeling that I talked to that ghostwriter one day on the mezzanine of a hotel in Columbus, Ohio.

A long time ago, I was a regular reader of Funky Winkerbean. That's when it was about high school students. At some point it made a giant leap into the present. Now those students are old. One of the characters in the current Funky Winkerbean is a cartoonist. This summer, there was a sequence in which that cartoonist reminisced about his tryout to succeed Harold Foster (1892-1982) on the Sunday adventure strip Prince Valiant. The search for a new artist really happened. That was in 1970. Real-life tryout artists were Gray Morrow (1934-2001), Wally Wood (1927-1981), and John Cullen Murphy (1919-2004). Murphy got the job and drew Prince Valiant from 1971 to 2004.

Gray Morrow was a Hoosier. Born on March 7, 1934, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he enjoyed a long and varied career as a cartoonist, comic book artist, and illustrator. I like to think about how Prince Valiant would have looked had he become the regular artist. (Wally Wood, too.) There were other artists at that time who would have been well qualified to continue the adventures of Hal Foster's characters. The name John Severin (1921-2012) comes to mind.

In this summer's sequence, the cartoonist in Funky Winkerbean remembers his fictional (or perhaps only fictionalized) tryout for Prince Valiant and names the other artists who really did participate. The problem is that he misidentifies Gray Morrow as Gary Morrow. Funky Winkerbean is hand lettered, or appears to be. It may be that the letterer transposed two letters in Gray Morrow's name and turned him into Gary. It may be also that the scriptwriter made the error. In any case, if anybody should look out for cartoonists, it should be other cartoonists. In this case, that didn't happen. I don't know whether Tom Batiuk and his team ever issued a correction. And I guess there's a third possibility. See the caption below.

Funky Winkerbean by Tom Batiuk, July 19, 2022, a metacomic of a kind that mentions other cartoonists, Wally Wood, Gray Morrow--his name misspelled as Gary--and "a third artist whose last name started with 'M'," who was of course John Cullen Murphy. I sense that someone--either real or fictional--doesn't like very much that Murphy won the tryout and became the regular artist on Prince Valiant. Whatever the case may be, there's no reason why Morrow's name should be misspelled. Or maybe that's part of the gag, the fact that the cartoonist's memory is fading? I don't know. All I know is that I like and greatly admire Gray Morrow's work. He has been gone for some time now, but we shouldn't forget him. We should instead remember him and pay proper respect in remembering him.

Text copyright 2022, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

Gray Morrow (1934-2001)

The police are in the news. Or they were. Now it's people against the police who are getting all of the attention. A couple of years ago, I found an old comic book drawn by one of my favorite comic book artists, Gray Morrow. I had planned at the time to feature it in this space, but that little project slipped away from me. Now the time seems right . . . or wrong, depending on how you look at things. From one angle, you can see Gray Morrow's comic book The Super Cops as a piece of 1970s pop culture: a little cheesy, a little exploitative, but nothing at all serious. Some people will no doubt see it differently. That won't stop me from showing it, as I think Gray Morrow's cover for The Super Cops, published forty-six years ago this month, is a beautifully done piece of comic book art.

The Super Cops, published by Red Circle Comics in July 1974, was based on a movie of the same name released in March of that year. The Super Cops was directed by Gordon Parks (1912-2006), a man of extraordinary accomplishment who had previously directed Shaft (1971), now considered one of the first movies in the genre known as blaxploitation. By the way, Gordon Parks' second wife was the daughter of a cartoonist, E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971).

In 1975, American International Pictures released Friday Foster with Pam Grier in the title role playing an intrepid magazine photographer. She was supported by Yaphet Kotto, Eartha Kitt, Scatman Crothers, and Carl Weathers. (During his long and varied career, Gordon Parks was also a magazine photographer.) Friday Foster is considered a blaxploitation film. It was based on a comic strip, the first of the postwar era and the first widely syndicated comic strip with a black woman as its title character. (It was preceded by Torchy Brown in "Dixie to Harlem", which was drawn by Jackie Ormes [1911-1985] and syndicated in 1937-1938.) Friday Foster began on January 18, 1970, with Jim Lawrence as writer and Jorge Longarón (1933-2019) as artist. Longarón was with the strip for most of its run. Gray Morrow took over on December 24, 1973, and carried it through to its end on February 17, 1974. Below is an image of the daily from January 29, 1974. Note the artist's inscription under the last panel.

Dwight Graydon Morrow was born on March 7, 1934, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended North Side High School in his hometown and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he received the sum total of his formal art training in just three months under Jerry Warshaw (1929-2007). Recognizing Morrow's talent, Warshaw told his young student, "Pack your bags and get started," and that's what Morrow did.* In 1954, he moved to New York City and found enough work to keep himself from starving. Not long after arriving in the city, he decided to look up political cartoonist Eugene Craig (1916-1984), formerly of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel but by then with the Brooklyn Eagle. Craig took Morrow to a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) and introduced him to giants, including Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and future giants, including Wally Wood (1927-1981). Morrow went on to work with Wood, as well as with Al Williamson (1931-2010) and Angelo Torres (b. 1932). That made his start as one of the great American cartoonists, comic book artists, and science fiction illustrators of the 1950s and after.

In 1956, Morrow got caught in the draft and spent two years in the U.S. Army, including service in South Korea. He returned to civilian life and his career as an artist in 1958. In the 1960s, he drew comic book stories for Classics Illustrated. In The Illustrated Story of Whaling, a title in the World Around Us series (#W28, Dec. 1960), Morrow depicted in his original artwork a number of black whalers in an attempt at historical accuracy. He later told of how his publisher, Roberta Strauss Feuerlight, made him change their features so as to avoid controversy. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of this comic book or any images of Morrow's artwork to show you.

In the mid-1960s, Morrow illustrated children's biographies of famous black Americans, Crispus Attucks: Black Leader of Colonial Patriots by Dharathula H. Millender (1965) and Frederick Douglass: Freedom Fighter by Lillie Patterson (1965). I have two images from these books:

An illustration by Morrow from Crispus Attucks: Black Leader of Colonial Patriots by Dharathula H. Millender (1965). Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dharathula H. "Dolly" Millender (1920-2015) was an author, educator, librarian, and local historian known as "Gary's Historian" for the northern Indiana city where she made her home. I should point out that Crispus Attacks was also at one time a whaler: in this case, Morrow was right in his research and in his art, and there should have been no controversy at all when he drew his comic book story for Whaling. Instead his art was bowdlerized. Today, with all of the smashing of statues, we see the same thing happening, though in a far worse way. What are artists and lovers of art to do in this age of violent, ruthless, aggressive iconoclasm, destructiveness, and culture of cancellation?

An illustration by Morrow from Frederick Douglass: Freedom Fighter by Lillie Patterson, a Discovery Book published by Garrard Publishing Company of Champaign, Illinois, in 1965. Lillie Griselda Patterson (1917-1999) was an author of children's books and a librarian in the Baltimore Public Schools. She also wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Francis Scott Key, whose statue was knocked down recently in San Francisco. I wonder what Ms. Patterson, who was black and a creator and an educator, would have thought of that.

Update (July 6, 2020): Now comes word that a statue of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, has also been toppled. The date was July 5, 2020, the 168th anniversary of his famous speech, "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" At this point, the question must be: what statue in America will stand?

You can read more about Gray Morrow on the Internet and in magazines and books, including Gray Morrow: Visionary, published in 2001 by Insight Studios Group. His work is characterized by flawless draftsmanship, an extraordinary ability to handle the human face and form, great skill at composition, and an excellent sense of color. His sense of aesthetics placed him above most comic book artists of his time and ours. Mr. Morrow died on November 6, 2001, in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. May he rest in peace.

Dharathula H. Millender's biography of Crispus Attacks is part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. The image above is from the Aladdin edition of 1986. The cover artwork was not by Gray Morrow, but his interior illustrations remained.

On this Independence Day, we should all remember Crispus Attucks and the men and women who sacrificed so much so that we might have and enjoy our freedoms. We should also hold in contempt the people who want to take all of that away from us. And we should remember people like Gray Morrow, who sought the universal in the particular and looked past surfaces to see the truth in things, as good and great artists do.

Happy Independence Day, America!

*After leaving art school, Morrow worked for a Chicago art studio. He also met a fellow Hoosier, Allen Saunders (1899-1986), famed author of Mary Worth, Big Chief Wahoo, and Steve Roper, who encouraged him to get into the field of syndicated comic strips. Morrow gave it a try, but only later did he find success as a not-always-credited artist on such strips as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, and Tarzan.

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.

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 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

George W. Spayth (1892-1969)

Photographer, cartoonist, reporter, editor, and publisher George William Spayth was born on January 28, 1892, in New Fostoria or North Baltimore, Ohio. His parents were Frank M. and Hattie (Landon) Spayth. He had one brother, Franklin J. Spayth. George Spayth quit school to help support his family and had only an eighth-grade education. In 1900, the family was in Henry, Ohio, and in 1910 in Lima. By then Spayth's mother had remarried.

George Spayth got his first newspaper job in 1913 as a cub reporter in Janesville, Wisconsin. Over the years, he would work for the Milwaukee News, Washington Times, Washington Herald, Galveston News, Houston Chronicle, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Reading Times, and Camden Courier-Post. In 1917, he was in Washington, D.C., and working as an artist out of the Kenois Building. By 1920, he was in the area of Galveston and Houston, Texas. He started as an editorial cartoonist at the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal-Gazette in 1920. When he was a child, he had gone on a train ride with his mother and had passed through Fort Wayne. It was the first big city he had ever seen. Spayth spent the first half of the 1920s there, not far from his original home in northwestern Ohio.

In addition to drawing cartoons for the Journal-Gazette, Spayth gave chalk talks in and around Fort Wayne and taught commercial art at the Knights of Columbus Evening School in his adopted city. By 1928, he was in Pennsylvania, where he worked for the Reading Times. His historical-educational comic strip Berks History in Pictures began appearing in the  Times on September 17, 1928. The initial plan was for the strip to cover Berks County history up to the present in 300 installments.

Spayth was still in Reading in 1930, but by 1932, he had moved further east, to Dunellen, New Jersey. He served as editor of The Chronicle of Dunellen before establishing his own newspaper business. From the 1930s until he sold his business in 1967, Spayth published what were called the Spayth Weeklies--The Weekly Call, The Piscataway Chronicle, The Middlesex Mirror, and The Store News--all under his company name of The County Press, Inc.

As he was nearing the end of his newspaper career, Spayth self-published a book, It Was Fun the Hard Way: The Autobiography of a Small Town Editor (1964). He was also an inventor whose brainchildren included a bookmark that automatically kept its place should the reader fall asleep while reading, as well as a device for straightening parking meters. He was married twice, first to Annis L. (Salsbury) Spayth (1882-1957), also a journalist, second to Elizabeth (Crosswell) Spayth. His children by his first wife were Lillian June, Sue, and Joseph. You can find Sue Spayth Riley on the Internet.

George W. Spayth died August 21, 1969, at his home in Dunellen, New Jersey. He was seventy-seven years old.

An editorial cartoon by George W. Spayth from the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, December 4, 1923.

What I believe are the first five installments of Berks History in Pictures by George W. Spayth, from the Reading Times, September 26, 1928. In his obituary, Spayth was described as a syndicated cartoonist, but his name does not appear in Allan Holtz's comprehensive American Newspaper Comics (2012). It may be that Berks History in Pictures was syndicated locally, and that might account for the artist's credit as a syndicated cartoonist. It may be also that Spayth's editorial cartoons were syndicated. In any case, his five years or so in Fort Wayne qualify George W. Spayth as a Hoosier cartoonist. We can also add his name to the list of Hoosiers who drew historical, informational, or factual comic strips, panels, or features.

Backdated to September 18, 2017.
Text copyright 2017, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Scoopie by Jerry Stewart (1923-1995)

Many years ago, I found a website called Pioneering Cartoonists of Color by cartoonist Tim Jackson. That's where I learned that Jerry Stewart of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel was also the creator of a comic strip in one of the nation's leading black newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier. In recognition of Jerry Stewart's pioneering efforts as a black cartoonist and newspaperman in Indiana, I would like to show a sampling of his comic strip Scoopie, from 1948-1950. 

Born in Arkansas, Gerald W. "Jerry" Stewart (1923-1995) came to Indiana in 1946 to work for the News-Sentinel, first as an office boy but very soon after that as a cartoonist. His character Scoopie is also a newspaperman, though not always up to snuff. As you can see in the strips below, Jerry inserted himself into his comic strips from time to time. As you can see, too, Scoopie was a good strip, well drawn and with some very funny gags. So here's Scoopie.

Oct. 9, 1948

Oct. 23, 1948

Oct. 30, 1948

Nov. 6, 1948

Nov. 27, 1948

Dec. 11, 1948

Dec. 18, 1948

Dec. 25, 1948

Jan. 1, 1949

Jan. 8, 1949

Jan. 15, 1949

Jan. 28, 1950

Mar. 4, 1950

Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley