Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books 9780520960022

Citation preview

Funnybooks The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books

Michael Barrier

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd iii

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Funnybooks

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd i

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd a

27/09/14 2:40 PM

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd b

27/09/14 2:40 PM

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by Michael Barrier Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barrier, J. Michael. Funnybooks : the improbable glories of the best American comic books / Michael Barrier. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-24118-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-28390-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-96002-2 (ebook) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. pn6725.b37225 2015 741.5′973—dc23 2014031037 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 10

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

16

15

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30 percent postconsumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd iv

27/09/14 2:40 PM

To Ida and Vernon, and Michael Sporn

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd v

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Introduction: “The Very Good Ones” Mickey in a Magazine Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly Whitman, K.K., and Dell Learning on the Job in L.A. A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff Animal Magnetism Cartoon Conundrums Carl Barks Makes His Break Barks Becomes the Duck Man The Workman: Gaylord DuBois The Observer: John Stanley “I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin” “Pure Corn” at Disney’s Special Talents Barks Masters His Medium An Arena for All the Passions Animal Kingdoms

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd vii

ix xiii xvii

1 15 25 43 53 58 68 79 91 104 115 127 142 150 161 179 193 207

27/09/14 2:40 PM

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Walt Kelly Branches Out Strong-Handed Friends Carl Barks: The Virtuoso Walt Kelly Escapes Oskar Lebeck in Exile Manifest Destiny Uncle Scrooge: Play Money Carl Barks in Purgatory The Slow Fade Disasters Epilogue: Can These Bones Live?

Abbreviations Notes Index

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd viii

221 234 250 265 278 290 301 311 327 334 346

355 357 397

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Illustrations

From Uncle Pogo So-So Stories (1953), Walt Kelly’s first original trade paperback / 12 Oskar Lebeck in 1943, with Western Printing colleagues and others / 27 The front cover of Crackajack Funnies no. 39, September 1941 / 30 Ruth and Oskar Lebeck in 1930 / 32 An early Walt Kelly page for the November 1935 issue of St. Nicholas: The Magazine of Youth / 38 The front cover of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 1 (1941), the first comic book produced by Western Printing’s Los Angeles office / 45 From “Porky Pig” in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 2, November 1941, by Roger Armstrong / 47 Roger Armstrong in late 1941 or early 1942, at work on “Sniffles and Mary Jane” / 48 From “Bugs Bunny and the Goofy Goose,” by Carl Buettner, in Bugs Bunny Large Feature Comic no. 8 (1942) / 54 From “Seaman Sy Wheeler,” by Walt Kelly, in Camp Comics no. 2, March 1942 / 59 From “Little Black Sambo,” by Walt Kelly, in Fairy Tale Parade no. 1 (1942) / 64

ix

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd ix

27/09/14 2:40 PM

x | Illustrations

From Walt Kelly’s inaugural story for the “Our Gang” feature in the comic book of that name (1942) / 66 Pogo Possum and Albert Alligator making their debut in Walt Kelly’s lead story for the first issue of Animal Comics (1942) / 69 From “Albert the Alligator,” by Walt Kelly, in Animal Comics no. 8, April–May 1944 / 75 From “Superkatt,” by Dan Gordon, in Giggle Comics no. 50, February 1948 / 89 Carl Barks in the 1940s / 94 From the “Donald Duck” story in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 32, May 1943, the first comic-book story that Carl Barks both wrote and illustrated / 100 From “The Terror of the River,” by Carl Barks, in Donald Duck Four Color no. 108 (1946) / 109 Gaylord and Mary DuBois in the mid-1940s / 116 From “Tom and Jerry” in Our Gang Comics no. 6, July–August 1943, written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by John Stanley / 124 From “Andy Panda” in New Funnies no. 92, October 1944, written and illustrated by John Stanley / 133 From “Oswald the Rabbit” in New Funnies no. 119, January 1947, written by John Stanley and illustrated by Dan Gormley / 135 John Stanley playing the guitar at a mid-1940s pool party at the Oskar Lebeck home in Croton-on-Hudson / 137 John Stanley and Oskar Lebeck around 1950 / 138 The front cover of the first Little Lulu comic book, Four Color no. 74 (1945), which was written and drawn by John Stanley / 140 Carl Barks in San Francisco in 1919 / 147 Carl Barks’s self-caricature for the August 1930 Calgary EyeOpener / 151 Carl Barks in Minneapolis in 1934 / 153 Carl Barks as a Disney story man in 1937, playing a supporting role to his writing partner Harry Reeves / 156 From “The Ghost of the Grotto,” by Carl Barks, in Donald Duck Four Color no. 159 (1947) / 167 From “Luck of the North,” by Carl Barks, in Donald Duck Four Color no. 256 (1949) / 177 From “Letter to Santa,” by Carl Barks, in Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade no. 1 (1949) / 189

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd x

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Illustrations | xi

From “Albert and the Barbecue,” by Walt Kelly, in Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum Four Color no. 105 (1946) / 194 From “Mountain Climbers” in Little Lulu no. 1, January–February 1948, written by John Stanley and illustrated by Charles Hedinger and Irving Tripp / 198 From “The Kid Who Came to Dinner” in Little Lulu Four Color no. 146 (1947), written by John Stanley and illustrated by Charles Hedinger and Irving Tripp / 200 From “Mr. Owl and the Atomic Bomb” in Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum Four Color no. 148 (1947) / 210 The front cover of Santa Claus Funnies Four Color no. 128 (1946), by Moe Gollub / 213 From “Chuckwagon Charley’s Tales” in Animal Comics no. 29, October–November 1947, written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by Moe Gollub / 215 From “The Men of Greed” in Tarzan no. 5, September–October 1948, written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by Jesse Marsh / 218 From “The Men of A-lur” in Tarzan no. 9, January–February 1949, written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by Jesse Marsh / 219 From “Albert and Pogo,” by Walt Kelly, in Animal Comics no. 28, August–September 1947 / 223 The front cover of Easter with Mother Goose, Four Color no. 140 (1947), by Walt Kelly / 225 From Our Gang Comics no. 40, November 1947, Walt Kelly’s pioneering depiction of black and white adolescents as equals / 238 A Kelly editorial cartoon from the New York Star, October 2, 1948 / 242 A Kelly editorial cartoon from the New York Star, January 13, 1949 / 243 From “Donald Duck,” by Carl Barks, in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 138, March 1952 / 256 From “Donald Duck” by Carl Barks, in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 145, October 1952 / 260 Walt Kelly, in publicity photos taken around 1951 / 266 From “Feelin’ Mighty Hale, and Farewell,” by Walt Kelly, in Pogo Possum no. 3, August–October 1950 / 274 From “Cinderella and the Three Bears,” by Walt Kelly, in Pogo Possum no. 8, January–March 1952 / 276

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xi

27/09/14 2:40 PM

xii | Illustrations

Oskar Lebeck with members of his comic-book staff in a photo taken around 1950 / 279 One of the dozen Surprise Books—this one illustrated by Dan Noonan—that Oskar Lebeck shepherded into print in the fall of 1950 / 280 Oskar Lebeck in the early 1950s, around the time his Twin Earths comic strip was launched / 282 From “The Little Rich Boy” in Little Lulu no. 40, October 1951, written by John Stanley and illustrated by Irving Tripp / 285 From Western Marshal Four Color no. 534 (1953), illustrated by Everett Raymond Kinstler / 296 Moe Gollub’s wraparound painting for Zane Grey’s Sunset Pass, Four Color no. 230 (1949) / 299 From “Only a Poor Old Man,” by Carl Barks, in the first issue of Uncle Scrooge, Four Color no. 386 (1952) / 303 From the third Uncle Scrooge one-shot by Carl Barks, Four Color no. 495 (1953) / 309 Carl Barks in 1956, with his friend Bob Harmon and Harmon’s wife, Eileen / 325 John Stanley in 1976 / 332 Chase Craig in 1969 / 341 Carl Barks at his easel in 1974 / 344

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xii

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Preface

I am sure there were people in mid-twentieth-century America who began reading comic books after they reached adulthood, but there cannot have been many such people compared with the millions for whom comics were among their earliest reading experiences. I was one such child, many years ago; I “read” aloud Walt Kelly stories in Animal Comics to my stuffed animals before I could make out the words. My childhood attachment to comic books was unusually strong. I dreamed of being a cartoonist, and I can remember clearly when and where I first saw many of my comic books—on a newsstand or in a variety store or at a friend’s home—even though my memories of my teachers and classmates have dimmed almost to the point of vanishing. Memories like mine are at once so commonplace and so particular to the person doing the remembering that there can be no point in devoting much attention to them here. What really matters about comic books, especially old comics like the ones from the 1940s and 1950s that are the principal subjects of this book, is whether they repay reading today, and not just by elderly people who want to bathe in nostalgia. Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books is my answer to that question, and my answer is, of course, yes. A qualified yes, to be sure, since most comic books, from any period, have very little to recommend them. At two times, separated by about thirty years, I devoted hundreds of hours to reading and rereading old comics, trying to sift out the best of them. The first time was when the xiii

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xiii

27/09/14 2:40 PM

xiv | Preface

late Martin Williams and I were choosing stories to include in A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (1982). I made my second and more intensive survey when I was writing this book. In both cases, nostalgia wound up playing no role in choosing stories—either to reprint, in the Smithsonian book, or to write about, in this one. When I was a boy, I read every kind of comic book, as most children did, but the comics that attracted me most strongly, and that I read and reread, were produced by Western Printing & Lithographing Company and published under the Dell label. “Dell Comics Are Good Comics” was the company’s slogan in the 1950s. Not every Dell comic was good, by any means, and certainly there were comic books from other publishers that repaid multiple readings; but, in work on this book, as when I was a child, I became aware of how distinct the Dell comics were from those of every other publisher, and how much better the best Dell comics were than almost all other comic books. My initial plan was to cast my net wider, but eventually Funnybooks became a history of the Dell comic books, concentrating on the years before comics of all kinds fell under the censor’s axe and with only a nod to great cartoonists like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner, whose work was for other publishers. Kurtzman and Eisner, and other artists like them, have already been the subjects of books—in some cases, many books—but there has been no book like this one. At that, my book is only a partial history of Dell and Western Printing, so there are names missing from the index that many devotees of the Dell titles will expect to find, or to find mentioned more often. But although Dell published the work of many writers and artists who deserve to be admired, it published only a few whose work demands to be read—Carl Barks (Donald Duck), John Stanley (Little Lulu), and Walt Kelly chief among them. Dell never did more than dabble in superheroes, the genre that for many people has long defined what is meant by the term comic book. The absence of superheroes was a large part of Dell’s appeal for me. When I was a boy I never cared for any comics of that kind, except for a brief infatuation with the lighthearted Captain Marvel titles. More recently, I have come to appreciate the tongue-in-cheek quality of many of Will Eisner’s “Spirit” stories and Stan Lee’s early-1960s stories with the Marvel superheroes. But superhero comic books in general, and especially those with the more serious superheroes, like Superman and Batman, have always seemed to me hopelessly inferior to the best comics with “funny animals” like Donald Duck. I found a clue as to why I have felt that way in what a respected science-fiction writer has written

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xiv

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Preface | xv

of Superman: “He is our universal longing for perfection, for wisdom and power used in service of the human race.”1 That is true, surely. But in the twentieth century, that longing for perfection was expressed not just in a benign form through Superman and the superheroes that followed him, each of them sharing a larger or smaller piece of Superman’s perfection, but also in odious totalitarian ideologies that pursued perfection through mass murder. The longing for perfection is a deeply suspect longing, even when it comes cloaked in the innocent wish fulfillment that the superheroes have always offered. I have always strongly preferred comic books with characters of a different kind—funny characters most of them, cartoon animals many of them, who on the rare occasions when they aspire to wisdom and power invariably reveal, with comical flourishes, their hopeless imperfectibility. Characters, that is, very much like their readers. Michael Barrier Little Rock, Arkansas February 2014 A postscript: A book of this kind will inevitably contain at least a few errors. As they surface, I will post corrections on my website, www. michaelbarrier.com.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xv

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Acknowledgments

Like several of my earlier books, this book makes abundant use of the research that the veteran animator Milton Gray conducted with me and for me over many years, since I first began writing about the Hollywood animation studios and their comic-book offshoots in the 1960s. Milt, whose enthusiasm for classic hand-drawn animation has not flagged after decades as a highly regarded professional, also read the manuscript for this book, caught some mistakes, and, as always, provided encouragement and support when it was most needed. Geoffrey Blum, the preeminent student of the work of Carl Barks and an editor of surpassing skills, read the manuscript twice and made innumerable helpful suggestions. John Kimball; his wife, Virginia; and his sister Kelly generously shared with me Walt Kelly’s correspondence with Ward Kimball, John and Kelly’s father, as well as drawings Walt Kelly made when he worked at the Walt Disney studio. I owe thanks, too, to Amid Amidi, proprietor of the Cartoon Brew website and Ward Kimball’s biographer, for paving the way for me with the Kimballs. I can only hope that his important book, becalmed because of copyright issues, will eventually be published in some form. Robert R. Barrett shared with me some of the fruits of his many years of exploring the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the comic-book and comic-strip incarnations of Burroughs’s characters. He lent me his copies of almost thirty years of the correspondence between Edgar Rice xvii

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xvii

27/09/14 2:40 PM

xviii | Acknowledgments

Burroughs Inc. and its licensee Western Printing & Lithographing Company, an invaluable window into Western’s dealings with its licensors. Donald Draganski, a friend since my student days in Chicago, lent me copies of some early and rare Disney comic books that eluded me when I was actively collecting decades ago and that I would probably never have seen otherwise. Steve Schneider, whose outstanding collection of artwork from the Warner Bros. cartoons has been recognized in museum exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, shared with me correspondence from Warner cartoonists who were working on the Dell comic books in the early 1940s—rare contemporaneous documentation of those early comics. Hames Ware, whose eye for artists’ styles has no equal in my experience, shared his expertise repeatedly and read the manuscript, saving me from a number of mistakes. Oskar Lebeck’s daughter, Letty Edes, shared not just memories of her parents, through telephone interviews and letters, but also rare photos of them and of some of her father’s colleagues at Western Printing. David Saunders, an indefatigable and ingenious researcher into the lives and work of the artists for the pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the twentieth century, was tremendously helpful in tracking down elusive information, about Oskar Lebeck in particular. It is one of my greatest regrets that I was never able to meet Walt Kelly and tell him how much he meant to me, but I did have the pleasure of meeting his son Peter and chatting with Pete about his father over lunch at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Virginia. Not a venue Walt would have chosen, probably, but I am sure he would approve the gentlemanly manner in which Pete superintends his father’s legacy. Another son of an illustrious father, John Stanley’s son, James, generously shared memories of his father and copies of his few surviving papers through email. I look forward to meeting Jim, too, in person one of these days. I received invaluable assistance from staff members at any number of research libraries and archives, some of which house what are from all appearances the only significant surviving records of Western Printing’s dealings with its licensors. There is no “Western Printing archive” accessible to researchers, and it seems likely that most of Western’s own records, and those of its publishing partner Dell Publishing Company, have long since been destroyed, since they would have no continuing legal or commercial usefulness for the current owners of the companies’ assets.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xviii

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Acknowledgments | xix

I am indebted to David R. Smith, Rebecca Cline, and Ed Ovalle of the Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, California. Dave Smith long ago shared with me the archives’ holdings of Carl Barks’s correspondence, and he and Becky and Ed have since provided me with important information from such sources as Walt Disney’s correspondence files and the Disney studio’s “main files,” which hold the records of Disney’s dealings with Western Printing and are off-limits to most researchers. Shortly before he retired in 2010, Dave Smith provided me with the number of copies of some of the Disney comic books on which Western paid royalties to Walt Disney Productions, information that turned out to be extremely useful. Thanks to Jenny Robb and Susan Liberator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, The Ohio State University, Columbus, I was able to spend several enjoyable days, on two visits, examining Walt Kelly’s voluminous and endlessly fascinating papers, as well as those of other people with ties to Western. The agent Tony Mendez’s papers, which include revealing correspondence with her client Oskar Lebeck, were especially helpful. Another exceptionally important collection is the “Marge” collection—the papers of Little Lulu’s creator, Marjorie Henderson Buell, including a full record of her dealings with Western Printing—at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I enjoyed the help of Laurie Ellis and other members of the library’s staff. Marva Felchin, director, libraries and archives, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, made available to me the surviving records (many were lost to fire long ago) of Gene Autry’s long affiliation with Western and Dell. I am also grateful to David Sigler of Special Collections, California State University at Northridge, where Chase Craig deposited letters from Carl Barks and items from his own long career in comics, and to the following librarians and archivists: Martin Gedra of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; Paul E. Schlotthauer, librarian and archivist, Pratt Institute Library, Brooklyn, New York: Kevin Hallaran, archivist, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California; Jonathon Auxier and Sandra Joy Lee of the Warner Bros. Archives, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Mary Robison, reference librarian, General Theological Seminary, New York; Eileen L. Fay of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library; Andy Needham of the Oregon

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xix

27/09/14 2:40 PM

xx | Acknowledgments

State Archives; Molly Bruce, archives and research assistant, and Susanne Belovari, archivist for reference and collections, digital collections and archives, Tisch Library, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts; Ian Stade of Special Collections, Minneapolis Central Library; Connie Von Der Heide, director of reference and outreach services, Wisconsin State Law Library, Madison; Lee Spilberg of the New York Public Library; Allan Raney of the New York State Library; Carol Thunem, archives and periodicals assistant, Carleton College Library, Northfield, Minnesota; and Jan Emberton, Leland Razer, and the members of the interlibrary loan staff of the Central Arkansas Library System. I am also grateful, for assistance of many kinds, to David Dunn, civil service director, City of Bridgeport, Connecticut; Maxine Hansen, executive assistant to Mrs. Gene Autry, Gene Autry Entertainment, Studio City, California; Shannon Fifer of Warner Bros.; James Sullos and Cathy Wilbanks of Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.; Stephanie Cassidy of the Art Students League of New York; Colin D. Riley of Boston University; John Ellis of the Milton Caniff estate; Margaret Adamic of the Walt Disney Company; and W. Christopher Barrier, Esq., Mark Kausler, Dana Gabbard, Thomas Andrae, Gunnar Andreassen, Steve Thompson, Mark Evanier, Donald Ault, Andrew Barnes, Didier Ghez, the late Michael Sporn, Art Spiegelman, Frank Young, John Benson, E. B. Boatner, Leonard Marcus, Donald Phelps, Ron Wolfe, Susan Orleans, Thad Komorowski, John Canemaker, and Gary Brown and Alan Hutchinson, whose privately published but wholly professional index to the Dell Four Color Comics was repeatedly useful. My longtime friend Patrick Garabedian shared with me the tape recording of his 1971 interview with Carl Barks. In addition to the Garabedian interview and many published interviews, this book draws on interviews that Milt Gray and I recorded—most of them long before this book was contemplated—with a number of people who worked on the comic books, worked for Dell Publishing in other capacities, or had connections of other kinds with the Dell comics and the people who made them. Regrettably, most of the people we interviewed are now deceased. I am grateful for those interviews to Roger Armstrong, Carl Barks, Jack Bradbury, Don Christensen, Ross Claiborne, Letty Lebeck Edes, Morris Gollub, Richard Hall, Jack Hannah, David Hilberman, Lynn Karp, Hank Ketcham, Ward Kimball, Harvey Kurtzman, Richard “Sparky” Moore, George Nicholson, Dan Noonan, Milt Schaffer, Gordon Sheehan, Frank Tashlin, Lloyd Turner, and Clair Weeks. I also

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xx

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Acknowledgments | xxi

appreciate the responses I received by mail over the years from Bob Burkert, Robert S. Callender, Del Connell, Chase Craig, Wendall Mohler, Veve Risto, George Sherman, and Bill Spicer. Thanks, too, to my editors and their colleagues at University of California Press: Mary Francis, Kim Hogeland, Rose Vekony, Aimée Goggins, and Carl Walesa. It remains only to thank my wife, Phyllis Barrier, for putting up with yet another book.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xxi

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd xxii

27/09/14 2:40 PM

INTRODUCTION

“The Very Good Ones”

In 1949, a writer for the Catholic magazine Commonweal interviewed a man named Harry Wildenberg, who was then a “scholarly cigar merchant” in Key West, Florida, but years before had been the sales manager for Eastern Color Printing Company in New York City. The article’s author, John R. Vosburgh, wrote of Wildenberg that he “invented the comic book back in 1932,” when his job was “to concoct ideas that would sell color printing for Eastern, which . . . printed the comic sections for a score of newspapers along the Atlantic Seaboard.” Wildenberg hit upon the idea for the comic book, Vosburgh wrote, as “he was idly folding a newspaper in halves, then in quarters. . . . As he looked at the twice-folded paper it occurred to him that it was a convenient book size, about seven by ten inches. “ ‘Why not a comic book?’ he reflected. ‘It would have 32 or 64 pages and make a fine item for concerns which distribute premiums.’ ”1 That idea gave birth in 1933 to a few premium comic books. They were made up of reprints of Sunday comics pages, one quarter the original size, and could be had by mailing a coupon. The next step was recounted in 1947 by Coulton Waugh, himself a cartoonist and the first serious chronicler of comic strips and comic books: During the premium book period, M. C. Gaines had become connected with Harry Wildenberg, as salesman for premium books. . . . He had been impressed, he says, with the public reaction to the comic books, and he, for one, did not see why they should not be sold directly over the news stands.

1

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 1

27/09/14 2:40 PM

2 | Introduction

Determined to test public reaction, he took several dozen of the premium books labeled Famous Funnies, pasted a sticker which read Ten Cents on them, and induced a couple of news stands to carry them over the week end. Every one was sold out when he visited the stands Monday morning.2

Despite such early and unequivocal signs of success, it was months longer before Eastern Color Printing got into the comic-book business by publishing what Waugh called “not the first comic book, but the first American comic magazine in modern format”—that is, roughly ten inches tall by seven and a half inches wide, stapled along the spine, and printed in four colors—“to be placed on newsstands for sale, independently of newspaper or premium connections.”3 That was Famous Funnies no. 1, dated July 1934 and put on sale, according to all accounts, in May 1934. Eastern Color wound up publishing Famous Funnies because a leading publisher of popular magazines, George Delacorte Jr., decided against exercising the option he held to the title and the format. According to Waugh, advertisers and the most important magazine distributor, American News Company, were cool to comic books’ coarse paper and garish color, and to the reprinting of comic strips that millions of people had already seen in newspapers. Their skepticism persuaded Delacorte to bow out. There was a hint here of the hostility that comic books, simply by virtue of being comic books, would encounter repeatedly in the years ahead. Over the next four years the comic book slowly gained traction, as Famous Funnies became profitable and was joined on the newsstands by a small but growing number of titles from other publishers—including, through a change of heart, George Delacorte’s Dell Publishing Company. As Waugh wrote: “He was awake to the new trend now, and in the fall of 1935 he arranged with the American News Company for distribution of a new magazine, Popular Comics. This was produced for Delacorte to publish by M. C. Gaines, who by this time was connected with the McClure Syndicate.”4 Delacorte had pioneered in comic books, starting in 1929 with an unsuccessful weekly effort: original comics in a tabloid format, called The Funnies. That setback may have discouraged him from picking up his option with Eastern Color Printing. Besides acting to remedy that mistake by publishing Popular Comics, Delacorte also resumed publication of The Funnies in October 1936, in the soon-to-be-standard quarto size. Like Famous Funnies, both Dell titles were anthologies selling for ten cents and made up mostly of reprinted newspaper comics.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 2

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Introduction | 3

In 1935, original material began turning up in some comic books alongside the reprinted newspaper comics. Then, in the spring of 1938, came the introduction of Superman in the first issue of Action Comics. The popularity of Superman and the other costumed superheroes that followed in his wake fueled tremendous growth in both the number of titles and the number of copies sold. By 1949, according to Vosburgh, comic books were selling sixty million copies a month. Such comprehensive sales figures were necessarily inexact, but there was no question but that comics were selling in the tens of millions. M. C. Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947, so by the time Vosburgh interviewed Wildenberg there was no one else who could claim credit for inventing the comic book. Or, as Wildenberg would have it, accept the blame. “I don’t feel proud that I started the comic books,” he said. “If I had had an inkling of the harm they would do, I would never have gone through with the idea.” But there was, of course, the lure of profit: “You must remember that in the beginning I gave little thought to the social aspects of the matter. In business a man seldom thinks beyond profits. The social impact of an idea, an invention, is secondary, if he contemplates it at all. It was my business to sell comics and it did not even occur to me to weigh the effects they would have.”5 When comic books began to appear in quantity in the late 1930s, they quickly dominated a niche that other mass-market publications had never filled so completely. The superhero comics were a particularly gaudy manifestation of what was by then a well-established subliterature: magazines that children sought out and embraced despite the misgivings or outright disapproval of their parents. That subliterature originated in the nineteenth century with dime novels, continued in the pulp magazines of the early years of the twentieth century, and flowered in the comic books of the thirties and forties. Comics were even easier to read than their predecessors, and just as cheap. Some of the principal ingredients of the superhero comics, as of their predecessors, were continuing characters, sharply defined heroes and villains, a high level of violence (or, at least, furious physical activity), and directness and even crudeness in their appeal to young, mostly male readers. Comic books provided those ingredients so efficiently that they became very popular very quickly. By the time Vosburgh interviewed Wildenberg, and for years afterward, the strongest criticism of comic books was directed at their graphic depictions of violence—not so much in the superhero comics, which by the late 1940s were on the wane, but in crime comic books

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 3

27/09/14 2:40 PM

4 | Introduction

like Crime Does Not Pay and then in horror comics like Tales from the Crypt—and how such depictions supposedly encouraged juvenile delinquency. But all comic books, even the most innocuous, were the targets of widespread disapproval. The complaints went not just to what comic-book stories were like, but also to what comic books were in their essence. The most vocal and effective of comics’ critics, like the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, were not distracted by any pleas on behalf of “good” comic books, because in their eyes all comics were inherently bad.6 In his most famous book, Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Wertham condemned the medium itself as hopeless, for this reason among others: An important area where comic books do specific harm is the acquisition of fluent left-to-right eye movements, which is so indispensable for good reading. The eyes have to form the habit of going from left to right on the printed line, then returning quickly to the left at a point slightly lower. Reversal tendencies and confusions are common among children at the age of six. As better reading habits are acquired, including the all-important left-to-right movements, reversals and other errors gradually diminish and may automatically disappear. It is different with the comic-book reader who acquires the habit of reading irregular bits of printing here and there in balloons instead of complete lines from left to right.7

Wertham had a point, but not exactly the point he thought he was making. Although comic books were vulnerable to criticism on many grounds, the problem was not that the medium itself was fatally deficient. It was that comic-book stories were easy to make, given a bare minimum of drawing skill, but they were surprisingly difficult to make well. Most comic-book editors, writers, and artists had no idea how to make good comics, and no idea why they would want to try. Even though the comic-book story grew out of the comic strip, the comic-book story’s challenges were different, subtler, and more severe. In particular, because such stories were typically much longer than the three or four panels of a daily strip (or the ten or twelve on Sunday), they demanded a more sophisticated handling of time. A panel in a comic-book story usually did not represent an instant, as a frame of film did. The words spoken in the dialogue balloons would take more time than that. Comic-book panels were thus a little like the shots in a movie, which could last for seconds or even minutes—but not really, because movement was absent in the comics. The cartoonist’s task was thus to compose somehow a drawing that was satisfying in itself but that also suggested the passage of time within the panel.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 4

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Introduction | 5

Just as important, making good comics required aligning dialogue and drawings so that there could be no doubt that a character that was supposed to be speaking was actually saying the words in the balloon over his head. Not only did the dialogue need to be distinct and individual, but the face beneath it had to mirror those words, even when, or especially when, that required distorting the speaker’s features, to the point of flirting with the grotesque. Good comics also required sensitivity to how each panel’s elements were composed, so that drawings and dialogue balloons were in balance, and reading the dialogue in the balloons was as natural and easy as reading type on a printed page. Panels had to lead one to another in what felt like a natural order, and with a rhythmic subtlety that made a page as a whole, and then a story as a whole, come alive as it was read. Such conditions were almost never met. It was much more common for a story to be clotted with dialogue, its balloons packed with words when words were not conspicuously absent, and for its crude drawings to lurch up and down and across the page, sometimes squeezed into as many as a dozen claustrophobic panels. Such stories required of the reader constant adjustments of the sort Wertham decried. They also relied almost entirely on the power of the medium even at its crudest. Some people working in comic books in the 1940s and 1950s understood their medium’s challenges and relished meeting them, but many more of their colleagues did not. They were in a sort of unspoken conspiracy with educated readers, who were repelled not just by comics’ crude printing but also by their pervasive shallowness. A comic-book story’s essentials could be absorbed in a single hasty reading, even when the story’s clumsiness threw up obstacles in the reader’s path. It seems never to have occurred to anyone that the best comic-book stories might reveal themselves fully only through many rereadings, and that they might be—in that respect, at least—more like paintings or music than prose fiction. In 1963, Lloyd E. Smith, a dedicated bibliophile of sophisticated tastes and for thirty-five years a principal editor and executive with one of the largest publishers, responded skeptically to a letter that praised some of his company’s comics: “It is true that comic books generally are not preserved and probably there is a question whether they should be preserved.”8 He softened that remark subsequently, suggesting to his student correspondent that if some university library decided to “build up a collection of comic books” that would be available for research, that might not be a bad thing. Assuming, that is, there was space

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 5

27/09/14 2:40 PM

6 | Introduction

available and the comics would be in the charge of “a sympathetic librarian.”9 But clearly he could not bring himself to attach any importance to such a collection. The comic books that Smith supervised, like almost all midcentury comics, were conceived as narrowly commercial enterprises. When a comic book from any publisher became the venue for artistry of any kind, it was invariably because of very unusual circumstances, and such an opportunity invariably vanished within a few years at most. There was, for example, Will Eisner, who as a very young man in the late 1930s was the coproprietor of a shop that produced comic books for a number of publishers, some of them on the fringes of respectable business. Free of any literary pretensions, the early comic-book publishers were interested only in turning out lots of comics quickly and at minimal cost, and Eisner’s factory, as he called it, met that need. But then the nature of his work changed. Early in 1940, Eisner began producing a sixteen-page syndicated comic book that newspapers could distribute along with their Sunday comics sections. He wrote and illustrated (with help) the eight-page lead feature, “The Spirit,” about a vigilante hero. Even though the Spirit was born in the first flush of costumed superheroes’ popularity, Eisner insisted on presenting his character in street clothes, the only costume a mask and gloves. His syndicate made almost no demands on him, except that he meet deadlines; he produced his stories for an audience— newspaper readers—that was composed more of adults than was typical for comic books. He thus enjoyed a greater freedom of action than most comic-book creators, and he soon began to take advantage of it. What really set “The Spirit” apart, after its first year or so, was Eisner’s increasingly inventive use of his medium. His explorations were interrupted by military service in World War II—he left “The Spirit” in the hands of lesser artists while he was gone—but after he took charge of “The Spirit” again he became preeminently a short-story writer who wrote mostly with pictures instead of words. He worked in what John Benson has called “an effortless visual narrative style, which is so unlabored that most readers are unaware of how much more his pictures tell us than do the pages of most comic books.”10 The clumsiness so common in prewar comic books, the simple ignorance of what a good story required, persisted in many if not most comics after the war, but Eisner’s best postwar stories are strikingly different. Their panels expand and compress time in unpredictable ways, and the characters are drawn in styles ranging from straight illustration to

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 6

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Introduction | 7

highly exaggerated cartooning—not just on the same page, but the same character, and not in any arbitrary fashion, but according to what will enhance the story. The richest of Eisner’s stories present small urban dramas, some fanciful, others grim, in which the Spirit himself is not much more than a bystander. The Spirit was at bottom a conventional comic-book hero, and Eisner often had to shoehorn him into stories that had no need of him. But a “Spirit” comic-book section without the Spirit was not feasible at a time when comic books, even one as unique as the “Spirit” section, were defined very narrowly. As a result, the overwhelming sense from the postwar “Spirit” stories is of playfulness. Eisner enjoyed exploring his medium’s possibilities, but without asking it to do very much serious work. The “Spirit” comic-book section shrank from sixteen pages to eight before it died in 1952. By then Eisner had already made a decisive turn. He had left the “Spirit” section in other hands and begun devoting his time to producing educational materials: a monthly magazine on preventive maintenance for the army. He was always a very practical artist, and when there was no longer room in comic books for stories of the kind he had mastered, he left the field. Eisner’s departure occurred when another significant publisher was under siege. This was EC, whose initials on comic-book covers stood at first for Educational Comics. It was founded in the mid-1940s by the pioneering M. C. Gaines, who published comic-book versions of the Bible and American history. After Gaines’s death, his son, William, shifted the company’s focus toward more popular kinds of comics, and by 1950 EC was publishing three unvarnished horror titles. The horror comics sold well—and spawned a host of imitators—but Gaines also published less popular and more ambitious science-fiction comics. Al Feldstein, the editor, principal writer, and occasional artist for the science-fiction titles (and the horror titles, too), relied so heavily on captions that the panels beneath his captions were in effect illustrations for stories told in prose. Harvey Kurtzman, EC’s other principal editor, was more purely a comic-book creator, and his comics were less indebted to literary models. The titles of Kurtzman’s comic books could have been those of any publisher’s war comics—Frontline Combat and TwoFisted Tales—but the content, particularly the harshly realistic stories set during the Korean conflict, could not have been more different. Like Feldstein and everyone else connected with EC, Kurtzman worked in a short-story form, but he wrote his stories as pages of rough sketches

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 7

27/09/14 2:40 PM

8 | Introduction

that guided other artists, and he illustrated some of his stories himself, with vigorous brushwork that fitted his subject matter perfectly. In 1952, Kurtzman’s resistance to the prevalent comic-book fantasies—especially the fantasies of wish fulfillment in the superhero comics—found perfect expression not in the war comic books but in the satirical Mad, a comic book just as serious in its own way as Frontline Combat, and, needless to say, much funnier. In Mad, Kurtzman lampooned movies and comic strips, but he was at his most penetrating when he was savaging superhero comics and “kiddie” television shows like Howdy Doody, coldly commercial fare that patronized a vulnerable audience. Mad sold well, but other kinds of success eluded it. The esteemed critic Robert Warshow, writing in Commentary, could come no closer to praise than acknowledging the “irritated pleasure” he took in Mad, which his young son brought into his home along with other comics. He called it a “wild, undisciplined machine-gun attack on American popular culture. . . . The tendency of the humor, in its insistent violence, is to reduce all culture to indiscriminate anarchy.”11 Kurtzman’s work was anything but undisciplined, but the discipline he observed was one that Warshow—and many people like him—could not recognize. Whether a creator took comic-book stories seriously by using them to explore ideas, as Kurtzman did, or to explore the form itself, as Eisner did, there was no shelter from the intense hostility that confronted all comic-book publishers in the early 1950s. EC’s Bill Gaines responded to the attacks on his comics by making them even more serious, wiping away the horror and crime titles and replacing them with “New Direction” comics, among them one called, remarkably, Psychoanalysis. When the New Direction comics failed, Gaines shut down his entire comic-book line and converted Mad into what turned out to be a highly successful magazine, distinct in its larger format and lack of interior color from comic books and thus relatively immune from attack. What Gaines tried to do with the New Direction titles, unsuccessfully, was free comic books from a prison created by their own success. Even at its most popular, the comic book was dominated by formulaic genres, each monthly or bimonthly title as easily categorized as a Hollywood B movie. Successful comics that fell outside existing genres tended to establish new genres, almost instantaneously. That was most famously true of the superheroes, but the pattern was repeated with the crime and horror comics after World War II and with comics of other kinds as well. Harvey Kurtzman eviscerated one comic-book genre after

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 8

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Introduction | 9

another in EC’s Mad, but such mockery quickly mutated into a genre of its own, as the newsstands filled with clumsy copycat titles that included one from EC itself, Panic. On the rare occasions when publishers tried to escape the genre trap, as with EC’s New Direction line, their efforts failed, quickly and decisively. In many genres, the best comics were not the most popular. In the teenage comedy genre, for example, the little-known and short-lived 1950s title Henry Aldrich compares very favorably with the much more popular Archie titles. Other genres, like the romance comics that flourished in the late 1940s, resisted producing any material of value. Even more than the teenage comics, which also appealed to a largely female audience, the romance comics pandered to their readers, stoking their self-pity and insecurity. It turned out, though, that a few comic-book genres could support stories worthy of a place alongside intelligent fiction of other kinds— novels and short stories and movies. Those comic-book stories depicted characters and situations that were essentially realistic, however far removed from reality the characters and situations might at first seem to be. Read without preconceptions, such stories did not require special pleading; neither was it necessary to pigeonhole them as experiments or as vehicles for ideas larger than the stories themselves. There were only a few such comic-book stories, compared with the many that were mediocre or worse, but there were enough to put the lie to any general condemnation of comics. Of the comic books that transcended the limitations of their genres, the best came from Western Printing & Lithographing Company, a Racine, Wisconsin, concern that was in the 1940s and 1950s a highly successful publisher of not just comics, but also children’s books and printed products of many other kinds. Western was the company of which Lloyd E. Smith was an executive. It made its comics for sale by Dell Publishing Company, under the Dell label. When Helen Meyer, Dell’s vice president, defended her company’s comic books—all of them “designed and produced” by Western Printing—before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1954, she testified that the average Dell title sold eight hundred thousand copies and that the bestselling titles, like Donald Duck, ranked among the best-selling newsstand publications in the country.12 Around that time, roughly one-third of the comic books sold in the United States carried the Dell label, and the percentage rose as the comic-book industry as a whole contracted later in the 1950s.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 9

27/09/14 2:40 PM

10 | Introduction

No one at Dell or Western Printing had any elevated conception of what comic books could be, but circumstances combined to give a few gifted cartoonists who worked for Western the openings they needed to realize some of their medium’s potential. The best stories for the Dell comics did not succeed as Eisner’s and Kurtzman’s best stories did. There is in them no dazzling critical exploration of the comic-book form, no ridicule of the falsehoods infesting comic books and other low forms of popular culture. There is mastery of the comic book’s graphic language, to be sure, and often sly satirical commentary, but what is central in the best Dell stories is character, as revealed through narrative. Such priorities can be glimpsed even in some of the Dell comic-book westerns and in the Dell incarnation of Tarzan of the Apes. But the very best Dell comics belong to genres of other kinds: the comic books with animated characters—“funny animals,” talking animals like Donald Duck—and precocious child characters like Little Lulu. Those genres were largely vehicles for the most puerile sort of comedy, but it turned out that they could also accommodate greater achievements than might have seemed possible for anyone working in comic books. As for what gave a few cartoonists the openings they needed, there was, for one thing, length. The Dell comics published stories longer than those of almost any other publisher—as many as thirty or forty pages or sometimes even more. The stories’ length was often even greater than might at first appear, because from the mid-1940s on, the standard Dell page for the titles with cartoon characters had eight panels, not the six that prevailed for years afterward at other publishers. The stories in the comics from other publishers were mostly short, or broken up into short chapters, which allowed room for advertisements. For more than a decade, Dell, unlike most other publishers, included no advertising in its comics, except to solicit subscriptions. Greater length was not always necessary or desirable—or even available, when a comic book was a monthly anthology title with a fixed number of pages for each feature. Another check on story length was a widespread editorial impulse that favored greater variety in a comic book’s features. But in many of the Dell comics, especially those devoted to a single character, length was there for the storyteller who needed it. With more pages and panels to work with, a creative cartoonist—in particular, one who was both writing and drawing his stories—could present his characters fully and let a story grow out of those characters, instead of simply rushing them through a truncated plot.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 10

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Introduction | 11

Western’s characters typically came to its writers and artists from other media, as with the Disney characters and other creatures of film. Sometimes those writers and artists fumbled with the characters they had inherited, but in other cases such characters gave Western’s people a valuable head start. The characters, continuing from one story to another (but usually not in a single overarching narrative), could become richer and more interesting than the borrowed originals. It was in the career of one cartoonist, Carl Barks, that the virtues— and ultimately the limitations—of Western Printing’s approach to comic-book publishing were most clearly visible. One title, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, became a monthly showcase for Barks, who wrote and drew a ten-page lead story about Donald Duck and his three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, for almost every issue between 1943 and 1965. In the best of those stories, and in the best of his stories for other Disney comics (most of them considerably longer), Barks demonstrated more effectively than any of his contemporaries that the comic-book story was a valid literary and artistic form. It was a form whose demands were all too easily ignored, but one that could offer unique rewards, especially as a vehicle for comedy, when those demands were respected by someone who was able to meet them. Barks received very little stimulation or encouragement from his readers and editors, and the same was true of the creators of the Dell comic books in general, some of whom produced work that rivaled in quality Barks’s stories in the Disney titles. They produced that work for magazines that were, emphatically and unmistakably, intended for an audience made up mostly of children—but that was not necessarily a handicap, as the newspaper columnist Murray Kempton observed in 1953. He was reviewing a book called Uncle Pogo So-So Stories, by Walt Kelly, who had become a syndicated newspaper cartoonist in 1949 after spending most of the decade writing and drawing Dell comics. Kelly’s comic strip, Pogo, was born in one of those comic books, Animal Comics, and at the time of Kempton’s review Dell was still publishing a quarterly Pogo Possum comic book. Uncle Pogo So-So Stories was Kelly’s third paperback book but his first original paperback, the first two having been made up of reprinted comic strips. The new book’s publisher was not Dell but the more prestigious Simon & Schuster, it was printed in black and white, and it sold for a dollar, ten times as much as most comic books in 1953. But a comic book it was, with panels and dialogue balloons and compact stories like those in the ten-cent comics produced on high-speed four-color presses.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 11

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Uncle Pogo So-So Stories (1953), Walt Kelly’s first original trade paperback, was a comic book in all but name and price—a dollar rather than a dime. © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo, Inc. Used by permission.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 12

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Introduction | 13

For that matter, the Pogo comic strip itself, with its cast of talking animals, stood revealed as a comic book in disguise when it was collected in the first two paperbacks, so that its stories could be read in a single sitting instead of as daily four-panel installments. Something similar might be said of other comic strips with continuing stories, but few if any other comic strips were ever so rich in drawing, language, and incident as Pogo. When Kelly edited his stories for the paperbacks, culling the weakest material and smoothing out the transitions, what remained were first-rate comic-book stories, memorable not just for verbal and physical pratfalls but also for the dozens of characters that made up Kelly’s cast, all of them richly comic (except when menace was the point) and distinctly individual. In June 1953, when Murray Kempton wrote his review, Kelly had just made his strongest claim for adult acceptance—of which he already had a great deal—by introducing into his comic strip a menacing cat named Simple J. Malarkey, a pointed caricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy. But Kempton was not fooled. Kelly, he wrote, “is an idol among the eggheads, which is odd when you consider that he is a simple man . . . and quite obviously peddles his wares for children, bright children, but children.” Dismissive as that might sound, Kempton was headed elsewhere: “Which is, of course, the only worth-while audience there is for the very good ones, childhood being almost the only period when the subject is exposed to consistently good writing; how many grown-ups read Mark Twain, who is obviously Kelly’s master[?]”13 That was an overstatement, but with more than a little truth in it. All of the great comic-book creators wrote and drew for children, even if some, like Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner, wrote and drew for audiences a few years older than the typical readers of Walt Kelly’s stories in Animal Comics. What distinguished the “very good ones” from their peers was not so much the nature of their audience as it was the skill with which they managed to respond simultaneously to its requirements and their own hearts’ imperatives. In the best of the Dell comic books, like those by Walt Kelly and Carl Barks—and John Stanley, the man responsible for the excellence of Little Lulu—there was remarkably rich comedy, in stories told for children but by an unmistakably adult storyteller. Those stories were told through words and drawings executed not just with a high level of skill but also with a clear understanding of what the comic-book form demanded. And in the best stories, strong threads of words and drawings were wound together inextricably, so that, as in Carl Barks’s case,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 13

27/09/14 2:40 PM

14 | Introduction

separating Barks the writer from Barks the illustrator is impossible. Few other comic books demand rereading so urgently or reward it so fully. For Barks, Kelly, Stanley, and a few other Dell cartoonists, writing and drawing stories for children was more liberating than confining. They were foreclosed from dealing directly with some kinds of adult behavior, but they could explore a great many adult concerns under the cover of characters that were children or talking animals. Barks’s best stories, especially, boiled with adult passions—greed, pride, jealousy, joy, sorrow, contempt, disgust, and many more, enough to fit out a contemporary novel, but in as few as ten pages. And because the principal characters were talking ducks, the drawing style so cool and precise, and the stories’ basic shape reassuringly familiar, as farce or fable or mystery or something else of the kind, there was almost never in those stories anything that might set off alarm bells in anxious adult minds. Walt Kelly was allowed to sign some of his comic-book work, and his editor, Oskar Lebeck, passed along to him dozens of admiring letters, many from obviously intelligent and educated adults who had discovered his stories by reading them to their children. Such letters could only have encouraged Kelly to pursue newspaper syndication. Others of Western’s cartoonists were not so fortunate. Carl Barks’s stories were never signed, and John Stanley’s almost never were; moreover, Stanley’s drawings were usually cloaked by the ink lines of a lesser cartoonist. Readers’ letters never made their way to Barks when he was doing his best work—except for a few inane complaints—and the same was probably true of Stanley. Even so, many children knew that Little Lulu was a special comic book, and they recognized Barks’s distinctive drawings as those of “the good artist.” They knew that Barks was, like Kelly, one of the very good ones. How those cartoonists came to be such, and to have the company of a few other very good ones, is the most important part of the story of the Dell comics and of Western Printing & Lithographing, the most successful and unusual of the many companies whose comic books filled the newsstands of mid-twentieth-century America. Western Printing, despite its impressive record as a publisher, never acknowledged the quality of its best comics, asking only that they be accepted as “wholesome” and harmless. When Western’s long run ended, it was the comic books that survived, to be collected, admired, reprinted, and written about, even as their publisher vanished as completely as water poured onto desert sand.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 14

27/09/14 2:40 PM

1

Mickey in a Magazine

The story of Western Printing’s comic books, and thus of the unlikely triumphs of Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, John Stanley, and a few other cartoonists, began with a man of a very different sort: Hal Horne, a peripatetic publicist who from offices on Fifth Avenue in New York City published the first nine issues of Mickey Mouse Magazine. That particular Mickey Mouse Magazine was actually the third publication to bear the title. The first two, in 1933 and then in 1933–35, were monthly promotional pamphlets, sixteen pages in digest size, about half the size of a standard comic book. The first issue of the third version—the first Disney newsstand periodical—was published in May 1935 and identified on its cover as a “summer quarterly.” It was exceptionally large for such a magazine, more than ten inches wide and thirteen inches high, and it cost twenty-five cents, an imposing figure for a children’s magazine in that Depression year. The price fell to a dime with the second issue, dated October 1935, the first on a monthly schedule, and the dimensions shrank, too, by almost two inches on each side. With the March 1936 issue the page count fell from forty-four to thirty-six, including covers, and the trim size shrank a little further. Times were tough, and Horne’s print orders for the first three issues of the new Mickey Mouse Magazine had turned out to be far too ambitious. He ordered three hundred thousand copies of each issue but sold fewer than half. Horne scaled back subsequent print orders, but sales continued to decline. The problem was certainly 15

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 15

27/09/14 2:40 PM

16 | Chapter 1

not the very popular Disney characters, but rather the magazine’s nonDisney content. One author of that content was Irving Brecher, who in 1935 was a young gag man for what he called “the cheapest form of human life, small-time vaudevillians.” He then became one of Horne’s two “associate editors” for Mickey Mouse Magazine and wrote what he described many years later as “stories with wit in them that were amusing only to grown-ups.”1 He invoked college humor magazines in describing his work, no doubt having in mind stories like “Frank Verywell in College by Horatio Algebra” in the May 1936 issue. Mickey Mouse Magazine’s level of inspiration was as low as that title suggests. The magazine offered a conventional mixture of short stories, poems, puzzles, and drawings, but the drawings, including those of the Disney characters, were often weak and even amateurish, the jokes lame, the stories pedestrian. Mickey Mouse Magazine was peculiar competition for the leading children’s magazine of the day, the sober and literary St. Nicholas: The Magazine of Youth. The strongest echoes throughout the magazine were of Hal Horne’s gag file. Over the years, Horne had accumulated a huge file of around six million jokes on three-by-five-inch cards (along with magazine cartoons on larger cards), housed in several rooms in a New York office building.2 Horne rented selections from his gag file to a range of clients identified as “comic strip artists, stage, screen, and radio comedians, playwrights, columnists, governors, senators, house organs and advertising agencies.” As to the nature of the gags in the file, there is a clue in Hap Lee’s Radio Joke Book: Famous Gags of Radio Stars (1935), since “Hap Lee” was a Hal Horne pseudonym.3 A sample (setting aside the all too abundant racist and misogynist material): “Young man, take your hands off my daughter’s knee!” “Excuse me, sir, I was just going to say what a nice joint you have here!”

Everything in the book is generally similar. Horne had connected with Walt Disney himself as director of advertising and publicity for United Artists (UA), the movie company that began distributing the Disney animated cartoons in 1932. In that role, he was identified as “editor” of the two giveaway versions of Mickey Mouse Magazine. On July 24, 1935, as the New York Times reported, Horne announced his resignation from UA to “organize and head a new advertising and publicity company in New York.”4 By then, though, a new company called Hal Horne Inc. had been in existence for some

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 16

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Mickey in a Magazine |

17

time. Its name was on the first issue of the new Mickey Mouse Magazine, which actually appeared a couple of months before Horne resigned from UA. As subsequent events were to show, Hal Horne Inc.’s financial foundations were fragile, and Disney, fearful of that, may have shopped the new version of the magazine to more established publishers before deciding to leave it with Horne. Years later, Ned L. Pines, who published a line of pulp magazines before becoming a publisher of comic books, said that “Walt Disney’s magazine was offered to us for publication” in 1934. Pines turned it down.5 Hal Horne was from all appearances an exceedingly restless and intense man, someone who, in Motion Picture Daily’s words, “burned up the track as an exploiter and theatre operator” before he joined UA in 1931 and began “attacking his new job . . . with characteristic vigor.”6 His intensity did not translate into success as publisher of a Disney magazine. In a December 27, 1935, letter, Horne lamented to Roy O. Disney, Walt’s brother and business manager, that the magazine “to date . . . has cost me a terrific amount of heartaches and exactly $50,000, all of which seems such a crime when you consider the magazine has been loved by those who have read it.”7 Roy was sympathetic. In February 1936 he wrote to Horne that he was “more concerned now with saving you from a loss than with trying to get any revenue from the magazine.” Accordingly, he authorized Horne to publish the magazine on “a non-royalty basis” for the rest of the year. Horne published Mickey Mouse Magazine for only a few more months, through the June 1936 issue, with sales declining almost every month. In early June, as the July 1936 issue went to press, Horne surrendered the magazine to a new publisher.8 He then became a producer for RKO Radio Pictures, which Walt and Roy Disney had chosen as their cartoons’ new distributor three months earlier.9 In August 1936 Horne sold his “gag library” to Walt Disney for twenty thousand dollars, for use by the writers of the Disney animated cartoons and comic strips.10 They received it with a predictable lack of enthusiasm. Buying the library was probably, at least in part, Disney’s way of compensating Horne for his losses on Mickey Mouse Magazine. Herman “Kay” Kamen, a former Kansas City, Missouri, advertising man, succeeded Horne as Mickey Mouse Magazine’s publisher. Kamen, in charge of Disney’s licensing efforts since July 1932, was an energetic and resourceful businessman who had talked himself into a deal in which he and Disney split the proceeds from licensing the Disney cartoon characters

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 17

27/09/14 2:40 PM

18 | Chapter 1

to other companies. Kamen delivered on that deal, spectacularly, by traveling incessantly and licensing Mickey Mouse and other characters to hundreds of manufacturers. The official total, when Mickey Mouse Magazine began publication in May 1935, was 230.11 Kamen had been based in New York since 1932,12 so there were no geographic obstacles to his taking charge of Mickey Mouse Magazine. Moreover, by 1935 there were in Kamen’s offices, as the New York Times reported, “workrooms where Disney artists, trained in the technique of the Hollywood studio, draw the countless pictures used in Mickey’s commercial undertakings.”13 Whatever that meant, exactly— there is scant evidence in Mickey Mouse Magazine of 1936–37 of successful training in how to draw the Disney characters—Kamen at least had plenty of people available to fill the magazine’s pages. But despite his success in licensing the Disney characters, Kamen was no more successful as a magazine publisher than Horne had been. Success for a Disney magazine would come only when that magazine became a comic book, but in 1937 that was not a conclusion that anyone connected with Mickey Mouse Magazine had yet reached. Disney comics of a sort, self-contained gag pages with dialogue balloons, appeared sporadically starting with Mickey Mouse Magazine’s first issue, but when the magazine began reprinting full-color Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies Sunday pages, as of the July 1937 issue, they stood apart from the rest of the contents by virtue of their crisp professionalism. That issue was also the first since the very first one, in 1935, to have half its pages in full color, and it was the first to be published not by Kay Kamen Ltd. but by a new corporation that borrowed Kamen’s initials: K.K. Publications. K.K.’s address was the same as that of the Kamen firm, 1270 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, but there was a signal of major change in the fine print that identified the magazine’s owners and its status with the post office. There was now “additional entry at Poughkeepsie, N.Y.”—that is, authorization to mail the magazine from that city eighty-five miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Valley. Poughkeepsie had become the site in October 1934 of Western Printing & Lithographing Company’s first plant outside its home base of Racine, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan. Western was by then already a leading publisher of children’s books, and in 1937 it was on the verge of also becoming a publisher of children’s magazines—comic books included. Western traced its origins to September 1907, when Edward Henry Wadewitz, a son of German immigrants and the twenty-nine-year-old

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 18

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Mickey in a Magazine |

19

bookkeeper for a Racine ship chandlery, bought the West Side Printing Company, a struggling basement print shop. The purchase price almost equaled what the print shop owed Wadewitz in fees for the bookkeeping services he had provided in his spare time. Wadewitz knew nothing about printing, but he wanted a business of his own, and within a year he took on a partner, Roy A. Spencer, who was an experienced printer. The company—incorporated as Western Printing & Lithographing in August 1910, after the addition of lithographic presses—grew steadily until by 1914 it occupied a six-story building in Racine. Western entered book publishing on February 9, 1916. As the chief creditor of a failed Chicago publisher named Hamming-Whitman, it acquired all of Hamming-Whitman’s assets, including its unsold books and the Whitman name. Later that month, Western set up Whitman Publishing Company as a subsidiary and began manufacturing and selling its own juvenile books.14 By the 1930s, Western was producing not only children’s books under the Whitman name, but also dozens of titles for other publishers. It was, besides, a leading producer of playing cards, games, and greeting cards, as well as being a large-volume commercial printer. In 1934, as a company publication said, Western was “looking for a site in the East, preferably within 100 miles of New York City, primarily to better and more economically serve the very substantial eastern markets.”15 Western found what it wanted in Poughkeepsie: an empty 125,000-squarefoot building on the Albany Post Road. The new plant had been built twenty-five years earlier to make Fiat automobiles when that Italian company was trying to establish itself in the American market. When K.K. Publications came into existence in 1937, there was already a strong link between Western and Disney. Western was one of the earliest licensees for Disney books—an association that had its beginnings on April 19, 1933, when Samuel E. Lowe of Whitman wrote to Walt Disney. He explained that Whitman had just launched the Big Little Books, chubby little books that fit in the palm of a child’s hand and told their stories through text and drawings on facing pages. Lowe sent Disney the first two, which were based on the popular comic-strip characters Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie. (The drawings were taken from the comic strips and the text adapted from the dialogue balloons.) He wrote: “Dick Tracy came out about two or three weeks before Christmas [1932], and we have printed over six hundred thousand of these books. Orphan Annie has been out about five weeks and we have printed over six hundred thousand. In the case of Dick Tracy

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 19

27/09/14 2:40 PM

20 | Chapter 1

we are already publishing a second book and we are planning to do the same with Orphan Annie. . . . We wonder if it is possible to get the right to Mickey Mouse in a book of this kind, which is different than anything already published.”16 Roy Disney’s response was positive—with sales figures like those in Lowe’s letter, it was unlikely to be otherwise—and later in 1933 Whitman published its first two Disney books—a Mickey Mouse coloring book and a Big Little Book, titled simply Mickey Mouse, that reworked a 1931 episode, “Mickey Mouse and the Gypsies,” from the Mickey Mouse comic strip.17 Before long, Western was producing all the Disney-licensed books, whether they were published by Whitman or some other company.18 In 1937, two and a half years after the opening of Western’s Poughkeepsie plant, its close relationship with Disney found additional expression in K.K. Publications and Mickey Mouse Magazine. In a 1979 memorandum, Howard Anderson, who was working for Kay Kamen in 1937 and later became Western Printing’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, recalled K.K. Publications’ genesis: K.K. Publications, Inc., came into existence in April 1937 for the purpose of taking over the publication of the Mickey Mouse Magazine. . . . [I]t was owned 60 percent by Kay Kamen, Ltd., and 40 percent by E. H. Wadewitz. . . . When K.K. Publications, Inc., was formed Western took over the printing of the magazine. In mid-1938 the subscription promotion and fulfillment function was moved from Kay Kamen’s office in New York to Western’s plant at Poughkeepsie. The Mickey Mouse Magazine (circulation 45,000) continued to be published by K.K. Publications, Inc., until the fall of 1940. It was not a profitable venture and it was decided that a change in format was necessary. In September 1940 it was decided that Western, through K.K. Publications, Inc., would take over the entire ownership. The 60 percent of the capital stock in K.K. Publications, Inc., which had been owned by Kay Kamen, Ltd., was transferred to two other individual Westerners, R. S. Callender and F. J. Leyerle, thus putting 100 percent ownership within Western. At the same time it was decided to discontinue the Mickey Mouse Magazine and in its place a new publication, namely Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, was born.19

Assuming Anderson’s circulation figure is correct, Mickey Mouse Magazine’s sales had continued to slide since Hal Horne’s departure—a slide that may have been all the more galling because a new and competing children’s magazine, Curtis Publishing’s Jack and Jill, was prov-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 20

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Mickey in a Magazine |

21

ing to be far more successful. In June 1939, eight months after Jack and Jill’s launch, Curtis claimed that monthly circulation had risen to 125,000, at a cover price of twenty-five cents, the same as the fading St. Nicholas, versus Mickey Mouse Magazine’s dime.20 In light of such a marketplace defeat, converting Mickey Mouse Magazine to a comic book might have seemed like an obvious and appealing response. But by mid-1939, two years after reprinted Disney comic strips began appearing in the magazine, they had never established much more than a toehold, usually taking up only five pages. Despite the occasional ballyhooing of the comic strips on the cover of the magazine, there was always the sense that its editors begrudged the pages given to them. Mickey Mouse was listed facetiously as editor on the magazine’s masthead, but the real editor by the fall of 1938, as identified in an annual statement required by the U.S. Post Office, was Lily Duplaix. She was the wife of Georges Duplaix, a French artist who had worked for the Artists & Writers Guild, a whimsically named Western Printing subsidiary, from around the time it opened its doors in Manhattan in 1935.21 The Artists & Writers Guild—which was in no sense a true guild—packaged children’s books for other publishers, thereby generating printing work for Western. By the time Georges Duplaix became its director in 1940, the Guild was making a serious effort to drive down the prices of such books, to increase their sales and take advantage of the Poughkeepsie printing plant’s economies of scale. Western’s price cutting bore fruit most spectacularly in the Little Golden Books, priced at twenty-five cents each when Simon & Schuster first offered them in 1942. In Leonard Marcus’s words, “It soon became clear that, at twenty-five cents, millions of parents would take a chance . . . by purchasing Little Golden Books not just one at a time but by the handful.”22 Such mass-market books were, along with the children’s books that Western published under its own Whitman label, regarded with distaste or worse by most other trade publishers, by traditional booksellers, and especially by librarians. Those people had even less use for comic books. Mickey Mouse Magazine’s gingerly handling of its comic-strip content amounted to a sort of confession that giving the comics more prominence really would doom the magazine, and thus the people associated with it, to permanent pariah status. Jack and Jill made scarcely a bow toward the comics, apart from a couple of one-page “picture stories” in each issue, and it was, in its prevailing sweetness and gentleness, the antithesis of most early comic books. Mickey Mouse Magazine in its Hal Horne phase proclaimed itself

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 21

27/09/14 2:40 PM

22 | Chapter 1

“A Fun-Book for Boys and Girls to Read to Grown-ups,” but Jack and Jill was much more the sort of insistently wholesome magazine that parents were likely to buy for their children. Jack and Jill’s one true comics page, “Peggy and Her Pinto Pony,” complete with dialogue balloons, vanished after two early-1939 appearances. By late in the 1930s, though, comic books were clearly ascendant: they were the publications that children eagerly bought and read even when their parents hesitated. It had taken the comic book a surprisingly long time to assume its definitive shape. Comic books of a sort, reprinting comic strips (often in hard covers), had appeared early in the twentieth century, soon after the first true comic strips appeared in newspapers, but what now seems like a short and natural step—to original comic-book narratives extending over multiple pages—took a surprisingly long time, awaiting an inspiration like the one that Harry Wildenberg described to John Vosburgh. It was not until Superman’s debut that a feature appeared whose leading character seemed to be perfectly suited to the new format: a generic mythological figure, as coarse and obvious as the color and the paper. But even that was deceptive. Superman’s writer and artist—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, respectively—envisioned their creation not as a comicbook feature, but as a newspaper comic strip, and they accepted a meager offer from a comic-book publisher only when the syndicates that distributed comic strips turned them down. In a publishing environment changed dramatically by the popularity of Superman and the superpowered characters that followed him, Mickey Mouse Magazine underwent what now seems like an inevitable transformation into a comic book. As of the September 1939 issue, its entire contents were printed in full color, and its covers on slick paper. With the June 1940 issue, its dimensions shrank slightly, to those of a standard ten-cent comic book. Then, with its last issue, dated September 1940, Mickey Mouse Magazine doubled in page count, to sixtyfour—the usual number of pages in a contemporaneous comic book— with reprinted comics filling thirty-four of those pages. It had become a comic book in all but name, anticipating the introduction of the new Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories the next month. The October 1940 Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, vol. 1, no. 1, was a real comic book with more than forty pages of reprinted newspaper comic strips—the culmination of the halting progress that had begun with the July 1937 issue of Mickey Mouse Magazine. It had been beaten to the newsstands by two other Western Printing comic books, as Howard Anderson explained: “In addition to publishing Walt Dis-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 22

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Mickey in a Magazine |

23

ney’s Comics and Stories K.K. Publications, Inc., took over the publication of Super Comics and Crackerjack [sic] Funnies, which prior to that time had been published by Western under an operation designated as ‘Whitman Newsstands’ . . . . These three publications made up Western’s entry into the comic magazine business.”23 Western introduced both Super Comics and Crackajack Funnies early in 1938, less than a year after taking charge of Mickey Mouse Magazine. Like many other early comic books, Super and Crackajack offered mostly reprinted newspaper comics—a few pages each of a wide range of Sunday pages, straight adventure alongside slapstick comedy. Even though comic books with new material had multiplied thanks to Superman’s success, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, when it made its debut in 1940, was still very much a mainstream comic book in its reliance on reprinted comic strips. Some of those comic strips were selfcontained gags (Donald Duck), and others were continuing adventure stories (Mickey Mouse). Many of the reprinted strips in Walt Disney’s Comics were a surprisingly awkward source for the content of a children’s magazine. The comic strips, products of the Depression years, portrayed a harsh world that invited correspondingly harsh laughter when they were supposed to be funny at all. Mickey Mouse, especially in the continuing stories of the daily strip, was an adventure hero whose life was threatened, fiercely and sometimes for days at a time, by murderous thugs. Donald Duck, in that gag-a-day strip, was often portrayed as a malicious delinquent whose misdeeds were repaid by savage beatings. Walt Disney’s Comics was, moreover, anachronistic in its reliance on text pieces like those that dominated Mickey Mouse Magazine until 1940. When the Disney animated feature Dumbo was adapted for Walt Disney’s Comics, it was not as comics but as text, spread over four issues, like the adaptations of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio in Mickey Mouse Magazine before it. But such was the public’s appetite for comic books in the early 1940s, and such the popularity of the Disney characters, that the circulation of Walt Disney’s Comics immediately outstripped that of Mickey Mouse Magazine. Western paid a tiny royalty—one quarter of a cent—to Disney and other copyright holders on each copy of a ten-cent comic book it printed, with the royalty payable upon completion of the print run. As E. H. Wadewitz explained to one of his licensors, the comic-book royalty was only half the royalty on children’s books sold through chain stores because “the distributor must have a larger margin in order to

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 23

27/09/14 2:40 PM

24 | Chapter 1

allow for returns of unsold copies.”24 But there was a trade-off: the licensor got paid for every comic book printed, even though 40 percent or more of those copies might not be sold. It was a trade-off that could become more attractive as sales and print runs rose. Western paid Disney royalties on 252,000 copies of the first issue of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories.25 Two years later, as of no. 24, the September 1942 issue, Western for the first time paid Disney a royalty on a million copies of Walt Disney’s Comics,26 and sales were continuing to rise. By 1942, Western Printing had long since opened a Los Angeles office, the better to be close to Disney and the other movie studios whose cartoon characters, in particular, were becoming increasingly important to it. Western had hired as a liaison with the studios Eleanor Packer, a widow in her early forties who had written Whitman books for years and had worked for a major studio besides. That office would become a vital adjunct to Western’s original comic-book operation based in New York City.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 24

27/09/14 2:40 PM

2

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly

Between 1935 and 1939, a German immigrant named Oskar Lebeck illustrated at least three coloring books for Western Printing & Lithographing’s consumer arm, Whitman Publishing. He also illustrated a Whitman softcover potpourri of fiction and fact for children called Chatterbox, drawing for all of those books in a spare, cleanly inked style. In addition, he wrote and illustrated three hardcover books and illustrated one more, an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, for Grosset & Dunlap, which was, like Whitman, a producer of mass-market children’s books, most notably the series with the juvenile heroes Tom Swift and Nancy Drew. Lebeck intended his own books for children younger than Tom Swift’s readers, and he may have taken a little too seriously the responsibility of entertaining an audience about the same age as his own daughter (and only child), who was born in 1932. “His humor was a little German, a little heavy,” said Morris “Moe” Gollub, who drew comic books for Western Printing after World War II.1 Indeed, both The Diary of Terwilliger Jellico (1935) and Stop Go: The Story of Automobile City (1936) are hopeless literary plodders. Only Lebeck’s last Grosset book, Clementina the Flying Pig (1939), has real imaginative flair, but that quality turned up in his work at just the right time, when he was hiring artists and writers some of whom turned out to have talents greater than his own. Because he recognized and nurtured those talents, Lebeck became one of the very few comic-book editors of real 25

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 25

27/09/14 2:40 PM

26 | Chapter 2

importance, and his comic books among the very few that published stories of lasting value. Grosset & Dunlap’s kinship with Western Printing was closer than mere resemblance to Whitman. In 1935, Grosset was the first customer for Western’s new Artists & Writers Guild, the subsidiary that packaged children’s books for other publishers. There is nothing in Lebeck’s Grosset books to confirm that they originated with the Artists & Writers Guild, but since he was working for Whitman at the same time, they may well have. His association with both Grosset and Whitman probably gave Lebeck a leg up when Western was choosing an editor for its new Whitman comic-book line in 1938, but he had more in his favor than mere visibility. Not only was Lebeck a working artist; he was also, in the words of John Stanley, one of the gifted cartoonists who later wrote and drew for him, “an impressive, imposing man”—he was six feet tall—“who could sell himself anywhere.”2 Lebeck was, said his daughter, Letty, “very gregarious, and people liked it,” even though a German accent was no social advantage in the 1930s and 1940s. “He was easy to make friends with,” she said.3 Lebeck became a Whitman employee no later than March 1938, and he probably edited the first two monthly Whitman comic books, Crackajack Funnies and Super Comics, from their inception in the spring of that year.4 By early in 1939 he was editing not just those comics but two more monthly titles, Popular Comics and The Funnies, after Western began producing them for Dell Publishing Company. With four such titles, Western could have a new monthly comic book on sale almost every week, in addition to the occasional special or one-shot comic. Lebeck’s office was at 200 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, diagonally across Fifth from the Flatiron Building. The sixteen-story office building was called the Toy Center because its tenants were overwhelmingly companies in the toy industry, good neighbors for a company producing children’s books.5 Western opened sales and display offices at the Toy Center sometime in the early 1930s. By 1939, as comic books with original material became increasingly popular, Western and Lebeck were responding by adding a raft of new features, to Popular Comics and The Funnies especially. Those features were for the most part continuing stories in a boy’s-adventure mode. “Shark Egan” (in Popular Comics) was described extravagantly but accurately by the comic-book historian Ron Goulart as “a South Seas adventure opus full of sailing ships, seaplanes, pretty ladies in distress, fabulous caches of pearls, and mutinous crews.”6 The hero of another

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 26

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

27

This photo, showing Oskar Lebeck at work in 1943, was taken in New York at what a handwritten note on the back of the photo identifies as the Martinique, presumably the hotel at 32nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Around the table: clockwise from the left: Ruth Lebeck, Oskar Lebeck’s wife; Leon Schlesinger, the proprietor of the Warner Bros. cartoon studio; Mary DuBois, wife of Lebeck’s premier comic-book writer, Gaylord DuBois; Harold Spencer, a Western Printing & Lithographing Company vice president, general manager of Western’s Poughkeepsie, New York, plant, and the brother of Roy Spencer, one of Western’s founding fathers; Spencer’s wife, Todd; Gaylord DuBois; Oskar Lebeck; and a woman who may be either Schlesinger’s wife, Bernice, or Helen Meyer, Dell Publishing Company’s vice president. Courtesy of Letty Lebeck Edes.

new feature, “Speed Martin” (in The Funnies), was, as Goulart wrote, “an ace newsreel cameraman who roamed the globe,” another figure readily imaginable in series fiction.7 One of the first original features in the comic books Lebeck edited was “John Carter of Mars,” based on novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes. Whitman and Burroughs had by 1939 been doing business for half a dozen years, first through the licensing agent Stephen Slesinger and then directly; Whitman published its first Tarzan Big Little Book in 1933. Adding a Burroughs property to The Funnies, once Western began producing that comic book, must have seemed like a natural step. The first four “John Carter” installments, beginning with The Funnies no. 30, May 1939, were drawn by Jim Gary, but almost immediately John Coleman Burroughs, Edgar Rice’s son, wrote to the Western executive Robert S. Callender to say that he wanted to illustrate “John Carter” him-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 27

27/09/14 2:40 PM

28 | Chapter 2

self. Lebeck replied on May 4, 1939, that he was “of course, delighted,”8 but the surviving correspondence from the next two years, until “John Carter” disappeared from The Funnies, reflects one worry after another. Lebeck was unfailingly diplomatic, but it is clear that editing a comic book when the format itself was still unsettled could be surprisingly difficult. The Funnies, like other early anthology comic books, cast its net for potential readers of many kinds, and so it was packed with features that each took up only a few pages—four pages, at first, in the case of “John Carter,” and later eight. To get more story into that limited space, Lebeck prodded Burroughs to draw pages of eight panels, not five or six.9 Then he resisted paying Burroughs for adapting his father’s first Mars novel to the comics. He mentioned that Western was paying “an exceptionally high royalty” to the senior Burroughs, but there was a more general policy involved: “In all cases where we supply the artist with either book character, or radio or movie script, the artist is handling the writing of the strip with his art work and does not get paid extra for this.” That policy would change soon, as the quantity of original material in the comic books grew and the writing and illustrating of comicbook stories was increasingly in separate hands. Lebeck anticipated the change when he told Burroughs that if “rewriting the strip” was too much work, “let me know and I will do this myself and then send you the script each time.”10 Even the lettering for “John Carter’s” dialogue balloons and captions was a headache. When he got one batch of eight pages, Lebeck complained that the lettering “comes down too small, please have it about twice as large on the next set. We have had quite a number of complaints from our readers that many features in our magazines are hard to read, the lettering being too small.”11 That was a problem for early comic books generally, since so many of their features were reprinted Sunday comic pages that had to be drastically reduced in size to fit onto the smaller comic-book pages. Dialogue balloons were difficult to read in the reduced size, so they were sometimes simplified and relettered to make them legible. The “John Carter” drawings themselves were too small, Lebeck told Burroughs a few months later, after Burroughs sent him a second batch of pages in “reduced size”: “Working in this smaller size and where there are many characters, it is impossible to get a good result, and I hope that your next set will again be done in the larger size.” There was even a problem with the way that Burroughs erased his pencil drawings

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 28

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

29

after he drew over them in ink: “In many spots, the inked work has been very gray and to such an extent, that the camera was unable to pick up the line.”12 Later that year, Lebeck was urging Burroughs not to use the “drybrush” technique, which was “very difficult for us to reproduce . . . on our rotary press plates. We have to shoot for line only, and a lot of the drybrush effect drops out completely where it is too gray and in other cases, it becomes solid black.”13 “John Carter” finally disappeared from The Funnies, in the middle of a continued story, as of no. 56, June 1941. By that time comic books of all kinds, but especially the titles Lebeck oversaw, were going through major changes, and his own role had changed accordingly. When a federal census taker questioned Lebeck on April 18, 1940, he gave his occupation not as “editor” but as “illustrator” for an unidentified publishing company.14 As such things were viewed at Western, the “editorial” function was exercised by those executives at Racine and Poughkeepsie who dealt directly with the copyright holders that licensed use of their characters. Lloyd E. Smith at Racine negotiated contracts, and Robert S. Callender at Poughkeepsie was the editor of Western’s comic books in a general supervisory sense. Lebeck’s job was to assemble the actual contents—the illustrations—of the comic books. As original material filled more and more pages in the comics, that became unquestionably an editor’s job in every important respect. As to how Lebeck went about that work, there is the recollection of a cartoonist named Frank Thomas (not to be confused with the Disney animator of the same name). Lebeck hired Thomas early in 1940 to write and draw the adventures of a masked hero called The Owl starting with Crackajack Funnies no. 26, August 1940. Another cartoonist had drawn the first episode, in the June issue, with The Owl as a shoddy imitation of radio’s Shadow, and Lebeck hired Thomas to transform The Owl into an athletic hero more like Batman. New costumed heroes were proliferating then, and starting late in 1939, all four of Lebeck’s monthlies began publishing stories with new characters best described as clumsy responses to other publishers’ superheroes, most of which were already clumsy enough. Martan the Marvel Man, an alien who regarded the human race with benign condescension, first appeared in Popular Comics no. 46, December 1939. The vaguely Tarzan-like Magic Morro followed in Super Comics no. 21, February 1940, and the gigantic, transparent Phantasmo, “master of the world”—he can, a caption assures the reader, “pick up a mountain and throw it into the sea”—in the July 1940 Funnies, suspiciously soon

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 29

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Crackajack Funnies no. 39, September 1941, cover featuring The Owl, a halfhearted effort by Oskar Lebeck to feed on the popularity of costumed heroes like Batman.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 30

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

31

after a generally similar superhero, The Spectre, debuted in a competitor’s More Fun Comics. Thomas had already originated a handful of superhero features for other early comic-book publishers. He had been sent to Lebeck by Helen Meyer, vice president of Dell Publishing, after he showed her his portfolio; Dell and Western were then in the early stages of their comicbook-publishing collaboration, which would last more than twenty years. The editors and publishers of other early comic books “seemed to be promoters and business men rather than creative types,” Thomas wrote in a 1965 letter. But under Lebeck, the procedure was different than I had before experienced. Oskar was a writer and artist in his own right and recruited a good staff of free-lancers of which I was proud to be one. . . . Oskar usually sparked the original feature idea, then called in the artist-writer he felt was best suited for it, the idea was talked over and enlarged upon, model sheets drawn up, a few pages executed and edited, then full steam ahead. After the first few episodes Oskar left the artist-author to go pretty much on his own, for he respected and encouraged individual talent and tendencies. And most were artist-authors—I recall very few features on which a team of artist and author were employed—that came later.15

As Lebeck’s subsequent career showed, costumed heroes were not his forte, but he did not burden his freelancers with his misgivings. Oskar Lebeck was born in Mannheim, Germany, on August 30, 1903, and immigrated to the United States in March 1927. “Dad was pretty independent,” his daughter recalled, “and I remember [my mother and father] always laughing about it, [that] he left to get away from his mother. . . . Dad came over first, and when he was making some money, so he could get an apartment, my mother [Ruth Seelig] came over [in December 1927], and they got married on Ellis Island”16 In April 1930 a census taker found the Lebecks living in the Forest Hills section of Queens in New York City, with Oskar’s occupation listed as “artist.”17 According to biographical information that he must have provided, Lebeck had worked in Europe as a stage designer for Max Reinhardt. After he came to the United States, he did the same sort of work for Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll on Broadway, and he was also employed as an “industrial designer.”18 Probably, like millions of other people in the Depression years, he scratched for work of almost any kind, and so for him, as for many other artists, comic books were a godsend.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 31

27/09/14 2:40 PM

32 | Chapter 2

Ruth and Oskar Lebeck in 1930, a few years after they immigrated to the United States. Courtesy of Letty Lebeck Edes.

By the spring of 1939, the Lebecks had moved at least twice since leaving Queens—first to Staten Island, and then north to Croton-onHudson in Westchester County, in the Hudson River valley.19 Croton is roughly midway between Manhattan, where Whitman and Dell had their editorial offices, and Poughkeepsie, where Whitman’s parent, Western Printing, had its East Coast plant, so the convenience of the location may have recommended it. By 1941 new stories dominated the Whitman and Dell comic books produced under Lebeck’s aegis—Crackajack, Super, Popular, and The

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 32

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

33

Funnies, plus the occasional color or black-and-white one-shot—even though there were still many pages of reprinted newspaper comic strips. The original material in the Lebeck-edited comic books was drawn by a cluster of young men in their twenties, some of them already veteran illustrators of pulp fiction. One of them, William Ely, told Ron Goulart that his family home in White Plains, New York, north of Manhattan, became what was, in Goulart’s words, “a sort of informal studio for Dell comic book artists.” Lebeck drove to the Ely home to pick up finished pages and deliver scripts.20 This increased activity yielded new features that were for the most part respectably drawn but also strongly reminiscent of newspaper strips or other publishers’ comic books. Lebeck’s young artists especially liked what they saw in Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates comic strip—the fluid brushwork, the rich shadows, the stalwart heroes, the glamorous women, the exotic settings. But there was ultimately no confusing their drawings with Caniff’s. The closest to an exception was Ken Ernst, who drew “Magic Morro”; he lived in Chicago and submitted his work not to Lebeck but to Don Black, an editor at Western’s Racine headquarters, just seventy-five miles north on Lake Michigan. Ernst ultimately became a syndicated cartoonist himself, drawing the Mary Worth comic strip for many years. The superhero fever was ebbing in the Dell comic books as early as the summer of 1941, when Captain Midnight, a radio hero who lacked superpowers, took Phantasmo’s place as the featured character on the cover of The Funnies. At the same time, the emphasis in Super Comics shifted back to comic-strip reprints. Change was in the offing in other respects. Most of Lebeck’s artists were of draft age, and as the military depleted his pool of freelancers, he had to fill his comic books with the work of cartoonists who were either too old for the draft or exempt for other reasons. That was a daunting task, but one of those draft-exempt cartoonists more than took the place of the cartoonists who had left. The big change in the Whitman/Dell titles, the first step toward comic books with an identity distinct from anything else in newspapers or on the newsstands, came a few months before Pearl Harbor, in the fall of 1941, when Walt Kelly connected with Lebeck. Kelly was still in his twenties then, but he was a veteran member of Walt Disney’s animation staff. He was already a competent draftsman when he was in his teens, and his natural bent toward cuteness and comedy fitted him for work on the Disney cartoons. He spent more than five years at that studio, under the tutelage

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 33

27/09/14 2:40 PM

34 | Chapter 2

of experienced animators who drew extremely well. As his high school classmate Ray Dirgo said, “That’s where Kelly learned how to make his drawings look effortless.”21 Kelly’s Disney credentials undoubtedly won him easy entrée to Lebeck’s office. As it happened, though, Kelly drew almost no Disney comics in his first couple of years as a Western freelancer. When he began drawing for Western’s comic books, it was the polish and warmth of his best drawings—not any specific Disney content—that made them so unusual and attractive, and that made his comics work stand out from the beginning. Walter Crawford Kelly Jr. was born in Philadelphia on August 25, 1913, the son of Walter C. Kelly Sr. and Genevieve MacAnnulla Kelly, both native Pennsylvanians; he had one older sister, Bernice. The Kellys moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound sixty miles northeast of New York City, when Walter Jr. was two years old. As he wrote in 1959, “The First World War brought to Bridgeport many strangers to work in the factories.”22 Kelly’s father was one of them; he was a foreman first in an immense Remington Arms munitions plant on Boston Avenue and then for General Electric, after it leased that plant in 1920 to make civilian products. The Kelly home at 478 East Avenue on Bridgeport’s East Side was less than a mile from the plant. Bridgeport’s population burgeoned from just over 100,000 in 1910 to about 175,000 during the war, then fell to 150,000 in the early 1920s and hovered around that figure for the next few decades.23 Despite the strains and labor strife that accompanied its rapid industrial growth, Bridgeport remained, as Kelly described it, an accommodating sort of town for a child. “We had our differences,” he wrote of himself and his schoolmates, “fighting over the important things, such as erasers, marbles, candy, but we didn’t quarrel about race or name. . . . It would be nice, Manhattan, if everything outside New York were Bridgeport . . . which was more flower pot than melting pot, more by-way than highway, maybe even more end than beginning.”24 In 1969, speaking to other cartoonists in blunter language than he had used in print a decade earlier, he called Bridgeport a “good town,” even though lacking in important respects. “Such sophistication as it had was brought back by kids from college and so on. And it hated New Yorkers, and it hated Negroes, and it hated Jews, hated anybody that was outspoken or needed something done for them. So it was a very crab-ass town, but a great place to grow up until you get to be about 14 years of age.”25

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 34

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

35

It seems likely that Kelly’s memories of Bridgeport, and then his proximity to it when he was drawing comic books and living elsewhere in Connecticut, shaped at least a few of his stories, particularly those in Our Gang Comics. Not that Kelly and his friends ever had to deal with exotic threats like those that the children in the “Our Gang” stories encountered repeatedly, but the stories took place in mundane, Bridgeport-like surroundings where children could roam freely without worrying their parents. “In my early teens,” Kelly wrote many years later, “I started work as a high-school reporter for the Bridgeport Post. This came about because while still somewhat of a recluse [because of a prolonged illness], I had submitted some drawings to the Sunday Post for its Junior Page section. Out of this, I became the high-school reporter.”26 Kelly also drew cartoons for the student newspaper and yearbook at Warren Harding High School. Ray Dirgo told Bill Crouch Jr. that art instruction at Harding, like the city of Bridgeport itself, had a distinctly utilitarian cast: “[Y]ou had to take mechanical drawing. This was because some people would be eventually getting jobs in the local factories as draftsmen. Then you were able to get into fine art. Mostly it boiled down to a lot of drawing of a vase with a flower stuck in it and stuff like that. However, if you did art like Kelly and I did”—that is, drawings in imitation of popular cartoonists of the time, like Percy Crosby (Skippy) and Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs)—“you were able to work on a poster or cartoon during regular class time.” Dirgo continued: “I’d had a course on lettering from a guy from Yale who was a friend of the art teacher. . . . Because of this I could letter better than Kelly in high school. Normally we’d get out of school about 2 p.m. and Kelly would head off to the newspaper. However, he wanted to pick up some of this stuff I’d learned and we would go up to the art department and work on lettering. He got good at it”—a statement buttressed by the expressive character of the comic-book and comic-strip lettering that is recognizably Kelly’s own, notably in the Pogo comic strip of the early 1950s.27 After Kelly graduated in 1930 there followed what he called “a brief period of factory work,” a few weeks or months of the sort of patchy employment awaiting many people in the early years of the Great Depression. According to a biography distributed by the Post-Hall Syndicate in the early months of Pogo’s national syndication (a biography that gives every sign of having been written by Kelly himself), that factory work consisted first of “wrapping scrap cloth in a factory that

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 35

27/09/14 2:40 PM

36 | Chapter 2

manufactured undergarments for ladies,” and then, when that job ended, “smashing faulty switches” in an electrical appliance plant (almost certainly General Electric, his father’s employer).28 But then, Kelly wrote, “the Post called me back and wondered if I would lend my highly imaginative style to general assignments. By sheer drift I was next assigned to the art department—indeed, for a long spell, I was it. During this time, fascinated by the angry, funny political work of J. N. (Ding) Darling, I experimented with political cartooning, because Bridgeport was face to face with the Depression and a change was in the air.”29 Kelly drew what he described as his first political cartoons for the Post, including some supporting Jasper McLevy, the Socialist Party candidate for mayor in the 1931 and 1933 city elections.30 McLevy was victorious in November 1933, but without any help from Kelly cartoons; the newspaper published no editorial cartoons in the weeks before the election except for one syndicated cartoon each Sunday by Ding Darling. Kelly seems to have made his most significant artistic contribution to the Post for seven months starting in July 1931, when he illustrated four panels a day of “P. T. Barnum’s Life in Pictures and Prose.” Barnum, the nineteenth-century showman and circus magnate, was at one time Bridgeport’s mayor and is still remembered as the city’s most famous resident. Not long after McLevy was elected mayor, Kelly left the Post to take a job as an investigator for Bridgeport’s welfare department.31 When he left (or lost) that job, probably by early in 1935, there followed what the syndicate’s biography called “a short engagement as a clerk in an art store, most of which time was spent hunting rats in the cellar.”32 Next was a stint as an unsuccessful freelance artist in New York City.33 That period was vague in Kelly’s telling, except for one episode recounted vividly in a 1952 Collier’s profile; it took place just before Christmas. Kelly found work with a window-display company but was tricked into decorating two plate-glass windows with drawings of Santa Claus for the price of one—or, as it turned out, for nothing, since his deceitful employer refused to pay him. Kelly, still in his early twenties, “retreated to my attic. . . . I got back to Bridgeport just in time for Christmas dinner.”34 The “educational history” section of Kelly’s Disney personnel record showed he spent a year studying commercial art at night school, location unspecified, as well as five weeks studying “illustration and life” with Franklin Booth, a famed illustrator of the 1920s. Booth taught at the Phoenix Art Institute, a New York school he cofounded in 1925.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 36

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

37

Kelly told an interviewer: “I was sort of a monitor and swept up the place, this gave me something to do in the afternoons.”35 Booth and Kelly were an odd fit: Booth’s drawings were so grand and meticulously rendered in pen lines that they resembled steel engravings. That was not Kelly’s style, but occasionally some trace of Booth would surface in his later work when grandeur was wanted.36 By late 1935, Walt Disney was expanding his staff in anticipation of the demands that would be imposed by work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the studio’s first animated feature. When Kelly wrote to Disney about a job he got a positive reply, and he left for California. “I borrowed some money from my father, who had to hock everything but the chimney,” Kelly told Murray Robinson of Collier’s, “and I set out for the West by bus.”37 He became a probationary Disney employee on Monday, January 6, 1936.38 In 1935, before he moved west, Kelly drew and probably wrote a few pages for some of the earliest comic books: More Fun, The Comics Magazine, and New Comics. These were simple one- or two-page features, not really comics at all. “The Little People, Irish Tales by Walt Kelly” from More Fun no. 8, February 1936, comes closest—twelve small panels on one page, with captions and no dialogue balloons—but a full page like “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” from More Fun no. 7, January 1936, filled with “little folk” that strongly resemble Palmer Cox’s Brownies, would have fit just as well in a traditional children’s magazine. Kelly drew at least one page for the most venerable of such magazines, St. Nicholas, illustrating a poem by Dorothy Brown Thompson, “Ballad of a Hunter of Renown,” for the November 1935 issue. The hunter is a vainglorious boy, and the page anticipates the illustrated poems Kelly contributed to the Dell comic books ten years later. Kelly’s move west and into animation may have been stimulated not so much by his desire to become a full-time cartoonist as by his infatuation with Helen De Lacy, a Bridgeport woman almost seven years his senior who had just moved to Oakland, California, to take a job as an executive with the Girl Scouts. Kelly met her at choir practice at the Methodist church they both attended. They were engaged by June 1937; she resigned then from her job with the Girl Scouts, effective in September 1937, the month she married Kelly.39 Clair Weeks, who eventually became a Disney animator, remembered that out of a “class” of perhaps three dozen men, only he and Kelly and one other candidate survived the probationary period to become permanent Disney employees. He said:

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 37

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Early Walt Kelly efforts like this page for the November 1935 issue of St. Nicholas: The Magazine of Youth anticipated the illustrations he would contribute to many Dell comic books for very young children in the 1940s.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 38

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

39

Walt Kelly and I used to go up on the hill behind the annex [the building that housed the pool of “inbetweeners,” or animation apprentices] at noontime and eat our little sack lunch and contemplate our futures—wondering what we were doing and whether we were going to make it or not. It was a very uncertain time of life for us. He was a very slim, thin little fellow, and he’d been working on a Connecticut newspaper, as a cartoonist. He came out here, with what little money he had, and he decided to take the gamble.

Weeks said that Kelly “was taken up by the story department . . . because he could draw little kids very nicely”—a judgment consistent with Kelly’s drawings for the early comic books, before he moved west. “He used to draw these cute little children while he was practicing inbetweening. . . . He was one of the first of us to sort of graduate and go across the street [to the main Disney plant]. In those days, crossing the street was like crossing the Red Sea, or the Rubicon, or something; that meant you had arrived.”40 Ward Kimball, who joined the Disney staff in 1934 and was by the late 1930s one of the studio’s premier animators, remembered that Kelly “made very funny drawings, and when it was decided that we needed extra animators, he left the story department and took a crack at animation.”41 In 1939 Kelly began working as a junior animator under Fred Moore, a leading Disney animator, and also, less often, under Kimball.42 Kelly eventually animated dozens of relatively simple scenes in four early Disney features (Pinocchio, Fantasia, The Reluctant Dragon, and Dumbo) as well as parts of a couple of Mickey Mouse shorts. “We loved the way he drew Mickey Mouse,” Kimball said. “His proportions were very subtly different from the model sheet, and even the accredited authority for Mickey Mouse, Fred Moore, would always laugh at Kelly’s drawings. They were just basically funny. In fact, everything he drew was funny.” Kelly in Kimball’s recollection, as in Clair Weeks’s, resembled a cartoon character himself: the stock editorial-cartoon image of “John Q. Public,” “the thin guy with the moustache and the bow tie . . . stoopshouldered, very thin. He always drew himself exactly like John Q. Public” in the caricatures of one another that the Disney animators exchanged constantly. “If anything slightly crazy would happen,” Kimball said, “we’d all draw a gag about it.”43 Kelly was slender—he weighed around 160 pounds when he registered for the military draft in October 1940, although at six feet tall, he was not the “little fellow” Clair Weeks remembered.44 Despite his meek

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 39

27/09/14 2:40 PM

40 | Chapter 2

appearance, Kelly plunged enthusiastically into the rowdy clowning that was typical of the Disney animators, who were overwhelmingly young and energetic as well as talented. Kimball spoke of “playing football in the hall, Kelly and Fred Moore on one side, Bud Swift [Kimball’s assistant, David Swift] and me on the other. We’d kick off in the narrow hallway and the boys in the rooms would have to close their doors, because the football would ricochet and go flying in every direction.”45 Hank Ketcham, who joined the Disney staff in October 1939 and in the 1950s became a famous newspaper cartoonist (Dennis the Menace), remembered Kelly as “a cigar-smoking Irishman who just loved his waking hours. He laughed loudly, and he was a great dramatist; he could act things out in a very funny way. He was a Charlie Chaplin freak and liked to caricature guys with canes and top hats. . . . Kelly was pretty much of a realist, and quite a cynic; a lot of things he didn’t care for.”46 That posture may have provoked this note in Kelly’s personnel record: “For a while was sort of a sore head griper but got over this at time of leaving.”47 Kelly’s departure from the studio on May 27, 1941—Ward Kimball noted in his journal that Kelly caught a 5:15 train that day, headed east—preceded by less than a day a traumatic strike by several hundred Disney artists.48 The strike began at 6 a.m. on May 28 and lasted two months, with flare-ups after that. Kimball, who did not join the strike, said that Kelly “had friends on strike and he had friends not on strike. He had to make a choice, and he didn’t want to face it.”49 Dave Hilberman, a leader of the striking employees, said many years later that Kelly “left before the strike, he wasn’t going to get involved.”50 Although Kelly told his friends that he was only taking a vacation and would be back, Kimball thought that he was leaving Disney’s for good, to work for a newspaper. Kelly’s prolonged absence from the studio was in fact with his superiors’ blessing. A note in his Disney personnel record said of Kelly that he “was not layed [sic] off but took extended leave of absence because of illness in family.”51 Kelly said many years later: “Someone was needed to take charge.”52 It was his sister, Bernice, two years his senior, who was suffering from some illness that has never been specified, and Kelly wrote from Connecticut to Kimball of “neurotic acrobatics in the family.”53 Kelly’s own life had already been shaped by serious illness. He wrote in a memoir of his childhood in Bridgeport that as a boy he “contracted

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 40

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly |

41

some still mysterious ailment which paralyzed my left side”—possibly, according to a profile of Kelly by the magazine writer Bob Abel, a reaction to a diphtheria antitoxin injection he received in his back.54 That condition kept Kelly out of school for two years, and it was probably what kept him out of military service in World War II. He was rejected when he was called up for induction in the fall of 1943.55 In June, after Kelly returned to Connecticut, he wrote disparagingly about the strikers and their union in a letter to Kimball and Moore: “I noticed that a good many men in newspaper photos of the picket line were amongst those sterling gentlemen who were canned a month or so ago—after living on charity for a good many years.”56 He at first seemed in his letters to be eager to get back to California and animation, but when he returned to Los Angeles in July 1941, he told Kimball he had decided to remain in Bridgeport.57 Kelly crossed the picket line on July 25, a week after his conversation with Kimball, to meet with Walt Disney.58 According to Helen Kelly, he went to seek Disney’s help in finding work in the East.59 That help was forthcoming on August 11, the day Disney left on an extended trip to South America. Three letters over his signature went out: to Kay Kamen, to Leo Samuels in Disney’s New York office, and to Marshall “Mike” McClintock, a writer and editor of the books that Whitman produced through its Artists & Writers Guild subsidiary. Disney’s letters, describing Kelly as a “former employee,” said that he had “a complete understanding of the handling of any and all of our characters” and urged the recipients to get in touch with Kelly at his Bridgeport address.60 A couple of weeks later, Samuels wrote Disney that McClintock was following through: “Mike advised that he is getting in touch with Kelly to have him come in to New York with a view towards giving him some free lance work.”61 It was undoubtedly through McClintock that Kelly met Oskar Lebeck and began drawing comic books for him around the time of his formal separation from Disney on September 12, 1941. According to Bill Crouch Jr., in fragmentary notes based on Helen Kelly’s memories, the Kellys settled first in Nichols, a town northeast of Bridgeport. Presumably Bernice’s illness was no longer an impediment to Walt’s leaving his parents’ home for a home of his own; neither was it needed as a reason for staying away from his job at Disney. Kelly drew comic books at home and commuted by train from Bridgeport to New York City three days a week to deliver finished work and pick up new assignments. The Kellys moved seven times in two years, alighting briefly in New York City and at Oskar Lebeck’s home in Croton.62

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 41

27/09/14 2:40 PM

42 | Chapter 2

Kelly wrote to Walt Disney around November 1 to thank his former employer for his help: “Your letters to your friends in New York were invaluable—and through them I’ve managed to land enough free lance work to keep out of the bread lines. As a matter of fact everybody has been quite friendly and generous toward me—and this attitude was due to the warmth of your letters.”63 A note on Kelly’s “value” in his personnel record said that he “was beginning to click on comedy action” just before he left the studio, but, even so, if he had returned to animation after the strike he could have been vulnerable to a layoff. He had skipped the “cleanup” step when he became an animator—the step above inbetweening, and preceding animation itself—and he was thus “very weak and costly” on animation’s purely technical requirements. “Also,” his personnel record noted in its telegraphic style, “work often so rough that cleanup and inbetween work on scenes very costly.” Expensive animators were a luxury Disney could not afford in the straitened environment that followed the strike. For Kelly, comic-book work in New York, so close to Bridgeport, was an obvious alternative to animation: he had already done such work, and the comic-book industry in 1941 was far more robust than in 1935.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 42

27/09/14 2:40 PM

3

Whitman, K.K., and Dell

In September 1929, Whitman published A Story of Our Gang, a children’s book based on the Hal Roach movie shorts.1 It was the first Whitman book written by Eleanor Lewis Packer, who had arrived in Los Angeles in July 1928, six months before her thirtieth birthday. Eleanor and her husband were both from Columbus, Ohio, but by early in 1928 they were living in Chicago, where George L. Packer was a sales manager for a stove company. He died in Chicago in April of that year, at the age of thirty-two, of what his death certificate called heart disease. “Fortified with introduction cards from an old Ohio State [University] friend,” the university’s alumni magazine later reported, the newly widowed Eleanor moved to Los Angeles, where she found work as a publicist, first for Douglas Fairbanks and then, six months later, for Hal Roach. While she was with Roach she wrote the Whitman book, which had, she told the alumni magazine, “a circulation of two million and a half copies.” After four months with Roach, she became a publicist for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the distributor of the Roach comedies; she served as the studio’s liaison with writers for fan magazines.2 According to the 1930 federal census, she was living in Beverly Hills with her two young sons and her mother.3 Packer worked as a publicist for MGM until 1933, when she quit and devoted herself to freelance writing.4 By then, she had already begun writing more books with movie tie-ins for Whitman, and she did so throughout the 1930s, mostly Big Little Books based on movies like 43

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 43

27/09/14 2:40 PM

44 | Chapter 3

MGM’s David Copperfield, Treasure Island, and Sequoia. She had become a Western Printing employee by December 1936.5 Ohio State’s alumni magazine reported in 1939: “As Hollywood representative for the Whitman Publishing Company . . . Mrs. Packer . . . handles all of the contacts of the company with the motion picture stars and writes most of the company’s other books based on Hollywood pictures.”6 It was undoubtedly thanks to her Whitman experience that she was chosen to oversee the comic-book operation on the West Coast. Oskar Lebeck, Packer’s counterpart in Whitman’s New York office (and at least nominally her superior), was also an author of massmarket children’s books, and as it turned out, that background subtly shaped the comic books Packer and Lebeck edited, and set them apart from most of their competition. The earliest superhero titles of the late 1930s and early 1940s often seem to have been written and drawn by children—more specifically, by young boys reveling in action of the most extreme and ridiculous kind—and, in fact, many of those cartoonists were no more than a few years removed from high school. The comic books that were emerging from Whitman/Western by 1941 were, by contrast, written and drawn for children, like the Whitman books that preceded them, and their editors and writers and cartoonists were unmistakably adult. That adult status was, to say the least, no guarantee of quality, but the violent children’s fantasies that shaped the superhero comic books were far more confining than the narrative formulas that typically shaped Western’s comic books. By early in 1941, the new Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, produced in Poughkeepsie, was demonstrating the sales potential of comic books based on animated-cartoon characters. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 1, the first comic book produced in Packer’s shop, was published in the summer of 1941. (The official publication date, according to its copyright registration, was August 1.) Its characters—Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd—were the stars of the animated cartoons produced by the Leon Schlesinger studio and distributed by Warner Bros. When Western, using its Whitman name, first got into the comicbook business on the West Coast, its offices were in the Quinby Building at 650 South Grand Avenue, in downtown Los Angeles. Roger Armstrong’s detailed memories of that period were stimulated when he saw, for the first time in more than twenty years, comic books whose stories he had drawn. He remembered “a fellow named [A. L.] Zerbe who had rented the office; he was the West Coast salesman for Whitman for their novelties,” the nonbook items. After Whitman put Packer

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 44

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 1 (1941) was the first comic book produced by Western Printing’s Los Angeles office and also the first based on the Warner Bros. cartoon characters.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 45

27/09/14 2:40 PM

46 | Chapter 3

in charge of the comic books, Armstrong said, “she sort of pre-empted one corner, and bit by bit poor Zerbe got pushed out into the hall.”7 Within a year or so, Packer had moved the Whitman office to the Brighton-Bedford Building at 9629 Brighton Way in Beverly Hills. “It turned out that Eleanor lived in Beverly Hills,” Armstrong said, “so it was more convenient for everybody that we have the office in Beverly Hills.”8 Packer probably met Chase Craig, the first freelance contributor to the comic books she edited, early in the fall of 1939. That was when Craig began assisting another cartoonist, Carl Buettner, with the drawing of a comic strip based on Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquist’s dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.9 The comic strip got off to a rough start in July 1939, as a daily gag drawn by yet another cartoonist. Bergen and the McNaught Syndicate then decided it should be what the Ohio State magazine called “a juvenile adventure strip with a continuous story.” Packer had written several children’s books for Whitman about Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Bergen summoned her to write the comic strip.10 Although the comic strip expired in mid-1940, Packer evidently kept Craig in mind, because he began working for her at Whitman a few months later. Craig said that he was actually hired not by Packer but by Oskar Lebeck. They probably met when Lebeck visited Los Angeles in March 1941, on what was almost certainly his first trip to the West Coast as Western’s comic-book editor.11 Lebeck himself described his position, in 1943, as “art director and art editor of all the books and magazines we do of animated cartoon characters, for which my company holds the license from the various studios.”12 It was, however, Packer who was Craig’s boss; he described her as “virtually a one-woman type of operation. She represented the company in many ways as well as editorially.”13 Roger Armstrong, then twenty-three, was working on the final assembly line at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Burbank when Craig, his senior by seven years—Craig was born in 1910, Armstrong in 1917— invited him to draw a story for the second issue of the new Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics. As was so often the case with early comic books, Armstrong’s hiring was fortuitous: he and Craig had met just once, probably in 1940, when both were drawing comic strips written by a third cartoonist, Fred Fox. Armstrong was filling in temporarily on a strip called Ella Cinders, and Craig was developing a strip, not yet syndicated, called Odd Bodkins. Armstrong said:

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 46

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Whitman, K.K., and Dell |

47

Roger Armstrong believed that his “Porky Pig,” in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 2, November 1941, “must be the worst comic strip ever done in the history of cartooning.” Actually, it had lots of competitors in 1941.

Chase and a fellow named Win Smith had already done the first issue [of Looney Tunes], which included not only the Warner Bros. characters—at that time, the Schlesinger characters—but also an original thing by Win Smith, called “Pat, Patsy and Pete.” It just so happened that the timing was right on the button, and I had my first vacation from Lockheed. I picked up a script, and I spent the two weeks of my vacation doing my first Porky Pig strip. I’ve often thought that I would dearly love to see that monster, because it must be the worst comic strip ever done in the history of cartooning. I had never seen the character Porky Pig, I didn’t have the remotest idea what he looked like. But they said, “Can you do it?” and I said, “Hell, yes, I can do it.” The only model sheet I had was a strip that Chase had done, and his Porky Pig was entirely different from anyone else’s. My Porky Pig was entirely different from any that has been seen before or since. It was so dreadful that I shudder at the recollection. But they hired me.14

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics was published not by Western, as either Whitman or K.K. Publications, but by Dell, an entirely independent company that had been in the comic-book business a lot longer than Western. George Delacorte, who had been “general manager” of pulp fiction magazines called Snappy Stories and Live Stories, started Dell around the end of 1921, publishing at first a single biweekly magazine called I Confess (“A Magazine of Personal Experiences”) with

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 47

27/09/14 2:40 PM

48 | Chapter 3

When Roger Armstrong was photographed in late 1941 or early 1942, he was at work on “Sniffles and Mary Jane” for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 8, June 1942. Courtesy of Roger Armstrong.

a monthly circulation, the company said many years later, of ninety thousand copies. Over the next two decades, the number of Dell titles and their sales expanded tremendously until by 1940, the company later claimed, thirty-nine titles were selling 3.7 million copies a month. Those Dell magazines, which included Modern Screen, Modern Romances, and Inside Detective, were aimed at a broad popular audience that bought them almost entirely through newsstands. Comic books were a natural adjunct.15 George Delacorte was removed, in taste if not entirely in background, from the bulk of his readers. He was born in 1893 to George and Sadie Tonkonogy, Russian Jewish immigrants.16 His ambitious father had sold newspapers and flowers in Chicago and then worked in a freight yard in Philadelphia while he studied English at night school. In New York, according to one early account, Tonkonogy “took up the work of tutoring young men who wanted to enter college but were deficient in mathematics and Latin.”17 He also studied law and became a lawyer in Brooklyn by early in the twentieth century. George Jr. grew up as a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 48

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Whitman, K.K., and Dell |

49

public school student in Brooklyn,18 but he then attended Harvard College before graduating from Columbia University in 1913. He remained George Tonkonogy Jr. for a few more years but in December 1917 changed his name to the less ethnic Delacorte in a Monmouth County, New Jersey, court.19 Delacorte was notably unsentimental about not just the family name but also his company’s publications and their audience. He said in 1943: “First, we publish a group of magazines in the motion picture and in the romance field, which are read by more or less literate people. Then we [publish] a group of pulp paper magazines which are read by less literate people between the ages of approximately 10 and 25. Third, we publish a group of magazines called comics for children between the ages of about three and eight directed to children who have not learned to read as yet, and to those who perhaps mumble with their lips as they read.”20 Dell and Western probably started doing business with each other sometime in 1936, less than two years after Western opened its Poughkeepsie plant. Delacorte said in 1943 that he had no written contract with Western: “It has been an oral agreement for the last seven years.”21 Whatever the nature of that oral agreement, Dell and Western had become tightly connected by 1939. Until then, the McClure Syndicate had been producing Dell’s flagship monthlies—Popular Comics and The Funnies—but early in that year Western assumed that role. Original material copyrighted in the name of the Western executive Robert Callender began appearing in both titles, along with the telltale words about additional postal entry at Poughkeepsie. By late in 1939, Dell was also publishing color one-shot comic books that Western produced. In March 1940 Dell published the first true Disney comic book, a Donald Duck one-shot that reprinted newspaper comic strips.22 The Donald Duck one-shot appeared a full six months before Western converted Mickey Mouse Magazine into Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, and possibly that one-shot served as a trial run for the monthly comic book. It is not clear, though, what kind of lesson Western drew from the one-shot’s sales: Disney received royalties on 335,000 copies of the one-shot,23 a print run more than 80,000 copies larger than that for Walt Disney’s Comics no. 1, so sales of the one-shot may have fallen short of expectations. Or Western may simply have been cautious. Dell published several more Disney one-shot comic books in 1941, after Walt Disney’s Comics was well under way. Western prepared the

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 49

27/09/14 2:40 PM

50 | Chapter 3

content of those comic books, printed their covers, and bound them. (It farmed out the printing of the pulp-paper insides to Eastern Color Printing.) Western sold the comic books to Dell, which distributed them mostly through American News Company, the dominant periodical wholesaler, but also sold them directly to chain stores like Woolworth and Kress, and to mail subscribers. Dell assumed the risk that some retailers might not pay, and since retailers could return unsold copies, it also assumed the cost of those returns. How well a comic book sold for Dell would normally determine how frequently a particular title was published, or whether it was published at all. Oskar Lebeck spoke of submitting rough pencil sketches and color proofs of the covers for approval by George Delacorte or Helen Meyer, Dell’s vice president.24 Meyer said many years later: “Every year I used to go out to Hollywood and see all the new films and cartoons, and then we would work out comics from them.”25 Even so, Dell’s editorial role seems always to have been limited. There are few traces in Western’s surviving correspondence with licensors of deference to Dell in editorial matters. Similarly, Delacorte said in 1943 that it was Dell, rather than Western, that paid royalties to the owners of the licensed characters, citing exact figures for New Funnies—for example, a total of $3,008.97 in December 1942—but that was not true in later years; or Dell may have been only a conduit for payments that originated with Western.26 The comic books themselves were identified as Dell publications, except for the few, notably Walt Disney’s Comics, that were published by K.K. In 1948, the K.K. titles began to carry the Dell label on their covers, and in the same year the Dell comic books first bore, in small type on the inside front cover, the credit line “Designed and produced by Western Printing & Lithographing Co.” Until then, Western was completely invisible to the readers of its comic books. It was an unusual arrangement, but one with a precedent of sorts in the books that Western produced for other publishers through its subsidiary the Artists & Writers Guild. In the early years of its collaboration with Dell, Western had what was probably a similar arrangement with at least two other comic-book publishers. Red Ryder Comics was published at first by Hawley Publications, a Stephen Slesinger company, starting in 1940, but Western produced the comic book for Slesinger. Western’s own K.K. then took over, starting with the sixth issue, in 1942; many Red Ryder features were copyrighted in the name of Robert Callender.27 Also starting in

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 50

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Whitman, K.K., and Dell |

51

1942, Fawcett published the first ten issues of Gene Autry Comics, but, again, there is abundant evidence—for example, a publication address, North Road in Poughkeepsie, the same as that of K.K. Publications— that Western produced most if not all of those comic books for Fawcett. Western began producing Gene Autry Comics for Dell in 1944.28 Western and Dell were by then working together too closely for a third publisher’s involvement to have been less than awkward. The two companies may not have signed their first formal, written agreement until November 29, 1944, when Western agreed to manufacture comic books for Dell; in later years that was the earliest such agreement in Western’s files. The 1944 agreement acknowledged that the two companies had by then been doing business with each other for years. John C. Worrell, a Western vice president, wrote in 1979 that “formal agreements were not nearly as popular in those days as they are today and E. H. Wadewitz, the founder of Western, much preferred to work on a handshake. As a result of this, many of our records are quite incomplete.”29 The library of its comic books that Western maintained at the Racine headquarters dated back only to 1944.30 Even after its affiliation with Dell, Western continued to publish Walt Disney’s Comics, Super Comics, and Crackajack Funnies under the K.K. Publications label. The idea, Howard Anderson explained, was “to always have firsthand knowledge of what was going on in the comic magazine field.”31 But far more of Western’s comic books, like Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics, were published by Dell. That company continued for a time to produce a few comic books of its own; they bore the name of George Delacorte’s son, Albert, as their editor. Albert, who graduated from Princeton University in 1935, also edited some of Dell’s magazines for adults. But by sometime in the early 1940s, the transition was complete, and Western was producing all of Dell’s comic books. By then, a few years after Superman’s debut, costumed superheroes were at the center of the comic-book world, and everything else— including the Dell titles—was on the periphery. Most of the Dell characters originated elsewhere, in other media, and were adapted to comic books; the reverse was true of the superheroes. Dell dropped its few superheroes in the early 1940s, and in subsequent years the Dell titles were conspicuously removed from many other such fashions that swept through the comic-book world. Crime, war, horror, romance, science fiction—there were almost no Dell comic books that could be assigned to any of those categories.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 51

27/09/14 2:40 PM

52 | Chapter 3

Separation from the mainstream bred in the Dell artists and writers a certain detachment that ultimately worked in their favor. They entered the field not because they were attracted to the superheroes, as so many other cartoonists did, but because the work was in some way similar to work they had already been doing. The best of them found challenges in the new industry that they never expected.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 52

27/09/14 2:40 PM

4

Learning on the Job in L.A.

Roger Armstrong’s first story for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, the “monster” he remembered with a shudder, “was a thing about Porky and a character called Dirty Dog, who I think was a Chase Craig invention. I’d never done anything like that before; I’d never worked with animated-type characters.” When Eleanor Packer patched together a Los Angeles–based staff, it was obvious from the first few issues of Looney Tunes that no one involved with it had any comic-book experience, or, for that matter, much experience with comics of any kind, or with the animated characters on which the comic book was based. Armstrong’s drawing style had been influenced by Clifford McBride (who drew the Napoleon comic strip about a large dog) and, he said, “the pen and ink stylists of Punch magazine as well as Charles Dana Gibson and Frank Godwin”—all of them artists who worked in a feathery, freely brushed style that had nothing in common with the sharply defined lines of typical animation drawings.1 The field was open for cartoonists better prepared to work in comic books. Before long, Craig recruited Carl Buettner, his former collaborator on the Charlie McCarthy comic strip, to draw part of the first Bugs Bunny comic book—Dell Large Feature Comic no. 8, a black-and-white comic book published in July 1942, which was in its dimensions (more than an inch larger than a standard comic book vertically and horizontally) and its lack of color an indicator of publishers’ lingering uncertainty about exactly what readers would prefer as the comic-book 53

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 53

27/09/14 2:40 PM

54 | Chapter 4

“Bugs Bunny and the Goofy Goose,” in Bugs Bunny Large Feature Comic no. 8 (1942), was the first story illustrated by Carl Buettner, the dominant cartoonist in Western Printing’s Los Angeles office in the 1940s.

format.2 It was the first one-shot of any kind produced in Western’s Los Angeles office. Craig wrote the comic book’s two stories and drew the first; Buettner drew the second. Roger Armstrong met Buettner for the first time the day that Buettner delivered the completed artwork to Whitman’s office. Armstrong himself was delivering a completed story with Sniffles the mouse, another Schlesinger character, and, he said, “I’ll never forget the condescension with which Buettner looked at it . . . and I was absolutely bowled over by the incredible magnificence (to me at 21–22 years of age) of his material.”3 Buettner was born in Minnesota in 1903, so he was approaching middle age when he drew his first comic-book story, “Bugs Bunny and the Goofy Goose.” He had been working as a cartoonist for about twenty years, including, in the late 1920s, a few years as an instructor

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 54

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Learning on the Job in L.A. |

55

for the Minneapolis-based Federal Schools correspondence courses.4 “The Goofy Goose” is a feeble contrivance, in which Bugs Bunny and other Schlesinger characters encounter the goose that laid the golden eggs, but Buettner’s brushwork, even if lacking in individuality, is strikingly free and assured compared with the labored drawings in Chase Craig’s companion story, “North Woods Mystery,” and with comicbook artwork in general. There was a great deal of room for improvement in the writing as well as the drawing of the comic books. “In those days,” Armstrong wrote in 1967, “[New York] writers were hired to write a lot of the animation characters’ stories and they didn’t know from Tuesday about characterization or anything. . . . So one day, I had one of these dreadful scripts about Porky Pig and I hit a place where it became asinine and un-drawable, so I called Eleanor . . . and explained my problem. She did understand story . . . so she said, OK, if you don’t like the material, go ahead and re-write it so it makes sense. . . . I rewrote the story more in keeping with the character of the pig and from then on, did a great deal of writing for myself and for other cartoonists.”5 By the mid-1940s, Armstrong was writing the Looney Tunes stories with Sniffles, along with some of the “Barney Bear and Benny Burro” stories for Our Gang Comics. As Armstrong’s remarks suggest, there was no hard and fast line between Western’s New York and Los Angeles comic-book operations, and some of the comic books based on Hollywood cartoon characters were produced on the East Coast. The Dell comic book called The Funnies metamorphosed in the spring of 1942 into New Funnies, made up mostly of stories with the Walter Lantz cartoon characters (Andy Panda, Oswald the Rabbit). Although the Lantz studio was in Hollywood, New Funnies was produced in New York by cartoonists working under Oskar Lebeck. Likewise, when Western and Dell launched Our Gang Comics in 1942, its characters were the stars of MGM’s live-action shorts and cartoons, but the stories were written and drawn by New York–based cartoonists. Lebeck was actually “the first art editor we had” in the Los Angeles office, Roger Armstrong said, even though he was based in New York. “He was a fantastic guy, because he was the kind of editor who, when he came out here, would look at your stuff and say he didn’t like this and he didn’t like that, ‘but we’ll run it. But next time . . .’ What Oskar would do was give you suggestions on how he felt it could be improved, but he didn’t lay down rigid rules.”6 Armstrong wrote many years later that he never met Lebeck, but knew him only through his “kindly and helpful letters.”7

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 55

27/09/14 2:40 PM

56 | Chapter 4

Armstrong remembered early efforts to bring to the Looney Tunes comic book some of the flavor of the Schlesinger cartoons, which were by the early 1940s very popular with theater audiences. “We used to get the word to be at the Warner Bros. studio at such-and-such a time on suchand-such a night. It was a big gala evening, and we’d go there and sit through maybe fifteen Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, which were supposed to supply us with ideas. I used to live up on Gramercy Place, four or five blocks from the studio, and in the afternoon, if I’d get bored drawing and feel like being entertained, I’d just wander down to the studio and commandeer a projectionist and a projection room and say, ‘I want to see ten Bugs Bunny cartoons.’ Any ten. I just sat there watching them, all by myself, munching popcorn in absolute lone grandeur.”8 Armstrong wrote of going “to Schlesinger’s in the early 1940s, to get Leon’s O.K. on my Porkys, Bugs & Sniffles pages,”9 but it is open to question just how seriously any of the cartoon studios regarded the comic books, especially since they seem not to have been disturbed that the comics so often diverged from the screen versions of their characters. Another of Packer’s cartoonists, Veve Risto, wrote of going to the Schlesinger studio to pick up model sheets of the characters, but not for approval of his work.10 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics in its first few years looked different from the animated cartoons—naturally enough. At the start no one drawing the stories had worked for the Schlesinger studio or had any significant animation experience at all, except for Chase Craig. A native of Texas who studied cartooning in Chicago, Craig moved to California in 1935. He worked for Lantz and Schlesinger briefly, and then tried out for animation at the Disney studio early in 1939, apparently without success.11 He next entered newspaper comics with a short-lived Los Angeles Daily News comic strip, Hollywood Hams.12 Carl Buettner, according to one biography, “worked in the animation departments of several of the major studios” after moving west, but he left no traces there.13 The comic book also differed from the cartoons in more peculiar ways. Bugs Bunny, who soared in popularity in 1940 and 1941, was a secondary character in the early issues of the comic book; “Porky Pig” was the lead feature in most issues. Daffy Duck, who first appeared in a cartoon in 1937, appeared in the comic book only in the tiniest of bit parts, and in one he spoke with a stereotypical “black” accent. Even though so many Schlesinger characters were being neglected, Packer filled out the comic book with features of Western’s own.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 56

27/09/14 2:40 PM

Learning on the Job in L.A. |

57

Those stories were copyrighted not by Western but by Robert Callender, the Western executive who was one of the three co-owners of K.K. Publications; he subsequently assigned his copyrights to Western, under its Whitman name. Similarly, Oskar Lebeck copyrighted in his own name the comic books and features that he originated on the East Coast, later assigning the copyrights to Western. This odd procedure may have grown out of a misapplication of patent law, where the applicant was supposed to be the “actual inventor,” to copyright. In any case, the copyrights helped to camouflage Western’s involvement, since it was not acknowledged otherwise in the comic books in the years when Callender and Lebeck were claiming copyright. Western’s annual reports to stockholders for 1943–45—possibly the earliest surviving reports, and certainly the earliest that are accessible—do not even mention comic books, and the only bow toward comic books in the 1946 annual report is a photo of a fanned-out assortment of Dell and K.K. Publications titles.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 57

27/09/14 2:40 PM

5

A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff

One of Walt Kelly’s first stories in a Dell or K.K. comic book appeared in the first issue, dated February 1942, of the very unusual Camp Comics. The “camp” in the title referred to the military facilities where thousands of new draftees were learning to be soldiers. Every page of the comic book was pitched directly to draft-age men, from the photo of a pretty girl on the front cover to the cigarette ad on the back. Western’s collaboration with Dell was still taking shape in in early 1942, and Camp Comics was published not by Dell but by Western itself, first in its Whitman guise and then as K.K. Publications. It was an odd stablemate for Western’s most important K.K. title, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. Camp Comics lasted only three monthly issues, but Kelly drew a slapstick feature called “Seaman Sy Wheeler” for all three, initialing the first story “WK” in its last panel. In the second installment, Kelly caricatured himself behind a hotel counter. He is wearing glasses and a moustache. Standing beside him is a taller, more dapper figure with a receding hairline: Oskar Lebeck. This may have been the only time Lebeck appeared, drawn or otherwise, in one of the comic books he edited. Kelly caricatured himself again in the third installment of “Sy Wheeler,” as a railroad ticket agent, and he caricatured Ward Kimball as an obnoxious child passenger. More caricatures of his colleagues at Disney and Western would follow in other comic books.

58

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 58

27/09/14 2:40 PM

A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff |

59

“Seaman Sy Wheeler,” by Walt Kelly, appeared in Camp Comics no. 2, March 1942, a comic book intended for young men newly inducted into the armed services. The two men standing together behind the desk are Kelly’s caricatures of Oskar Lebeck, on the left, and Kelly himself.

Kelly also drew a two-page feature, “Elmer and Bugs Bunny,” for the first issue of Camp Comics. He thus drew comics with the Warner Bros. cartoon characters before he drew any Disney comics. Dan Noonan knew Kelly at Disney and wrote and drew comic books for Lebeck after World War II. He told Bill Spicer and Vince Davis: “The thing that struck me about Lebeck more than anything else was his feel for what was ‘right’—what was good, and what was genuinely funny. He had this feel for Walt Kelly’s stuff long before anyone else had it.”1 It was presumably thanks to Lebeck’s benign involvement that early issues of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics, starting with the third, dated January 1942, included a feature called “Kandi the Cave Kid,” drawn and almost certainly written by Kelly as some of his first

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 59

27/09/14 2:40 PM

60 | Chapter 5

work for Lebeck. Kelly’s stories about a juvenile caveman were strikingly simple, direct, and even funny, especially compared with the clumsy stories surrounding them. For Looney Tunes no. 20, June 1943, Kelly wrote (apparently) and illustrated a story with a cast made up of stick figures; it is a much higher grade of nonsense than anything else in the comic book. Then he picked up and revived briefly the comatose feature, also owned by Western, called “Pat Patsy & Pete,” about two children, their penguin companion, and an inept pirate. In Kelly’s hands, those stories became the rowdiest sort of slapstick. Most likely those Kelly stories never passed through Eleanor Packer’s hands but were added to the Looney Tunes comic book when the rest of the artwork for an issue arrived in New York on its way to Poughkeepsie. Other New York–based writers and artists contributed, too— notably Gaylord DuBois, the most important of Western’s writers, who evidently wrote at least a few of the stories that Kelly drew, as well as backup features with lesser Schlesinger characters.2 Throughout the early and mid-1940s, Kelly stories like the Looney Tunes features appeared in comic books that originated in Los Angeles but were almost certainly added in New York at Oskar Lebeck’s direction. Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories was a special case: Kelly drew the “Gremlins” stories in 1943 issues and the front covers starting that year, but Walt Disney’s Comics was edited from Western’s Poughkeepsie offices until late in the 1940s, even though the Los Angeles office produced more and more of its content. As Noonan said, Kelly was fortunate that he worked in New York for an editor who appreciated his work. If he had remained in Los Angeles and entered comic books through Western Printing’s office there, the results might have been different. Roger Armstrong remembered the skepticism about Kelly: “[Carl] Buettner never understood about Walt Kelly. Never. The original Pogo stories”—the genesis of Kelly’s enormously popular newspaper comic strip of the 1950s and 1960s—“appeared in Animal Comics, and I told Buettner one time, ‘This is an absolutely fantastic thing. Why isn’t something being done about syndicating it?’ He shook his head and said, ‘Roger, you don’t understand. This kind of stuff, it’s too “far out” for the public.’ ”3 Lebeck clearly saw Kelly as his star cartoonist. In March 1942, Dell published Kelly’s first important comic-book work, and Oskar Lebeck’s first important comic book: the inaugural issue of Fairy Tale Parade, sixty-eight pages (including covers), all of it drawn by Kelly. Even though Kelly was always a fast and productive worker, drawing so

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 60

27/09/14 2:40 PM

A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff |

61

many pages must have required a month or longer—a major investment of time and effort not just by him but by his editor. Although Lebeck had in his first few years as a comic-book editor followed a conventional path, by relying on reprinted comic strips and salting them with new stories that imitated successful genres, there is visible for the first time in Fairy Tale Parade a different kind of ambition: to achieve a level of quality and respectability approaching that of the best traditional children’s books. Western and Dell were beginning to use more and more licensed characters from companies like Disney and Warner Bros.—in contrast to leading comic-book competitors like Detective Comics Inc. (DC) and Fawcett, whose characters were mostly their own properties—but not only did Fairy Tale Parade have no stories with licensed characters; it had no continuing characters at all. It was the first comic book Lebeck produced that bore his own copyright. Even though that copyright had no legal significance—Lebeck assigned it to Western a few weeks later, in what became the standard procedure for his copyrights—the comic books and features bearing his copyright became measures of his taste and ambitions, which differed markedly from those of most comic-book editors.4 When Fairy Tale Parade no. 1 appeared, the great success of the superhero comic books had already generated a backlash against comic books in general, most importantly in the writings of the newspaper columnist Sterling North. His attacks on comic books started in 1940— that is, just two years after Superman was introduced in Action Comics—and immediately found a sympathetic response from other writers, parents, and educators. Hostility toward comic books bubbled up in magazines and newspapers throughout the early 1940s.5 Lebeck, in a short piece on the inside front cover of Fairy Tale Parade no. 1 (it is unsigned but could hardly be by anyone else), took pains to separate his new comic book from the herd, describing it as “an attempt to bring to young and old a series of picture books of folk tales and stories of many lands—not as a shortcut to reading but in the hope of instilling the desire to read and re-read the fairy tales, legends and myths of bygone days. Often we have longed for more pictures in our favorite fairy tale book. Now Walt Kelly, the artist who drew all the wonderful pictures in this book, makes our wish come true.” The immediate stimulus for the new comic book may have been the debut in October 1941 of Classic Comics, adaptations of famous books (The Three Musketeers was the first) in the comic-book format.6 Classic Comics was certainly the inspiration for another Lebeck-edited title,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 61

27/09/14 2:40 PM

62 | Chapter 5

Famous Stories; the first issue, adapting Treasure Island, was published in February 1942, a few weeks before Fairy Tale Parade no. 1. Famous Stories was not successful—it expired after its second issue, based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—but Fairy Tale Parade survived. Walt Kelly drew five stories for the first issue, as well as pictures and decorative borders for the covers. He signed only the back cover’s elaborate latticework, which is swarming with birds, small animals, and elfin creatures. The antique lettering there and on the other covers is recognizably Kelly’s, but much of the lettering inside the comic book is not. The dialogue balloons have been lettered in upper and lower case, a departure from the standard comic-book and comic-strip practice of using only capital letters. However, the problem is not that, but rather that the dialogue was almost certainly lettered by someone other than Kelly after he finished his drawings in ink. The fit between balloon and words is frequently awkward, the words squeezed in too tightly or floating in too much space. Such misfit dialogue balloons were to be a nagging deficiency in Lebeck-edited comic books throughout the 1940s. Some cartoonists did not want to do their own lettering. Moe Gollub recalled that he was paid thirty-five dollars a page by Western in the last half of the 1940s for drawing each page in pencil and finishing it in ink (a surprisingly high figure for the time), “but I didn’t letter. I always hated lettering.”7 Lebeck may have wanted to conserve other cartoonists’ time, especially when the military draft was scooping up artists in the early and mid1940s. Publishers organized on more of an assembly-line basis typically dealt with such issues by having artists submit penciled artwork to an editor who after approving it or ordering changes gave it to a letterer before it went back to the original artist or, at least as often, to yet another artist, for inking. But Lebeck’s cartoonists were more nearly in charge of their own stories. Thanks to that greater freedom, there was the opportunity for more individual work but also a greater risk of messiness—or excessive tidiness, when mechanical lettering was used. The fairy tales in Fairy Tale Parade no. 1 are a mixed lot. “Thumbelisa,” adapted from Hans Christian Andersen, is clouded by the morbidity that suffuses that author’s stories, and “Hansel and Gretel,” from the Grimms, does not flinch in depicting the gruesome fate of the wicked stepmother and the witch. Two stories, billed as “an old English fairy tale” and “an Irish folk story,” appear to be modern inventions, and rather thin ones at that. But the fifth story, “Little Black Sambo,” is something else again. The human characters are not Asian, as in the original story, but American blacks (whose speech is mercifully dialect free). The

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 62

27/09/14 2:40 PM

A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff |

63

tigers that threaten to eat Sambo and that ultimately chase one another until they melt into butter are a pack of vaudeville hams, hopelessly pleased with themselves as they strut in the clothes they have bullied from the boy. The tigers never seem to notice that they could eat Sambo and keep his clothes, instead of accepting them as bribes not to eat him. Kelly’s drawings make their smug stupidity comically believable. What Kelly brought to “Little Black Sambo” that distinguished him most strongly from Lebeck’s other artists was not just that he could draw better—although he certainly could—but also that his drawings got better the more strongly his comic sensibility manifested itself. His superiority was clearly visible in the second issue of Fairy Tale Parade, whose pages he shared with other artists. The first issue was sufficiently successful that Dell began publishing Fairy Tale Parade on a bimonthly schedule in the summer of 1942, and several other artists—Arthur E. Jameson, George F. Kerr, Jon Small—began illustrating stories in addition to Kelly’s. There is nothing really wrong with their work, Jameson’s in particular. He was a veteran illustrator, a much older man than most comic-book artists of the time, born in England in 1872,8 and his stories have an antique flavor that suits fairy tales. The drawings seem slightly indistinct, lending them romantic distance. But it is Kelly’s stories that combine charm with the emotional openness and immediate appeal that Walt Disney’s animators sought and that was such a lively novelty in early comic books. As good as his stories were from the start, it took Kelly a while to hit his stride. “Little Black Sambo” apart, his drawings for the first issue of Fairy Tale Parade look a little worked over, almost fussy—similar in fact to the drawings he made for very early comic books in 1935. There is some of that same carefulness in other early Kelly stories. Soon, though, as Lebeck piled assignments on him, his drawings for Fairy Tale Parade and other titles looked more spontaneous, more like the work of a cartoonist who was confident of his skills. Kelly did not mock the fairy tales he illustrated, but he found a great deal of fun in them. That was especially true in stories whose writing was recognizably his, wholly or in part, as when he embraced the comic possibilities in a giant with two quarrelsome heads. There were such giants in two different stories in early issues of Fairy Tale Parade. It was, however, when his characters were animals that he seemed most like himself. Unlike many other cartoonists, he was always comfortable drawing anthropomorphic animals. “[Y]ou can do more with animals,” he told an interviewer many years later. “They don’t hurt as easily, and it[’]s possible to make them more believable in an exaggerated pose, than it is the human.”9

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 63

27/09/14 2:40 PM

“Little Black Sambo,” by Walt Kelly, in Fairy Tale Parade no. 1 (1942), was a bright spot in that sixty-eight-page comic book illustrated entirely by Kelly.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 64

27/09/14 2:40 PM

A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff |

65

Kelly knew and admired the work of the best comic illustrators of the early twentieth century, such as A. B. Frost and T. S. Sullivant, both of whom excelled at bringing anthropomorphic animals to comic life on the page. His own drawings echoed theirs in how he marshaled shading, cross-hatching, and other such techniques to give his comic-book panels a rich, worked-up look that benefited especially from his skill with a brush, but his drawings’ solid, three-dimensional quality—the sense that his characters were moving freely in real space—owed most to his Disney training. Even the best of Frost’s and Sullivant’s drawings can seem static compared with Kelly’s best. There was in his work a combination of directness and nuance that was extraordinarily rare in cartooning of any kind, but especially so in comic books. His next major assignment, as he continued to draw for Fairy Tale Parade, did not call for him to draw animals except as occasional incidental characters. Lebeck assigned him to the lead feature in the new Our Gang Comics, whose first issue was published in midsummer 1942. The comic-book feature was based on the short subjects originally produced by Hal Roach and then, starting in 1938, by MGM, about the mostly comic adventures of a “gang” of prepubescent boys and girls. Our Gang Comics was another of Western’s growing number of licensed properties; most of the comic book was filled with stories about characters from other MGM movies, notably the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry and Barney Bear. There was not much room for comic animals in the “Our Gang” stories, with their more realistic characters and drawings, but the gang’s pet goat Julip gradually became more expressive, for comic purposes, than the stories would at first glance seem to have permitted. The earliest “Our Gang” comic-book stories, from when the film series was still in production—the last short was released in April 1944— tend to be stiff and awkward, as if everyone was a little self-conscious about translating live actors into cartoon characters, with obvious reliance on publicity stills. Kelly drew the first “Our Gang” story from a script by Gaylord DuBois, Lebeck’s principal writer, and DuBois wrote at least two more installments, but as early as the third issue “Our Gang” was starting to seem like something Kelly wrote as well as drew. The first two stories—DuBois may have written the second as well as the first— have Our Gang involved in conflicts, the first with a rival gang that ends when a misunderstanding is cleared up, very much a DuBois marker, and then one with criminals. The third story, though, is slapstick comedy of the kind that became a Kelly specialty.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 65

27/09/14 2:41 PM

66 | Chapter 5

Walt Kelly’s inaugural story for the “Our Gang” feature in the comic book of that name (1942) depicted unexaggerated versions of the young actors who made up the screen “Gang.”

There is no obvious reason that the subsequent “Our Gang” stories could not have been conceived and drawn as movie-style comedy, but soon there was instead a pronounced tilt away from comedy and toward adventure. In the eighth and ninth bimonthly issues of Our Gang Comics, the kids are anomalously presented as actors (in the Our Gang series, naturally) on a film set. Then the action segues out to sea—on a sailing ship that is a movie prop—and into a continuing adventure, written at least in part by DuBois. On a Pacific island, the gang and their one adult companion, the ship’s old caretaker, are imperiled by a handful of Japanese soldiers. This was the period when Kelly had his only brush with the military. In 1943 and 1944, as a biographical press release from around 1955 put it, he “fooled around with the Foreign Language Unit of the Army.”10 That fooling around consisted of illustrating at least two of the two dozen or so pocket-size “language guides” that the War Depart-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 66

27/09/14 2:41 PM

A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff |

67

ment published and distributed to soldiers and sailors. All of the humorous illustrations in the Dutch language guide are recognizably Kelly’s work, as are many of the illustrations in the Japanese language guide.11 He was credited, as “Walter C. Kelly, Jr.,” for his illustrations in two “self-teaching guides”—The Mechanics of English and Building Good Sentences—published in 1944 by the U.S. Armed Forces Institute.12 Kelly made such drawings as a freelance cartoonist. He was never a federal employee, and although he visited Washington, D.C., for days at a time, he never lived there.13 George Kerr drew the “Our Gang” stories in the seventh and ninth issues of Our Gang Comics, probably because Kelly’s workload had increased with the number of Lebeck’s Dell titles, but otherwise Kelly’s identification with “Our Gang,” as artist and increasingly as writer, grew steadily stronger. There was no sense in the “Our Gang” stories that the gang members led lives like those of ordinary children: school was rarely a concern. Instead, the stories increasingly resembled not just juvenile series fiction but also adventure comic strips like Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, and Wash Tubbs, whose protagonists were children or childlike. The common thread was that these children or almost-children enjoyed a freedom of action, without the constraints of parents or school or money, that their child readers could enjoy only vicariously, through fictional characters.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 67

27/09/14 2:41 PM

6

Animal Magnetism

In September 1942, Lebeck originated another comic book bearing his own copyright, Animal Comics—a title that, like Fairy Tale Parade, spoke of a desire to reach a young audience familiar with traditional storybooks. It was the third Dell comic book launched that year for which Walt Kelly drew the lead story. Like the first issues of Fairy Tale Parade and Our Gang Comics, the first issue of Animal Comics was a trial issue, dated only with the year of its publication; but also like those other two comic books, it very quickly began appearing on a bimonthly schedule. Kelly’s lead story for Animal Comics no. 1 was titled “Albert Takes the Cake.” The cast was made up of an alligator, Albert; an opossum, Pogo; and a black boy, Bumbazine—all of them residents of a southern swamp. The other six stories in the first issue of Animal Comics (one of them illustrated by Kelly) were, characteristically for the Dell anthology comic books of the time, a mixture of light and serious. “Katonka Flies North,” in the second position, is a somber animal story in the Ernest Thompson Seton vein, with a goose as its protagonist. “Albert Takes the Cake” was the seed from which Kelly’s Pogo comic strip grew, although both of the animals, in keeping with the general carefulness of Kelly’s early comic-book stories, look much more like real creatures (clothed, in Pogo’s case) than the versions that would emerge in the comic strip six years later. Albert threatens to eat Pogo and Bumbazine, but that threat, unlike Albert himself, has no teeth, 68

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 68

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Pogo Possum and Albert Alligator make their debut in “Albert Takes the Cake,” Walt Kelly’s lead story for the first issue of Animal Comics (1942).

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 69

27/09/14 2:41 PM

70 | Chapter 6

because the alligator is as easily manipulated as Sambo’s tigers. “Albert Takes the Cake” is easily imaginable as a children’s picture book, so much so that it is open to question how much of that first story is Walt Kelly’s and how much Oskar Lebeck’s. “Albert Takes the Cake” barely resembles the stories with Albert and Pogo that followed, all of which show every sign of being entirely Kelly’s work. Frank Thomas spoke of how Lebeck “usually sparked the original feature idea” before turning it over to one of his artist-writers; Gaylord DuBois, who wrote for Lebeck but did not draw, spoke of such a procedure when he and Lebeck collaborated on juvenile fiction. The genesis of “Albert Takes the Cake” may have been similar. Kelly kept a scrapbook filled with almost all of his Albert and Pogo stories, but “Albert Takes the Cake” was conspicuously missing. When he wrote about that story seventeen years after it was published, in Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, his 1959 survey of the comic strip’s first ten years of national syndication, his description was far wide of the mark: “Pogo Possum started active duty in a comic book in 1943 as a spear carrier in a feature called ‘Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator.’ Bumbazine was a little boy who lived in the Okefenokee swamp and had learned to talk to the animals. The early material was fairly frightening. Albert kept eating things. As time went on, his manners improved, and Pogo stepped forward as a sort of Jeff to Albert’s Mutt. Bumbazine was dropped because, being human, he was not as believable as the animals.”1 Just about everything in that paragraph is wrong (Pogo’s first appearance was in 1942, not 1943; the Okefenokee was not designated as Pogo’s home swamp until years later; and so on). On that page in his book, Kelly offered a drawing from memory, a version of his original possum that bore scant resemblance to any of the highly variable Pogos that appeared in the early issues of Animal Comics. Neither is there any hint in the story that Bumbazine is a sort of backwoods Christopher Robin who has “learned to talk to the animals”—although that is exactly the sort of storybook connection that Oskar Lebeck could have had in mind. There are echoes in “Albert Takes the Cake” of the much earlier Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, a source that both Kelly and Lebeck would have known, but neither Bumbazine nor Pogo qualifies as a mischievous trickster of the Brer Rabbit kind.2 Pogo and Bumbazine try to bargain their way out of being eaten, but they are successful not because they are clever but because their adversary is stupid.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 70

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Animal Magnetism | 71

Bumbazine has baked a cake for Pogo’s birthday, and he and Pogo persuade Albert that he should eat the cake before he eats them. It turns out the cake is so heavy that after Albert eats it and dives into the water in pursuit of Bumbazine and Pogo, he sinks instantly to the bottom and stays there for a week. A trickster sort of outcome, it might seem, but not really, because Bumbazine had no intention of baking so leaden a cake for his friend. Kelly’s work, although instantly recognizable as his, appeared anonymously in the early issues of both Our Gang and Animal Comics. Cartoonists like Kelly were credited only sporadically in the Dell titles of the early 1940s, perhaps because so many Dell features were owned by licensors that were in one sense the “authors” of those features. The potency of those licensed characters was evident in the second issue of Animal Comics, dated February–March 1943; it was the first issue in which Howard R. Garis’s rabbit character Uncle Wiggily appeared. The “Uncle Wiggily” stories were drawn by Hubbell R. McBride, who was, like his Western colleagues Arthur Jameson and George Kerr, a veteran illustrator—in McBride’s case, of Liberty magazine’s covers. Uncle Wiggily and his supporting cast usurped not just the lead position but the front and back covers of Animal Comics no. 2, and Uncle Wiggily monopolized the front cover for the next year and a half. Considering that “Albert Takes the Cake” was the lead feature in the first issue of Animal Comics and there was an alligator on the cover, Lebeck probably planned sequels from the start, even under different titles for each story. But once “Uncle Wiggily” began appearing, stories set in the swamp dropped in and out of Animal Comics. One even turned up in the sixth issue of Our Gang Comics, in 1943. In the first few stories—all of which assigned star billing to either Albert or Bumbazine—there is no more than a trace of a southern dialect, and not much of a southern setting, either, except what is necessary to make an alligator’s presence acceptable. These are playground stories, essentially, with Albert as a smug, greedy bully who gets his comeuppance at the hands of meeker creatures. But then the stories changed, quite abruptly, as Kelly began to use them as a vehicle for what his friend Ward Kimball remembered as a fascination with the South, a place he had never visited. Kelly “loved anything about the South,” Kimball said. “When he was at Disney’s, if Edna Ferber’s Showboat would come to town, or any show that had that old hokey southern stuff, he’d go to see it two or three times. Then he’d draw gags about his friends based on his memories of the show.”

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 71

27/09/14 2:41 PM

72 | Chapter 6

In one such drawing, Kelly drew himself as an elderly black retainer of the Uncle Tom or Uncle Remus sort. “He never talked in southern dialect,” Kimball said, “only wrote it, but he would remember all the lyrics from Showboat and use excerpts when he drew up a gag for us.”3 A profile in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, published early in 1950 in the first flush of the Pogo comic strip’s popularity, said of Kelly: “He greatly admires southern folk culture, to him the most imaginative and beautiful lore of America, but he picked it up from books and from listening to southerners like his father”—an odd statement, since the senior Kelly was actually born in Philadelphia, the son of native Pennsylvanians.4 The writer may have misconstrued something Kelly said about what his father read to him, possibly the Brer Rabbit stories, when he was a boy. Kelly’s third wife and widow, Selby Daley Kelly, said in an interview published ten years after Walt Kelly’s death that “his father used to read him things like Uncle Remus, and he picked up a lot of the Southern accent and the ‘fun talk’ from his dad.”5 Kelly’s father has also been described as an artistic influence on his son because he supposedly painted theatrical scenery, but any such activity must have been incidental in a working life defined mainly by factory jobs. Kelly himself wrote that it was his father “who first placed a pencil in my hand,” but he also wrote: “I thought vaguely that I could be an artist, but experiments with my father at my elbow (he was a pretty fair painter) convinced me that the work was hard.”6 The elder Kelly has been described as a “Sunday painter who . . . enjoyed painting seascapes in oil.”7 The Kelly family had a radio by 1923,8 and Walt undoubtedly encountered “southern folk culture” on the radio as well as in books. Throughout the 1930s, the radio historian Arthur Frank Wertheim has written, “the airwaves were full of banjo music, sentimental Southern ballads, and blackface routines.”9 But one radio show with a southern flavor towered above the others, and there is reason to believe that Kelly listened to it attentively. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Kelly was a teenager, he lived in an America that was madly in love with the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show, in which two white performers, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, pretended to be southern-born blacks. “Amos Jones” and “Andrew H. Brown” had moved from Atlanta to Chicago and then to New York, but they spoke not just with a strong southern accent but also in what was supposed to be a Negro dialect. As they struggled with Standard English, its grammar and pronunciation, they twisted the lan-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 72

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Animal Magnetism | 73

guage into comic knots (most famously, “I’se regusted,” but also “repression” for “depression,” “incorpulated” for “incorporated,” and so on). Blackface comedy, minstrel shows, and “coon acts” had relied on such dialect in the decades before Amos ’n’ Andy, but as the first radio show with a truly nationwide audience—roughly one-third of the total population was listening at the daily program’s peak—it was successful on a much larger scale.10 Amos ’n’ Andy was heard in Bridgeport over a New York City station, WJZ. Growing up in Bridgeport, Kelly had little contact with real black people. In 1920, when he turned seven, the city’s African-American population was tiny, less than 2 percent, and it grew very little over the following decade. Most of those people worked in low-status jobs as laborers and domestics and so were all but invisible to many whites.11 Kelly wrote in 1959 that he attended school with black children—two of them—for the first time only when he got to high school: “We saw our first Negro children in class there, and believe it or not, none of us was impressed one way or another, which is as it should be. Jimmy Thomas became a good friend and the young lady was pretty enough to remember even today.”12 That may have been an enhanced memory. No Bridgeport blacks of any age make an appearance in the extended memoir of his childhood and adolescence that Kelly wrote for publication in 1962, and there is only a cameo by a young black man from Philadelphia.13 Amos ’n’ Andy would have been for Kelly, as for millions of other white Americans, a window onto a version of everyday black life that was mostly imaginary but not necessarily toxic. For all of its roots in stereotypes, Amos ’n’ Andy was free of the mean-spiritedness that dominated the portrayals of blacks in other media. Its principal characters were variously sympathetic or simply funny, but Gosden and Correll did not present their characters as objects of contempt. In one of Kelly’s first comic-book stories with Albert and Pogo, “Bumbazine and the Popinjay,” in Animal Comics no. 3, June–July 1943, a bird character called the Popinjay, never seen again, speaks in Amos ’n’ Andy–like dialect for a few panels. Then there is a small-scale eruption of such talk in the “Albert the Alligator” story in Animal Comics no. 5, October–November 1943, when Albert goes to a train station and, as a “talkin’ alligator,” throws the black humans there into turmoil. They squabble over ownership of this phenomenal creature. “Jes’ a minute!” one cries. “I did sign-tiffic research on him! He’s my ‘gator!” (There is also a glimpse of a couple of moonshine-swigging white hill-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 73

27/09/14 2:41 PM

74 | Chapter 6

billies whose speech, what little there is of it, has a different but comparably stereotypical ring, perhaps originating in the Li’l Abner comic strip by the former Bridgeport resident Al Capp.) Bumbazine and the animals come closest to speaking Standard English; a few outbursts by Albert aside, they don’t do much more than drop their g’s and speak of children as “chillun.” They speak with what is supposed to be a southern accent, spiced with traces of dialect. But in the eighth issue of Animal Comics, dated April–May 1944, the animals and Bumbazine alike are suddenly speaking as if they were delivering lines from an overripe Amos ’n’ Andy script—and talking so much that the dialogue balloons crowd the panels. “Whilst Bumbazine is gone,” Albert says, “Ah’ll jes’ ‘vestigate certain chawklit cake smells what has been permeatin’ and percolatin’ thru this here vicinity! Heehee! Ah sho’ is a mean thing!” When he finds the cake—which happens to have Pogo inside it—Albert says: “Mought jes’ as well test out de flavor as a favor! Bumbazine cain’t not mind if Ah tastes at it a little!” What follows is the first of many crises born of Albert’s accidental consumption of one or more of his fellow swamp dwellers. Murray Robinson, in a 1952 Collier’s profile, wrote that Kelly’s work on the likes of the Japanese and Dutch language guides was the impetus for this explosion of dialect: “The study of language interested him, and on his own hook he did a little haphazard research on American dialects. He became enamored of the Georgia accent—and stored it up for use in his comic strip.”14 Another article published around the same time described the Pogo characters’ speech as “a mixture of Georgia cracker and pure hokum [that] comes from Kelly’s interest in speech patterns of the Atlantic seaboard.”15 Such references to Kelly’s “research” were invariably vague, but Kelly himself, writing in the third person early in 1952, was more precise: [H]e had taken an interest in phonetics and phonemics. This came about because it was necessary to translate foreign phrases into American English sounds. To do this an average level of American speech had to be found and army experts spent tedious hours finding out exactly how people in every part of the country would pronounce the word, “THROUGH” for example. Kelly followed their findings with great interest as far as Georgia and dropped the pursuit right there. He was fascinated. So, what many have declared to be authentic, Georgia sounds started being translated into Kelly’s project in the comic books.16

Given the timing, it is certainly possible that there was a connection between Kelly’s work on the language guides—which were based on

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 74

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Albert lunges into overripe (and overly plentiful, as witness the crowded dialogue balloons) southern dialect in “Albert the Alligator” by Walt Kelly, in Animal Comics no. 8, April–May 1944.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 75

27/09/14 2:41 PM

76 | Chapter 6

phonetic equivalents of foreign words—and the first appearance of fullblown dialect in Animal Comics. But the echoes of Amos ’n’ Andy, whose principal characters were supposed to be from Georgia, are much stronger in the Animal Comics dialogue than the echoes of any other credible source. In particular—to pursue another oft-cited Georgia connection—it is hard to find any linguistic similarity between Kelly’s comic-book stories and the Uncle Remus stories that Kelly supposedly remembered his father reading to him when he was a child. Those stories were written by the native Georgian Joel Chandler Harris in a thorny dialect that Harris offered as an authentic transcription of black speech—“wholly different . . . from the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage”—and that bears almost no resemblance to the speech of Kelly’s characters.17 The world of the Remus stories is, moreover, comic in a harsh and often brutal manner befitting the grim world of the slave. In the story called “The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf,” from Harris’s first Remus book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, Brer Rabbit scalds his enemy Brer Wolf to death, with his snickering children as an audience. In “Old Grinny Granny Wolf,” from the second collection, Nights with Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit murders the blind and crippled old lady wolf of the title—there is no other way to put it—and then tricks Brer Wolf into eating the stew he makes from the dead body of Grinny Granny, the wolf’s own grandmother. Other stories are just as gruesome, and just as far removed from anything that happened in Kelly’s swamp. The notion of Albert as a carnivorous bully was essentially gone from Animal Comics as of its second issue, in the first Albert story that seems to be entirely Kelly’s. It resurfaced in very mild form only once or twice before disappearing completely. With it disappeared any material resemblance to the Remus stories. There were in fact comic books in the 1940s that may have owed something to Joel Chandler Harris. The story called “Brother Rabbit Gets Brother Fox’s Dinner,” in Nights with Uncle Remus, could have been the template for a series in DC’s Real Screen Comics. In Harris’s story, Brer Rabbit is helping Brer Fox shingle his house when he nails the fox’s tail to the roof—accidentally, of course—and then descends to the ground and helps himself to the fox’s dinner pail. That situation recurred with many, many variations in the “Fox and the Crow” stories in Real Screen, with the crow assuming Brer Rabbit’s trickster role. Likewise, the “Li’l Bad Wolf” stories in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories take place, like the Remus stories, in a world in which talking

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 76

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Animal Magnetism | 77

animals—some of them Disney versions of Harris’s characters—are neighbors who just might kill and eat one another if the opportunity were to present itself (as it never quite does in the comic book). There are no such echoes of Harris in Kelly’s stories. His characters, in Animal Comics and later in his comic strip, live in a different world, one much more like that of The Wind in the Willows, where no one seems to work but cupboards are full of good things to eat, deadly peril is absent except on those rare occasions when the resident carnivores forget their manners, and the urgent question is how to fill the hours of the day most pleasurably. Kelly’s luxuriant swamp looks nothing like the scraggly post–Civil War Georgia countryside drawn by several artists, most notably A. B. Frost, for Harris’s stories. When Kelly spoke of a literary model for his comic strip, he invoked not Harris but A. A. Milne, creator of the much sweeter-tempered Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and from all appearances he was not speaking facetiously.18 But it was Amos ’n’ Andy that offered the most to work with. That show, after a fifteen-year run as a daily serial, went off the air in February 1943, reappearing in October of that year as a half-hour weekly situation comedy that quickly became one of the most popular on radio. The weekly Amos ’n’ Andy was more heavily weighted toward comedy, and populated with more extravagantly comic characters, than the serial, which was as much drama as comedy. The new show thus lent itself readily to a comic-book cartoonist’s purposes. For example, in the second of the new shows Andy, a genial oaf, has just gotten his diploma from a correspondence school for piano playing—without ever touching a keyboard—and is opening a school of his own, with the raffish George “Kingfish” Stevens as his partner. “I’ll learn ’em the white keys and you learn ’em the black keys,” Andy says to the Kingfish, in dialogue easily imaginable coming from Albert in an Animal Comics story. The explosion of dialect in Kelly’s Animal Comics stories occurred less than six months after the new weekly Amos ’n’ Andy show went on the air; that is, Kelly was writing and drawing those stories around the time the show’s first episodes were broadcast. The timing suggests that Kelly’s “haphazard research” consisted largely of listening to Amos ’n’ Andy and reshaping its version of a “Georgia accent”—and almost everything else about it—to meet his bimonthly needs. As a mock dialect became increasingly prominent in Kelly’s Animal Comics stories, the eventual absence of any human characters in those stories obscured their connection with black stereotypes. It did take a while for black human characters to disappear completely. After that

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 77

27/09/14 2:41 PM

78 | Chapter 6

handful of humans in the fifth issue of Animal Comics, one more turned up in “Albert Holds That Tigah,” in no. 10, August–September 1944, this time conversing with the animals as peers. Otherwise, Bumbazine was the only representative of humankind in Kelly’s Animal Comics stories until he, too, disappeared after the twelfth issue, published in the fall of 1944. From then on, the cast was composed entirely of animals, none of them resembling stereotypical blacks. There was one curious exception in early 1946: in “Albert and the Barbecue,” in the first of two one-shots titled Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum, Albert and Pogo spend a page and a half in casual conversation with a black human, a locomotive engineer who departs declaring, Amos ’n’ Andy style, “You annymiles is the craziest people Ah knows!” There is no accounting for that anomaly, which appeared almost two years after Bumbazine’s departure—except that stereotypical black humans were still appearing in other Kelly stories, outside Animal Comics and its offshoots, around the same time. By the mid-1940s Kelly’s Animal Comics stories were increasingly circumscribed, and not just by the departure of humans from their cast. Everything had to take place in the swamp, a decidedly rural environment that did not offer much in the way of props or stimulating backdrops. Perilous adventures were out of the question, and since Albert’s desire to eat his neighbors had been suppressed, it had to be his accidental (and always temporary) ingestion of smaller animals that was a major engine of what passed for plots. But other artists had found selfimposed limitations a stimulus to creativity, and that was happening with Kelly, as the confines of his Animal Comics stories pushed him toward finding ways to make his characters funny through their day-today collisions. Albert’s role remained central as Kelly transformed him from the inept menace of “Albert Takes the Cake” and the swaggering bully of the next few stories until, as the stories thickened with dialect, he emerged as a scheming, finagling, but ultimately ingratiating blowhard, one who could rely on the much more subdued Pogo as a friend. He almost always had a cigar in his mouth, as if to underline his resemblance to the boastful, cigar-smoking Andy half of the radio team. Kelly was a cigar smoker, too, usually photographed when he became famous in the early 1950s with a cigar in hand or mouth, and Albert was in that way, as in others, a funhouse mirror’s reflection of his creator.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 78

27/09/14 2:41 PM

7

Cartoon Conundrums

After a year, everyone involved with the Looney Tunes comic book was struggling to write and draw stories that did not invite invidious comparisons with the cartoons. The task at hand, which it is unlikely anyone articulated at the time, was to find some way to bring animated-cartoon characters to life on the printed page without the support they enjoyed on the screen: music and movement and idiosyncratic voices. On paper, the characters were more nearly naked, existing mainly as distinct designs. Almost all of them were, moreover, talking animals, and it was in comic books that talking animals seemed most inescapably juvenile. The great authors of talking-animal fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Joel Chandler Harris, Beatrix Potter (The Tale of Peter Rabbit), and Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)—depicted characters whose natures were shimmering and shifting mixtures of the animal and the human, a duality captured in Potter’s illustrations for her own books, and in A. B. Frost’s illustrations for Harris’s. Even though such books were inevitably pigeonholed as children’s books, their subtlety and sophistication were widely recognized. Their literary quality encouraged superficially similar efforts by writers and artists working in harsher environments—newspaper columnists like Howard R. Garis, author of the Uncle Wiggily stories, and comicstrip artists like George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat made the transition to animated cartoons in 1916, and Felix the Cat was a cartoon star for much of the 1920s, but most of the 79

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 79

27/09/14 2:41 PM

80 | Chapter 7

leading animated characters, like Max Fleischer’s KoKo the clown and Paul Terry’s Farmer Al Falfa, were human until the success of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, starting in 1928, spawned a host of new animal characters. The Disney animals—Donald Duck most prominent among them—led the field until the early 1940s, but animal characters dominated the rolls at the other cartoon studios, too. The behavior of some of those characters, like Disney’s Pluto and MGM’s Tom and Jerry, bore a slight resemblance to the behavior of real animals. Other characters, Bugs Bunny in particular, straddled the line between the animal and the human, even engaging in conversation with human hunters who regarded them as wild game and intended to kill them. Most often the cartoon animals were indistinguishable in their actions from cartoon humans, but what audiences learned to accept in the cartoons could seem considerably odder on the printed page. Walt Kelly, testifying in a 1943 lawsuit brought by Dell against another publisher, Nedor, spoke of the difference between animal characters designed for animation and those designed for print. An animation animal, he said, “is usually based on circles with a fluid construction in the body, with rather peculiar but definite markings on the face and on the body, so that these things will appear in good shape on the screen. An ordinary cartoon”—that is, a cartoon animal intended solely for print, and not for the screen—“is not constructed that way.”1 Kin Platt, a cartoonist who drew for Nedor, testified in the same case. He said that in the design of an animal for animation, “certain features are sublimated and eliminated to provide for an easy manner of projecting the character on the screen, which gives a certain degree of the flexibility to the character, which the ordinary animal itself could not have. For example, a dog’s legs are very awkward to draw in actual animated form. So they simplify that by making that in a rubbery fashion. . . . [T]he lines are all curved and circular as opposed to angular lines on the animals itself.”2 When animals designed for animation appeared in a comic book, the result was, in the words of the attorney questioning Kelly, that “the magazine reproduces the character but not [the] animation.” But without the animation, and especially without the quickness and elasticity that distinguished the best animation by the early 1940s, characters might look like their film versions but still be fatally deficient. Many of the conventions that had emerged in movie cartoons by the 1940s—for example, that characters escaped serious harm even when they were the victims of what looked like lethal violence—had no equivalents in comic

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 80

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Cartoon Conundrums | 81

books. They could not, because those conventions depended on sophisticated animation. Characters whose design was more than adequate for films could thus be shallow and uninteresting on the page—fit fare indeed for children who, as George Delacorte said, moved their lips as they read. But if those characters were drawn more realistically—that is, more like the animals depicted by Ernest H. Shepard for The Wind in the Willows or by Kurt Wiese for Walter R. Brooks’s Freddy series, with its cast made up of talking farm animals—they would not be recognizable as the screen characters that attracted readers to the comic books in the first place. The design of many animated characters became subtler and less formulaic over the course of the 1930s, but there remained a gulf between such characters and even the more caricatured of the animal characters drawn solely for print. There were occasional signs of life in the new animated-character comic books, of some alternative to clumsily aping the cartoons. For example, by mid-1942, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig costarred in the lead story in almost every issue of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics. They almost never appeared together in the cartoons, and for good reason: they were both relatively understated characters who were naturally cast against hot-tempered bullies. As reworked for the comic books, though, they made a rough sort of sense as an oddly matched team like those already familiar from countless movies and comic strips—Laurel and Hardy, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy—with Bugs brash and foolhardy and Porky much more cautious. The mouse Sniffles was a sweet-tempered, very Disney-like character in the cartoons, and so a guarantee of boredom in a comic-book story. “They were looking for a premise on which to hang some kind of story thing with this mouse named Sniffles,” Roger Armstrong said in 1975. “They wanted somebody to play opposite him, so they got the concept of this little girl.” Mary Jane, a character who never appeared in the animated cartoons, was paired with Sniffles in the first issue of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics, got her name in the second issue, and very quickly became the senior partner, as the character with whom very young children might identify. With the help of “magic sand,” she shrank to Sniffles’s size and joined him—in dreams, at first—in juvenile adventures.3 Eleanor Packer hired Carl Buettner, the best cartoonist of those freelancing for Whitman at the time, as the art editor for the comic books by January 1943.4 “But at the beginning,” Armstrong said, “Chase and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 81

27/09/14 2:41 PM

82 | Chapter 7

Carl and I were all artists. And there was a fellow named Ed Volke, a nice little man. He was not a very good cartoonist, but Eleanor Packer thought he was the world’s greatest. She used to hold up Ed Volke’s work as the shining example—she would say, ‘See, Roger, see what nice work Ed Volke can do.’ ”5 Volke signed some of his work in 1943 (as did Armstrong). His drawing is crudely amateurish, and the staging in his panels is clumsy and crowded. But Packer must have liked him: he drew the lead story, with Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, in most issues from late in 1942 until Carl Buettner began drawing those stories (now titled “Bugs Bunny”) with no. 21, July 1943. Packer, like other editors in comic books’ early days, seems to have had no trouble accepting poorly drawn work if it met her needs in other respects. Volke probably never missed a deadline. The Buettner stories were the same sort of puerile stuff that Volke had illustrated, but now they looked much better. Lynn Karp, a former Disney animator who drew stories in the 1940s for Western and other publishers, remembered Buettner as “a picky son of a gun; just as picky as they come,” but Buettner at least measured up to the standards he imposed on others.6 “Carl Buettner was a martinet,” Roger Armstrong said. “He was an absolutely superb draftsman, but he expected everyone else to be, too. If you didn’t come up to Carl’s standards, you redid it. He never accepted you on your terms; it was always on his terms. He was very German.”7 The first true Schlesinger veteran began drawing for Packer as of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 15, January 1943. That was Veve Risto, who started drawing for comic books in 1942 after animating for two Schlesinger directors, Bob Clampett and Norman McCabe. Risto’s drawings were hard and stiff, but so were Craig’s and Armstrong’s at the time, and Risto was unquestionably the superior draftsman. His versions of the characters—he specialized in Elmer Fudd at first—looked like their animated-cartoon counterparts, even as the scripts diverged increasingly from the cartoons. Risto both wrote and drew some of his early work for Western before concluding that there was more money to be made from drawing, in both pencil and ink, from other people’s scripts.8 The standard rate in the early 1940s was ten dollars for a penciled and inked page, as both Carl Barks and Roger Armstrong remembered.9 When Risto wrote in December 1942 to John Carey, his friend from Schlesinger’s Bob Clampett unit (Carey served in the navy during World War II), he said that he was making more money “than I ever did before anywhere.” In that

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 82

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Cartoon Conundrums | 83

month, he was drawing not just for Looney Tunes but also for Our Gang and even for a new Dell title, Gene Autry Comics, about the fictional adventures of a real movie cowboy; it was the first comic book produced by Packer’s shop that was not based on animated cartoons.10 The nature of the work, Risto told Carey in a later letter, was deceptive, its requirements seemingly so simple, and yet difficult to master if they were not approached with humility: “I’ve seen some very extra good artists not make the grade. Seems the utter plain simplicity of comic books of this type brings up a feeling that the new artist is better than the stuff. I guess it’s called ‘sincerity’ that is needed at the outset. The ability to be interested enough to do a good job on a story that you know you could write better yourself; if you had time (and would rather do your own stuff throughout), than make more money by working on stuff already written for you.”11 Roger Armstrong spoke more bluntly about the difficulty animators in particular might have with comic-book work: “When I was [at the Walter Lantz studio, where Armstrong worked in 1944–45], the guys were very fascinated by the work I was doing for Whitman, and one by one they tried it, and one by one they fell right spang on their noses. For one thing, they didn’t know how to do any inking, [and] they had a hell of a time composing or staging a panel—their staging was almost amateurish. . . . They were so used to thinking in terms of movement that they did not think in static terms; and you had to be able to think in both ways. If you’re going to be a good comic-book artist, you have to think kinetically, but you also have to put a kinetic concept into a static form.”12 There are hints in the work even of experienced animation people who became comic-book regulars that making the adjustment could be difficult. From all appearances, the Warner Bros. cartoonist Tom McKimson drew his earliest stories for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics without allowing enough space for the dialogue balloons. As a result, those balloons—most likely lettered and inked by someone else over McKimson’s pencil drawings—overlap onto the drawings, often obscuring the characters’ faces. For animators who accepted the need for “sincerity” and approached the work with the humility Risto thought was required, the sheer novelty of comic-book work could be refreshing, as Risto told Carey in that 1944 letter: “There’s one of the former Disney animators doing the same work I’m doing but for another company here. He said he’d animated everything they could think of so many times it got tiresome.”13

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 83

27/09/14 2:41 PM

84 | Chapter 7

As cartoonists at the Hollywood animation studios began to take on freelance work on comic books in the early 1940s, most of them gravitated not to Western, the company licensed by their employers to publish comic books with the characters they drew every day, but to a New York company that called itself Cinema Comics but had no cartoonstudio connections. Those cartoonists were recruited not by an editor like Packer, who had no animation experience, but by a fellow animator, Jim Davis. Davis was a Californian, but he got into comics—probably in 1942— when he was working in Miami for what had been the Max Fleischer studio but had been renamed Famous Studios after Fleischer’s departure in 1941. As Davis told Will Friedwald, “I started working, down in Florida, on comics, for Jay Morton,” a writer for the Superman cartoons that Fleischer/Famous made under a license from Superman’s owner, DC. Morton “went up to New York once, and tramped around and made connections with a fellow named [Benjamin W.] Sangor. So, he was supplying Sangor with comics done by various guys down there in Florida. I don’t know who all did them, but I was one of them. I didn’t do many, but I did some, and then I wrote to Sangor before I left Florida and told him I was coming back [to California].”14 Morton probably met Sangor through Sangor’s friend Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of the Superman comic book, or someone else at DC. Sangor was a more than typical comic-book entrepreneur of the early 1940s, a man whose checkered and sometimes criminal past made for an odd contrast with comic books of the kind Davis produced for him: talking-animal fare aimed at a very young audience. That Sangor plunged so heavily into such comics (he also produced other kinds) invited comparisons with Western Printing, but that company’s midwestern uprightness never came into question throughout its several decades of comic-book publishing. Sangor emigrated from Russia as a teenager. He was born in 1889, arrived in the United States in 1904, and was naturalized in 1914.15 When he registered for the draft in 1917, he was already a self-employed lawyer in Milwaukee. While he was living there, Sangor took part in a scheme to defraud a Milwaukee insurance company, a scheme that resulted in two rulings against him in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.16 By 1920, his wife, Sophie, had died, and he was living alone in Chicago, where his daughter, Jacquelyn, was a student at a parochial school.17 By 1922, B. W. Sangor was listed in a legal directory as a Chicago attorney and was advertising real-estate auctions in the Chicago Tribune.18

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 84

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Cartoon Conundrums | 85

Sangor moved to New York by the mid-1920s,19 and by 1935 he was a failed real-estate developer in Toms River, New Jersey. That year, he and a Toms River banker were convicted of embezzlement, in a scheme that left a widow destitute, and they were sentenced to prison.20 In February 1938, his appeals exhausted, Sangor was on the verge of entering prison for a term of two to three years. He apparently served much less than that, although no records have survived showing how long he was imprisoned, or even if he was jailed at all. In any case, he was free by June 1940, when he returned to New York by ship from Mexico.21 By then, Sangor had entered publishing with Cinema Comics, which was incorporated in September 1939.22 For a few years, probably starting in 1941, that company produced Cinema Comics Herald, a fourpage giveaway that promoted current movies in a comic-book format. It also packaged comic books for other publishers, starting with Nedor Publishing Company. Nedor was owned by Ned L. Pines, who had married Jacquelyn Sangor by 1938.23 It was probably that family connection that brought Sangor into publishing in the first place (and provided him with the necessary financing). Pines was a leading publisher of pulp fiction that appealed to the same sort of mass-market audience as George Delacorte’s magazines. As with Delacorte, Pines needed to take only a short step to enter the comic-book business. Sangor testified in 1943 that Pines called him in July or August 1941—that is, around the time that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics made its debut—“and told me that he would like . . . to get a magazine with animals in the order of the Fairy Tales, talking animals, and we discussed it, and I started on it about that time.”24 Early in 1942 Sangor delivered the contents of the first Nedor talking-animal comic book, Coo Coo Comics no. 1, for publication in August. Coo Coo featured a superpowered rodent, Supermouse, thereby hitching itself simultaneously to two popular genres: talking animals and superheroes. The connections between Sangor and the Famous Studios animators grew much stronger after Famous moved to New York from Florida early in 1943. The studio was returning home: its predecessor, the Fleischer studio, had moved from Manhattan to Miami in 1938 after a bitter strike by many of the studio’s cartoonists. When Famous returned to New York, the animator Gordon Sheehan said, “comic books were coming into their own, and practically all of the animators at Famous were doing comic-book stuff in their spare time, including myself. The outfit that published the comics [Sangor’s Cinema Comics] was right next to the building where we worked. We were at 25 West Forty-fifth

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 85

27/09/14 2:41 PM

86 | Chapter 7

Street, and they were at 45 West Forty-fifth Street. . . . I remember Mr. Sangor well, a distinguished-looking, pleasant man. In fact, for a while there I think he was interested in taking over Famous animated cartoon studios.”25 Dell and Western responded quickly to Nedor’s Sangor-produced comic books, but not through the Dell comic books themselves. In February 1943, Dell sued Ned Pines; his widowed mother, Dora Pines; and Nedor Publishing Company for unfair competition. Dell complained that three Nedor comic books—Coo Coo Comics, Real Funnies, and Funny Funnies—too closely aped Dell’s New Funnies in their depiction of animal characters on their covers. New Funnies, then still titled The Funnies, began cover-featuring the Walter Lantz animated characters with no. 64, May 1942, the second issue published on what turned out to be a very brief bimonthly schedule. The name changed to New Funnies with no. 65, June–July 1942, and monthly publication resumed with no. 66.26 Dell said that before The Funnies began featuring animated characters and added New to its name, its average monthly circulation—the period was not specified— was 130,000 copies. In 1942, the complaint said, “the circulation increased to an average of 350,000 copies per month . . . and in January 1943 to 550,000 copies per month.”27 By comparison, the pioneering Famous Funnies sold well in the 1930s, peaking in 1937 with an average net paid circulation per monthly issue of 462,303. By the first half of 1942, though, per-issue sales had dropped to 180,421.28 In June 1943 an appellate court affirmed an injunction barring Nedor from mimicking New Funnies too closely. But although Dell’s suit was successful, its victory was essentially meaningless. The market for talking-animal comic books was growing too fast, the sales figures were too large, to be much affected by fine distinctions like those embodied in Dell’s complaint. As Gordon Sheehan noticed, Ben Sangor “was a good friend of Harry Donenfeld’s.” That friendship was of special value when Sangor began publishing his own comic books—the first two titles were Ha Ha Comics and Giggle Comics—in mid-1943.29 Not only was Donenfeld the publisher of Superman and other popular superhero comic books, but he owned an important distributor, Independent News. Sangor was thus assured of a place on many newsstands. Sheehan contributed an eight-page feature, “Bow-Wow Beagle Dog Detective,” to the first issue of Ha Ha, and he was joined by a half dozen other animators from Famous and a second New York studio,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 86

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Cartoon Conundrums | 87

Terrytoons. James Tyer, who animated for Terrytoons in a strikingly bizarre style, drew two stories for the first Ha Ha that look like what might have resulted if a German expressionist painter of the 1920s had somehow wound up drawing comic books with talking animals. The content of the Sangor comic books would soon take on a much stronger Hollywood flavor. After Jim Davis moved back to Los Angeles, he ran the animation department of Raphael G. Wolff Studios, one of a number of small Hollywood companies that produced industrial films, training films for the armed forces, and other specialized projects. Davis recruited a crew of Hollywood animators, one of whom, Jack Bradbury, had animated at the Disney studio and then on Leon Schlesinger’s cartoons for Warner Bros. “As a sideline,” Bradbury said in a 1986 interview with Dave Bennett, “Davis had a few guys working for him part time doing comic book work” for the Sangor titles. “A lot of guys were supplementing salaries this way. They would go home after animating and do a little comic book work at night or on weekends. Davis was paying $15.00 a page for writing a story, drawing, and inking. So I thought, what the heck, and started doing some comic book work, too.”30 Bradbury remembered producing three or four stories as a freelancer before Davis asked him to go into comic books full-time. Although the Disney characters had been appearing in comic books since 1940, and the Schlesinger characters since 1941, Bradbury “had no idea” what comic books were like before he started drawing for them: “The only comic book job that I had seen beforehand was one that Gil Turner [also a Warner Bros. animator at the time] had drawn.” Davis’s was one of a number of shops that produced early comic books of various kinds, middlemen who packaged whole comic books for publishers. In Davis’s case, there were two layers, himself and Sangor, since Sangor sold to other publishers many of the stories that Davis produced. When his Los Angeles operation was running full blast, Davis said, “there were 65 of us working on those things at one time, and we used to send back sheets of Strathmore [drawing paper] two feet high every month. I just mailed [Sangor] the original art. It finally got to a point where I represented Sangor, and I wrote the checks here, on a local account, for the services involved.”31 After Davis recruited Hollywood animators to work on the Sangor comic books, many of the stories in those comic books took on a very general resemblance to the Hollywood studios’ cartoons. Their animal characters tended to be cuter and more rounded than the often grotesquely

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 87

27/09/14 2:41 PM

88 | Chapter 7

proportioned characters drawn by cartoonists from the studios in the East. As a rule, the Sangor characters were not obvious imitations of Hollywood originals, echoing them instead in their general appearance and sometimes in their alliterative names. Like superheroes, “funny animals” could be generated with apparent ease in almost infinite variety. The Sangor comic books looked different in another respect. Although the earliest of Dell’s comic books with talking animals typically were drawn with six panels to the page, by early in 1944 the standard page had become eight panels, four rows of two panels each. This was because the comic books’ page count had shrunk from sixty-four to forty-eight, plus covers, under the impact of wartime paper shortages. It was always the cost and availability of paper, not the cost of producing the stories that filled them, that had the greatest impact on comic books’ page count and frequency of publication.32 The number of pages in the Sangor-produced comic books shrank, too, but those comic books held to a six-panel format with a more “open” appearance than the eight-panel Dell pages. Jim Davis explained: “With Sangor, we used a half-sheet of Strathmore for a page of artwork. It was easier and allowed more spontaneity for both artists and writers.”33 Davis recalled that Sangor matched what Western was paying at the time, the fifteen dollars per page cited by Jack Bradbury. “But Western was also very persnickety,” Davis said, “you had to draw on a huge sheet and they always loaded it with stuff”—that is, called for more elaborate drawings than the Sangor norm. “With ours, nobody was telling us what to do or how to do it. We had a lot more freedom, and a lot more fun in working with our stuff.”34 What Davis remembered as spontaneity expressed itself most often in drawings with fluency but no depth. There is in the Sangor comic books a pervasive shallowness, even by low comic-book standards, so that the characters may look appealing at first glance but are almost never more than puppets. As Davis himself pointed out, “neither I nor anyone else [was] doing any kind of regular characters for Sangor. The . . . only one who had any kind of so-called regular characters was [the former Disney animator Ken Hultgren], because he did his own characters and he did repeats on all of them. But on the other stuff, that was pretty much hit or miss.”35 There was continuity with a few other characters, notably “Superkatt,” a Giggle feature written and drawn by Dan Gordon, a former Fleischer and MGM writer, but Gordon worked in New York. Far more so than Western’s, the Davis roster was packed with veterans of the Hollywood animation studios—not just animators like Bob

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 88

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Cartoon Conundrums | 89

The domestic animals in “Superkatt,” by Dan Gordon, conversed freely with human characters, as in this example from Giggle Comics no. 50, February 1948.

Wickersham but writers like Mike Maltese, Warren Foster, and Cal Howard. Lloyd Turner, like Maltese and Foster a writer for the Warner cartoons, remembered writing stories with Foster: “On a Saturday, we’d get together with a bunch of beer, go up to his apartment, we’d sit and talk, he’d get an idea, I’d get an idea, we’d do ’em, take ’em over to Jim, and get paid. I think they paid, in those days, ten dollars a page. So you do an eight-page story, that’s eighty bucks, sitting there drinking beer with Warren.”36 The stories were usually that short, eight pages or less, with an improvised-on-the-spot quality. There was, however, very little of the nimbleness and wit that might have accompanied such improvisation, just a pervasive lack of any sustained effort. Only the Dan Gordon “Superkatt” stories rose a little above the norm. Superkatt, who fashioned his costume from a baby’s diaper and bonnet, lacked superpowers, and his stories took place in an ingratiatingly odd world where cats and dogs conversed freely with human characters but were still domestic animals. Typically, though, Gordon’s stories sputtered and stalled well before the concluding page. “We used to get criticism on them, on each month’s magazines,” Jack Bradbury said. “We’d get a letter back; a fellow who worked for Sangor [the editor Richard Hughes] would say what he thought of the different ones, but they were pretty lenient, because there was a big market at the time, and they wanted lots of stuff, quantity rather than quality.”37 So robust was the market that Davis’s shop wound up

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 89

27/09/14 2:41 PM

90 | Chapter 7

producing stories with licensed cartoon characters. “I had this group of guys going,” Davis said, “and then Whit Ellsworth [an editor for Donenfeld’s DC] came out looking for a cartoon subject. The only thing available was Columbia, but I had half the guys there working on Sangor’s stuff already. . . . And Sangor was pretty solid with [Donenfeld], and told him that he was interfering with his operation out here. So, the whole thing was swung over to him.”38 The first issue of Real Screen Comics, with the Fox and the Crow and other Columbia characters—all of them decidedly minor players— appeared early in 1945. Other DC comics with talking animals followed, most of them not based on the Columbia cartoons. All were in the Sangor vein, but marginally more polished. Although the stories were short, as in Sangor’s comic books, the drawings were more nearly uniform—DC, more than most publishers, cultivated a house style for each of its different kinds of comic books—and the writing not so careless. But many of the stories were like half-remembered routines from vaudeville or burlesque. As easy as it was to conjure up “funny animals,” it was much harder to find interesting things for them to do.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 90

27/09/14 2:41 PM

8

Carl Barks Makes His Break

As Sangor and other publishers fed the appetites stimulated first by the animated cartoons and then by the earliest comic books based on them—the Disney titles, Looney Tunes, and New Funnies—Dell and Western were slower than their competitors to take advantage of the demand that they had themselves done so much to create. The first new comic-book stories with Disney characters did not appear until mid-1941, in Walt Disney’s Reluctant Dragon, a one-shot Dell comic book that took its title from a Disney feature. The feature was assembled from animated shorts and a live-action tour of the studio, but the comic book offered only rough approximations of the shorts. A few months later, Dell published two one-shot comic books based on the 1941 Disney animated feature Dumbo, one in color and one a black-and-white “comic paint book.” Both were crude looking, and the color Dumbo was filled out awkwardly with reprinted Mickey Mouse comic strips. Like Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, the new oneshot comic books were produced by people who worked at Western’s Poughkeepsie plant. Irving “Bud” Tripp, a nineteen-year-old Poughkeepsie native, started with Western in September 1940—that is, just as the first issue of Walt Disney’s Comics was being published. As he told Bruce Hamilton in 1984, he was put to work immediately, turning Disney comic strips into Disney comic books: “A lot came in as newspaper repros [proof sheets] and press sheets and we cut them up. The daily and Sunday newspaper 91

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 91

27/09/14 2:41 PM

92 | Chapter 8

strips we cut up and put into comic form to make a 48-page book. Sometimes you’d have to add on to the edges, so there was a little art work involved. If a panel ran short you’d have to add on the backgrounds. . . . This was what I actually started doing.”1 The Reluctant Dragon and Dumbo one-shots could not be assembled in that fashion, though, since comic-strip versions did not exist, and so, according to Tripp, Oskar Lebeck came up with a solution: trace the frames of the actual Disney film while using the film-editing machine called a Moviola to project the film up onto a piece of frosted glass inserted in a drawing board: “The projector of the editing machine would shine onto the frosted glass [from] underneath . . . and when we’d see [a frame] we wanted to use [as a panel in the comic book], we just stopped the machine, put in a single piece of Strathmore or tracing paper over the top of it and [made] a rough sketch. Then we’d go to the next panel. Then we’d ink them in and add balloons, put them in comicpage order and make a 48-page comic book out of it.”2 A stenographer transcribed the dialogue so that Tripp and his colleagues knew which words to put in the dialogue balloons. This curious expedient was a variant on a familiar animation procedure called rotoscoping, in which animators tried to produce lifelike movement by tracing frames of live-action film—the most important difference being that Western’s young cartoonists had to trace relatively few frames of film to produce the panels of the comic books, whereas full-scale rotoscoping could involve tracing many hundreds of frames, and so was far more tedious. Tripp recalled his work on those early comic books as “a lot of fun”—a statement no animator would make about rotoscoping. Tripp spoke of making tracings from not just other Disney cartoons but also a couple of MGM cartoons, The Milky Way and The First Swallow, for the first two issues of Our Gang Comics in 1942.3 As odd as it was, comic-book rotoscoping evidently persisted for a year or two, perhaps until Tripp entered the army in September 1942. In addition to the Reluctant Dragon and Dumbo comic books, a comic book devoted to Mickey Mouse also appeared late in 1941, but it was made up not of new material but of reprinted daily comic strips— a complete story titled “Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot.” Reprinted newspaper comics continued to dominate the pages of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories throughout 1942—a successful strategy, as the sales figures argued—although one new story, drawn on the East Coast by Walt Kelly, somehow slipped into no. 23, August 1942. It was a comic-book version of “The Laughing Gauchito,” a segment planned

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 92

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Carl Barks Makes His Break |

93

for the Disney feature Saludos Amigos but scrapped months before the comic-book story was published. In the meantime, Eleanor Packer had produced two Disney comic books that were the first to be composed of new material that was not based on a current animated feature. One, a black-and-white comic book in the Large Feature series, no. 7, called Pluto Saves the Ship, was published in July 1942. It was followed in August by a color comic book called Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, an early entry, no. 9, in what Dell called its Four Color Comic series of one-shots.4 The two comic books, each of which took its title from the story that filled its pages, included the first work for Packer by a veteran Disney cartoonist, Carl Barks. By the time those comic books were published he was forty-one years old and had been a member of the Disney staff for close to seven years, mostly as a writer—or “story man,” as the Disney writers were called—for the short cartoons starring Donald Duck. Fittingly, Barks’s first comic-book work was more as a writer than a cartoonist. He shared the writing of Pluto Saves the Ship with two other Disney cartoon writers, Jack Hannah and Nick George. Barks wrote in 1981 that the three men wrote the story in 1942 in our evening hours. It was not an adaptation of a cartoon story. Eleanor Packer . . . may have dressed up the basic plot. It was only a oneshot special designed to take advantage of the wartime jitters. Anyway, we three did the final draft in rough sketch form in my den room in North Hollywood. The post–Pearl Harbor blackouts were in effect, and we had all window blinds closed and taped shut. It was hot and stuffy, and we consumed many beers. The story shows the effects. One of Disney’s layout men with a flair for drawing panel after panel of shipyard scaffolding did the artwork. I can’t recall his name. Because . . . we were only writing action gags to flesh out someone else’s story line, none of us felt we deserved any claim to fame. I certainly forgot the whole business very quickly. As for payment, I doubt that we received more than a dollar a page.5

Work on the Donald Duck comic book involved some of the same people, but in a different combination. This time Barks was drawing instead of writing. Bob Karp, who wrote the gags for the Donald Duck newspaper strip, also wrote “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold,” basing the comic book on story sketches for an unproduced feature cartoon. That cartoon, which was to have starred Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, would have been called Morgan’s Ghost. It would have been a modestly budgeted cartoon about an hour long, one of several such features—Mickey and the Beanstalk and The Wind in the Willows

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 93

27/09/14 2:41 PM

94 | Chapter 8

Carl Barks posed with a feathered friend in the 1940s. Author’s collection.

were others—that Walt Disney was making or contemplating in 1941, when his studio was in deep financial trouble and about to be wracked by a divisive strike. By 1942, all those features had been shelved, temporarily or permanently. Barks said on at least two occasions that the idea for the comic book originated with Oskar Lebeck when he “was out there at the studio looking for material that could be adapted for comic books.” That was probably in February 1942.6 There is, however, no indication in those interviews that Barks had any personal knowledge of Lebeck’s involvement.7 Like Barks, Jack Hannah remembered the “Pirate Gold” assignment as originating not directly from Lebeck, but elsewhere.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 94

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Carl Barks Makes His Break |

95

“A fellow named John Rose worked upstairs,” Hannah said (Rose managed the Disney story department), and he had something to do with Whitman Publishing Company. [He was] a sort of go-between with Eleanor Packer and the studio. She wanted someone to draw this book, and Carl Barks and I were picked out; we were asked if we wanted to do it at night, at home, and we said great. I never knew that [the story was taken from the unmade feature Morgan’s Ghost]; I never saw a story sketch that came from it. Carl and I were given a typed copy of the story—I think it was broken into panels. That’s all that I worked from. Carl and I took it to our respective homes; we took thirty-two pages apiece, and got together on hookups. We’d just take sections; we didn’t even split it down the middle. To my recollection, I never saw a sketch of any kind on the thing.8

Barks likewise remembered a typewritten script, broken down by panels. It would describe a ship or a dock or a room in some detail, to show what atmosphere should be developed in that panel. . . . When we began, we were only given four or five pages of script, while Bob [Karp] was working on other pages. I took a couple of pages, and Jack took a couple, and by the time we got those done, there was much more of the script done, and we had a little talk together as to which we enjoyed or felt either of us could draw better than the other. We decided that I would take most of the outdoor scenes, and he would take the indoor ones.9

In both comic books, the story has been broken down into too many drawings, recalling not just the sketches on a storyboard but also the layout drawings that cartoon directors used to guide the work of their animators. Drawings of both kinds were not just typically more plentiful, in proportion to the action depicted, than the panels in a comicbook story; they were also never intended to stand on their own. They required a story man’s narration or an animator’s hand to bring them to life. Especially in the Pluto story, the action has been dissected so thoroughly that each panel looks like a frozen moment, and the drawings lie flat on the page. In addition, as Geoffrey Blum has noted, Barks and his colleagues borrowed heavily from several Disney cartoons that Barks had helped to write in the preceding four years.10 Both comic books were, however, striking departures from the comicbook norm in important respects. Their stories were exceptionally long—”Pluto Saves the Ship” fills all but one of that book’s fifty-two pages, covers included, and “Pirate Gold” fills sixty-four pages of sixtyeight, again counting the covers as pages. Both stories’ prevailing tone is

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 95

27/09/14 2:41 PM

96 | Chapter 8

serious. “Pluto Saves the Ship” is a wartime story with Nazi saboteurs (one of them a traitorous dog—that is, a canine) as villains. As for “Pirate Gold,” Walt Disney spoke in 1941 of making Morgan’s Ghost “a good burlesque of Treasure Island,” with the eponymous ghost a comic presence on the screen,11 but the comic-book story resists the “burlesque” label and demands to be regarded as an imitation of the Stevenson novel, with Mickey Mouse’s longtime nemesis Black Pete in the Long John Silver role. The length of the stories, and their serious tone, may have reflected strong sales of the 1941 Mickey Mouse “Phantom Blot” oneshot. That comic book was also devoted to a single story starring a Disney character engaged in conflict with a deadly enemy. Disney received royalties on 427,057 copies—but when Dell next published a Mickey Mouse one-shot, in 1943, Western paid Disney royalties on more than a million copies. If, as seems likely, Oskar Lebeck was at Disney early in 1942 looking for a suitable source for a full-length Donald Duck adventure story comparable to “Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot,” that would have been because there was no existing material suitable for reprinting; the Donald Duck newspaper comics offered not stories but a daily joke. Dell had published three Donald Duck one-shots at that point, two in black and white and one in color, and all assembled from daily strips or Sunday pages. Cobbling together such newspaper comics to tell a real story of any length would have been impossible. Morgan’s Ghost met that need, once Mickey Mouse and Goofy had been replaced in the cast by Donald’s three nephews. Both Lebeck and Eleanor Packer would have been at ease working with longer stories in any case—Packer especially, because she had written so many of them for Whitman in the 1930s. A standard sort of story in Whitman’s juvenile books—the ones published for children who could read for themselves—was an adventure whose heroes were likable characters familiar from comics and the movies. Comic books like Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold and Pluto Saves the Ship were awkward new variants of what had already become a Whitman formula. The two Disney comic books appeared within weeks of the first Bugs Bunny comic book, the black-and-white issue with Carl Buettner’s first work for Packer. The stories in the Bugs Bunny comic book were not as long, at twenty-four pages each, but were still long by prevailing comicbook standards. A sixty-four-page adaptation of Bambi (the film was released in the summer of 1942) followed soon after Pirate Gold, drawn by the Disney animator Ken Hultgren in the period before he began

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 96

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Carl Barks Makes His Break |

97

drawing in quantity for Benjamin Sangor. The lead story in the first Porky Pig one-shot, published late in 1942, was also long, at thirty-nine pages. The stories in Dell anthology comic books like Walt Disney’s Comics and Looney Tunes were shorter, ten pages or less, but those stories were longer than many stories in comparable titles from other publishers. As crude as the stories in the early Dell titles were, there was in their length the potential for the development of both plot and character. Kelly’s “Laughing Gauchito” aside, the first original comics did not appear in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories until no. 27, the December 1942 issue, in the form of a twelve-page story, drawn by Carl Buettner, about Joe Carioca, the parrot star of Saludos Amigos. By then, not only were comic books with new material dominating the market, but the well of reprintable Disney comic strips was starting to run dry. New comics based on characters from Bambi, and drawn again by Ken Hultgren, appeared in three issues of Walt Disney’s Comics in early 1943, breaking the pattern of text adaptations from the animated features. Those stories were, however, more conspicuously juvenile—simpler in both writing and drawing—than the reprinted comic strips they displaced. As it turned out, another original story was more significant. This was the ten-page story with Donald Duck and his nephews in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 31, April 1943—the first such story to be drawn by Carl Barks, and his first comic-book work since his collaboration on “Pirate Gold.” By the time Barks drew that ten-page story, late in 1942, he had left the studio, without telling Jack Hannah, his partner in the story department, that he was leaving. “I took a trip east for a few days [on family business],” Hannah said, “and when I came back, Carl had quit the studio to go into comic books.”12 Barks had left his Disney job without giving notice. Instead, he wrote to Hal Adelquist, the Disney personnel director, on November 9, 1942, to tell him that he had decided to leave the staff as of the previous Friday, November 6: I tried to see you last Friday to tell you that I have decided to leave the studio and try farming at my San Jacinto estate (five acres of Russian thistles). I had not planned to leave so suddenly, in fact, I might have stuck around indefinitely had not gasoline rationing forced me to move while it is still possible to do so. . . . I have become tired of working for wages and have decided to make one reckless effort to survive on my own. . . . I feel that with more time to develop

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 97

27/09/14 2:41 PM

98 | Chapter 8

my long-neglected knack for drawing human figures I may be able to break into the comic magazine field. . . . Certain of the boys have the mistaken idea that the little job of drawing that I did on a duck one-shot last summer gave me comic-strip delusions and accounts chiefly for my itchy feet; such however is not the case. I was working nights to develop a comic-strip technique long before I even heard of the Whitman Publishing Co. I have no promises of work from the Whitman people in the future, and I doubt very much that they would offer me any lest the studio feel that they had in some degree lured me from the fold.13

He had discovered in 1941, Barks wrote fifty-five years later, “that the hot sun of the semi desert area east of L.A. made me feel good.” He had been suffering from sinus trouble, which he blamed on the studio’s air conditioning, to the point that he had undergone an operation of some kind to relieve its symptoms. In San Jacinto, though, I could breathe through my nose, and my itchy giant hives simply burned away in the heat. The great depression was still raging. Real estate was cheap. I bought five acres with a livable house [on April 17, 1941]14 and planned to use it as a weekend “recovery” place . . . . The wartime restrictions that the studio had to impose upon us hired help would have ended my weekend recoveries. I had to make the break, hence my departure and my letter to Hal Adelquist. . . . I had no way of knowing if I could make a living at freelance cartooning or at raising chickens. Luckily I was saved by the decision of Whitman Publishing Co. to try printing original Donald Duck stories in [Walt Disney’s Comics].15

Barks had been looking at comic books with interest for a few years before he drew one, and he said in 1983 that he found in working on “Pirate Gold” that he liked drawing comic-book stories: [Y]ou could get in and do some drawing, and you could do it with a finepointed pen. Lord, those old blue and red pencils we used to rub out [story sketches] with—they were broad and soft and smudgy—they took all the fun out of art; it just became a type of shorthand. It was fun to be able to draw things in sharp detail for once. I looked in the [National] Geographic and got some of the English architecture to use for the Bucket o’ Blood saloon. And I would have used the Geographic for reference on the ship’s rigging.16

In 1973, Barks remembered getting in touch with Whitman—that is, with Eleanor Packer—soon after retreating to his chicken farm: “I wrote to Western Publishing [sic], and told them that I had left the studio, and that I was available in case they had anything they wanted done.”17 Packer may have had a script in hand or, at least as likely, may have written one herself in short order. “They sent me a ready-written

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 98

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Carl Barks Makes His Break |

99

script to draw for story #1 several weeks after I left the studio. . . . The script was the Crow story,” in which Donald defends his Victory Garden against a gang of voracious crows. That story was published in the April 1943 Walt Disney’s Comics after Barks had not just drawn it but rewritten it. “I noticed some bad errors in the plot,” he said in a 1967 letter, “and wrote the editor for permission to change things around.”18 He trod lightly when he reworked the crow story, he said a few years later: “I believe I sent them a sort of a draft of some change, or suggested some change. I was a little bit new with these people, they hardly knew who I was, so I wasn’t going to make myself an obnoxious character right away.”19 He was successful: “The result was they invited me to see if I could do a whole original story myself. The story of the kids and their ‘rabbit foot’ [in the May 1943 Walt Disney’s Comics, no. 32] was my answer to the opportunity.”20 Barks’s “Donald Duck” story in the April Walt Disney’s Comics began on the fifth page of the magazine, but for May his story moved to the lead position. It is possible, though unlikely, that the script for the first “Donald Duck” story came to Barks not from Packer but from Dorothy Strebe, who worked for more than twenty years in the publications department at Walt Disney Productions. Her undated memo to Barks, now in the Walt Disney Archives, says: “Here is a 10-page story for Donald Duck. Hope that you like it . . . you are to stage it, of course . . . and if you see that it can be strengthened, or that it deviates from Donald either in narration or action, please make the improvements.” She asked for delivery in two weeks—“by the 23rd,” probably of December. Barks was to be paid $12.50 per page, an increase from the $10 per page he remembered receiving for his work on “Pirate Gold.” Strebe added: “Golly, I didn’t know you had left [the studio].”21 In 1974, Barks said of the script that accompanied Strebe’s memo: “That would have been about the second one, I think. The first [script] came to me directly from Eleanor Packer.” But he also recalled getting a script for only the first story, the one in the April 1943 Walt Disney’s Comics.22 Did Barks receive a script for his second story from Strebe but not use it? He definitely submitted his second story to Whitman on December 23, 1942—a date that is consistent with Strebe’s memo—but he always said he wrote as well as drew that story. The question of when Barks began both writing and drawing his stories is of more than incidental interest because the “Donald Duck” stories were for many years such a congenial artistic platform for Barks, and because so much of the merit of those stories was owing to their

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 99

27/09/14 2:41 PM

100 | Chapter 8

The “Donald Duck” story in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 32, May 1943, was the first comic-book story that Carl Barks both wrote and illustrated. © 1943 Disney.

harmonious marriage of script and drawings. There is obvious attraction in being able to say of one of Barks’s comic-book stories, this is where it all began. But any definitive statement of that sort will always be elusive. When Barks began writing and drawing stories for Western, he had no comic-book experience. There were precious few models he might have emulated, whether in Western’s other comic books or in those of other publishers. Clumsy writing and weak drawing prevailed. As the Looney Tunes cartoonists Veve Risto and Roger Armstrong believed, the comic book imposed new demands that many cartoonists were slow to understand, much less obey. Where Barks stood apart—and what gave him the breathing space he needed to develop skills uniquely suited to comic books—was in his experience at Disney. Barks was more familiar with animated characters than many of his comic-book colleagues. He knew how to draw them, and, most

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 100

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Carl Barks Makes His Break |

101

important, he knew how to write stories for them, even if those stories were better suited to animated cartoons than to comic books. The Donald Duck cartoon stories Barks wrote with Jack Hannah and others while he was at Disney invite criticism—the comedy is often labored and Donald Duck himself noisy and pugnacious, defects magnified by Jack King’s cautious direction—but they are clear and coherent, and they had passed muster with Walt Disney himself. That was a credential that no one else writing comic books for Western in 1943 could boast. Barks’s earliest stories for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, like his pages for “Pirate Gold,” speak strongly of the storyboards he had been making for years: the sparse and functional drawings, with their stock expressions, seem to be waiting for an animator’s enlivening touch. The connection between storyboard and comics page was one that Barks himself made. He said in 1971 that in his early years of comic-book work “I practically considered the formation of a story like I was working on a storyboard,” even though he first wrote a script in longhand. I bought a sheet of Celotex [fiberboard], four by eight, and I put that up in front of my drawing board, and when I’d get a half sheet or a comic page done in pencil, I’d stick it up there, and then the next one, and the next one, and after I got about five of them done, I would sit back and look at the display and read the continuity. Sometimes I would take down two or three sheets and do a lot of erasing and changing. I was able to visualize my story progress much better that way.23

By May 1943, Barks had written as well as drawn three ten-page stories for Walt Disney’s Comics. He then surrendered that feature to another cartoonist for one issue while he wrote and drew the three stories in Four Color no. 29, a Donald Duck one-shot published in the summer of 1943, the first such one-shot since Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold. As in “Pirate Gold,” comedy is notably lacking in that comic book’s lead story, “The Mummy’s Ring.” Barks said of it: I submitted a sort of script in advance there. I don’t remember how detailed a thing it was, but I believe I kind of roughed out the drawings and sent the sheets in, or took the sheets and left them there. Eleanor Packer . . . read through what I had planned . . . and I remember that she suggested some big changes, and she asked me to draw up these changes. Well, I did. I drew up the changes, and I think I sent the roughs of those changes back. She looked them over, and sent back word to go ahead with my original version, my original version was better. So after that, I never had any trouble.24

In “The Mummy’s Ring” there is again a prevailing seriousness (and a heavy reliance on National Geographic for the Egyptian settings).25

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 101

27/09/14 2:41 PM

102 | Chapter 8

There are threats of death that Donald and his nephews must take seriously and a torrent of dialogue-heavy balloons once the story’s mystery is solved. As in other early comic-book stories from Western’s Los Angeles office, the sense is of clumsy imitation of comic strips that more successfully combined comedy and adventure, like Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs and Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse. Within the next few months, though, Barks began to master the peculiar requirements of comic books. The story for the February 1944 Walt Disney’s Comics no. 41, titled “The Duck in the Iron Pants,” is readily imaginable translated to the screen—it echoes a 1942 Donald Duck cartoon called Donald’s Snow Fight, for which Barks was a writer—but it works as a comic-book story because its panels are not static, like storyboard sketches, or snapshots, or frames of film. For the first time in a Barks story, the individual panels throughout the story clearly embrace varying amounts of time; they “breathe.” Dialogue balloons always nudge a cartoonist in that direction—in particular, when two characters are speaking to each other in a panel, the elapsed time within that panel is necessarily more than a split second—and Barks was by this time assigning more weight to dialogue. “In the early stories,” he said in 1971, “I carried the progression with action a great deal more, and then in later stories, I was allowing the dialogue to carry a great deal of the story progress.”26 Dialogue is not just a storytelling tool, though. It imposes demands on a good cartoonist, especially for greater subtlety in how the characters in a panel seem to be responding to one another’s presence. On a larger scale, it is an important element in how panels and pages are related to one another. Barks spoke of that aspect of his work at the Boston Newcon comics convention in 1976. “I tried to end each page, especially toward the latter part of the story, with a little zinger that would carry the reader forward. I’d write the story as I went along, and when I was stuck, I’d skip ahead and write the ending, then go back and do the middle of the book, moving the story along to the already-written conclusion.”27 Within Barks’s intensely practical description of his working methods there is visible a concern for what might be called phrasing. Very early in his comic-book career, he began to think like an actor who is delivering a major speech or, perhaps even more, a pianist who is shaping a performance of a sonata, or a conductor a symphony: he began to make of a comic-book story an organic whole, one whose panels’ apparent duration expands and contracts in a syncopated pattern grounded

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 102

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Carl Barks Makes His Break |

103

in an acute sensitivity to time, and whose pages move in longer and deeper rhythms. Other cartoonists, notably Will Eisner in his Spirit stories, mastered comic-book time as fully as Barks, but none so naturally and unobtrusively. There is almost never in Barks the flamboyance and theatricality that Eisner so much enjoyed, but instead something that makes Barks’s stories seem more real: a temporal flow that mimics how people actually experience time.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 103

27/09/14 2:41 PM

9

Barks Becomes the Duck Man

From the beginning of Carl Barks’s comic-book career he was attentive to the form’s demands, as many of his peers were not. Jack Hannah, for one, drew a few undistinguished comic-book stories after his work with Barks on “Pirate Gold,” but, he told Jim Korkis, “I remember very little about the work, I’m afraid, because it just didn’t seem significant to me. . . . I can’t remember doing the stories but it’s obvious I did them. I really had no contact with the people at Whitman. . . . I was probably just given some typewritten scripts and drew them up.”1 There was, however, not much more than a hint of artistic sophistication in the first few years of Barks’s Donald Duck stories, and the stories suffered from debilities that extended beyond his tentative grasp of comic-book aesthetics. In the early stories, Donald often battled ferociously intense opponents—notably his surly, beetle-browed next-door neighbor Mr. Jones, but Mr. Jones was never more than a simplified version of a grumpy movie comedian like Edgar Kennedy. Conflict between Donald and his nephews recurred frequently but was rarely true parent–child conflict. Donald was instead like an older kid, a bully rather than a surrogate father. Other stories suffered from basic structural problems. Comic catastrophes accumulated, sometimes with strong echoes of silent two-reel comedies like Buster Keaton’s—films of the kind Barks saw as a young man—but there was no culminating disaster, only a contrived happy ending.

104

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 104

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Barks Becomes the Duck Man |

105

Barks was, however, increasingly aware of the possibilities in his new medium, and of the limitations of the animated cartoons that originally served as models for his stories. He said of gags like those in the Donald Duck cartoons and in his early stories that “sight gags are quite limited. You know, there are only so many things you can do with a human body or a duck body and then you start repeating yourself; otherwise you’d kill him.”2 The animated Donald Duck was, in Geoffrey Blum’s pithy description, “little more than a feathered temper whose peculiar voice makes conversation limited at best. Donald in the comics is capable of both speech and thought—rudimentary thought when the comics began in the early 1940s, but that was enough for Barks to work with.”3 Barks said of the gradual transition in his stories toward a greater emphasis on psychological comedy: You could draw just so much violent action in a comic book before it began to get tiresome. And I think Floyd Gottfredson [who plotted and drew the Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip] put his finger on it one time when I was talking to him; he says, “In the strip, the reader can hold it up, and he looks at it for a long, long time, but when it’s on the screen, he sees it for one twenty-fifth of a second, or something like that, and it’s gone.” There’s no chance for him to start looking at it too long. I remembered what he had told me, and I toned down my action a little bit after having talked with him. . . . I think it was sometime in the 1940s. I’d gone to the studio for something.4

Circumstances also pushed his work in a more promising direction. Like Western’s other cartoonists, Barks worked at first on stories made up of six-panel pages, but as wartime paper shortages shrank Walt Disney’s Comics from sixty-four pages to forty-eight (and then, briefly, thirty-two), plus covers, he wound up working with pages made up of eight panels. Barks said that he preferred working with six panels, so long as the sheets of drawing paper were of a manageable size. When he was working with six panels on large sheets, he said, “[i]n order to draw the stuff up here at the top, I had to fold the bottom part of the sheet of drawing paper back under the drawing board, and it made it difficult to ink.” With an eight-panel page, he could cut the paper in half. “A lot of the guys, though, just drew on full size. I used to see them around the office whenever I’d take in stories, there would be other guys’ work lying there, great big sheets, and I used to think, good Lord, they must have arms on them six feet long.”5 His work looked better in the tighter format, though, because it fit the growing precision of his drawings.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 105

27/09/14 2:41 PM

106 | Chapter 9

Barks was still a chicken farmer as well as a cartoonist, but as Western began to “load me up with this comics stuff,” he realized that “I could make more money drawing comics than I ever could with those chickens.” From about 1944 on, he simply fed his egg-laying hens “and let them live on a pension.”6 In the mid-1940s, when the Donald Duck one-shots were appearing only once a year, Barks was called upon to draw, and often write, stories with other characters—“Barney Bear and Benny Burro” in Our Gang Comics, single issues of Porky Pig, and Mickey Mouse, and even one story, at the very beginning of his work for Whitman, with Andy Panda, for New Funnies. “They weren’t characters that interested me a great deal,” Barks said of the “Barney Bear and Benny Burro” series. The two characters had been paired in Our Gang Comics no. 11, May– June 1944, after earlier stories had made clear that neither was strong enough to sustain a series on his own. “[T]hat burro, to try to figure out how to do much with that confounded burro—he’s got no hands,” only hooves. The stories “were harder to write, because I had to have very special business for those two guys. With the ducks, I could use human business, because a duck could do anything that a human could do.”7 That was because Donald Duck, as designed for the screen, had arms and hands rather than wings. In Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, new stories with other characters filled in behind Barks’s “Donald Duck stories,” alongside the continuing comic-strip reprints. Then, starting with no. 39, December 1943, “Bucky Bug” became a regular backup feature. “Bucky Bug” had already appeared for two years in the Silly Symphonies Sunday page, a page that began with “Bucky” in January 1932, almost a year before the release of a Silly Symphony with similar characters called Bugs in Love. “Bucky Bug” had then lain dormant for almost ten years. There is no way to retrieve the reasons for singling out such characters for continuing features, but their potential to support a series of stories must have been paramount, and “Junkville,” miniature insect homes built out of humans’ trash, may have been an appealing setting. As it happened, the “Bucky Bug” stories in Walt Disney’s Comics were from the beginning slanted toward a very young audience. The stories were extremely simple, drawn in a much broader cartoon style than Barks’s, and, as in the 1932–34 Sunday pages, the dialogue was all in rhyme. A side effect was that Barks’s stories seemed more adult set beside them. Walt Disney’s Comics was not unique among Western’s comic books in that respect—in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 106

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Barks Becomes the Duck Man |

107

Comics, the “Sniffles and Mary Jane” stories tilted younger than the “Bugs Bunny” stories—but the spread in the likely audiences’ ages was larger in the Disney comic book. Curiously, the “Bucky Bug” stories very quickly became crime stories, almost without exception (the exceptions usually being stories about insect warfare—also a subject when “Bucky Bug” occupied the Sunday Silly Symphonies page). Crime comic books enjoyed a great burst of popularity in the middle 1940s, and it may be that the writers of “Bucky Bug” were taking note of that; or, at least as likely, such stories were simply easier to write than other kinds. New Funnies, produced in New York, had its own insect feature, “Billy and Bonny Bee,” starting with no. 67, September 1942—a feature, drawn most often by Frank Thomas, that Western owned—and it was in such superficially similar stories that the Dell comics from the Los Angeles and New York offices were actually most different. In their whimsical tone if not in their appearance, the New York comic books produced under Oskar Lebeck resembled traditional illustrated children’s books, but “Bucky Bug,” with its stories dominated by vigorous conflict, was imaginable only as a comic strip or in a comic book. As Walt Disney’s Comics became a true anthology comic, with reprinted newspaper strips playing only a supporting role, there was the possibility that other cartoonists might become as closely identified with their characters as Barks was with the ducks, and develop their stories in the same way—but nothing like that happened. Instead, a character like the Li’l Bad Wolf, whose stories began with no. 52, January 1945, passed from hand to hand, the stories rarely rising above formula (the Big Bad Wolf tries to catch and eat the Three Little Pigs and the Li’l Bad Wolf thwarts him, usually without the Big Bad Wolf’s being aware of it) in both writing and drawing. The comic-book stories were not hamstrung by the animated cartoons; Li’l Bad Wolf in no way resembled the young wolves in two Disney shorts with the Three Little Pigs. It was just that, from all appearances, no one was as willing as Barks to take real pains with his work, or else was able to make such pains pay off for more than a story or two. Barks himself could in the middle 1940s lapse into a disregard for plausibility that was all too typical of comic books generally. Both of the stories in his third Donald Duck one-shot—Donald Duck in Frozen Gold, Four Color no. 62, published late in 1944—suffer in that way, combining the ludicrous (how does Donald know how to fly an airplane?) with a pulpish seriousness (Donald is again under the threat of

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 107

27/09/14 2:41 PM

108 | Chapter 9

death). In the second story, called “Mystery of the Swamp,” the ducks confront a particularly silly menace, the Gneezles, murderous hillbilly trolls who have been cut off from the outside world for centuries but somehow speak English. Such longer stories were inevitably more problematic than the tenpage stories. The shorter stories could be, and almost always were, entirely comic, even though they differed in their kind of comedy. The longer stories, serious in tone from “Pirate Gold” on, could never escape the requirement for some strand of adventure, some element of peril, and making the ducks’ peril believable without sacrificing the comedy was a continuing challenge. Despite the deficiencies of “Mystery of the Swamp,” its pacing—the rhythm of the transitions from panel to panel—and the comic incidents suggest for the first time that Barks was on the verge of mastery of a craft, the fabricating of the literate comic-book story, that still barely existed. It was in stories published soon afterward, early in 1945, that Barks began to show just what that mastery would look like when he finally achieved it. The story in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 53, February 1945—in which Donald buys a tramp steamer and heads for Acapulco with a load of bubble-bath soap—is a comic adventure, and, even more to the point, a comic-book adventure, like none before it. There are no echoes of film, no suggestion that Barks’s panels are awaiting conversion into a more appropriate medium. This was the first ten-page story that took the ducks out of the country, from a starting point in what could only be California, and their environment embraces not just their little ship but tempestuous seas, a rambunctious whale, and a Mexican coastal village. Everything is more persuasively detailed and concrete than in earlier stories. The story in the next issue—no. 54, March 1945, in which Donald and the nephews race down a frozen river the three miles to Pumpkinburg on ice skates—also benefits from the expertise Barks had gradually acquired in timing and staging. What was lacking now for this kind of story was an emotional focus that would make the ducks seem like rival family members as well as rival racers. Later stories in 1945 for Walt Disney’s Comics were not as good. For the July through October issues, when the page count had shrunk again, Barks had to squeeze as many as twelve panels onto a page. But the end of the year saw another burst of stories distinguished by a new subtlety and self-assurance. In no. 62, November 1945, Donald enters water-ski

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 108

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Barks Becomes the Duck Man |

109

In “The Terror of the River,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 108 (1946), Carl Barks took the ducks into uncommonly serious territory. © 1946 Disney.

races but must operate his tow boat by remote control after the nephews eat themselves sick on popcorn and candy. The situation sounds hopelessly contrived, but not only does Barks make it look possible, mechanically; he also makes it feel possible, through his emphasis on exactly those elements—Donald’s vainglory and desperation, the nephews’ smugness—essential to that result. Two months later, in no. 64, January 1946, the conflict between the nephews and Donald has become unmistakably a conflict between children and parent, with a corresponding increase in psychological verisimilitude. Things could still go wrong, especially in the longer stories. The nephews had to behave with maturity in those stories, because otherwise they would be burdens on Donald, but in “The Terror of the River,” in the Donald Duck one-shot for 1946, Four Color no. 108, Barks boxed himself in. Too much of the story’s load falls on the nephews’ shoulders, to the point that one of them rents a plane and pilot, and another rents a tugboat—adult activities impossible for very young children. The story as a whole has an ominous tone—the villain is a sadistic, murderous psychopath—that is hard to reconcile with its comic machinery.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 109

27/09/14 2:41 PM

110 | Chapter 9

As embryonic as Barks’s stories still were three years after he began writing and drawing them, he was already putting distance between himself and his colleagues. They were improving, too, and a 1946 comic book like Bugs Bunny’s Dangerous Venture, Four Color no. 123, with a thirty-page lead story of that title drawn by Tom McKimson, not only looks much better than earlier comic books with the Looney Tunes characters, but also invites comparison with what Barks was doing. A well-plotted story puts Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in genuine peril, in an exotic Tibetan setting whose appearance suggests that McKimson, or someone, did a little homework. There is even a comic but entirely appropriate name (Mr. Omi-Akin-Bak). The unidentified author of the story punts on the language question—everyone in Tibet speaks English, it seems—but no more egregiously than Barks had done in the Gneezles story the year before. Still, the “Dangerous Venture” dialogue lacks Barks’s economy and pungency—it is burdened especially by Porky Pig’s stutter, which more astute writers learned to minimize—and the panel layouts are frequently awkward, with dialogue balloons shoehorned into whatever space the letterer could find. The intriguingly named Omi-Akin-Bak remains offstage throughout the entire story, and the Tibetan settings, however authentic they may look, are lacking in atmosphere. And then there is the lead character himself, Bugs Bunny, who is a little too much the bully, just as he was in some of his early 1940s animated cartoons. “Bugs Bunny’s Dangerous Venture” is a perfectly presentable comicbook story for its period, more attractive than most, but lacking refinements of exactly the kind that would over the next few years invigorate Barks’s stories so greatly. Already, by 1946, the range of both visual and verbal expression in Barks’s stories was wider—and much more precise—than in most other comic books, especially those with animated characters. Page through a story drawn by almost any of Barks’s contemporaries, even a story like “Dangerous Venture,” and the sense very quickly is that a limited repertoire of gestures and expressions is being called upon to do a great deal of work. The dialogue is functional at best. Barks’s stories are not vulnerable to such complaints. Barks’s colleagues recognized the clear superiority of his stories to most of what was going into Western’s comic books. Roger Armstrong remembered that he and Carl Buettner talked about Barks, who was, “even then [in the mid-1940s], the cartoon genius of the group—and we concurred on the fact that Barks was strictly a ‘Duck’ man. Given any other character . . . he wouldn’t have come through on such a tremen-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 110

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Barks Becomes the Duck Man |

111

dously high level. . . . He had a peculiar affinity with those damn Ducks and he really made them as far as comic books go.”8 His colleagues’ admiration found its strongest expression in the ritual called “the showing.” Roger Armstrong remembered that ritual as almost too hideous to get into. We used to bring our work to the office, and . . . the receptionist would call out, “Here comes Roger, with his Porky Pig.” Eleanor [Packer] would say, “Goody, goody, we’ll have the showing now.” We’d all go into this room with a big table, and Eleanor would sit right in front, in a big overstuffed chair. The drawings were placed in front of her, and everybody who was there—the artists or anybody else—would come look at them. Carl [Buettner] would sit at the table, too, and in a very, very amused voice he would read the stories. We were all delighted when it was a Carl Barks story, we would all laugh and roll on the floor. If it was a story by one of the rest of us, we would die a million deaths. Eleanor would peruse the story as Carl Buettner read it aloud. With expression! He would have a blue pencil in his hand; Eleanor would say, “There needs to be a comma there,” and he would reach over and mark it with his blue pencil. Or Carl would say, “I think we could stage this a little better, don’t you, Roger? Heh, heh, heh.” . . . That was the showing. When it was all over, Eleanor would heave herself up out of her chair and we would all go our ways, and the unfortunate whose work had been on display would pick up the pieces, and take his brush, and white paint, and paint out or paste up or whatever the hell had to be done. You did the work right there.9

Armstrong recalled the occasion when “they tore one of my ‘Sniffles and Mary Jane’ stories to pieces”; he identified the story as the one in Looney Tunes no. 38, December 1944. “This was in the afternoon, around three o’clock, and the redrawing and pasting up I had to do on that thing took me until four-thirty the next morning. There was no transportation available, so I had to walk back to my little place on Gramercy Place. It’s a long haul from Beverly Hills to Hollywood, even when the streets are deserted.”10 The rationale for the showings, Barks believed, was that “Eleanor Packer and Buettner and those people were new at their business of editing comic books, and they felt that the best way to see how comicbook stories were put together was to read them out loud. If they would read well, as you read them out loud, they would read well to the children. The parents reading these stories to their children would be able to read them and get the sense out of them.”11 Armstrong remembered that “Carl Barks was so modest, so quiet during the showings. He’d stand quiet over on one side, and he’d look out the window. He’s always been the most modest, self-effacing man

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 111

27/09/14 2:41 PM

112 | Chapter 9

in the world. It never bothered him that people were going over his stuff; it may have, but he didn’t show it. He probably turned his hearing aid off.”12 Chase Craig took issue with Armstrong on that point. “We all went into hysterics of laughter” when Buettner was reading a Barks story aloud, he said, “and such appreciation of his work certainly could do nothing but give him a lift. Carl loves recognition of his talent as much as anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s exactly what he got every time he ever came to the office. In fact, it was a great day when Carl came in once a month to deliver his work. We all had lunch together and sort of celebrated the occasion. I repeat, he was not embarrassed by his reception. He loved it.”13 Barks may or may not have disliked the showings, but they were an element in his artistic growth; he was, after all, getting applause from his peers. He said as much in 1978: “When I got appreciation—when people said, ‘That’s a great story,’ and laughed—it made me feel good. If they had read the stuff through and just deadpanned it, I would have felt disappointed.” But he was glad when the showings stopped, by sometime in the late 1940s.14 Barks’s superiority as a cartoonist and a writer began to emerge clearly in the mid-1940s, just at a time when his editors were likely to be most responsive. The market for comic books of the general Disney type was expanding rapidly, many people entering the field were struggling to master its requirements, and the military was snatching up cartoonists. Chase Craig enlisted in the navy in 1942, and Roger Armstrong entered the army on February 15, 1945.15 Armstrong had worked in animation for Walter Lantz for about a year before that, while continuing his comic-book work, in an ultimately futile effort to keep from being drafted. (The Lantz studio was making films for the military as well as Woody Woodpecker cartoons.) “Eleanor was getting panicky because so many people were being drafted,” Armstrong said. “She said, ‘Roger, you’re the only hope we’ve got, because you’ve got kids [from a youthful marriage that ended in divorce], but we’re going to have to shore this up to make sure we can keep you through the war. If we lose you, I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ She went to Walter Lantz, and she kind of blackmailed him into taking me.”16 In such circumstances, Barks—an older man, not subject to the draft because of his age and his defective hearing, reliably productive, and clearly a better writer and artist than most of his peers—was a treasure,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 112

27/09/14 2:41 PM

Barks Becomes the Duck Man |

113

and he was treated accordingly. Not with higher pay, to be sure, but with an unusual artistic freedom to explore the potential of the kind of story he had been hired to write and draw. Said Roger Armstrong: I’m quite sure that Carl was given a great deal more latitude with his Donald Duck stories than the rest of us were with our stories. I’ve often wondered why his things turned out the way they did, and I realize in hindsight that the reason must have been that he was given complete carte blanche, he could do exactly as he pleased. I don’t think any editorial rein was exercised on Carl. As a consequence, he gave free flight to his imagination. I can remember going in there with story ideas and being hooted down—Eleanor would say, “Oh, Roger, that’s just too fey”—whereas Carl would just go ahead and do the thing, he wouldn’t discuss it with them. As a result, his stuff caught on— Carl Buettner liked it very much, we were all mad about it.17

What was most distinctive about Barks’s best work, though, was not that he gave “free flight to his imagination” but that he shaped his stories in accordance with a view of life that was essentially pessimistic. In story after story, Barks revealed his understanding of how people’s minds and hearts really work—and, typically, lead them astray. As with the best stories by Harvey Kurtzman and John Stanley, many of the best Barks stories invite labeling him a comic-book Ambrose Bierce—an author he never mentioned and probably never read—except that Barks rarely succumbed to the bitterness that is always lying in wait for the cynic and the satirist. Perhaps it was awareness of his readers’ youth that steered him away from darkness. However bleak his stories’ underlying message might be, it was always delivered with perfect comic timing and robust comic action. He took seriously his obligation to entertain the child reader. Not only had Barks entered middle age by the time he began writing as well as drawing comic-book stories with the ducks; he had led a life that differed greatly from the lives of most of his colleagues—the young city boys who made up the bulk of the staff at Disney and Whitman. He was conscious of the difference: On the farms and the cold, snowy ranch in eastern Oregon where I was raised, all the people lived hard, bitter lives. When I think of them now, I think, my God, every day of their lives was just a hell on earth. . . . It was just hard work and suffering and loneliness. . . . I think I found it natural to satirize yearnings and pomposities and frustrations in the ducks because of my earlier contacts with people in woeful ways of life. Those people had the ability to laugh at the most awesome miseries. If they hadn’t had humor in their lives, they would have gone crazy.18

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 113

27/09/14 2:41 PM

114 | Chapter 9

Barks’s life had been more physically demanding than what his colleagues had known, beyond doubt, but also drearier, more tedious, and even a little sleazy, since for about six years he made his living as a cartoonist and editor for what was, by the standards of the time, a smutty joke magazine. Few autobiographical elements made their way into his stories, he said in a 1971 interview, because “I had so few personal experiences, other than just hard work.”19 His earlier life was in many ways disconnected from what he later accomplished. The very act of writing and drawing comic-book stories tapped abilities barely visible in all of his previous work. He came to comic books after forty mostly grueling years, but he also came to them as a stubborn autodidact, and his stories with the Disney ducks permitted him to use his rough learning, from magazines and encyclopedias and old textbooks, to explore the surprisingly rich meaning to be found even in relatively narrow experiences like his own. There is in Barks’s stories some of the Depression-bred coldness of the Donald Duck newspaper strip. While he worked at Disney he contributed a few gags for that strip, which was drawn by Al Taliaferro. Cynicism surfaces only rarely in Barks’s stories, though, as does its twin, sentimentality. Donald Duck’s foolish choices are the engine of Barks’s plots, but there is never the sense that Barks believes that either he, as author, or his readers could be capable of much better. It was this cool realism that made his stories seem “adult,” compared with most comicbook stories, even in the mid-1940s, and that made his best stories so extraordinary when he had fully mastered the demands of his art.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 114

27/09/14 2:41 PM

10

The Workman: Gaylord DuBois

Oskar Lebeck’s most important writer in the mid-1940s, as for the preceding few years, was Gaylord DuBois. He was also one of the most important figures in the early comic book. That was not because his work was of high quality in a literary or artistic sense, although admirers believe that some of it deserves such praise. Rather, it was because he worked so well in tandem with Lebeck, contributing materially to the creation of an environment in which gifted artists and writers could thrive as it was not possible to thrive then at any other publisher. Walt Kelly and John Stanley, the two best of Lebeck’s other artists and writers, illustrated DuBois scripts before they began writing all or almost all of their own stories. DuBois’s scripts set the tone for the whole Dell line, which was free of almost everything that was lurid and morbid and generally excessive in competitors’ comic books. DuBois may deserve the greatest credit for that departure from the prevailing norms, or it may be that he simply absorbed better than anyone else the priorities that Oskar Lebeck observed. Either way, because DuBois’s scripts were more archetypally “Dell” than anyone else’s—because they established a baseline—they opened the way for other creators who preferred to work in the same vein. There was in the Dell comic books the opportunity to make much better stories than the comic-book industry usually permitted. Gaylord McIlvaine DuBois became a comic-book writer when he was in his midthirties—he was born in upstate New York on August 24, 115

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 115

27/09/14 2:41 PM

116 | Chapter 10

Gaylord and Mary DuBois, mid-1940s. Courtesy of Letty Lebeck Edes.

1899—and almost by accident. In 1935, when he was suffering from brucellosis and casting about for work that he could do while confined to bed, he wrote to ask his college friend Lloyd E. Smith for help.1 Smith and DuBois had both attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1921–22. DuBois left Trinity, attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, briefly, and then held a series of odd jobs before winding up at Boston University in 1925–27; he never received a college degree.2 His friend Smith remained at Trinity until he graduated in 1923. Smith worked as a freelance writer, then as an English instructor

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 116

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Workman: Gaylord DuBois |

117

at Trinity, and finally for three years as an editor for Ely Culbertson, a great popularizer of contract bridge, before joining Whitman’s staff in Racine, Wisconsin, as a writer and editor in 1934.3 In the meantime, DuBois worked as a necktie salesman and then as a social worker before enrolling in General Theological Seminary, an Episcopal institution in New York City. (He was from a family of Episcopal priests.4) After he graduated from the seminary in 1933 he took a job with the federal government’s Works Progress Administration, managing shelters for what were then called “the transient unemployed” and would later be called “the homeless.” One six-month assignment took him to Wyoming—far from his home ground in New York—and gave him an exposure to western ways that he would soon put to use in books. DuBois described to an interviewer, Lou Mougin, how Lloyd Smith’s response to his plea for work eventually led him into the comic-book business: “I was given a copy of [a] Lone Ranger radio script with the following instructions: ‘Write a 60,000 word novel based on this script, and if we accept it, you will have more assignments.’ I thought the script was pretty corny, and not very good material to base a novel on, but I managed to use a little of it as the base for a plot.” Although DuBois was identified as the author of The Lone Ranger on early printings, he was then displaced on the book’s cover by Fran Striker, creator of the Lone Ranger radio series. “I’ve never had any complaints about that,” DuBois said, “because I sold all the rights to the novel to Whitman.”5 As DuBois’s biographer Irvin H. Ziemann has written, “Following the success of DuBois’ novel, Lloyd Smith began to send him other work, mainly the writing of Big Little Books—DuBois wrote 30. . . . Gaylord’s editors would give him the name of the principal character for a book and a handful of assorted clippings from newspaper comics—out of sequence—based on that character. DuBois’ task was to create a plot that would link these illustrations together, with one page of corresponding text opposite each picture.” In 1939, recently married and seeking more income, “DuBois set off for New York City to find adequate work, and again Lloyd Smith came to his aid” by recommending DuBois to the licensing agent Stephen Slesinger.6 Whitman published most of the books, Big Little Books especially, that bore Slesinger’s copyright. Slesinger was cut from the same cloth as Hal Horne and Kay Kamen, all of them furiously competitive. When Slesinger licensed Whitman to publish Tarzan Big Little Books in 1933, his contract with Edgar Rice

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 117

27/09/14 2:41 PM

118 | Chapter 10

Burroughs Inc. probably did not permit him to make such a deal. Only after Burroughs had sent several stiff letters to Whitman, complaining that Whitman had infringed on its copyright by publishing a Tarzan Big Little Book, did the two companies enter upon a long and profitable relationship.7 Burroughs did not forgive Slesinger so easily, parting company with him in 1938. Slesinger’s greatest coup was buying the merchandising rights to Winnie-the-Pooh. Once Slesinger had satisfied himself that the rights were available, he went to London and signed an agreement with A. A. Milne, author of the Pooh books, on January 6, 1930—two and a half years before Kay Kamen, his fellow licensing pioneer, signed a comparable agreement with Walt Disney.8 Slesinger subsequently acquired the merchandising rights to other properties. In addition to Burroughs’s Tarzan, he controlled the licensing of Zane Grey’s western novels and some popular newspaper comic strips, including Wash Tubbs, Alley Oop, and Tailspin Tommy. Whitman liked doing business with Slesinger because, in the words of Whitman’s president, Samuel E. Lowe, “it is much more difficult to do business with a single organization than it is to do business with an organization which represents a number of items that we are using. We have turned down a good many things simply because we dreaded doing business with the individual.”9 Slesinger and Whitman had the same overriding goal—to sell as much as possible—whereas the creator of a literary property might find other considerations at least as compelling. Slesinger himself produced two comic strips: Red Ryder, drawn by Fred Harman; and King of the Royal Mounted, a Zane Grey property drawn by Jim Gary. Slesinger needed a writer for both comic strips, and Gaylord DuBois, after writing dozens of Big Little Books with western characters, was a perfect choice. DuBois had already written what he described as scripts for early comic books. “Back then,” as he said, “the whole idea of a comic magazine was experimental. Some of them had twelve panels to a page. For each twelve-panel page I wrote, I was paid fifty cents”—a low figure even then, but there may have been a reason. He was probably describing the very odd “Tom Mix” feature that appeared in Dell’s Popular Comics, starting with the May 1936 issue. There were two pages usually, of twelve panels each, with captions rather than dialogue balloons, and each page had its own heading so that it resembled a reprinted Sunday comics page. Whitman was already producing Tom Mix Big Little Books, and the “Tom Mix” pages in Popular Comics were adapted

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 118

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Workman: Gaylord DuBois |

119

from the illustrations in Big Little Books, reversing the usual procedure in which comics were reworked for the books. It was probably for that adaptation, and not for any original writing, that DuBois was paid fifty cents a page.10 “Tom Mix” was copyrighted by Slesinger, who owned the licensing rights to the movie cowboy. Fred Harman had joined the Slesinger staff through yet another Whitman connection: Samuel Lowe liked the illustrations that Harman drew for a 1938 Big Little Book called Cowboy Lingo: Boy’s Book of Western Facts and recommended him to Slesinger. Harman had been drawing a cowboy comic strip called Bronc Peeler for about four years, at first syndicating it himself, with only limited success. Almost certainly at Slesinger’s behest, Harman canceled his comic strip and transformed the rough-hewn Bronc Peeler into a virtually identical but somewhat slicker red-headed cowboy, Red Ryder. He had already replaced Bronc Peeler’s crusty sidekick Coyote Pete with a more readily adorable Indian boy named Little Beaver. Harman began drawing a Red Ryder Sunday page late in 1938, under a contract Slesinger negotiated with a newspaper syndicate, and then a daily comic strip early in 1939. Harman was usually identified as the creator of the Red Ryder comic strip, which achieved much greater popularity than Bronc Peeler, but Red Ryder bore Slesinger’s copyright, and it was always unclear who actually owned the character.11 It seems highly likely, though, that Slesinger as the copyright owner reaped by far the greatest rewards. The same was true in other, more famous instances. In the early 1940s Superman’s creators, Siegel and Shuster, were paid just ten dollars a page for the stories with their character that they wrote and drew for comic books published by Harry Donenfeld’s Detective Comics Inc. By then the character was no longer theirs. DC had bought all the rights for $130—the equivalent of $10 a page for the first thirteen-page story—on March 1, 1938, a few weeks before Superman’s debut in Action Comics no. 1.12 The television commentator Andy Rooney, who knew both Slesinger and Harman, wrote of their relationship: “Steve was a merchandizing [sic] genius. He went to the Daisy Air Rifle Company and sold them a deal to make a Red Ryder BB gun. In Hollywood, Republic Pictures agreed to pay Steve for the rights to make ten B movies based on Red Ryder. Fred Harman, meanwhile, was cranking out the strip in Steve’s back room for $60 a week.”13 That sum may have been more, it must be said, than what Harman could have been earning by himself with Bronc Peeler.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 119

27/09/14 2:41 PM

120 | Chapter 10

Once DuBois began writing comic strips directly for Slesinger, his pay was, in Ziemann’s words, “significantly better” than what he had earned in 1936, “enabling DuBois to rent an apartment in Brooklyn and send for his family.” According to Ziemann, DuBois met Oskar Lebeck while on “an errand” from Slesinger’s office, probably in 1939. “A friendship developed, and Lebeck offered DuBois full-time work as a freelancer for Whitman.” At first that freelance work involved more than comic books. Three juvenile novels, all published by Whitman in February 1941, bore the names of Lebeck and DuBois as coauthors. “Lebeck originated the characters,” according to Ziemann, “but DuBois composed the plot and did the actual writing.”14 As with DuBois’s reworking of a Tom Mix Big Little Book, that “actual writing” involved adapting existing material, since new stories with the characters from all three books— Rex King of the Deep, Stratosphere Jim and His Flying Fortress, and The Hurricane Kids on the Lost Islands—had already appeared in Dell or K.K. comic books by late in 1939. Rex appeared in The Funnies, Stratosphere Jim in Crackajack Funnies, and the Hurricane Kids in Popular Comics. There is no reason to believe that DuBois wrote any of those comic-book features, except possibly some of the later “Hurricane Kids” installments. If Lebeck and DuBois hoped that their collaboration would lead to bigger things, they were disappointed. The books had no sequels, and the comic-book features all died within a few years. The Hurricane Kids on the Lost Islands, like the other two books—and, for that matter, like DuBois’s very first novel, The Lone Ranger—is pure pulp. Its collegefreshman twin heroes, indistinguishable except by hair color, encounter dinosaurs, cavemen, pirates, sea monsters, bloodthirsty giant gorillas, and “Zulu” warriors in a little more than two hundred pages heavily illustrated by Bill Ely, who drew “The Hurricane Kids” for Popular Comics. There is lots of action, much of it involving gunfire and violent death, but nothing that invites emotional investment by anyone more than twelve years old. Although DuBois wrote a total of eight juvenile novels published in 1940–42, the increasingly popular comic books demanded more and more of his time. Thanks to Lebeck, DuBois told a correspondent around 1962, I began writing comic book scripts full time. Oskar was a man of immense drive and had a way of developing the best ability and the fervent loyalty of the artists and writers who worked under him. My work load grew so heavy that I had to dictate scripts to my wife while she typed. Rush orders were

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 120

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Workman: Gaylord DuBois |

121

often telephoned late in the day from Whitman Co.’s office in New York to our Brooklyn apartment. One night I worked with my wife Mary till 4:00 a.m., and rolled onto the bed fully dressed while she went out to the subway with the finished script to mail it in Grand Central Station so it would be delivered at the office that morning!”15

DuBois was a paradigmatic comic-book writer in that he turned out huge numbers of scripts with great speed, rarely received published credit for his work, and had no control at all over how his scripts were illustrated, often not even knowing the name of the artist involved. Late in his career, he described his working methods: Well, a workman like me gets his assignment—a single script or a whole book—from his editors. The characters are already established and so is the background or setting in a general way. I think up the best plot (or plots) I can, and write the plot details out in longhand. Usually I let the thing “settle” overnight, if it’s a 12 or 15 page story. In the morning I go over it, visualizing each picture that is to be drawn by the artist. I mark off my longhand rough story in pages of the comic book. Then I put an original and two carbons in my typewriter, and start writing. Each panel is handled the same way; that is, I first describe the picture the artist is to draw, in detail, which includes color, action, expression, background, angle of view, etc. Then I write out the dialogue for [balloons], and finally I write the caption or narrative line. I have nothing to do with choosing the artist, as he is chosen by the Art Editor. The artist is free to use or not to use my instructions for each panel. Sometimes he changes the picture I described—to suit his own idea or that of the Art Editor. Usually, though, the art department follows my script fairly close. The Script Editor reviews and approves or changes the dialogue and the captions I have written; usually the changes are few and minor.16

DuBois kept meticulous records of his work. His account books dated back to the early 1940s, but he had begun writing comic-book stories before the earliest entries. DuBois was able to identify some earlier stories that he wrote, copyright registrations identify him as the author of others, and in still other instances the tone and shape of a story make it recognizable as his. It is clear from a list based on the account books,17 and from the stories that predate the stories on the list, that Lebeck did indeed work DuBois very hard—and not as any sort of specialist in cowboys, because western stories played a small part in the Dell comic books of the early forties. Lebeck valued DuBois not just because he was productive and versatile—most of his earliest stories were in the talking-animal vein, in contrast to the adventure stories he had written before—but also because he

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 121

27/09/14 2:41 PM

122 | Chapter 10

was highly professional in a new business that was heavily burdened with clumsy amateurs. There is rarely a hint, in the stories based on DuBois scripts, that his panel breakdowns—that is, how the action was divided into individual drawings—hogtied his illustrators by cramming too much action into some panels and leaving others effectively empty. Likewise, words and pictures are usually in balance within each panel. There is almost never an overload of dialogue, whereas awkwardness of that sort is all too frequently visible in stories written for Whitman’s titles by other, mostly anonymous writers, not to mention the stories in other publishers’ comic books. (Roger Armstrong may have had such deficient scripts in mind when he complained of getting “un-drawable” scripts by New York writers.) DuBois’s talents were of a kind that everyone working regularly in comic books in the early 1940s needed but few had. DuBois contributed to Animal Comics from the second issue on, by writing all of the “Uncle Wiggily” stories; he wrote a few stories for Fairy Tale Parade, also starting with the second issue; he wrote several backup features for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics, even though most of that title’s content originated on the West Coast; and he wrote extensively for early issues of Our Gang Comics and New Funnies. DuBois’s versatility served him especially well when he was writing for Our Gang, since he was called upon to write not just talkinganimal stories (the first six “Tom and Jerry” stories, “Barney Bear” in the first issue), but also “King,” a deadly serious dog story that calls up thoughts of Jack London. “King” was copyrighted by Oskar Lebeck, as was “Flip and Dip,” for which DuBois wrote the first seven installments. The “Flip and Dip” stories, completely unlike “King,” were raucously and even brutally comic, as if The Katzenjammer Kids or some other early twentiethcentury comic strip had been superimposed on an ape family in the jungle. “Flip and Dip” survived for many years, but “King” expired after only five issues, tilting Our Gang‘s tone toward the uniformly comic—with the notable exception of the title feature. Many early comic books resembled Sunday comics sections not just in their heavy use of reprinted Sunday pages, but also in their mixture of different types of comics—adventure, humor, domestic drama—that appealed to children of different ages and to both boys and girls. New Funnies was a particularly striking example, even after its focus shifted to talking animals with the title change from The Funnies. In the last half of 1942, the title’s regular features included—besides stories with the Walter Lantz characters Oswald the Rabbit and Andy Panda, and Johnny Gru-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 122

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Workman: Gaylord DuBois |

123

elle’s talking dolls Raggedy Ann and Andy—“Young Hawk,” about Indian boys; and “Keeto the Jungle Boy,” a knockoff of Tarzan and Mowgli inherited from the recently deceased Crackajack Funnies. Over time, and especially as original material displaced the reprinted comic strips, most of these anthology titles became more uniform in the kind of comics they included. On the evidence of the comic books themselves, however, assembling a satisfactory lineup was never easy. Our Gang’s early issues, like the early issues of other comic books with talking animals, revealed just how tricky it could be to present animated-cartoon characters in the new format. There could be no satisfactory equivalent on the comic-book page for the strenuous violence in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. There was instead, in the comic book, mortal conflict, grim in outline and almost as grim on the page: the mouse seeking food, the cat trying to kill and eat the mouse. DuBois found part of a solution in the very first story, by giving Jerry, the mouse, a companion called Tuffy, who wore a diaper so that the two mice could be distinguished easily. Such a character was added to the animated cartoons years later, under the name Nibbles. In DuBois’s sixth and last “Tom and Jerry” story, illustrated by John Stanley for Our Gang no. 6, July–August 1943, the mice are in a bathroom, and the story presents them not as a cat’s intended prey, but as two curious children. Among the bathroom’s accessories is a box of “Kelly’s Liver Pills.” A toilet is on plain view—a great rarity in cartoons and comic books—and much of the story’s comedy centers on its tank. For New Funnies, DuBois wrote the “Andy Panda” and “Oswald the Rabbit” stories for the first couple of years (that is, assuming he wrote the stories preceding the earliest entries in his account books). He also wrote “Raggedy Ann & Andy” for New Funnies until that feature was spun off into its own monthly comic book in 1946, with DuBois continuing to write it. New Funnies was, if anything, an even more problematic title than Our Gang. Not only did it present the usual difficulties involved in translating animated characters to the comic-book page, but the principal Lantz characters, Andy Panda and Oswald—the two Lantz characters for whom DuBois wrote scripts—were much less distinct in appearance and mannerisms than competing studios’ characters, like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck. Although Andy Panda and Oswald appeared side by side in New Funnies, Andy had actually succeeded Oswald as Lantz’s cartoon star. When New Funnies got under way in 1942, Lantz had made no Oswald cartoons since 1938.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 123

27/09/14 2:41 PM

In “Tom and Jerry,” in Our Gang Comics no. 6, July–August 1943, written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by John Stanley, a toilet was used as a prop, most unusually for a comic-book story.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 124

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Workman: Gaylord DuBois |

125

Andy Panda was originally, in a few cartoons released in 1939–42, a bratty child modeled on Fanny Brice’s radio character Baby Snooks, and living with his parents in the wild. The character’s appeal depended almost entirely on giant pandas’ novelty—the first live panda had been brought to the United States only in 1936—and their easy adorability. In 1942 Lantz abandoned the original version in favor of an older, bourgeois Andy. That Andy appeared in occasional cartoons throughout the 1940s, but he was always amorphous. DuBois struggled with the first version of Andy, writing a multi-issue continuity that took a freakish “talking panda” from the Asian jungle to life as an American movie star, complete with a Hollywood apartment. Andy was portrayed as a bright child, not a comic figure at all. The “Andy Panda” and “Raggedy Ann and Andy” stories that DuBois wrote for New Funnies were illustrated by George Kerr, who was—like Arthur Jameson of Fairy Tale Parade—a much older man than most of his comic-book contemporaries. Kerr was born in 1870, and so in 1942 was already in his early seventies. He was for many years a newspaper artist, for the Hearst Sunday supplement American Weekly, and he also illustrated children’s books by L. Frank Baum and Thornton W. Burgess early in the twentieth century.18 There is no comedy in Kerr’s drawings for DuBois’s scripts (and for stories in other Lebeck-edited titles). His drawings are instead airy and light. Many of his characters seem to be dancing on the page, their poses highly stylized, their proportions and sizes changing in a manner that seems more dreamlike than arbitrary. The famed newspaper cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who thought of Kerr as a “great, great artist,” said of him: “The thing that I marvel at is he was such a big he-man, and he was doing these beautiful little pixies, delicate stuff.”19 The “Raggedy Ann” stories, like the Johnny Gruelle books on which they were based—and, for that matter, like the books that Kerr illustrated early in the century and the books that Oskar Lebeck wrote and illustrated in the 1930s—were intended for an audience of very young children whose parents would most likely be reading the stories to them aloud. It was in the “Raggedy Ann” stories, and perhaps most of all in an Oswald the Rabbit one-shot published early in 1943 as a sort of Easter special—a comic book also intended for a very young audience— that DuBois first showed what would make him so distinctive as a comic-book writer. In that sixty-four-page Oswald story, illustrated by Ken Hultgren, a rabbit community surmounts a cascade of crises after first taking refuge

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 125

27/09/14 2:41 PM

126 | Chapter 10

from a flood in a curious “church” that seems to have no religious purpose. The rabbits’ overriding fear is not that they will be drowned or left homeless, but that there will be no Easter baskets ready for the young bunnies. With Oswald in the lead, the rabbits enlist the aid of a host of other gentle animals and birds—ducks, beavers, pack rats—and all ends well on Easter morning. There is in this story, as in other stories drawn from DuBois’s scripts, none of the feverish, arbitrary activity that dominates the original material in other early comic books. Instead, his characters calmly work through practical problems, including some created by villains who themselves behave like naughty children. There are passages in DuBois’s juvenile novels, such as The Hurricane Kids, that are generally comparable—passages that sometimes abound in technical terms that would be unfamiliar to most children—but those are interludes in otherwise purplish stories with villains who are mortal threats. The emotional temperature is much lower in the stories based on DuBois’s scripts for younger children. It is tempting to read moral lessons into those stories, especially since DuBois graduated from an Episcopal seminary and in later years served as a lay pastor for small churches without an ordained minister,20 but there is unforced sweetness rather than preaching in his stories. The stories’ challenges are of course those that might confront sentient dolls or talking animals—that is, wholly fantastic characters—and so any connection to reality had to arise not from those challenges but from how the characters responded to them. DuBois was at pains to make what happened in his stories plausible on the stories’ own terms. In that way, if in no other, he resembled Carl Barks. For Barks, plausibility was only the grounding of his stories, the solid foundation that freed him to do much more through his dialogue and his drawings, and especially by knitting those elements together to form an artistic whole that was uniquely “comic book.” For DuBois, as a script writer who had no control over the realization of his ideas in drawings, plausibility could only be an end in itself. But the kind of plausibility he established, in which sympathetic characters support one another as they master the difficulties confronting them, would prove to be highly adaptable to stories intended for an older audience—stories of the kind that DuBois began writing for the new Roy Rogers Comics by 1944. That was when he left behind most of the work he had been doing for New Funnies and Our Gang Comics and returned to writing western and adventure stories. Many more stories for older readers followed.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 126

27/09/14 2:41 PM

11

The Observer: John Stanley

Gaylord DuBois had abandoned the unworkable movie-star conceit for Andy Panda when he wrote the stories for the mid-1943 issues of New Funnies, but the new installments presented Andy as an adorable wanderer and were hopelessly sticky. Finally, in New Funnies no. 79, September 1943, Andy became a middle-class homeowner generally similar to the animated-cartoon version, and he acquired a foil in the form of a belligerent chick, named Charlie, who in the next issue became a fullgrown rooster. Oswald the Rabbit had already acquired a companion of his own, a bear—originally a talking stuffed toy—named Toby. The talking-animal stars of New Funnies, because they were so indistinct, desperately needed such foils, and as a result they soon had domestic arrangements unlike anything in the animated cartoons or in most other comic books. Andy shared a house with Charlie Chicken, Oswald with Toby. None of those characters ever held jobs, except for the convenience of a particular story. Their ages were variable, too— presented as fully adult in one story, they might be children of seven or eight (that is, the same age as their typical readers) in another. Their circumstances were far more fluid than those of Disney characters like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, who in the comic books were always adults. In that respect Andy and Oswald echoed Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories far more than Walt Kelly’s “Albert and Pogo” stories ever did. Brer Rabbit and the other animals in Uncle Remus’s tales were in effect furred people in some stories and talking animals in 127

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 127

27/09/14 2:41 PM

128 | Chapter 11

others; they were even less anchored to a particular identity than the Lantz characters. The “Andy Panda” stories that DuBois wrote (according to his account books) and that John Stanley illustrated (if the resemblance to his later work can be trusted) feel like hybrids, with quirky touches that are not typical of DuBois’s scripts and that Stanley may have added with Lebeck’s encouragement. So rough-and-ready were the Lebeckedited comic books in the pinched war years—when manpower and supplies of every kind, paper especially, were in short supply—that the coloring is often crude beyond excuse and the printing beneath even low comic-book standards. Several hands may be visible in the drawings for a single story, and since the stories were rarely signed, identifying authorship can be a little like a burlesque equivalent of assigning anonymous work to Italian Renaissance artists through telltale details like the shape of an ear. But taking as a guide stories that are unquestionably all Stanley’s in writing and drawing, for the early issues of Little Lulu (1945–46), and working forward in New Funnies and Our Gang from 1943, certain stories stand out as his, and reveal a sensibility that was strikingly different from the comic-book norm. By 1944 Walt Kelly was no longer an anomaly among Lebeck’s artists, a draft-age cartoonist surrounded by older men, some of them gifted but much older, like Arthur Jameson and George Kerr, and some of them lesser talents that had been ground down by years in the pulps and other low-prestige venues. In Stanley, Lebeck found another cartoonist who drew as well as Kelly did, if in a very different style, and he would soon put Stanley to work on comic-book features that fitted him as well as Kelly’s features fitted Kelly. John Patrick Stanley was born on March 22, 1914, the second of the five children of James Stanley and Anna Ahern Stanley, Irish immigrants who lived in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. James was a conductor on the New York subway and then, by 1930, a ticket agent, by which time the family had moved to 2907 Heath Avenue in the Bronx.1 James Stanley’s occupation may have inspired three of his son’s stories for the Lebeck-edited comic books New Funnies and Little Lulu. In one New Funnies story, Woody Woodpecker is an apprentice trolley conductor, learning the ropes from a cheerfully sadistic instructor; in another, Li’l Eight Ball rides a subway train that is inexplicably luxurious. In Little Lulu, Lulu tells a story in which she travels around the world—by trolley. Stanley attended Textile High School in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, a vocational school that embraced classes in design as well

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 128

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Observer: John Stanley |

129

as manufacturing. A classmate, Gill Fox, himself to become a comicbook artist, remembered Stanley as extraordinarily talented: “You wouldn’t believe how good his work was at 16—as good as most professionals today.”2 In June 1932, Stanley received the Saint-Gaudens Medal, given to the graduating student from each New York City high school who had completed an elective art course with the greatest distinction.3 In a 1976 profile published for Stanley’s first appearance at a comicbook convention, Donald Phelps wrote of him: “His high school artistry was good enough for him to win a two year scholarship to the New York School of Art.” That was probably the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, which offered courses in commercial illustration; in the 1930s it occupied a five-story building on the southwest corner of 80th and Broadway. The school, now known as Parsons The New School for Design, has no record of Stanley’s enrollment, but early records are incomplete. “He felt very uncomfortable there,” Phelps wrote, “as most of his classmates were well-to-do and, being a city kid, he did not really blend in.”4 After two years, Stanley found a job with the Max Fleischer studio, which was producing animated cartoons at 1600 Broadway, about thirty blocks south of the New York School. “I worked for Max Fleischer for about a year,” Stanley said in 1976 at the Newcon comics convention in Boston (where he and Carl Barks appeared together for the first and only time). That would have been in 1934–35. “I started out as an opaquer and worked from opaques to inks to being an in-betweener.”5 At the Fleischer studio, as at other animation studios of the 1930s, “inkers” traced all the pencil drawings made by the animators and their assistants onto sheets of celluloid. An opaquer, in animation parlance, was the person who filled in the inked tracings with paint. The celluloids were then photographed, a frame or two at a time, to produce the illusion of movement when the film was projected. At the Fleischer studio, impatient young men who tried to climb the promotion ladder too rapidly risked collisions with resentful superiors, but Stanley’s exceptional talent seems to have spared him from reprisals. His promotion to inbetweener, after just a year or so as an opaquer and then an inker, was announced in the August 1935 issue of the Fleischer studio’s mimeographed in-house magazine, Fleischer’s Animated News.6 Three months earlier, in the May issue, Stanley had contributed a page of staff caricatures titled “But for the Grace of God (What They Might Have Been).” The caricatures are less than flattering: the animator Dave Tendlar is a peddler of overripe fish (and his name is misspelled “Tendler”), the camera operator Frank Paiker is selling

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 129

27/09/14 2:41 PM

130 | Chapter 11

naughty postcards, and the animator Tom Johnson is a piano mover who fobs off the heavy lifting on someone else.7 A promotion to assistant animator would have been Stanley’s next step, but Hal Horne had begun publishing the third version of Mickey Mouse Magazine by then, and Stanley left the Fleischer studio to join Horne’s staff by sometime early in 1936. “Besides drawing characters and illustrations for the magazines,” Donald Phelps wrote, “Stanley also drew some covers.”8 The job with Horne could not have lasted more than six to eight months, since Horne surrendered the magazine to Kay Kamen with the July 1936 issue and Stanley left Mickey Mouse Magazine when Horne did. Stanley said, though, that he was on the staff long enough that he “shook hands with Roy Disney once.”9 Stanley next worked for Kamen until late in 1936 if not longer, drawing characters for Disney merchandise items that included one of the Mickey Mouse watches.10 “After that,” Stanley said in 1976, “I free-lanced for a while. I didn’t want to be a cartoonist or a writer: I sort of backed into it. Those were hard times and I couldn’t find the kind of work I wanted as a graphic artist.”11 From September to December 1937, Stanley attended evening classes on etching at the Art Students League.12 “By his own admission,” Phelps wrote, “he didn’t learn much about [etching] but he did meet a group of ‘good time guys’ who believed in revelry and a whole lot of tipping the elbow . . . it was a more personally satisfying experience than his stint at the New York School of Art had been.”13 It may have been while he was at the Art Students League—which was, like the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, famous and prestigious—that Stanley became an alcoholic or something close to it, and, as a corollary, adopted a contemptuously casual attitude toward his work. That was a defensive gesture, surely, since from the beginning, with the Fleischer cartoons and Mickey Mouse Magazine, he worked on unambiguously commercial products that enjoyed none of the prestige of the paintings, drawings, and prints made by his schools’ many famous alumni. Stanley was still living at home with his parents on Heath Avenue, at the age of twenty-three, and he would continue to live there for the next several years.14 It seems likely that it was the steady income provided by comic books—the least prestigious work he had done, work he did not want to do—that finally permitted him to move to a home of his own. Stanley said in a 1965 newspaper interview that his comic-book career began more or less by accident: “I just drifted in: I was a commercial artist and letterer in New York when a friend who was in the comic book business asked for some help. I did the art work, but was unhappy with the

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 130

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Observer: John Stanley |

131

story and suggested I write my own.”15 He completed that account at the 1976 convention: “So they [presumably Oskar Lebeck] said, ‘All right . . . try your hand at it.’ They let you do anything at Western in those days.”16 Stanley later claimed to have saved none of his comic-book work. He told Glenn Bray in an undated letter in the early 1970s: “Somehow I never managed to hold on to a single copy of Little Lulu—or any other comic I’ve done.”17 He even pretended not to remember the titles of comic books he had originated, although he could be much more specific when his authorship was questioned. Neither was he indifferent to praise, at least when it came from his fellow cartoonists: “I wanted guys like Kelly to say, ‘Hey you’re great[,] man!”18 But for the most part he maintained a shell of indifference toward the work to which he devoted most of his adult life. Stanley’s younger brother, James, was a second lieutenant in the army air force and died in combat in 1944, but, like Walt Kelly, Stanley escaped the draft. He was rejected for military service in 1941.19 “I believe he suffered from a slight touch of tuberculosis, which kept him out of the service during the war,” his colleague Dan Noonan said— although Noonan’s knowledge was secondhand, since he didn’t meet Stanley until after the war—“and it was during that time that he got a job with Lebeck doing artwork. He began doing some writing, too, and he submitted a couple of ideas. I think Lebeck sensed his talent instantly.”20 In keeping with his temperament, Stanley himself spoke of Lebeck with a certain cool respect, saying that he was a “good editor in that he gave a free rein to the artists.”21 Nothing in the Dell comic books suggests Stanley’s involvement before 1943, although considering the lead time typically involved he may have started working for Lebeck by late in 1942. The earliest stories that can be identified with confidence as illustrated by Stanley, in late-1943 issues of New Funnies (“Andy Panda”) and Our Gang Comics (“Tom and Jerry”), are much better drawn than was the norm for the Dell talking-animal titles that originated in New York, Kelly’s work aside. The typical New Funnies story of 1942–44, when the rising demand for comic books was colliding with the loss of cartoonists to the military draft, is not just simply but carelessly drawn. Stanley’s drawings are not more detailed—they are lean in much the way that Oskar Lebeck’s were—but the draftsmanship is vastly superior. It was when he began writing his own stories that Stanley became a unique comic-book presence. Speaking at the 1976 Boston convention, Stanley contrasted his methods with those of Carl Barks: “I made no synopsis. I started from the very first panel on the page without having

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 131

27/09/14 2:41 PM

132 | Chapter 11

the faintest notion of how it would turn out. And I just hoped for the best, that’s all. Generally, it worked out.”22 Many of Stanley’s stories for New Funnies read like highly spontaneous sketches, the sort of thing he tossed off quickly and wrapped up however he could. He was indifferent to neat resolutions. Other stories in New Funnies are illuminating by contrast: the “Homer Pigeon” stories, starring another Lantz character as middleclass as Andy Panda, are irreproachably tidy, as narrative and in drawings (most often by the West Coast’s Veve Risto), and hopelessly dull. “Andy Panda” in New Funnies no. 92, October 1944, is one of the first stories that seem to be totally Stanley’s, script and drawings, in a way that anticipates his stories for Little Lulu. Andy in this story pursues a goal—to bake a prizewinning cake—with the blinkered obsessiveness that great comedians have always found a fertile resource. A cookbook cannot be found? Very well, Andy will use a recipe he finds in 1001 Chemistry Problems: “Good thing we got the putty!” Does that recipe call for baking his “cake” for thirty minutes? “We’ll leave it in for an hour and it’ll be twice as good!” So focused is Andy on completing the cake that when he realizes it lacks icing, he concerns himself only with how the cake should look, and so he ices the cake with a can of paint. The quintessential Stanley stories may be those, like this early example, in which one or more characters pursue their own ruin—or the incidental ruin of bystanders—with a mad single-mindedness. Sometimes things turn out well for his characters, as in this story, but it is always obvious that disaster was at least as likely, and not infrequently disaster arrives for those bystanders. Andy’s victory in the baking contest comes at the price of crushing the hopes of all the legitimate contestants. The story falters on a question of simple plausibility—victory depends on Andy’s cake weighing a great deal, weight that is evident only sporadically when Andy and Charlie Chicken are handling it—but Stanley soon managed such details better. By the time he produced that “Andy Panda” story, Stanley was writing and drawing “Woody Woodpecker” stories for New Funnies, too. That character had been, in a starring role in the animated cartoons and a supporting role in the comic books, a violently unhinged maniac. In Stanley’s stories he was much calmer. He was easily imaginable in a role like the one assigned to Andy Panda in the cake-baking contest—that is, as the kind of character who does unreasonable things in a perfectly reasonable manner. He was also well suited to comedy of a sort that would blossom in the Lulu comic books, as when Woody, in New Funnies no. 88, June 1944, must struggle with a character even more unreasonable than he, and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 132

27/09/14 2:41 PM

“Andy Panda,” in New Funnies no. 92, October 1944, was one of the first comic-book stories written and illustrated by John Stanley.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 133

27/09/14 2:41 PM

134 | Chapter 11

vicious to boot. Worse, the vicious character is a baby and so cannot be repelled by any normal defense. Stanley’s drawings for the stories he wrote are simpler than Barks’s and Kelly’s—not less important, exactly, but they serve unmistakably as a superstructure for the words and ideas that give the stories their forward thrust. Barks’s and Kelly’s stories are more organically comic-book stories than Stanley’s, with dialogue and drawings that more strongly resist being pulled apart. And yet, because Stanley could draw so well, he could communicate his intentions clearly even through very rough drawings. He was thus exceptionally well qualified to be a comic-book writer who did not tell his story in words, like Gaylord DuBois, but sketched each story in rough form, so that he controlled the staging within each panel and the general appearance and the attitudes of the characters. In any case, Stanley’s characters were not planted as firmly at the center of his interest as the characters in Barks’s and Kelly’s stories were at the center of theirs. Stanley was concerned with broad reaches of foolish and destructive human behavior; he was more purely a satirist than his comic-book colleagues. Barks and Kelly brought nuances to the drawings of their characters, making them more distinct as individuals, that would have detracted from the peculiar strengths of Stanley’s stories. Stanley demonstrated in the “Woody Woodpecker” stories his rapidly increasing technical security, as he dispensed with dialogue for a page or more and on rare occasions for most of a story—the comic-book equivalent, given the usual importance of knitting drawings and dialogue into an indivisible unit, of working without a net. There are strong echoes, on some of these pages, of the New Yorker’s dry, understated humor, and Stanley did sell one multidrawing gag to that magazine; it was published in the March 15, 1947, issue. By then Stanley was also writing many comic-book stories he did not illustrate, his work unsigned but always distinguishable by its detached, ironic tone. There is, for instance, “Oswald the Rabbit” in New Funnies no. 119, January 1947, in which Oswald, walking on stilts that lift him far above the street, has his pocket picked. The gag is executed not just with a necessary respect for plausibility but also with sangfroid worthy of Buster Keaton. First Oswald’s trust is abused by the pickpocket, and then a policeman is more than skeptical when the indignant rabbit reports the theft. That script and many other Stanley scripts were illustrated by Dan Gormley, a Whitman standby whose relaxed, cheerful drawings warmed up stories that might have seemed a little chilly otherwise. Stanley borrowed Gormley’s name for a taxidermist, an art gallery’s director, a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 134

27/09/14 2:41 PM

In “Oswald the Rabbit,” in New Funnies no. 119, January 1947, written by John Stanley and illustrated by Dan Gormley, Oswald learns that even being on stilts is no protection against a pickpocket.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 135

27/09/14 2:41 PM

136 | Chapter 11

pet-shop owner, and a postman, among other characters. (Walt Kelly, for his part, dubbed an island Gormley’s Folly in a couple of “Our Gang” stories.) Gormley, in Dan Noonan’s recollection, made only the pencil drawings, which were inked and lettered by a woman named Anahid Dinkjian: “She was a very good inker, and she inked almost precisely what you had laid down there.”23 This was an early example at Western of a multipart division of labor that was to become more common there, as at other publishers. By the time the Oswald-on-stilts story appeared, Stanley had been firmly attached for a couple of years to a character that would be almost entirely his responsibility for another dozen. “That’s the way it went for about a year,” he said of his initial freelance work for Western in 1943– 44 on Our Gang Comics and New Funnies, “then Lulu came along and the rest is history.”24 When Oskar Lebeck assigned him to the first Little Lulu comic book, “I’m sure it was due to no special form of brilliance that he thought I’d lend to it,” Stanley told Donald Phelps. “It could have been handed to Dan Noonan [actually not, because Noonan had not begun working for Western yet], Kelly or anyone else. I just happened to be available at the time.”25 And yet the fit between character and cartoonist is so tight that it is hard to believe that such perfect casting was accidental. The character Lulu was born early in 1935. The Saturday Evening Post was losing Carl Anderson’s popular weekly panel cartoon, “Henry,” starring a mute, hairless boy, to King Features Syndicate. An editor at the Post asked a regular contributor to the magazine, Marjorie Henderson Buell—she signed her cartoons “Marge”—for help in coming up with a replacement for “Henry.” The Post wanted another child character, but a girl this time. “The editors noodled out the name,” Buell told an interviewer more than thirty years later. “I was too busy thinking about how she’d look and what she’d do.” The name the editors “noodled out” was “Little Lulu.” For a design, Buell essentially added a skirt and corkscrew curls to Henry’s shoe-button eyes, upturned nose, and babyish jawline. The new character was a devilish child, heiress to a long line of such characters that in newspaper comics extended back to the Yellow Kid, Buster Brown, and the Katzenjammer Kids. Like theirs, her mischief, as displayed in a weekly panel, often bordered on the malicious. Lulu first appeared in the Post for February 23, 1935, and ran there until the issue of December 30, 1944. By that time, she was also appearing in animated cartoons for Paramount and in advertisements for Kleenex tissues. “The Post didn’t want me to go into large-scale business with

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 136

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Observer: John Stanley |

137

John Stanley, Oskar Lebeck’s neighbor, plays the guitar at a mid-1940s pool party at the Lebeck home in Croton-on-Hudson, in the Hudson Valley. To Stanley’s right is Anne DeStefano, Lebeck’s secretary. The woman behind Stanley is Jane Werner (later Jane Werner Watson), author and editor of many of Western’s children’s books. Courtesy of Letty Lebeck Edes.

Lulu,” Buell said, “but I wanted to see what she could do in all forms. We parted amicably.”26 Buell’s first contract with Western Printing & Lithographing Company covered inexpensive books (ten to fifteen cents retail) but not comic books specifically. It was dated March 15, 1944, and provided for a royalty of a half cent on each copy sold.27 Seven months later, in a contract dated October 23, 1944—a contract that perhaps reflected the growing popularity of comic books—Buell gave Western “the right to publish in printed form, in color or in black-and-white, comics magazines or comics [sic] books known as one-shots” featuring Little Lulu. In other words, the Lulu comic books were limited to the Dell Four Color series, with no commitment on Western’s part to publish on a regular schedule. Buell was to receive five hundred dollars as a royalty on the first three hundred thousand copies printed, and a higher royalty of a quarter cent on each copy for print runs above that figure. She got an advance on her royalties of five thousand dollars—a significant vote

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 137

27/09/14 2:41 PM

138 | Chapter 11

John Stanley (foreground) and Oskar Lebeck around 1950. Courtesy of Letty Lebeck Edes.

of confidence in Little Lulu, who had appeared in animated cartoons for the first time only the preceding January—and was to get an advance of the same size in the contract’s second year.28 The world of comic-character licensing was a small one: William C. Erskine, who negotiated Buell’s contracts with Western and managed the licensing of Little Lulu, had worked in the 1930s for Kay Kamen, Disney’s licensing maestro—he was by 1938 vice president of Kay Kamen Ltd.—and had thus received what was the best schooling in character merchandising that anyone could get, except possibly under Stephen Slesinger. Erskine also licensed other famous characters—Raggedy Ann and Andy and Uncle Wiggily—for products that included Dell comic books.29 Buell maintained a proprietary interest in her character as Erskine signed up more licensees. Gordon Sheehan, who animated on the Little Lulu cartoons for Famous Studios—the successor to the Fleischer stu-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 138

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Observer: John Stanley |

139

dio, where John Stanley worked in the mid-1930s—remembered that Buell came to the studio in Manhattan occasionally; “She seemed to get quite a big kick out of seeing her little character animated. . . . She might have had a few little friendly words of advice, but I don’t think she tried to change things very much.”30 After she signed her contract with Western, and Oskar Lebeck chose Stanley to write and draw the new comic book, Stanley went to Philadelphia to meet her. The official publication date of the first Little Lulu comic book, Four Color no. 74, was May 14, 1945, almost five months after Lulu’s last appearance in the Post. That first issue was written and drawn entirely by Stanley, who also wrote and illustrated the second and third issues. The new comic book was an immediate success: Marge’s Little Lulu began appearing on a de facto bimonthly schedule in 1946, even though it did not become officially a bimonthly for two more years, under an amended agreement. As of the fourth issue (Four Color no. 115, 1946), Stanley began to share the drawing of the feature with two other cartoonists, Irving Tripp and Tripp’s friend Charles Hedinger, both of whom had just returned to the art staff at Western’s Poughkeepsie plant after military service. Tripp remembered that they “wanted something a little different to do, and we went to Oskar Lebeck . . . and he said he’d see what he could come up with.”31 Western sent Buell proofs for each issue of the comic book, and she had fifteen days to disapprove any of the contents. She noticed the change in drawing style when she saw the proofs for the fourth issue. She wrote to Erskine, who read part of her letter to Oskar Lebeck over the phone. Erskine wrote to Buell on May 14, 1946, reporting on a conversation that is rare specific evidence of Lebeck’s diplomatic skills: He told me that in order to keep pace with the schedule two artists were added on this job to assist and work under the supervision of John Stanley whom you met in Philadelphia one day. Mr. Lebeck said that outside of members of his own art department no one but you had noticed any change, and he said that all of your comments were to the point and the three men are now working efficiently and effectively, and he is sure that you are going to be pleased with the result. . . . Lebeck did not advise me of the change in advance because he did not want to prejudice our comments, but he is really pleased that you noticed the differences however slight they may be.32

Hedinger made the pencil drawings for the Little Lulu stories for the next few years, and Tripp finished them in ink. Tripp eventually assumed both penciling and inking duties, with help on the lettering and the

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 139

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The first Little Lulu comic book, Four Color no. 74 (1945), was written and drawn completely by John Stanley. © 1945, 1973, Marjorie Henderson Buell.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 140

27/09/14 2:41 PM

The Observer: John Stanley |

141

backgrounds from two other artists. Stanley drew only the covers of Little Lulu and no stories, with rare exceptions, but, as he told Maggie Thompson, he remained in control: “For the 13 or 14 years I did them, all the stories, gags, etc., good and bad, were written entirely by me. The stories were done in storyboard form . . . and sent to the Poughkeepsie plant to be copied on large sheets of Bristol board, inked and lettered.”33 Those “storyboards” were rough sketches broken down into the panels for each page, drawn on what Tripp called “regular typewriter paper.”34 Stanley’s stories for Little Lulu always had identifying characteristics that pointed toward his authorship, even though his work was almost never signed.35 Maggie Thompson listed a few of them: “the character screaming ‘YOW!’ in fury or fright, frequent use of overweight characters, assorted sound effects peculiar to his work, the slapstick situation of disaster in the wake of an unnoticing causative figure.”36 Tripp spoke of Stanley’s scripts warmly, saying they were “beautiful to work with. . . . I mean he had expressions! Everything was so clear and precise, you didn’t have to go over it with a magnifying glass or ask questions. . . . You knew.”37 Tripp remembered seeing Stanley at the Poughkeepsie plant only “three or four times,” the first time soon after Tripp and Hedinger began drawing the Lulu stories: “I remember John saying, ‘the inker can make or break a story,’ so it was kind of encouraging. He complimented me on what I was doing and encouraged me to keep with it. He came to Poughkeepsie with Oscar [sic] Lebeck on occasion, but mostly they were just having a good time.”38 Stanley said in later years, however, that he disliked the published drawings made by the other cartoonists. He told Donald Phelps: “I complained constantly trying to get a change of artist but to no avail. It was too static for me. I would rather have had faster movement.”39 In a letter written about ten years after he spoke to Phelps, Stanley was a little more charitable, but also more revealing of the pride he took in his work. He remembered meeting Tripp—whom he dismissed as a “copiest [sic]”— “maybe two or three times at the Poughkeepsie plant. . . . I never saw Tripp in the New York office. . . . He was sent my storyboards and enlarged and finished them. He did a good job, but he never added, subtracted or changed anything whatever. I wouldn’t allow any tampering with my work, and LeBeck [sic], the boss, was totally supportive of this.”40 That was not a typical comic-book situation—either in Stanley’s determination to resist tampering or in Lebeck’s support for his artist. Its atypicality was a major reason that Little Lulu became an extraordinary comic book.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 141

27/09/14 2:41 PM

12

“I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin”

“I seldom reminisce,” Carl Barks wrote in 1975 to an admirer of his stories with the Disney ducks. “Ninety percent of my life has been spent in such drudgery that I studiously avoid recalling anything earlier than ten minutes ago.”1 That was comic hyperbole, and Barks could at times slip into extended riffs in the same vein—self-deprecation with overtones of resentment and just a little self-pity, as in this 1968 letter to the magazine writer Dick Blackburn: Frankly, I was incapable of writing much in the way of hidden “messages” into my stories. In personal background I am a backwoods bumpkin. My education consists of eight grades in a one-room Oregon schoolhouse. I’ve traveled nowhere, seen few movies or plays, read few books (e.g. Zane Greys and Perry Masons). The background research evident in my comic book stories was laboriously dug out of my shelves of National Geographics and Encyclopedia Brittanicas [sic]. I’ve long been afflicted with partial deafness, so I’ve missed any oral exchanges with people whose ideas might have broadened my intellect. With such limited knowledge of expression I had to stick to writing my stuff straight. On the physical plane, however, my experiences during my early years when I worked as a farmhand, mule skinner, psuedo [sic] cowboy, and steel worker, always terribly inefficiently, gave me practical knowledge for complicating many of Donald Duck’s problems. The perversity of beasts, machines, and nature I knew by heart.2

There was mere exaggeration in such statements, nothing more. When Barks spoke in 1973 about his early years in Oregon, he described 142

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 142

27/09/14 2:41 PM

“I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin” |

143

a boyhood removed by only a few years from the brute harshness of nineteenth-century pioneer life: My folks had a little wheat ranch in southern Oregon, about two miles over the California line. My dad was a homesteader and moved up there in the 1880s. He’d been a blacksmith and a teamster and so on, on those big grain ranches around Stockton, in the San Joaquin Valley, quite a number of years, and he had come there out of Missouri, as an orphan at the age of about fourteen. He had had a little apprenticeship as a blacksmith, and so he went to work on those big ranches. He worked there for many years, and when he heard about the homestead land guys could pick up in Oregon, why he went up there and took up a homestead of a hundred and sixty acres. He was very industrious at it, cleared the sagebrush off, and he got enough income out of his hundred and sixty to buy other hundred and sixties around him, so by the time I came along, he had about a square mile of land, all in wheat, and doing all right.3

His parents, William Barks and Arminta Johnson, had met as schoolchildren in Missouri. After William made his way west—“I remember him telling about riding on top of the boxcars coming out to California,” Carl Barks said—he and Arminta “corresponded with each other a little bit over the years.” When her parents died, after what were probably long illnesses, Arminta and William married on November 1, 1897—not in Oregon, for some reason, but in Yreka, in northern California about twenty miles south of the Oregon state line.4 Both William and Arminta were almost forty years old when they married. Their first son, named Clyde, was born in 1899. Carl Barks was born on March 27, 1901, near the small town of Merrill, Oregon, in a two-room cabin. The cabin became a bunkhouse and laundry room around 1905, after Barks’s father built a proper ranch house with a long ell to accommodate a dining room that could seat a dozen or more hired hands at harvest time. The Barks ranch, as all such western farms are called, was only a couple of miles north of the California line, about five miles west of Merrill and fifteen miles south of Midland. Merrill itself was brand new, laid out in the spring of 1894—the first building was a flour mill— and not incorporated until May 1903, when Carl Barks was two years old.5 The nearest town of any size, Klamath Falls, was hours away from the Barks farm, behind a team of horses. In Merrill, Barks attended the one-room Lone Pine schoolhouse near the ranch with a dozen or so other students.6 Even in his nineties, Barks remembered life on the ranch as emotionally parched: “The ranch house was a lonely place with no close neighbors. My parents had little patience with the yearnings of a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 143

27/09/14 2:41 PM

144 | Chapter 12

small boy, both being old enough to be my grandparents, and my slightly older brother had little patience with my ‘sissy’ fascination with drawing and reading so, other than the farm animals, I had little companionship.”7 Barks’s father tired of wheat ranching, and when Carl was about seven years old the family moved from the ranch to Midland, where William Barks put up some big corrals and feed lots, and then we used to feed the cattle and bed down the shipping cars whenever these big trail herds would come in from eastern Oregon. . . . Real cowboys would come in with those outfits. You’d see the string of cattle coming through the gap in the hills off to the east, and boy, it was a couple of hours before the tailers came through. . . . Those cowboys were tough fellows. They were used to having one little old blanket roll, rolled in stiff canvas on the back of their saddles, and they’d just lay that out on the barn floor and sleep in that. . . . My brother and I we just worshipped those fellows! And oh, what vulgar-talking men they were!8

After about two years in Midland, William Barks rented the ranch and the feed lot and moved his family to Santa Rosa, California, north of San Francisco. In Santa Rosa, Barks for the first time attended school with boys his own age. He remembered seeing his first movie there.9 But the move to Santa Rosa did not work out well. William Barks was so sure that he had to have some solid income, so he went and spent money to buy a prune orchard, in Santa Rosa. Right away, the price of prunes went down to nothing, and right away the rains stopped up in Oregon, and the wheat ranch didn’t pay off . . . . [T]he only income that was coming in was rent from the feed lot, and so hard times began to settle in on us, and my dad, he had a nervous breakdown. . . . In the meantime, my mother had had an operation for cancer . . . she knew she had only a few more years to live. She wanted to get us all back up to Oregon, and back on the ranch, if possible. Well, the lease on the ranch had a couple of more years to run, so we went back to the feed-lot business. For two years we were there, then the ranch lease ran out, and we went back to the ranch, and there my mother died.10

Arminta died on November 7, 1916. Barks was fifteen. His schooling ended around the same time. “I got through the eighth grade. . . . I would have loved to have gone on to high school, but it was five miles to the nearest high school, and my hearing at that time had begun to deteriorate a little bit to where it was kind of difficult for me to pick up things in class.” Barks traced his hearing loss to a childhood case of the measles.11 When he finished school, “I helped my dad there on the ranch for . . . a little more than a year. The war was on, World War I, and kids my

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 144

27/09/14 2:41 PM

“I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin” |

145

age could get five dollars a day, which was fantastic wages, working for the farmers, pitching hay, helping to harvest, just about anything . . . . I worked for wages any time I could get time off from working on the home ranch. When I was seventeen, the war ended, and at that time I was eager to go to San Francisco, to get where I could maybe pursue a line of cartooning.” He had first become seriously interested in cartooning way back when I was going to school in Santa Rosa. There was a kid sat across the aisle from me in the school . . . and he was a little older than I was, but he had evidently had some correspondence-school training in cartooning, or his parents or somebody had, because he used to amaze me with little old drawings he’d make of Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt or somebody like that, little cartoons. I would look at them, and see how he constructed them, and oh, I thought that was the most wonderful thing in the world to draw like that kid could draw.12

A few years later, soon after his mother’s death, Barks tried to harness his continuing interest in cartooning to formal instruction: “I think I hadn’t quite turned sixteen yet when I talked my dad into letting me subscribe” to a mail-order course offered by the Cleveland-based Landon School. He spoke almost sixty years later as if his failure to follow through with the Landon course still made him uneasy: “I got about four of the lessons under my belt when the war work began to get so insistent, I didn’t have time to work out those problems. . . . But those [lessons] did help me. And I was always able to look at cartoons in the newspapers, the comic strips, and the feature pages and so on, and get something out of looking at how other guys did their cartoons. So, I had developed a fairly good style; I could draw well enough to get by with quite a lot of things.”13 Of the comic strips that appealed to him when he was a boy, Barks cited only one in a 1976 interview with Donald Phelps: Winsor McCay’s lavish Sunday page Little Nemo in Slumberland. “It came out in the San Francisco Examiner. We’d get that through the mail on our home ranch up in Oregon.”14 Barks always expressed admiration for comic strips, Nemo being the oldest, that were drawn in a more realistic style than that of the Disney short cartoons or comic books. His taste for such drawing turned out to be a critical element in his development as a cartoonist: he was not an exceptionally gifted draftsman capable of a Little Nemo or a later Sunday page like Harold Foster’s Prince Valiant, but in drawing comic-book stories he increasingly brought to them the same attention to realistic settings that characterized comic strips of the kind he admired.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 145

27/09/14 2:41 PM

146 | Chapter 12

In 1978, an inspection of his “morgue” showed that it included panels from Prince Valiant (many of those panels depicted small ships on rough seas), Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff, Jungle Jim by Paul Norris, Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer by Roy Crane, Tarzan by Burne Hogarth, The Lone Ranger by Charles Flanders, and Flash Gordon by Mac Raboy. The work of Crane and Foster was particularly useful, he said, “and any other guy who drew fairly accurately, but at the same time with a lot of freedom.” He didn’t copy individual panels: “I would just take the general appearance of it.”15 Barks carefully distinguished between the kinds of influence he had felt from other cartoonists. E. C. Segar of Thimble Theatre (starring Popeye the Sailor) was unquestionably a powerful influence in shaping Barks’s comedy—the kind of comedy that presents the ridiculous with a straight face—but, as he wrote in 1984, “[n]o doubt my drawing style was more affected by [Roy] Crane’s staging and compositions.”16 Barks arrived in San Francisco in December 1918. He wrote more than fifty years later: “I lived there nearly 2 years (1918–20) and I credit the city with most of what I absorbed in culture and feeling for adventure.”17 He got a job as an errand boy for a print shop, but he could not interest the San Francisco newspapers in hiring him as a cartoonist, and after a year and a half he returned to Oregon. He spent the summer working on the ranch, and then returned to San Francisco to study show-card writing at night school. “I soon found that the lettering came so hard for me, that that wasn’t one of my natural talents. I used up all of my money, and went back up to Oregon, and worked on the ranch again,” until, he said, “I foolishly got married” to Pearl Turner, who was sixteen or seventeen at the time, on October 1, 1921. Barks was a bust as a rancher: “[A]s soon as I tried to raise wheat and potatoes and things there on the ranch, the rains stopped. Nothing would grow, so I had to work at something else. My father-in-law [William A. Turner] was an old sawmill man, and he had sold out his own sawmill [which was on Stukel Mountain, roughly midway between Merrill and Klamath Falls18], but he had a logging contract with a logging outfit. So, with my young bride, I went up to the logging camp, and I spent the summer [of 1923] with the loggers.” When the logging operation closed for the winter late that year, leaving Barks at loose ends, “I remembered people that my folks had known in Midland who were in the oil fields, down at Coalinga [in California’s Central Valley], I believe.”19 The Barkses drove to Coalinga in their secondhand Ford, “a real rattletrap” with doors that wouldn’t close. Presumably they brought their infant daughter, Peggy, with them, although Barks never mentioned it.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 146

27/09/14 2:41 PM

“I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin” |

147

Carl Barks in San Francisco in 1919. Courtesy of Carl Barks.

Near the end of his life he spoke of his first marriage and his two daughters—a second daughter, Dorothy, was born in 1924—as if they were all the products of mistakes: “[N]either of us should have gotten married. We did and we had no intention of having any children, but accidentally we got one and then we got another one a little later on.”20 Once in California, the Barkses found that the family friends had moved away. They drove to Roseville, “where there was a couple that my wife knew. This guy worked for the railroad, in the car shops. He

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 147

27/09/14 2:41 PM

148 | Chapter 12

said, ‘Oh, hell, I can get you on at the car shops.’ . . . So I went over, and right away I got put on in the car shops. And there I was for over six years, in those darned car shops.21 Barks was tall (six feet one and a half inches) and slender (he weighed 180 pounds when he registered for the military draft in February 1942,22 and probably less in earlier years), and he had worked for most of his life in physically demanding jobs. Now, in the car shops, he had another one: “I started out just swinging a sledge hammer, and common labor, and got put on to heating rivets on a riveting gang, and that was piecework. I was on that for five and a half years or so. God, I was getting sick of that.” In the meantime, he was continuing to draw: “By the time 1928, ‘29 rolled around, I had begun to sell some stuff to [the Calgary Eye-Opener], and also sold a couple of cartoons to Judge magazine. That boosted my ego tremendously.”23 Barks’s first and possibly only Judge cartoon appeared in the issue dated November 22, 1930. Barks worked in Roseville for Pacific Fruit Express, a refrigerated-car system owned jointly by Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, from 1923 to 1929, according to his employment record at the Disney studio (which showed him earning $225 a month in that job). “Work was in the repairing of banged up cars,” he wrote in 1980. “I worked in the heavy steel section, which mostly repaired the steel underframes and wheel ‘trucks.’ ” Pearl “resented the long evenings and weekends I spent at trying to draw cartoons and would have preferred that I lived like the other less ambitious husbands around us,” Barks said.24 The marriage deteriorated: “I was always trying to figure out a comic strip or something I could do. That’s what used to irritate my wife at that time, she was perfectly satisfied just to be the wife of a laborer on the railroad, that’s all she wanted out of life. I was using our evenings, and all of our spare time, working at this darned stuff, and she would rather have been socializing, and so we gradually got to fighting all the time.” The Barkses separated early in 1930, and, with “fifty dollars and what I could carry on my back,” he returned to Oregon for the first time in years. His in-laws (“the salt of the earth, wonderful people”) invited him to live with them. His father-in-law got him a job at a factory making wooden boxes, but “the Depression was just going down,” and he soon lost that job. He began devoting all his time to drawing cartoons, and soon “I was [selling cartoons and] holding up my end on the groceries and everything there. In the meantime, my mother-in-law and I had gone back down to Roseville on the train and picked up my two kids. . . . My wife had just sort of become the town tramp, so I just

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 148

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin” |

149

figured the kids were better off with my in-laws, and they did, too.”25 According to the 1930 U.S. census, the girls were living with their father and their grandparents in Merrill by April of that year.26 Barks later asked that the “town tramp” remark be excised from the transcript of the interview in which he criticized his former wife—she was still alive then—and his accounts of both of his unsuccessful marriages were of course one-sided, but there is no reason to doubt that he spoke honestly about how his marital conflicts appeared to him. After a year or so of living with his in-laws, I began thinking, well, this isn’t the right thing, I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m imposing on these people’s hospitality a little too much. And my checks coming in were enough that I felt I could break away. I took the two kids and went over and set up in the little town of Medford, in Oregon, where the climate was a little warmer. I was getting along fine, [but] one day they didn’t come from school . . . . So I went along to see what happened to them. I met one of the neighbors that lived down the line, and she said she saw a car pull up and a man and a woman got out of the car and talked to the girls, and the girls got in. . . . It was my wife and her boyfriend, [they] had come up there and picked them up. She took them back over and left them with my in-laws, I found out afterwards. But I spent some pretty hard days there . . . . After that, I didn’t feel I owed anybody a hell of a lot, because they let me be hurt like I was hurt in those weeks of uncertainty. I’ve always had a lot of respect and love for my in-laws, but that was a hard thing.27

Barks and his second wife eventually took the girls, who by then were teenagers, with them on a road trip in 1938. They drove from California as far east as Louisiana, probably in the last half of August, when Disney cut back operations so its employees could take vacations. But he would otherwise see very little of his daughters and later his grandchildren for the next few decades. When he was drawing the lead story in the most popular children’s magazine in the country, there were no children in his life except for the occasional inquisitive neighbor, and Barks did not encourage such visits. Children were distractions. In 1931, though, his most pressing concern was his own survival: I took my overcoat down to try to hock it, and nobody wanted an overcoat at the time, it was too warm. But I had a few pieces of stainless steel around that I had bought for the kids and I to eat with, and I got fifty cents for what I had accumulated of that stuff. I went and got a haircut, a hamburger, and a package of cigarettes, for fifty cents. And not only that, but I had some left over to buy some postage stamps. I wrote back to the Eye-Opener and asked them why in hell they hadn’t sent me my last check.28

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 149

27/09/14 2:42 PM

13

“Pure Corn” at Disney’s

The Calgary Eye-Opener took its name from a satirical Canadian newspaper published early in the twentieth century by a footloose Scottish immigrant named Bob Edwards. He died in Calgary, Alberta, in 1922, and the paper evidently expired the next year. By 1925 the Bob Edwards Publishing Company and the Eye-Opener—its name, at least—had been bought by Harvey Fawcett, one of three brothers who had built a publishing empire in Minneapolis. The Fawcett flagship was Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, described accurately by Time as a “magazine of washroom humor.”1 It took its name from Wilford “Captain Billy” Fawcett, who had launched the Whiz Bang after serving as an army captain in World War I. Harvey Fawcett, after leaving the family company in disgrace—he supposedly took kickbacks from paper suppliers—launched the new Eye-Opener as a magazine of the same kind. According to the Barks scholar Geoffrey Blum, Barks’s first signed cartoon appeared in the Eye-Opener’s June 1928 issue. Soon after Barks began contributing to it, the magazine changed owners. Harvey Fawcett died in February 1929 (although his name lingered on the masthead for months afterward), and the Eye-Opener was bought by a contractor named Henry L. Meyers. It was he who summoned Barks to work in Minneapolis. I spent the summer [of 1931] in Medford, free-lancing, and my checks kept getting a little bigger and a little bigger. I was selling more and more stuff to them, and finally . . . the editor they had in charge back there, he was drink150

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 150

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Pure Corn” at Disney’s |

151

Carl Barks caricatured himself for the August 1930 Calgary Eye-Opener, published the year before he left Oregon to join the magazine’s staff in Minneapolis. Courtesy of Geoffrey Blum.

ing a little too much, and he got so careless about when he would come to work, and what time the magazine’s dummy got pasted together and taken over to the presses, and the assistant editor was also hitting the bottle pretty much. . . . Henry Meyers, he was enough of a businessman [that] he could see things weren’t being run right around there, there was too much drinking and playing around and not enough production. So he looked over the list of gag men and decided that hell, I was a hard-working son of a gun, so he sent a telegram to me, asked if I would come back there. I had enough money to send a telegram saying I didn’t have enough money to get back there. He sent me money to come back there, and I closed up my affairs very rapidly and gave away the big stack of joke magazines I had. What I could carry in a valise, I carried with me. . . . I got into Minneapolis in November of 1931. I went to work there with the Eye-Opener. Phil Rolfsen, the editor, had been fired by then, and Ed Sumner was editor. Ed Sumner and I worked together. I was the gag man and illustrator, and he was a wonderful poet, and gag writer himself, but he did have that one fault of drinking a little too much.2

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 151

27/09/14 2:42 PM

152 | Chapter 13

Barks’s Eye-Opener cartoons, his earliest published drawings (besides his single contribution to Judge), could best be described as “careful”—in their execution more than their subject matter, although the cartoons’ sexual content is mild by modern standards. Barks’s drawings echo the work of more accomplished cartoonists, their black-andwhite patterning in particular recalling John Held Jr.’s highly stylized drawings of Jazz Age libertines. And although Barks never cited the cartoonists for the youthful New Yorker as an influence, it is hard to believe that he never paid any attention to the work of Peter Arno, Gluyas Williams, and Rea Irvin. Where the Eye-Opener is most likely to startle is in the crudity of its racism. Barks’s depictions of blacks and Jews, among others, resist acceptance except as specimens of attitudes repellent now but extremely widespread in the 1920s.3 In 1932 Henry Meyers sold the Eye-Opener to Antoinette “Annette” Fawcett, who was freshly divorced from Wilford Fawcett. Since, as Time said, apart from the names on the cover “there is little to distinguish Eye Opener from Whiz Bang,” Annette Fawcett was in direct competition with her former husband. She fired Ed Sumner as editor of the Eye-Opener, Barks said.4 She wanted to put on her own type of heavy drinkers. I never did fit into it, because I just couldn’t drink a hell of a lot. . . . I just didn’t fit into the social scheme of things, but I fitted into the workhorse part of it. Boy, I was there for four years, doing that work. It just got to where I was doing all of it. . . . Toward the last there, I was practically writing the whole thing. We bought a few gags, at a dollar a gag, and two dollars a gag, and so on. Very little of that.5

At first identified as the “art director” for the Bob Edwards Publishing Company in the Minneapolis city directory’s listings for 1932 and 1933, Barks was the Eye-Opener’s editor in the listings for 1934 and 1935. He was an island of stability in the turmoil that accompanied Annette Fawcett, who referred to herself in print as the “Henna-Haired Hurricane of Joy and Laughter.” Annette was “a swinger,” Barks said. “She was the theatrical type. Among her friends were burlesque queens and so on. She was not the genteel sort.”6 Barks remembered his Eye-Opener salary as a hundred dollars a month, although he also said, in a 1961 letter to a former contributor, that he was paid only ninety dollars “for writing and drawing more than half the book, editing it, and composing stalling letters to you contribs to gloss over the fact that no money was in the bank to pay for your stuff.”7 His Disney employment record showed him being paid

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 152

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Pure Corn” at Disney’s |

153

Carl Barks in Minneapolis, circa 1934. Courtesy of Carl Barks.

two hundred dollars a month—perhaps an error on the studio’s part, perhaps an exaggeration on Barks’s; or his nominal salary may have been twice as much as he was actually being paid. Quite often, he said, “there wasn’t enough left after Annette got her fingers into the incoming checks. She would entertain these visiting stars that came to town. She had sort of expensive tastes; she lived in the Radisson Hotel in a very expensive suite, and she entertained very lavishly whenever there [were] any visiting celebrities from Hollywood in town. She would just take everything that came in, and spend it.”8 Barks had applied for work at Disney, sending as samples of his work drawings of Mickey and Minnie Mouse and his own idea of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That first Disney feature film was still

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 153

27/09/14 2:42 PM

154 | Chapter 13

being written in 1935, but the studio was beginning to expand its staff. “Disney’s sent for me to come to work, and so I told the head of the printers over there that I was going to leave, and right away, the printers called the linotypers, and they called up the engravers, and said, ‘Barks is gonna leave, he’s gonna go out and work for Disney, what are we gonna do about it? Well, we’ll raise his salary, we’ll give him a hundred and sixty dollars a month to stay on.’ It was tempting because, oh, a hundred and sixty looked like a fortune.”9 Disney was going to pay him only about half as much, but, he said, “I thought there was a future, if I went the route to Disney’s, and there wasn’t any at Minneapolis.” When he left for California he was still married to Pearl Turner, but he was accompanied on the move by Clara Ovidia Balken, a woman almost three years his senior who had been the switchboard operator at his apartment hotel.10 Pearl divorced Barks in Reno, Nevada, on September 10, 1937,11 and Barks probably married Clara soon after.12 Barks became a Disney employee on November 4, 1935, two months before Walt Kelly. He remembered that there were seven members of his November “class.” “You worked one month, and you went to their art class, and you looked at their animation, and you studied and figured out how you were going to be able to use your talents to help them out. . . . At the end of one month, they picked out the ones that were likely to make the grade, and those that weren’t were given their walking papers. Of the seven that went to work with my bunch . . . I believe there were four of us” who were hired permanently.13 Not for the last time, Barks was again just scraping by; he had no money for a return ticket to Minneapolis if he got his “walking papers” from Disney. “I had barely enough money for rent [of] an apartment for a month, and before I got my first paycheck I was just reduced to eating fig bars. That was my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”14 He was being paid fifteen dollars a week during his trial period, a salary that rose to twenty dollars after he was hired permanently. Clara Balken, meanwhile, found “a job in a printing plant for wages about the same as Disney paid me.”15 Although Barks had begun dressing up his Eye-Opener drawings through cross-hatching, stipple effects, and the like, as opposed to a more open style, at Disney “it was just roughed-out drawings . . . there was no opportunity, in other words, to use those shading styles that I had developed.”16 The only Disney artists who could work in their own styles were in the layout department, whose artists designed the settings

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 154

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Pure Corn” at Disney’s |

155

for the cartoons. Otherwise, while there was room for distinct kinds of animation—that is, of movement—the goal was for greater uniformity in drawing styles. Barks had entered the studio knowing nothing about animation. He worked first as an inbetweener, the lowest rung on Disney animation’s career ladder, and, he said, I wasn’t making out too well at it. I began turning in scripts, or gags for the comic strip, and selling those to the comic-strip department, as just a sort of a sideline. I was attracting a little attention that way. The story department would send over a little outline of a story, just an idea of a story that they were going to try to make into a seven-minute short subject, and ask the guys for gags. . . . I was beginning to turn in some pretty good gags, and finally I turned in the gag of the barber chair that was made into a movie, the first of the [short cartoons starring Donald Duck], which was called Modern Inventions. Walt paid me fifty dollars for the gag. He seemed to get the idea that I should be working in the story department, rather than over in animation.17

That gag was a “fanny gag,” in which a robotic barber chair traps Donald upside down in its seat, trimming and combing the feathers on his rump (and polishing his beak with black shoe polish). It was the sort of gag, with echoes of the barnyard, that Walt Disney—like Barks, a farm boy—always found congenial, and that Barks had produced in quantity at the Eye-Opener. Jack Hannah, who began working alongside Barks a couple of years later, said of him: “Carl had come from Oregon, and he had a little bit of the sticks in him; his early work was raw but very refreshing. I never worked with a guy who came out with so many new ideas. . . . Some of it was too far out sometimes; you’d have to watch him on continuity.” That was what Hannah said in an edited transcript. He had actually said in the interview that Barks’s early work was “pure corn,” and that Barks’s ideas were not “far out” but “very corny.”18 From 1936 to 1942, Barks worked on almost nothing but the stories for Donald Duck cartoons, among them Donald’s Nephews (1938), the first cartoon with Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Disney paired Barks first with Harry Reeves, a veteran story man who had worked on silent Felix the Cat cartoons in New York years before, and they were subsequently joined by another writer, Chuck Couch. After that, Barks worked as a team with Jack Hannah. “During the years when Harry Reeves, Chuck Couch, and I were a story crew,” Barks wrote in 1990, “we usually shaped stories from the earliest idea germs through to the finished story boards. Jack Hannah and I worked that way, too, except on a few

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 155

27/09/14 2:42 PM

156 | Chapter 13

As a Disney story man in 1937, Carl Barks played a supporting role to his more flamboyant writing partner, Harry Reeves. The storyboard is for a Donald Duck cartoon called Good Scouts (1938). © Disney.

gagged up preliminary plots that were wished onto us by Harry Reeves or Walt. We preferred to concoct our own story lines.”19 Barks saw Walt Disney only at story conferences: We’d have a “showing,” and when we had these showings, everybody was nervous and worried for days in advance. Walt would come down, and one of the story men would get up and talk the storyboard through for Walt. He would sit there with one eyebrow cocked up high, and when you got through there was dead silence for about five minutes, then he would say something. Usually, he would start in and say something fairly pleasant—you know, “Well, that’s a good gag up there . . . pretty good stuff . . . but this down here, I think I would change that.” He was very helpful. Very seldom did he ever say a real hurtful thing to any of the story men, something that would cause him [the story man] great discouragement. If he turned down a story completely, he would do it as gently as he could. As he walked out of the door, he would say, “Well, I think the best thing to do with that is just to shelve it for a while.” So you knew that was the end.20

Barks said of Walt Disney: I had a great respect for him. His ideas were always good, his analysis of things was always so darned keen. He had a tremendous intellect, as far as

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 156

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Pure Corn” at Disney’s |

157

that kind of stuff went. He could look at a gag, and like Chaplin, he could tell whether a gag was funny or not . . . he could see it moving in his mind. Now, that’s one of the things that handicapped me. I don’t think I visualized stuff in action like I should have. I was more of a plot man. I could work out the plots, the timing on gags, but all the individual action that was to depict that on the screen was something that was a little over my head, I didn’t see it. . . . Walt could see the animation possibilities, and I couldn’t. I could see a gag, and it looked funny in maybe three or four still pictures, but just how many feet of animation it was going to take to put that over, was over my head. . . . It wasn’t a serious handicap; it’s just that I could never have become a director, or somebody who had to translate those gags into the final product.21

Barks repeatedly drew a distinction between what he called “plot gags” and “animation gags.” He illustrated the distinction by referring to the 1936 Mickey Mouse cartoon Moving Day, in which Donald Duck struggles to free himself from a plumber’s friend stuck on his rump: “Now that was an animation gag. It went on for practically six minutes of the seven [actually, much less than that]. A plot gag would have been merely the planning that went into this situation, by which he happened to get where this plumber’s friend was and the method that was used to get the plumber’s friend stuck on his fanny. Then, it immediately came to the animation gag, and it just went—all the funny animation problems he could get into with this plumber’s friend.”22 A plot gag was, in other words, merely what was necessary to set up what really mattered, the animated elaboration of a conflict between Donald and some other character or a prop—in this case, a bathroom plunger. At Disney, the greatest value was always attached to those animators who could exploit the possibilities of animation gags. (Fred Spencer animated Donald’s warfare with the plunger.) Barks left no doubt as to where his own preferences lay: “I was a PLOT man,” he wrote in 1977. “Animation gags were long and tiresome to me. I wanted to see movement from one situation to another rather than movement revolving endlessly within one situation. Thank the lord I had editors at Western who let me ravel out my plots as I saw fit.”23 Barks’s discontent vanished when he worked for perhaps six weeks with Chuck Couch on the story for Bambi. Ken Hultgren, who would draw a comic-book version of Bambi and then become a mainstay of the Sangor talking-animal titles, worked with Barks and Couch, making finished drawings from their rough sketches. Barks loved his Bambi assignment because “you could work for a week and never produce anything and still get your paycheck.” He resisted returning to the

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 157

27/09/14 2:42 PM

158 | Chapter 13

Donald Duck shorts: “I just couldn’t see myself getting back over there and working at honest labor.”24 There was comic exaggeration in Barks’s comments, but not a lot: during work on Bambi, in particular, some of the Disney writers were notoriously unproductive. Given how thoroughly Barks’s life was defined by work, it is difficult to imagine his being satisfied for long with such a sinecure, but, in any case, once he was back on the Donald Duck cartoons there was no cushion for his discontent—especially after Disney moved from Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood to shiny new quarters in Burbank. He wrote in 1975, The physical layout of the Hyperion studio was very informal, and for that reason was a more pleasant place to work. We duck and Pluto crews got moved every few weeks into quarters that were still being hammered together by carpenters. At Burbank we were catalogued and classified and packaged like so many guinea pigs in quarters that seemed as friendly as hospital fourbed wards. . . . From the standpoint of working conditions, the studio was different things to different people. I found its mass milking of minds and talents very discouraging. Being a loner in my creative thinking, at least, I felt ill at ease among groups of thinkers, all trying to get one up on the next guy.25

Whatever resentment he might have felt, Barks used his years at Disney—in the period when the Disney cartoons were changing most rapidly, and imposing ever stronger demands on the people making them— to become a much more skilled writer than he had been at Minneapolis. When he started at Disney in 1935, he could get by with gags not too far removed from those in the Eye-Opener: just as corny but cleaner. By the time he left the studio in 1942 there were still people on the staff who were doing that kind of work, but as Barks told Patrick Garabedian in 1971, he had educated himself for something better: I spent many a night, sitting with an English book, learning how to put sentences together. That was after I’d gone to work at Disney’s. I’d already been a magazine editor, but after I’d gone to work at Disney’s, I decided [that] if I was ever going to learn the English language, I’d just have to get a bunch of old English books—grammars, you know, school instruction books—and I did, I got them at second-hand bookstores, and I would sit at night and study those darn things, and make up sentence structures, and learn all about adverbs and adjectives and pronouns. . . . That helped me a lot when I went to working out scripts for comic books. In making up my dialogue—I don’t think many people ever noticed it—I would condense my dialogue down, to get the idea across in the fewest words possible. I would read those things over and over and over again. Finally I would be breaking it down to the number of syllables. Even after getting it down to a certain number of words,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 158

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Pure Corn” at Disney’s |

159

I would choose a word that had the proper number of syllables, so that I had a kind of meter in my writing. Writing would have to flow smoothly for me. I would read it over and over again.26

In Barks’s dogged self-education, as in his determination to become a cartoonist during his unhappy first marriage, there is an irresistible echo of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Fortunately for him, though, Barks did not aim as high as that novel’s Jude Fawley. Hardy’s character, a poor stonemason, yearns for a classical education at a university modeled on Oxford but suffers crushing disappointment. Barks wanted no more than to learn how to write well for cartoons and then comic books, and he succeeded. The difference his studies made was visible not just in his comic-book stories but in his letters and interviews. There was in Barks’s voice and delivery in his later years still a rustic tinge; his comfortable drawl was punctuated by verbal crutches like “little old.” But he often wrote drafts of his letters before sending them, and the finished versions are typically as tart and direct as the speech of his comic-book characters. Barks’s coolness toward the studio as an organization did not prevent him from making good use of what he called his “Disney training.” He learned, he said, how to integrate contrasting elements into a coherent story: “I would say the key was, you have to have a reason for everything. And if you could find a reason for something, you could drag anything in. I think that was what I got out of my Disney training more than anything, was to analyze whether anything was necessary to a story.”27 Likewise, he said, “[w]e tried to get a certain amount of logic in what we did with the Duck. . . . If the Duck was going to pick up something, a very heavy weight, for instance, we had to make it look like that darned weight was heavy.”28 Barks learned at Disney to ask of his readers only a single, overarching suspension of disbelief. There is always the inescapable suggestion in his stories that the ducks are a distinctly different species, half the height of the semihuman characters around them. They are, as John Benson put it, “squat little ducks that walked around half-naked in a world otherwise populated by fully clothed full-sized people with vague animal attributes.”29 The bargain Barks offered was this: accept such a world, in which ducks can talk (and share the streets with “humans” who usually have noses like dogs’), and everything else will follow naturally—with natural being defined differently in the ducks’ world than in our own.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 159

27/09/14 2:42 PM

160 | Chapter 13

That was the same implicit bargain that other talking-animal comic books offered their readers, but most of them either failed to deliver or else, like the bulk of Western’s talking-animal titles, gave their readers stories that hung together, barely, but had little else to recommend them. Barks’s stories were, by contrast, dense with comic business presented with, as he said, “a certain amount of logic.” There was also, in his longer stories especially, an echo of what Walt Disney said in 1941, at a meeting on Morgan’s Ghost, the unmade feature cartoon that became the basis for Barks’s first Donald Duck comic book: “Suspense is a good thing to remember in these things. If you can get good comic suspense it’s swell. If you just have gags it’s not exciting.”30 In 1946–47, as Barks’s mastery of a comic-book story’s demands deepened, he was able to put to increasingly good use what he had learned at Disney. And as in earlier years, the superiority of his work insulated him from some of the more disagreeable changes occurring in Western Printing’s Beverly Hills office.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 160

27/09/14 2:42 PM

14

Special Talents

Roger Armstrong returned to Western after he was discharged from the army late in 1945. He remembered drawing a premium comic book of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs, one-quarter the size of a regular comic, some months later. It was copyrighted on January 29, 1947, so an incident he recalled must have taken place in 1946, probably in the fall: As I recall, I banged that thing out in ten days and delivered it to Carl Buettner at his home. The only time I ever paid a “social call” in all the years he and I were associated. Marcie, his wife, put crackers with cheese on them in the oven to toast and I recall how irritated he was because she had to use two separate brands of cheese and one of them didn’t work as readily as the other . . . anyway, over crackers and cheese and a couple of drinks (scotch, I think we were drinking) he confided in me that he and a fellow in the Eastern office (Poughkeepsie) by name of Lloyd Smith had just put the knife in old Eleanor [Packer] and she wouldn’t be with us much longer. [Buettner] had just returned (as art editor) from a three week trip to the East and among other things, he had helped put the skids under old Eleanor. And he was right.1

Actually, Lloyd E. Smith was based in Racine, at Western’s corporate headquarters. He did travel to the West Coast occasionally, and he visited there in early 1947, around the time Packer left the company.2 Since joining Whitman Publishing in 1934 and, according to an official history, “help[ing] to organize its first editorial department”—it was in that capacity that he brought his friend Gaylord DuBois into the Whitman fold— Smith had become the head of Western Printing’s rights and royalties 161

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 161

27/09/14 2:42 PM

162 | Chapter 14

department, or, as it was sometimes identified, the editorial and legal department. (He was also “assistant secretary” of the company.) He was in charge of licensing copyrighted characters and negotiating royalties for their use. It was in managing those licensed properties and dealing with their owners that Smith performed his editorial function. Packer’s dismissal was probably a matter of opening a position for an executive who would more aggressively exploit and expand Western’s character licenses, and who had a close family connection with Western’s principal owners besides. Here is Roger Armstrong again: “Shortly after [his conversation with Buettner], we got the . . . you should excuse the expression . . . boss’s son-in-law: Bob Callender arrived on scene, regimentation was instituted, and the whole operation started its slow, gradual disintegration.”3 Robert Stevens Callender, who was born in Racine in 1913 and grew up there, began his career with Western Printing at Poughkeepsie in 1935. In 1937, in Racine, he married Wynnefred Audrey Wadewitz, the daughter of Western Printing’s founder, E. H. Wadewitz. He entered the navy as a lieutenant in 1943, served twenty-eight months and then, late in 1946 or early in 1947, transferred from Poughkeepsie to take charge of Western’s Beverly Hills office.4 At Poughkeepsie, Callender was not just one of the three Western executives who owned K.K. Publications; he also handled the Dell Publishing account. He was involved with comic books from the earliest days that Western produced them—thus his name as the copyright holder on many of the features in those comic books. As Chase Craig said, “Callender and Alice [Nielsen] had put together the original Disney magazine which had been done in N.Y. just prior to the comic boom”—that is, they had transformed Mickey Mouse Magazine into Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories.5 Starting in 1941, Nielsen was credited in the annual circulation statements required by the post office as the editor, at Poughkeepsie, of Walt Disney’s Comics. She had been a Western employee since 1932, working first in the Racine bindery during high school vacations and then joining the company full-time as a proofreader. She moved to Poughkeepsie after Western opened its plant there. She evidently continued as a proofreader after she began editing Walt Disney’s Comics, since that job—especially in the early years, when it was a cut-and-paste operation—would not have demanded all of her time.6 After Callender moved to Beverly Hills, Nielsen followed him, by sometime in 1948 at the latest, to edit Walt Disney’s Comics and other

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 162

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 163

comic books. The circulation statement published in the December 1947 issue showed Nielsen still editing Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories at Poughkeepsie as of September 9, 1947. A year later, according to the notice published in the December 1948 issue, Nielsen had married Jack Cobb, becoming Alice Nielsen Cobb, and she was based at Beverly Hills.7 By then Eleanor Packer had long since lost her job, leaving behind no trace in Western Printing’s official accounts of its comic-book operations. Said Roger Armstrong: “Things tightened up at Western in the late forties. . . . Bob Callender ran things with a much tighter hand. I’m sure it was all company [policy], but Bob implemented it.” One change, Armstrong said, “was a very deliberate policy . . . to keep the various artists from knowing each other . . . everything was very secretive . . . they had a sliding scale of pay and they never wanted artists to become too intimate for fear of comparing page rates. They scheduled our appearances in the office so there wouldn’t be overlaps with consequent fraternizing . . . hence, I never knew many of the other cartoonists.”8 That may have been the case, although in the comic-book industry generally, as more and more cartoonists worked as freelancers at home and only rarely delivered their drawings in person, the opportunities for encountering their peers inevitably diminished. In the postwar years, even modest departures from a straightforward storytelling style were increasingly rare. Armstrong reveled in memories of one such opportunity, in the “Bugs Bunny” story in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics no. 73, November 1947. “I had been looking at a lot of Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips and I got carried away with borders and tricky ideas of presentation; it was a real experimental job and I loved every bit of it. I’ll never know what came over old stodgy German Carl Buettner that he let me have my hand to this degree, but I had a ball drawing this one.”9 Armstrong’s “experiments” are, however, more of a garnish than a recasting of the usual structure of a Western-produced comic book, and it was probably for that reason that Buettner raised no objections—if he even noticed. Carl Barks was by then so well established, and so highly regarded, that the changes Armstrong lamented seem not to have affected him. Barks said that if he had not met Callender on one of his visits to Western’s offices, “I wouldn’t have known that there had been any changes made. They never corresponded with me.” Essentially, he delivered finished pages to Western and the company sent him checks. “I used to like to drive in with a story, finished artwork, because it was an outing for

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 163

27/09/14 2:42 PM

164 | Chapter 14

my wife and I. We’d go home by way of the Farmers Market, and stop and nibble the rare cheeses and eat exotic foods, and maybe go by Chinatown and have a big Chinese dinner, then drive back home again.”10 Barks was isolated, and, as he wrote in 1966, soon after he retired, he did not regret his very limited contact with other comic-book artists. He had a generally low opinion of other comic books, including those in the talking-animal vein: I usually thought their stories were weak or monotonously formulated or both. . . . I read very few comic books of any kind. I was afraid the formats might be catching to the extent that my own stuff would start following the same patterns. . . . I knew only a few of the artists that worked or now work for Western. I don’t know which ones did which books, and never asked. San Jacinto [where Barks was living in the 1960s] is a day’s drive round trip from the Western Pub. [sic] offices and I went in no oftener than once a month if I could avoid it. The chances of meeting another free-lancing artist in the few minutes I’d be in the office were dim indeed.11

He was, if anything, even more skeptical about the superheroes: “What amazed me about Superman was that these guys could continually keep the public’s interest going with the same rehashed plot week after week and year after year.”12 Barks enjoyed in the late 1940s a position that was all but ideal for someone of his talents and temperament. He had established himself with Western’s editors as a superior artist years before, and the comic books for which he provided the principal features were extraordinarily successful. By 1947, Western Printing was paying Walt Disney Productions royalties on more than two million copies of Walt Disney’s Comics every month. Most remarkably, hundreds of thousands of those comic books were going to mail subscribers who sent K.K. Publications a dollar for twelve monthly issues. “At its peak,” the Western executive Howard Anderson wrote, “we had over 400,000 paid subscribers to Disney Comics, ran a direct mail campaign every fall using a self-mailer with only full cash payment up front and felt that any mailing not generating a 3 percent pull”—about twice a typical return rate for direct mail—“was unsuccessful!” According to Anderson, “K.K. Publications, Inc., officially became a wholly owned subsidiary of Western in 1949 when all the stock was transferred to Western” by the three executives—Wadewitz, Callender, and F. J. Leyerle—who were its owners.13 Starting in the early 1940s, Dell also aggressively sought mail subscriptions for its comic books published on a monthly schedule, with

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 164

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 165

considerable success. By 1950, the Dell titles that accepted subscriptions (Looney Tunes, New Funnies, and so on) accounted for about five hundred thousand copies a month, in addition to the four hundred thousand subscribers to Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. The subscription rate now seems remarkably low—a dollar for twelve issues—especially considering that fulfilling the subscriptions required that the women working at a conveyor belt in Poughkeepsie give prestamped wrappers an edging of paste before rolling them around individual comic books.14 But postal rates for magazines were very low, too, and mail subscriptions were a stable base that made print runs and ultimate sales more predictable; and Western Printing & Lithographing was, above all, a printer. Western was in that respect as in others—like being based in a small Wisconsin city far from New York—a very different kind of company from the many comic-book publishers, like DC and Fawcett, whose roots were in pulp magazines of various kinds. For Western, whose publishing roots were in children’s books sold in dime stores, its publishing partner Dell was a sort of bridge to the harshly competitive world of the newsstands. Western differed from many of its rivals most curiously in that it was, compared with the other leading comic-book publishers, a distinctly Gentile company from the top down, the Wadewitzes being German Christians. It is hard to find Jewish representation among Western’s comic-book people, whether they worked for the New York or Los Angeles office, or, for that matter, at Racine or Poughkeepsie. By contrast, not only were the owners and managers of the New York– based comic-book publishers overwhelmingly Jewish, but so were a great many of the artists, writers, and editors. Western was, as a Gentile redoubt in its industry, analogous to Disney in the movie industry. That studio, and Walt Disney himself, were the targets of unfounded charges of bias, but there was rarely if ever any complaint that Western did not want to give work to Jews or looked down on other publishers because they were Jewish. Western’s affiliation with Dell may have served as a shield against any such accusations. The flowering of Walt Disney’s Comics and Western’s Dell titles in the late 1940s took place in the first years of the baby boom, when the potential audience for comic books intended for young children was growing rapidly. Television was not yet ubiquitous, and the periodic waves of indignation about the crime and horror stories in other publishers’ comics served mainly to give Western and Dell an opportunity

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 165

27/09/14 2:42 PM

166 | Chapter 14

to emphasize how different their titles were. The editors in Western’s New York and Los Angeles offices liked good work, even if they were willing to settle for less. As a result, there was for a few years an unusually broad opportunity for the most creative of Western’s cartoonists, of whom Carl Barks was the best, to respond to the challenges posed by the comic-book form. Barks told Malcolm Willits he did not enjoy working at Disney because “I didn’t like the pressure and the fact there were so many straw bosses looking over your shoulder to see how you were doing, criticizing your work all the time. I can’t take criticism.”15 Barks was by 1946 and 1947 still some distance away from complete mastery, but most of the time the only “straw boss” looking over his shoulder and criticizing his work was Barks himself. Dell had published only one Donald Duck one-shot each year from 1942 through 1946, but for 1947 there would be three. The print runs, which had hovered around a million copies of each issue, began to rise as the nagging postwar paper shortages finally began to ease: for the first 1947 issue, Four Color no. 147, Western Printing paid royalties to Disney on more than 1.2 million copies. To his relief, Barks shed the last of his non-Disney comic-book features, “Barney Bear and Benny Burro,” in January of that year, when he submitted the story that would be published in Our Gang Comics no. 36, July 1947. Now he would write and draw only stories with the ducks. The temptation always for any writer of comic-book stories was to take shortcuts that looked exactly like what they were, trusting to the audience’s lack of sophistication to make them acceptable, and Barks was not immune. In “Volcano Valley,” the lead story in Donald Duck Four Color no. 147, a crucial plot device—Donald must become a national hero before he can leave the wretched Latin American country of Volcanovia—seems especially arbitrary because the story’s opening pages are so cheerfully cynical, all but inviting the reader to scorn the contrived comedy that follows. “Adventure Down Under,” the second story in the next 1947 issue of Donald Duck, Four Color no. 159, is, by contrast, simply too serious, with the ducks in danger for too much of its length. The ducks were intrinsically comic figures, at home in an environment where characters could be named Wyndham Blowhard and Argus Gimleteye (as they are in this story’s opening pages); so, when comic action disappears, as it does in “Adventure Down Under” for pages at a time after Donald is captured and threatened with death by realistically drawn aborigines,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 166

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 167

In “The Ghost of the Grotto,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 159 (1947), Carl Barks for the first time expanded a panel to a full half page. © 1947 Disney.

the strain is felt. The apparent reality of the settings, not just in Australia but in the ducks’ hometown in what is unmistakably California, mostly intensifies the strain. “The Ghost of the Grotto,” the lead story in that issue, is a different matter, with comedy and adventure in perfect balance for the first time in one of Barks’s longer stories. “Ghost” fills twenty-six pages, but it originated, Barks recalled, in an idea for a ten-page story—that is, a wholly comic story—for Walt Disney’s Comics.16 The menaces—a huge octopus, a mysterious man in armor—are real, as are the settings—the ducks are gathering kelp in a credibly depicted West Indies—but the reader is never asked to believe that the ducks are in deadly danger, or to laugh at gags present for their own sake. What the story offers, instead, are moments like the spectacular half-page panel—the first such very large panel in any of Barks’s stories—in which the octopus, tricked into eating a roll of meat stuffed with chili pepper, rises stunned into the air, shattering the ancient sailing ship it has used for shelter. In 1946 and 1947, Barks’s best efforts were going into his longer stories, and the ten-page stories suffered in comparison. Even so, they were usually well constructed: a story’s events were plausible even when

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 167

27/09/14 2:42 PM

168 | Chapter 14

they were predictable. In the story in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 76, January 1947, for example, Donald insists on giving shelter to a stray cat that rewards his kindness by keeping the ducks awake all night. There is never the slightest doubt that by the end of the story Donald will be pursuing the cat with homicidal intent, but Barks makes sure that his story arrives at that point with no arbitrary twists or turns. For one thing, the cat’s behavior is always recognizably feline, and recognizably exasperating. By 1947, Barks had achieved a level of craftsmanship in his best stories, in both Donald Duck and Walt Disney’s Comics, that had no equal in other comic books of the talking-animal kind, and he had few if any peers in other kinds of comic books. But it was not until the fall of that year, five years after he entered comic-book work, that Barks became wholly himself as a creator of comic-book stories. It was then that he wrote and drew the ten-page stories that were published in the early1948 issues of Walt Disney’s Comics. The story in the February 1948 issue, no. 89, was one of the first in which Barks spoke clearly in his own distinctive voice. It begins as Donald stalks down his front walk, thinking to himself: “I’ve got to get a job, that’s all there is to it! The rent is due, and the kids need new toothbrushes!” There is, to begin with, that absurd disproportion—rent and new toothbrushes—but, besides that, these are toothbrushes for ducks, characters who lack teeth except on those rare occasions when teeth can be gritted to show anger or determination. (The ducks display teeth nowhere in this story.) Barks does not poke his readers in the ribs to make sure they get the joke, because that would distract their attention from Donald; and Donald, it is clear well before the bottom of the first page, is serious about finding a job, serious about those toothbrushes, and, above all, serious about himself: “But I’ll not work at just any job!” he thinks in the second panel. “I want something that suits my special talents!” The sly toughness always lurking in Barks’s earlier stories was here out in the open: when the ducks show up at a warehouse for Donald’s new job as a night watchman, the coldly suspicious guard on duty edges his pistol out of its holster. Later, when bandits come to steal the silk Donald is guarding, one thug says he will find the night watchman and “bump him off”—that is, kill him. Donald’s three nephews—so often his opponents in broadly comic conflicts in earlier issues—had by 1947 become more subtly depicted characters. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were always interchangeable trip-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 168

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 169

lets, and Barks did not abandon triplet comedy, as when he had each nephew speak one part of a complete sentence, but the effect was not gimmicky, as it was when it was overused in stories by other writers and cartoonists. It was instead as if, being triplets, the nephews thought alike and each picked up naturally from what the others were saying. The divided dialogue was that of minds working in concert. One nephew might occasionally stand apart from the others, but there was never any sense that Huey, say, was an individual distinct from Louie and Dewey. It was in how the nephews related to Donald, and vice versa, that the stories were changing. The story in the October 1947 issue, no. 85, for instance, is more psychologically complex (and believable) than its predecessors. The nephews and Donald are at odds—not over any childish mischief, but because the nephews are determined to learn to play one chord on their stringed instruments and thus earn the frog-hunting trip to Mud Lake that Grandma Duck has promised them. It is the resulting racket (FWANG! RASP! BLOONK!) that drives Donald wild, not misbehavior, of which there is none once the nephews have signed on to Grandma’s offer. When Barks’s stories really began to soar a few months later, the weight within the ducks’ parent-child relationship shifted from story to story, and within each story, as Donald and the nephews traded roles. In the February 1948 night-watchman story, Donald is at the start the parent in command, seeking work and then ordering the nephews to bed early so that he can rest before going to his new job at midnight. Donald finally falls asleep just as it is time to leave for work, and the nephews, like grimly determined surrogate parents, doggedly follow him on his rounds, keeping him awake until Donald exhausts even their patience by falling asleep on a fakir’s bed of nails. Eventually Donald routs the murderous burglars by shooting his pistol while he dreams, and the nephews read about his triumph in the morning paper. They respond again like weary parents, shaking their heads as their ne’er-dowell child escapes the humiliation he so richly deserves. One nephew says: “Well, gents, that proves what I’ve always said! . . . That when the horseshoes were being handed out, Unca Donald was there with the cavalry!” In the next story, in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 90, March 1948, the ducks are more like competitive siblings—they are rival telegraph messenger boys—than parent and children. In the May 1948 issue, no. 92, the wheel turns again, and this time Donald is not just a father but a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 169

27/09/14 2:42 PM

170 | Chapter 14

martinet, ranting at the nephews and waving a switch when they ride hoes as “horses” instead of weeding his garden. But then Donald falls under the spell of Professor Pulpheart Clabberhead, “the friend of all children” and Barks’s top-hatted riposte to Benjamin Spock and his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, published two years earlier. Here was more evidence of the new sharpness and energy in Barks’s stories: he had done nothing comparably satirical in earlier stories, even when he was working with the same basic situation. (In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 64, January 1946, the nephews run wild after Donald vows to hold his temper.) The professor, like some latter-day Rousseau, persuades Donald that he should let the nephews do whatever they please—“Only by that way can they ever learn what they are fitted for in later life!”—and the nephews, anything but sober miniature parents this time, seize the reins from Donald with cool, sadistic glee. They steadily escalate their demands on Donald and his bankroll (“Hustle out and buy us some frock coats and high silk hats!”) until, finally, Donald identifies the weak spot in the professor’s argument. It seems that—as the professor himself puts it while pursuing the nephews across the countryside, switch in hand— “[b]lowing Professor Pulpheart Clabberhead skyhigh with an atomic bomb is strictly against the rules!” There is tremendous energy in Barks’s writing and drawing in his stories from the late 1940s and early 1950s, energy almost always under tight control but constantly molding the stories in large ways and small—in extreme characters like the furious old crone Angina Arthritis (in the March 1948 story), and in the profusion of details like the mildly annoyed birds that observe Donald from their birdbath as he erupts into his backyard and then frets about how to master the chaos that Professor Clabberhead has unleashed. And then there are the names, pouring out now in a gusher. Memorable comic names turned up occasionally in the midforties (for example, Dr. Carver Beakoff), but now they were present in abundance: Gladstone Gander, Prunella Prunepuss, Señor Mañana N. De Patio, J. Morganbilt Giltwhiskers, Rimfire Remington, Blacksnake McQuirt, Trigger Trueshot, and on and on. Barks’s dialogue and captions, too, were, from 1948 on, more pointed and concrete, persuasive evidence of how intensively he had studied his English textbooks while he was on the Disney staff. Thus: “Unca’ Donald couldn’t catch a fox with a barrel of squabs!” In that fox-hunt story, in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 98, November 1948, Donald is calling out to a tame fox named Red Herring that the nephews have planted to help

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 170

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 171

him, but the fox responds only to his name, and Donald cannot remember it. He summons up every fish name he can think of, or perhaps anyone could think of: “Here, finnan haddie! Here, smoked barracuda! . . . Shad roe, where are you? Kippered sprats! Marinated mackerel! Filet of sole! Sardines in olive oil! . . . Columbia River smelt, come to papa! Grilled halibut, ol’ boy, it’s me! . . . Dogfish! Catfish! Sawfish! Swordfish! Goldfish! Whitefish! Chub! Carp! Minnows! Guppies! . . . Calico bass! Bluegills! . . . Red snapper! Jelly fish!” The fox is too quick for him (and visibly contemptuous of his pursuer): “That needle-nosed nuisance is faster than a boarder’s reach!” Donald has been thrown by his horse, and in desperation he rents a plow horse from a farmer, riding away in such a hurry that he will not take the time to let the farmer remove the horse’s harness. And so, as Barks writes in a caption, Donald rides “with trace chains flying”— trace chains that trigger a disaster that is entirely believable because we can see what is happening when the chains catch on a wire fence. Barks’s ducks, unlike most other talking animals, live in a world full of real things—things with names, and, especially, dangerous things that must be treated with respect. As Barks told Paul Ciotti in 1972: “I understand enough about machinery from having been a farm boy. I knew what machines should look like, and gear teeth and sprocket wheels and things were just part of my growing up. I’ve worked on printing presses and threshing machines and engines and so on, so I know a little bit about the principles of mechanics.”17 By 1948, Barks was beginning to exploit the comic possibilities even in bystanders: in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 95, August 1948, as Donald quarrels with his cousin Gladstone Gander, a fat man passes deep in the background with an ostrich on a leash. Animals—that is, “real” animals, like Red Herring the elusive fox, as opposed to the voting population of the ducks’ home town, Duckburg—could be mocking commentators on the main action. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 101, February 1949, when Donald suffers nightmares about being pursued by ravening sharks and wolves, those predators are enjoying themselves entirely too much. Usually if not quite always, Barks was by the late 1940s producing short stories that were simultaneously marvels of narrative construction and psychological acuity. (A mild qualifier is needed because he was, after all, writing and drawing roughly a page a day of finished artwork.)18 It is, finally, not so much what happens that commands our attention as the ducks themselves, the distinction between “plot” and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 171

27/09/14 2:42 PM

172 | Chapter 14

“character” dissolving as it so often does in the most enduring fiction. Even when, as was frequently the case, a story was by definition a farce, it was a farce whose improbabilities were marshaled so skillfully that the comedy was much richer than it had any right to be. Barks himself provided a sort of commentary on his art when he worked from a script provided by Western for the story in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 99, December 1948, in which the ducks are contestants on a radio quiz show. Barks always rewrote such scripts, and the story’s expert construction makes it feel like his; but other characters could have filled the ducks’ roles (as was true with the interchangeable talking animals in many other comic books). In most of the stories Barks wrote himself when he was at his peak, any such substitutions were unthinkable. By 1948, Western was paying Barks twenty-five dollars a page for writing and drawing his stories; he was thus paid $800 for the thirtytwo pages of interior art in “The Old Castle’s Secret,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 189, and $250 for the ten-page “Donald Duck” story in the May 1948 Walt Disney’s Comics. “I know there were a number of guys who were getting higher rates than I was,” he said in 1978. “But they were more under the thumb of the editors. They had to make more corrections, and the work they were doing was not so interesting as what I had. I had that freedom. It was worth ten dollars a page to me, at least, to have the freedom to write whatever I wanted to write. If they didn’t like it, they paid me for it anyway. I got along well enough.”19 The longer stories varied in form even more than the ten-page stories, but by this time Barks could move from one type of story to another without ever losing his footing. And so the twenty-page “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 178, the last 1947 issue—and the first story with Donald’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck, a character of Barks’s invention—is cheerful farce. Barks submitted his next long story, “Darkest Africa,” twenty-two pages for a 1948 issue of the Boys’ and Girls’ March of Comics giveaway, a few days after he submitted the night-watchman story for the February 1948 Walt Disney’s Comics. Like that story, “Darkest Africa” pits the ducks against an adversary, Professor Argus McFiendy, who is prepared to kill to get what he wants—in his case, the world’s rarest butterfly. Poison intended for the ducks dispatches a crocodile instead. “The Old Castle’s Secret,” in the next Donald Duck one-shot, Four Color no. 189, the first in 1948, is very different from its predecessors—a perfectly paced hauntedhouse story.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 172

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 173

“Secret” is also a comic-book story to its core, simple and far-fetched, even though it shows the nephews more believably mature and resourceful than ever before. The same could be said of “Sheriff of Bullet Valley,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 199, the next 1948 issue—a thirty-twopage story in which the nephews disrupt the plans of rustlers who rely on a highly improbable ray gun to change the brands on cattle. “Bullet Valley” is, however, richer in every way than “Old Castle’s Secret,” filled as it is with comically distorted echoes of the cowboy movies and Zane Grey and B. M. Bower novels that Barks favored. Barks’s reading, as he described it, was almost entirely restricted to pulp magazines and western novels of the Grey variety. He also remembered occasionally reading the fiction in popular weeklies like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, and he spoke fondly of P. G. Wodehouse. “The [nonfiction] articles [in the popular weeklies], I don’t know, never appealed to me much, because I never seemed to agree with the guys who wrote the articles. I’d get mad at what they were writing about.”20 In “Bullet Valley,” the rustlers’ leader, Blacksnake McQuirt, is a murderous villain, and in one of the most extraordinary scenes in any of Barks’s stories, he actually seems to shoot Donald—to kill him, that is, although Barks reveals quickly that Donald’s enormous sheriff’s badge has deflected all the bullets. Here, though, in contrast to earlier stories like “Adventure Down Under,” the atmosphere is so thoroughly saturated in comedy—even the horses have distinct comic personalities— that it can absorb the most apparently lethal violence. Barks’s next important long story was the thirty-two-page “Lost in the Andes,” in Four Color no. 223, the first of the four 1949 issues of Donald Duck. That story is even richer in comic detail than its predecessors. A simple transfer of orders down the chain of command on a museum expedition’s ship becomes a satirical commentary on class distinctions: stiff and dignified exchanges at the top give way to the brusque and peremptory as the orders descend through the ranks, until finally Donald is bullying the nephews. “Lost in the Andes,” perhaps the best loved of all of Barks’s stories and the one that he more than once singled out as his best (“I never did anything before or after that would come up to that”21), centers on the square eggs that Donald, in a real if menial job as a museum guard, accidentally discovers. Ultimately, and plausibly—Barks had by now scrubbed away virtually all traces of the arbitrariness that disfigured the work of so many of his fellow comic-book writers—it is Donald and the nephews who must enter the Andes to find the source of the mysterious

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 173

27/09/14 2:42 PM

174 | Chapter 14

eggs. Their search leads them into the ominous mists from which, an aged vicuña hunter tells them, another American, raving and near death, emerged long ago with the square eggs. Blundering through the mists, the ducks find themselves in a primitive city hewn from rock. It is home to a blocky populace that speaks, as Donald puts it, “straight cornpone,” a deep-fried southern version of English. The inhabitants have learned it from an American professor from Birmingham, Alabama (or, as they call him, “th’ professah frum Bummin’ham”), who dubbed their home Plain Awful. They eat nothing but the square eggs. There are echoes in Plain Awful of the ducks’ encounter with the Gneezles, the swamp goblins in the 1944 story “Mystery of the Swamp,” but the difference is enormous. The Gneezles, supposedly isolated from human contact for hundreds of years, nevertheless speak perfectly intelligible English. The Plain Awfultonians speak English, too, but there is no mystery about how they learned it. The sense that Plain Awful is a real society, with complications and dangers lurking beneath its seemingly simple surface, is much stronger in the later story. That sense of reality is enhanced, as before, by settings based on Barks’s careful study of National Geographic—in this case, an article in the August 1942 issue called “The Pith of Peru,” about the remote Inca fortress Machu Picchu. “Barks was no longer copying whole images into his comic as he had in ‘The Mummy’s Ring,’ ” Geoffrey Blum has observed of “Lost in the Andes,” “but we can pick out the details he borrowed”—including the “terraced and angular” appearance of Plain Awful itself.22 The one very small problem with “Lost in the Andes” is that Barks has a little trouble figuring out what to do with the ducks once they have arrived in Plain Awful. So, echoing “Volcano Valley” of two years earlier, he manufactures a crisis: the round bubbles the nephews blow with their bubble gum are, it seems, sacrilegious in Plain Awful, although there is scarcely a hint of what kind of religion the Plain Awfultonians might observe. The nephews save themselves by seeming to blow square bubbles—which are actually blown, somehow, by concealed square chicks that have hatched from square eggs. That relatively strained episode, inconsequential in a story otherwise so rich in comic invention, has no counterpart in the thirty-two-page stories that immediately followed “Lost in the Andes.” The pacing of “Voodoo Hoodoo,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 238, is impeccable: Barks deposits the ducks in Africa as smoothly and surely as he deposits them in Plain Awful, but once they are there he finds plenty for them to do. In Africa, Donald is under a threat that is both serious and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 174

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Special Talents | 175

ridiculous on the comic book’s own terms, in contrast to the awkward juxtaposition a few years earlier in “Frozen Gold.” He has been pursued by a zombie—an emissary of the vengeful witch doctor Foola Zoola—who has mistaken Donald for Uncle Scrooge. Even after Donald clears up that misunderstanding, he remains in jeopardy, as Scrooge’s nearest living relative. In Scrooge’s absence the witch doctor intends to shrink Donald to the size of a mouse, as punishment for Scrooge’s imperialist misdeeds seventy years before. Before the ducks come face to face with Foola Zoola, there emerges from a clump of grass a tiny man, Professor Cornelius McCobb, dean of mystic lore at the University of Ypsilanti, who has in fact been shrunk by the witch doctor. But there is no terror in this dramatic entrance, nothing to disrupt the story’s comic equilibrium. The professor is heard before he is seen, speaking in what are clearly supposed to be unruffled tones. (Barks discreetly sets aside any question that might be raised about the volume of this tiny man’s voice.) He enthusiastically endorses his diminished size, which, after all, brings with it greatly reduced clothing and grocery bills: “A peanut feeds me for a week!” Donald is not persuaded. What is most striking about “Voodoo Hoodoo,” and especially the story that immediately followed it, “Luck of the North,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 256, is how masterful Barks had become in his command not just of comic-book grammar, but also of what might be called comic-book rhetoric—the marshaling of a comic-book story’s elements to make the strongest possible impression. In the years he had been working in comic books he had demonstrated better than any of his colleagues how important it was to compress and expand the amount of time a story’s panels seemed to take up, through a constantly shifting balance of dialogue and action. In the 1947 “Ghost of the Grotto,” for example, when the huge octopus surges up from the wrecked galleon, stunned by the chili pepper in the baited meat, there is counterpoint to that spectacular half-page drawing—which could only represent an instant—in a bit of dialogue from one of the nephews: “Uh oh! I musta used a sprinkle too much pepper!” Now, in “Luck of the North,” Barks almost seemed to move backward, by isolating moments of time in a sequence of panels as Donald gradually, painfully realizes that a satisfying practical joke may have deadly consequences for his obnoxious cousin Gladstone Gander. Barks was, however, not reverting to the storyboard-like drawings of his early stories but was instead dissecting Donald’s psychological state with a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 175

27/09/14 2:42 PM

176 | Chapter 14

subtlety that was unique in comic books. There were echoes of Barks’s animation work in such panels, but echoes completely different from those in the early stories, as Barks explained in 1971: “Back in the days when I was working there at the studio, the thing was to hold a character for as long as you could. Let the public see him think. And his actions were studied, so that whenever he did pull a fast gag, it was a contrast to the slow action up to that time.”23 Because Barks shows so clearly the workings of Donald’s mind, what follows in “Luck of the North”— Donald’s frantic effort to catch up with Gladstone and save him from perishing in the Arctic—is entirely believable. Somewhere in this period, when Barks was starting to share the duck stories with other cartoonists, he prepared a model sheet titled “Magazine Comics Duck” that seems to have been intended to help those cartoonists draw Donald in something resembling Barks’s style. Among the instructions: “Avoid excessive distortion of beak and brows. Tilting eyes is key to most expressions.” Barks illustrated that point with nineteen drawings showing Donald’s face or just his eyes, and added this note: “Use this eye tilting cautiously. It’s awfully easy to tilt the eyes too far.”24 There is no reason to believe, on the evidence of their drawings in the comic books, that the other cartoonists tried to follow Barks’s advice, but if they had, they might well have felt boxed in by such restrictions— especially since Barks himself had transcended them. He was by the time he drew that model sheet so completely in command of his medium that when he depicted Donald’s gathering anxiety in “Luck of the North” he eschewed not only “distortion of beak and brows” but even “eye tilting.” The changes in Donald’s face are all but indiscernible, but the movement of his thought, conveyed through his posture and even the position of the pupils of his eyes, is distinct, and culminates in a striking image: Donald is weighed down, his head seemingly squashed by the drawing above it, as he imagines that his joke has led to a polar bear’s eating Gladstone. Words—what Donald says or, more often, thinks—are sparse in these panels, but there are just enough. They simultaneously give needed voice to Donald’s disquiet, so that the drawings do not have to do too much work, and subdue any danger that the page might seem fragmented into shards of time. Barks was by the late 1940s increasingly unusual because he both wrote and illustrated his stories. By then, it was much more common for one person to write a story and one or more cartoonists to illustrate it (one making the pencil drawings, another finishing them in ink), with the work passing through the hands of an editor at each stage—an

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 176

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Luck of the North,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 256 (1949), was one of the first stories in which Carl Barks showed Donald’s mind at work, with a subtlety that was rare if not unique in comic books. © 1949 Disney.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 177

27/09/14 2:42 PM

178 | Chapter 14

arrangement that lent itself to much greater editorial control and diminished the opportunities for a strong artistic personality to assert itself. John Stanley, whose Little Lulu stories in particular were unmistakably his own even when drawn by Charles Hedinger or Irving Tripp, was the rare comic-book writer who surmounted that obstacle. As for Barks, he not only wrote and drew his stories but submitted them in finished form to his editors. Throughout his best years, there are pages that might have been unacceptable to an editor in script form, whether it was written or roughly sketched like a storyboard. Marvelous panels like those in “Luck of the North” tracing Donald’s growing remorse over his misfired joke could easily have been mistaken for padding, but such pages instantly made sense when seen in Barks’s inked drawings. Because Barks was both writer and artist, there was no gap to bridge between the stories he wrote and the drawings he made. Each was always in the service of the other. There is, in particular, complete harmony between words and drawings, harmony of a sort that shames any complaints that the medium itself is hopelessly inadequate. The words or thoughts in the balloons always seem to be emerging from the faces beneath them, and the words, whether dialogue or captions, tell what the drawings do not. Words and pictures are interdependent: neither is superfluous; they complete each other. In most comic books and comic strips, the vital connection between words and drawings is either not made or made only in the most general terms. There is a sort of vacant space between drawings and dialogue—not a literal lacuna, but closer to what happens when a film and its soundtrack are not quite synchronized, and the discrepancy repels acceptance of what is on the screen. In comic books, it is when that gap is bridged—almost invariably by precise comic exaggeration of the sort that Barks and a few other cartoonists mastered—that comics make their strongest claim to be regarded as art.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 178

27/09/14 2:42 PM

15

Barks Masters His Medium

As highly regarded as Carl Barks’s stories were in the 1940s, they did not invariably pass through his editors’ hands unscathed. Western, probably in the person of Eleanor Packer, rejected completely the “Donald Duck” story Barks submitted for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 64, January 1946. That story had Donald’s neighbors responding furiously to his Christmas caroling, and it was apparently the juxtaposition of the holiday with exceptionally violent slapstick that prompted the rejection.1 Christmas was a touchy subject: another holiday-themed story, “The Golden Christmas Tree,” for Donald Duck Four Color no. 203, in 1948, underwent surgery to tame it down, at Barks’s hands but at the direction of his editors. As he wrote to a fan in 1961, he thought the revisions “took the guts out of the story. I still gag when I read the last two pages. . . . But the rest of the tale was robust enough.”2 There was occasional tinkering with other stories—changes in both artwork and dialogue. As Barks said, “[T]here are a few words here and there in certain stories that got changed in the office.” For instance, in the 1949 Donald Duck story “Voodoo Hoodoo,” the word dead has been changed to done for in two instances but—typically for such censorship—left unchanged in a third. Barks wrote in 1966: “Any ending that is sickeningly sweet is almost certain to have been altered from my original product.”3 Not many endings were changed, though. The most significant such change, apart from “The Golden Christmas Tree,” was the substitution 179

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 179

27/09/14 2:42 PM

180 | Chapter 15

of two panels at the end of “The Firebug,” a story in the 1946 Donald Duck one-shot, to make Donald’s pyromania the stuff of a bad dream. (Barks had him going to jail for burning down a courthouse.) The “pressure from the office”—“the guidance from the editors, just by talking with them”—was apparently light enough otherwise that it was rarely disturbing. In a few instances it may even have been helpful. In 1971, Barks said of his shift toward more comical menaces, and away from characters like the psychopath in “Terror of the River”: “That was conscious. . . . I was getting away from the real serious stuff. . . . [The reasons were] not only pressure from the office, but I was beginning to feel that giving villains too much of a character—that is, you build up a respect for them. I don’t want people to respect the villains, the bad guys.”4 There is no sense in the published stories from the late 1940s that Barks felt cramped. He was still developing as a comic-book artist, and the Dell comic books, especially those that Barks wrote and drew, were increasingly popular. There was every incentive for cartoonist and editors to accommodate one another’s needs. By the late 1940s, Barks’s drawing had become suppler, free of the residual storyboard stiffness in his earliest stories. He always drew with dip pen and ink, using a flexible nib, and turning to brush for areas of solid black. For him as for other artists, relying on the pen encouraged relatively cool and restrained expression compared with the expansive gestures the brush permitted. This restraint worked to Barks’s advantage: now he was drawing broadly conceived cartoon faces and bodies with a new variety and subtlety of expression. The ducks’ beaks shrank, as did the pupils of their eyes. “I did deliberately shorten the ducks’ beaks around 1949,” he said, “when my slow wits finally awoke to the fact that I’d been drawing them too long.”5 He had diminished the size of his characters’ most expressive features while simultaneously and paradoxically increasing their capacity for expression, by bringing everything about their faces into better balance. It was in Barks’s stories that the conundrum identified by Walt Kelly and Kin Platt in that 1943 court case—how to adapt characters designed for animation to the printed page—was resolved most satisfactorily. Barks took advantage of both Donald’s design—its capacity for human activity and expression—and the opportunity that the comic books provided for dialogue that was much richer than was possible in the cartoons, where Donald’s voice was limited by its quacking sound as well as the economy of words that classic animation demanded. Although

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 180

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Barks Masters His Medium |

181

Barks drew his ducks with poses and expressions whose equivalents could be found in some of the best animation coming then from Hollywood cartoon studios, notably Chuck Jones’s Warner Bros. cartoons, those cartoons could not incorporate dialogue as rich as Barks’s without sacrificing some of their other virtues. In good animated cartoons of the 1940s the characters often move much faster than is possible in real life, and there was no way to combine such speed with dialogue spoken normally. Barks’s ducks were emphatically creatures of print, even though their origins in animation were never in doubt. The drawings by some of Barks’s contemporaries in the Dell talkinganimal titles, such as Veve Risto (“Henery Hawk,” “Homer Pigeon”) and Bill Wright (“Mickey Mouse”), were more rigid than precise, but Barks’s drawings never fell into that trap. His writing demanded that his drawings depict emotions and states of mind that were highly specific, as in “Voodoo Hoodoo,” when Donald awakens to find a zombie standing at the foot of his bed. Barks shows Donald’s awakening and his sudden awareness of his visitor with a panel or two more than most cartoonists would have used, and those panels make a tremendous difference in revealing Donald’s state of mind. And then there was “Luck of the North,” in which Barks went so much further, devoting most of a page to Donald’s dawning realization that he has tricked his insufferable cousin into a treasure hunt that may lead to his death. Gladstone Gander had first appeared in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 88, January 1948, but it was more than a year later, in “Race to the South Seas,” a story in a 1949 March of Comics giveaway comic book, that Barks attached to him a characteristic that made him a perfect foil for Donald. Gladstone is, for the first time in “Race,” more than a smug dandy: he is also preternaturally lucky. Donald’s anger and frustration are coarse-grained compared with how subtly Barks would depict the workings of his character’s mind in “Luck of the North,” but “Race to the South Seas” is Barks on the verge of his best. The story’s broad comedy is supported by the concrete detail of the ducks’ perilous voyage across the Pacific to rescue Uncle Scrooge, who is cast away—they think—on a remote island. Barks wrote and drew “Race to the South Seas” about six months before “Luck of the North,” and it is like a preliminary sketch for that later and better story. In “Luck of the North,” Donald’s fierce resentment of Gladstone’s luck is never just a pretext for gags but always the engine of the story: everything flows from it. And there is no doubting that Donald would feel such resentment. In the story’s opening four

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 181

27/09/14 2:42 PM

182 | Chapter 15

pages, Gladstone (making his first appearance in the Donald Duck series) enjoys one lucky break after another, each unexceptional in itself but overwhelming in cumulative impact, especially since Gladstone crows continuously about his good luck and insists on dragging Donald along to witness it. Barks’s stories by this time were almost always impeccably constructed, but it was his emphasis on how his characters’ minds worked, his willingness to take the time—that is, the panels—to make them seem real, that lifted the best of those stories to a higher level than any other comic-book stories of the time. That psychological acuity, too, meant that the ducks, and Donald in particular, could be convincing characters even though their circumstances differed sharply from story to story. In both “Luck of the North” and “Trail of the Unicorn,” a story in the next issue of Donald Duck, the ducks, after enduring heartbreak and misery for page after page, triumph over Gladstone and wind up rich—but their wealth is evanescent. There is no trace of it in the stories that follow. The stories themselves differed more now in their basics than had ever been the case in earlier years, when they tended to fit into broad categories. “Ancient Persia,” the lead twenty-four page story in Donald Duck Four Color no. 275, the first 1950 issue, seems at first to be a pulpish sort of story. There is a mad-scientist villain (drawn, like more and more of Barks’s characters at the time, with a completely human face rather than a dog’s nose) and a plot that hinges on the scientist’s efforts to resuscitate ancient royals who were “dried” and turned to dust millennia ago. The kingdom in question is, however, called Itsa Faka, its ruler King Nevvawaza, and his daughter Princess Needa Bara Soapa. Burlesque trumps pulp, but without disrespecting pulp’s virtues. For one thing, the ducks (and Barks’s readers) can understand what the king is saying in his indignant ravings because, it seems—and this is pure pulp, of the most entertaining kind—the “thought processes” of the dried Persians have risen like perfume from the water in the royal bathtub where they are being revived. Rather than work around differences in languages, the writers of talking-animal stories usually ignored them, thus affirming their stories’ childishness. But Barks disposed of the language problem neatly in “Ancient Persia,” and he did the same in “The Magic Hourglass,” the twenty-eight page lead story in Four Color no. 291, a later 1950 issue. Uncle Scrooge has fobbed off what he thinks is a worthless hourglass on the nephews, and they try to sell it to a junkman with a pushcart. The

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 182

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Barks Masters His Medium |

183

junkman sneers at the very idea: “And don’t try to tell me it’s a magic hourglass just because of what’s written on the top of it!” The inscription, it seems, is in ancient Arabic, which the junkman can read; and why shouldn’t a junkman have a fascinating history that encompasses knowledge of ancient Arabic? “As long as this glass keeps perfect time, its owner will grow richer hour by hour. . . . What nonsense!” the junkman snorts. “The Magic Hourglass” is full of such language issues, and Barks resolves the earliest of them so deftly, as with the junkman and then with a camel-riding Arab who learned English from American soldiers during World War II, that he finally can ignore them. The Bedouin-like “raiders of No Issa” speak English without any explanation’s being offered—but even here, Barks has left vague whether what we read as English is what the raiders are supposed to be speaking to one another. Only the raiders’ leader addresses the ducks directly, in what has to be English. Barks knew that by the time the raiders appeared in his story he had a great deal of leeway, considering how thoroughly he had established the reality of the ducks and their surroundings in other ways. In many of the comic books published in Barks’s heyday, there was the suggestion that the stories were occurring in something like the order in which they were published (as was very much the case where adventure comic strips were concerned, since one story usually segued into another). But in many other comic books, those with talking animals especially, there was only the slimmest connection between stories. The chronological sense in the duck stories was likewise very loose; almost never did a story contain a reference to events in another story. The ducks’ external circumstances changed as a story required: sometimes they lived in what had to be southern California; other times they spent the winter up to their necks in snow. Everything was in flux. Barks spoke as if he always considered his gags to be more important than his characters,6 a ranking reflected in the mutability of the ducks’ surroundings and the ducks themselves. In his prime years, though, he almost never compromised a character for the sake of a laugh. As different as the ducks might seem from one story to the next, they were whole in each story. Barks took great pains to make the events in his stories plausible, to make each story seem real on its own terms, and as a result there was in his stories something that was missing from almost all the superficially similar others: a powerful core of emotional continuity. Most talking animals, whether in comic books or in animated cartoons, were little more than costumes (with perhaps, in the movies, distinctive voices

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 183

27/09/14 2:42 PM

184 | Chapter 15

and a few obvious mannerisms), but Barks in his best stories preserved the sense that his characters were the same people, just behaving very differently as their circumstances changed. Those carefully plotted stories never seem mechanical, because so much of what happens seems to originate within the characters themselves. The work of Barks’s best years demands to be read as a suite of distinct but interrelated stories covering hundreds of pages, their nature ranging from farce to domestic comedy to exotic adventure. Only then is it really possible to understand what Barks was doing, and that the mutability of the ducks, and of Donald and his nephews in particular, was not unrestricted but existed within distinct but very wide boundaries. If the ducks change from story to story, Barks says clearly, that is because this is what people are like—never the same from moment to moment, much less day to day. Montaigne could have been writing about Barks’s ducks: “Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.”7 Barks said of Donald: “He was just the everyday sort of a guy. It depended on what mood he had when he got up in the morning whether he was going to be a mean son of a gun all day or whether he was going to be a real good-natured fellow. . . . He was flexible, yes,” unlike the Donald of the animated cartoons. There, he was typed as a guy who had to be always squawking all the time, and making a lot of noise, and he was cranky and belligerent. I got away from it, because that was too hard to follow, to have a character that can only be cranky and belligerent all the time is very difficult. People would get tired of him, I would have thought. . . . As it was, I was able to make him into a sympathetic character at times, and a hero, and a heel. . . . He was just a whole variety of things, and I believe that was one of the reasons that people would pick up the book.8

Donald in Barks’s stories is variously brave and foolish, generous and spiteful, childish and mature. There are, however, certain things he can be imagined doing only under the most extreme circumstances, like being seriously derelict in his responsibilities as a parent. His mutations thus make him more real, not less, because they make him more like us: like Barks’s Donald, we retain some core of identity through what may be tremendous changes in everything about us and around us. It is difficult to think of comparable characters not just in other comic books but in popular culture outside comic books. Barks’s Donald was remarkably complex, and it is for this reason that Barks’s stories have always commanded the allegiance of a sizable cluster of adult readers. The stories attracted child readers through their comedy and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 184

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Barks Masters His Medium |

185

propulsive narratives, and then held some of them—the ones not persuaded that comic books had to be abandoned with the onset of puberty—as those readers began to recognize themselves in his characters. Barks was by the late 1940s very self-assured as a comic-book writer and artist, consistently extending himself in ways that other cartoonists never considered. Tom Gill, who began drawing the Lone Ranger comic book for Western in 1950, wrote many years later: “All cartoon illustration must be done from memory when making deadlines. There is no time for involved research. . . . Usually you’ll have your picture files handy just to prod your memory, but normally you will fill the drawing area with your visions from your mind.”9 Many of Barks’s stories, though, reveal exactly the sort of research that Gill said was impossible. In 1966, near the end of the most active years of his comic-book career, Barks described his “morgue,” whose reference materials extended far beyond the panels clipped from the work of cartoonists he admired: “I have four files [filing cabinets, presumably] full of clippings of every sort of subject and type of drawing. Also have many years of Nat’l Geographics, and an Encyclopedia Britannica. The rock of Gibraltar picture in ‘Ancient Persia’ and the authentic-looking background props and frescoes are from Nat’l Geo. I simplify such material, naturally.”10 By the late 1940s, the settings of Barks’s stories resembled actual places, especially where he lived at the time or had lived in the past, more than ever before. Any number of his stories are unmistakably set in either Los Angeles or the desert country to the east, and his snowstorms have a distinct Minnesota look to them. References to southern California, both visual (palm trees) and verbal (Burbank), are so plentiful in Barks’s stories from the late 1940s and early 1950s that he even mentions a specific Los Angeles street intersection—of Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue—in “Vacation Time,” a long story in the first issue, for summer 1950, of a 128-page “giant” comic book called Walt Disney’s Vacation Parade. Sometimes the sense of reality in one of Barks’s stories is so strong that it tilts the story itself in a direction uncharacteristically serious. That is true of “Vacation Time,” but what happens in that story is not the same as what happened three years earlier in “Adventure Down Under.” Barks’s plotting pushed “Adventure Down Under” into overly serious territory, but in “Vacation Time” everything—the settings, the situation (a devastating forest fire), and the characters (especially the villain, the sneering, cigarette-smoking fisherman who starts the fire

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 185

27/09/14 2:42 PM

186 | Chapter 15

through his carelessness)—is so insistently real that Barks’s plotting, more than satisfactory in itself, is still not quite strong enough to permit him to bring comedy and drama into the most satisfying balance. The ducks’ world, in all of Barks’s most successful stories, was realistic but not real. It was instead a world increasingly rich in comic detail—detail that was never so thick as to become overbearing (as could sometimes happen a few years later in the stories drawn by Will Elder for Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad comic book) but that established a texture different from that of our own world. Comic-book stories in general, and talking-animal comic-book stories in particular, typically seem to have no “real life” outside the story itself, but in the best stories, especially Barks’s best, what happens seems to take place in a current of everyday life. Not everyday life as we know it, but the everyday life of the characters on the page. The storytelling in most comic books has always been like a crude, reduced version of the kind of storytelling that makes up the bulk of American popular narrative: character is sketchy and undeveloped, plot turns are correspondingly arbitrary, and nothing is allowed to stand in the way of a story’s forward movement. A supreme stylist like Will Eisner in his “Spirit“ stories could accept those conditions without surrendering any of his essential self, but what Barks did was entirely different. He held the comic-book culture’s narrative barbarity at arm’s length, acknowledging only a duty to entertain, to give the kids a dime’s worth of enjoyment. While always bearing in mind that fundamental obligation, he depicted his characters and worked out his plots with a passionate attention to psychological and emotional exactitude that was worthy of a serious novelist or playwright, and he broke down his pages into panels, and composed each panel, as carefully as any serious filmmaker selected and composed his shots. The result was an extraordinary truthfulness within the boundaries imposed first by the nature of the intended audience—young children— and then by the nature of the characters and their environment, both of which were always fantastic in important ways. In Barks’s case, a sympathetic reader had to accept not only the possibility of real literature’s emerging from a cheaply printed pamphlet sold mostly to children or bought for them, but also the legitimacy of continuing characters, which were automatically suspect in some educated readers’ eyes no matter how many respectable precedents might be invoked. Moreover, almost all of those characters were talking animals, and Disney animals at that, the Disney association no longer being a positive one in the eyes of

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 186

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Barks Masters His Medium |

187

many educated readers by the time Barks was doing his best work. A sympathetic reader had to recognize that if stories are truthful, as Barks’s best stories are, it makes no difference if they do not—or cannot, for external reasons—explore all the infinite varieties of human behavior. They point toward other, untold stories that are just as true. What Barks did in comic-book stories could be compared to what Chaplin and Keaton did in films, as they mastered their medium and used it for a comedy that was, within a few years, much richer than anything in their earliest efforts. The difference was that the obstacles to acceptance of Barks’s work were much higher. Not only were comicbook stories regarded with suspicion, but for the most part that suspicion was justified, the shallowness of the great bulk of comic-book stories being undeniable (and, for that matter, a major element in their appeal to children, because the stories were so undemanding). Even though the comic-book story itself was not hopelessly suspect as an artistic medium, few readers recognized that, and only a few cartoonists, like Barks, grasped the potential of their medium and tried to realize it, mostly without articulating what they were doing or reaching out to a broader audience. And then there were the publishers, almost none of whom had any respect for their own product. That Barks enjoyed so much artistic freedom under those circumstances—and moreover, that he took full advantage of it—was all but miraculous, with astonishing results like the story called “Letter to Santa” in the first issue of the first Dell giant comic, Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade, from 1949. Unlike most of Barks’s longer stories, it is not a mixture of comedy and adventure but is instead completely comic, like most of the ten-page stories in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. The comedy is sustained without a lapse through twenty-four pages. It is a Christmas story, in a children’s comic book, but it is almost entirely sugar free. (After rejecting or manhandling two earlier Christmas stories that were comparably unsentimental, Barks’s editors for some reason decided to leave this one alone.) It is also the first full-dress appearance of one of the most memorable comic-book characters, Donald’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck—Barks’s creation, and a character as fiercely acerbic as any of the great supporting actors in the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Scrooge in “Letter to Santa” was making his sixth appearance in one of Barks’s stories since he had been introduced in “Christmas on Bear Mountain” two years earlier. When Barks used Scrooge for a second time in “The Old Castle’s Secret,” six months after “Bear Mountain,”

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 187

27/09/14 2:42 PM

188 | Chapter 15

it was not because there had been any favorable response to the character either from his editors or from his readers. He heard, he told Malcolm Willits, “not a word, but I kind of liked old Scrooge and he filled a gap. We needed somebody to help Donald out.”11 In the 1949 story “Voodoo Hoodoo,” Scrooge was identified for the first time (in a caption) as “the richest man in the world,” but it was in “Letter to Santa” that he was first visibly so rich—as Donald says to himself, the “richest tycoon in the universe.” Donald goes to Scrooge to ask for money to buy a steam shovel: he mistakenly believes that the nephews want a full-size steam shovel for Christmas, rather than the toy they actually want, and he has forgotten to mail their letter to Santa Claus asking for one. In Scrooge’s office, cash spills around his desk and threatens to topple onto Scrooge himself. “The nerve of you, nephew!” he cries. “If I could afford a steam shovel, I’d have one in here shoveling this money out of the way!” Scrooge was also more compelling and attractive than before, because he was far more energetic and irascible. When Donald tells him that he wants the money to buy a Christmas gift for the nephews, Scrooge has what looks like a change of heart, giving Donald what he calls a “wad of money! Go out and buy ’em a steam shovel!” Scrooge is indignant, though, when he realizes that the nephews will believe that Santa has brought the steam shovel: “What kind of a deal is that? I furnish the money to buy their present, and Santa Claus gets the credit!” It is his indignation that makes his generous gesture believable: he not only wants to be rich but also wants the world, his relatives especially, to bow to his fortune. Scrooge quickly concludes that he must buy another steam shovel and deliver it himself. It is inconceivable that anyone else could be at the controls if he is to get the credit he knows he deserves, and Scrooge is clearly the sort of self-made man who is comfortable around heavy machinery. He says to himself as his chauffeur drives him in search of a steam shovel: “What’s the use of having eleven octillion dollars if I don’t make a big noise about it?” When the police arrest Scrooge and Donald after they have battled with their steam shovels like two latter-day dinosaurs, Scrooge is as brazenly contemptuous of the law as any nineteenth-century robber baron, dressing down the judge and then, when he is fined a million dollars, tossing two million at the bench (“Put the rest in the kitty—in case we come back”), a remarkably cynical gesture for a children’s comic book.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 188

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Letter to Santa,” in Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade no. 1 (1949), was the first Carl Barks story to present Uncle Scrooge McDuck in all his irascible splendor. © 1949 Disney.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 189

27/09/14 2:42 PM

190 | Chapter 15

The story’s lack of sentiment is underlined rather than contradicted by Scrooge’s changes of heart—not one, but two. The second follows the ducks’ court appearance, when he tells Donald that he has been an “old brat.” Now Scrooge is going to help Donald cover for his failure to come up with a steam shovel by disguising him as Santa, so that Donald can feed the nephews a hard-luck story. Scrooge’s acknowledgment of his personal failings turns out to be highly superficial. Within a few pages he is disguised as Santa himself and telling the nephews that if they had only asked Scrooge for a steam shovel, “you’d have gotten some action! Scrooge McDuck is the greatest man in the world! Why, he can give steam shovels easier than Santa Claus can give gumdrops!” Santa Claus himself shows up as the story draws to an end, and this is a little surprising, because Barks usually avoided characters that were wholly fanciful even on the terms set by the ducks’ universe. Barks’s Santa is, however, a remarkably plausible personage—Barks has figured out how he can easily navigate up and down chimneys—and he is a very practical fellow, too. He gives the nephews exactly what they want, but only that—there is no flood of unrequested gifts. Most important, Santa by his very existence has generated the turmoil that precedes his entrance: if Santa did not exist, it would not matter that Donald had forgotten to mail the nephews’ letter to him. There is the occasional eccentric detail in “Letter to Santa,” like the man who carries Christmas presents on a unicycle, but there are far more traces of a reality closer to our own. They serve simultaneously to leach the sugar out of the central idea and to make what happens in the story more believable. As Donald anxiously stalks the streets after realizing that he has failed to mail the nephews’ letter, he passes near a sign: “Flop 25¢.” Duckburg, a Disney city, has flophouses. When Donald tries to buy a steam shovel, he does not drive one out of the heavy-machinery lot, as any other comic-book talking animal would, but is told by a gruff overseer: “Listen, bud! You don’t buy steam shovels like you do teaspoons! You gotta order ’em from the factory!” How many comparisons might that overseer have made, and how perfect is his “like you do teaspoons,” calling up as it does thoughts of a mass-produced item much smaller than a steam shovel, but not pathetically trivial. The slapstick in “Letter to Santa”—first the battle of the steam shovels, and then Donald’s mishaps while he is disguised as Santa, culminating in the explosion that follows when his suit, full of wet beans, expands and bursts in the chimney—is set up and staged with the care that good slapstick always demands but rarely gets. It may be a tad too

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 190

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Barks Masters His Medium |

191

convenient that Scrooge has a second Santa Claus suit handy that he can wear when he takes Donald’s place, and the concluding panels have an obligatory feeling (the story has ended on the previous page, but there has to be a coda of some kind), but if “Letter to Santa” is not perfect, its tiny imperfections are very easy to excuse. There was, however, one small cloud over this marvelous story, arising from the fact that Scrooge himself was inherently a much more limited character than Donald. As Barks said, “[H]e did always have one characteristic, his desire for money. That was the first thought that would come into his head whenever he was in a dangerous situation, how to save his money rather than himself.”12 And there were nuances in the Scrooge of “Letter to Santa”—in his interplay of greed, vanity, and spasms of self-interested generosity—that would be difficult to sustain in the comic-book environment, with its persistent tropism toward the simple and obvious. Because he was producing so many long stories for Donald Duck and the new giant comics, Christmas Parade and Vacation Parade, Barks had to cut back on his work for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. The ten-page “Donald Duck” story in the January 1950 issue was his last for a year, except for the March and June 1950 issues. Carl Buettner had been sidelined for months by a heart attack in the fall of 1949,13 and so it was his assistant, Tom McKimson, the former Warner Bros. cartoonist and a member of Western’s staff since 1947, who wrote to Barks from Whitman’s offices (which by then were at 405 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills) on August 4, 1950: “Your public is clamoring to see more Donald Duck, a la Barks . . . so we have decided to put your story-art combination back into the monthly magazines.” Set aside the one-shot you’re working on, Barks was told, and whip up a tenpage story for the February 1951 Walt Disney’s Comics as quickly as possible. “When you get the plots worked out” for a couple of tenpagers, McKimson wrote, “we’d enjoy having a brief synopsis of what you have in mind.”14 Barks submitted his first new ten-pager very quickly—quickly enough that it was published in no. 124, the January 1951 issue, rather than February. Alice Nielsen Cobb wrote to him on August 21 to tell him that his editors were very happy with it. (“Amen!” Tom McKimson wrote in the margin of the letter.)15 But who made up the “public” McKimson mentioned? Were child readers and their parents writing to complain that the quality of the duck stories in Walt Disney’s Comics had plummeted (as indeed it

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 191

27/09/14 2:42 PM

192 | Chapter 15

had)? It is difficult to read into the royalty figures for 1950 any direct effects of Barks’s absence. The number of copies on which Disney received royalties—the number of copies printed—ranged in the course of the year from 2.5 million to 2.875 million, with the high figure for the August 1950 issue, the low for the November 1950 issue. Seasonal variations were almost certainly more important than any response to Barks’s absence. Barks’s name never appeared on his comic-book work, so anyone complaining that he was gone would have had to refer to him as “the good artist” or something similar. That was in fact the way that many young readers distinguished him from his lesser contemporaries. The figures for Donald Duck showed a similar pattern, with summer print runs higher. Print runs for that title actually rose in 1951, to well above two million copies per issue, after Barks cut back on his Donald Duck stories so he could resume his monthly appearances in Walt Disney’s Comics. Barks told Donald Ault that he “never got a swelled head over hearing that [Walt Disney’s Comics] was selling millions of copies. I knew it wouldn’t last. And besides, Alice Cobb . . . told me my work wasn’t selling those comics—it was Walt Disney’s name over the titles.”16 Cobb was surely right. Even if many children recognized and responded to Barks’s superior work, the Disney characters and the comic-book format itself were the strongest lures. That reality would inevitably have some effect on the remarkable artistic freedom Barks enjoyed.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 192

27/09/14 2:42 PM

16

An Arena for All the Passions

When colleagues described John Stanley, handsome was the first word they used. He was “strikingly handsome,” Dan Noonan said. A “handsome son of a gun,” Moe Gollub said. In the first of Walt Kelly’s two Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shots, from 1946, Albert has Pogo in a barber chair when he shows him a wanted poster for “Perty Boy John,” a Stanley caricature. “Look!” Albert says. “You kin be as dee-lishus as dish yere feller fo’ twenny cents.” Pogo responds: “Man— he perty!” Stanley was blue-eyed and prematurely gray, tall and slender—six feet two inches and 170 pounds when he registered for the draft in October 1940, and not much heavier, if at all, in photos taken years later.1 Cartoonists being what they are, his good looks made him a natural target for Kelly’s good-natured abuse, in that story and others. But his colleagues were aware, too, of his exceptional intelligence. Noonan described Stanley in a 1968 interview as “an omnivorous reader, always. He reads everything he can lay his hands on. I’d say he’s an authority on writers like Samuel Pepys and Boswell. He has a very strange, wonderful feel for words; he’s similar to S. J. Perelman in that sense. He loves words like ‘foot-pad’ or ‘cut-purse,’ or the like; strangesounding Elizabethan terms appeal to him. He’s got a very fine mind, and I think he could have been a serious writer had he chosen to be one.”2 Stanley “used to send ideas to The New Yorker,” Noonan said, “and Jim Geraghty, who was the cartoon director there, was so impressed with Stanley he wanted to give him a contract. Stanley 193

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 193

27/09/14 2:42 PM

194 | Chapter 16

“Albert and the Barbecue,” by Walt Kelly, in Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum Four Color no. 105 (1946), is notable for its caricatures of Western Printing insiders. “Perty Boy John” on a wanted poster is John Stanley. On the second wanted poster, “Danny the Dip” in front view is Walt Kelly; the “side view” may be of Richard Small, a Western salesman and later an executive at the Poughkeepsie plant.

wouldn’t have any of it; he didn’t want to be tied.”3 Stanley’s ideas were “very sophisticated gag ideas, all of them,” Noonan said.4 There seems to be no record in the New Yorker’s archives of any such relationship with Stanley, or of anything he contributed to the magazine other than that one 1947 cartoon.5 Among Stanley’s papers was a single letter from Geraghty, dated only November 11, no year, rejecting the ideas he had submitted the previous week. There is, however, every reason to believe that Stanley was a considerably more sophisticated man than the comic-book norm. The discrepancy between his distinguished appearance and literary pursuits on the one hand, and what was unquestionably low-status work in comic books on the other, surely fed his dismissive attitude toward his own work. And it may have made alcohol more attractive, too. Moe Gollub said of Stanley: “He drank a little bit; he wasn’t a lush or anything, but every weekend he’d hit a few, mostly because he couldn’t sleep nights. His Irish background, with all the restraints that his religious parents put on him, seemed to have had some negative

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 194

27/09/14 2:42 PM

An Arena for All the Passions |

195

effects that he could never really consciously offset, although he was not anything like religious.”6 Like Marjorie Henderson Buell’s panel cartoons, Stanley’s early Little Lulu stories had a strong flavor of the 1930s, although in his case that flavor lingered throughout the 1950s. Most obviously, the children, especially the boys, dressed in styles of early in the twentieth century—in knickers, short pants, sweatshirts, and cloth caps. Tubby, the fat boy who was Lulu’s costar (called “Joe” in the panel cartoons on the rare occasions when he was named), always wore a sort of black suit coat and white cravat—and shorts, regardless of the weather, with a tiny sailor hat perched incongruously atop his large round head. Lulu’s hometown was not suburban but looked like a small eastern city of the Depression and World War II years: plain houses with tiny yards or none at all. (Many front doors opened directly onto the sidewalk.) Families were small—Lulu, Tubby, and Lulu’s next-door neighbor Alvin, the third major character, had no siblings—and parents usually looked middle-aged or close to it, as if they had postponed having a child until defense spending lifted the economy after ten years of the Depression. Lulu’s town could have been a small city in the Hudson valley, where Stanley himself lived and worked after moving to Crotonon-Hudson in Westchester County—the same town where Oskar Lebeck lived—sometime in the mid-1940s. Stanley’s Lulu stories remained frozen in time, with only a few concessions—like the very occasional appearance of a television set—to postwar changes. Lulu and the other characters visited no other towns, much less other countries. Stanley said he restricted the settings of the Lulu stories for practical reasons: “Why did all the Little Lulu stories take place within one neighborhood? Because it saved me all kinds of research. Why should I send her to Alaska when all the passions that make a story absorbing are already present within the neighborhood setting? It was laziness.”7 Marjorie Buell and Stanley differed on just how much raw material she gave Stanley to work with. In handwritten notes dating from 1984, Buell said: “I drew model charts of Little Lulu, Tubby, and Alvin for Western as I did for many licensees, and it was clearly understood that I had the final word on the drawings and stories in the Western Little Lulu comics. Western sent drafts of each comic book for me to OK and I returned the drafts sometimes with suggestions for changes but most of the time without.” Lulu’s parents and Tubby’s parents also made the transition from panel cartoons to comic books, she said. “Many other

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 195

27/09/14 2:42 PM

196 | Chapter 16

characters in the Saturday Evening Post Lulu cartoons resembled to some extent other characters in the Western Lulu comic books.”8 Stanley was fully as expansive, and probably more accurate, in his claims to authorship. For one thing, no character identifiable as Alvin can be found in the last three years of the Post panels or any of the half dozen book collections of the Lulu panels published by Rand McNally and the David McKay Company. “LeBeck [sic] gave me two characters, Lulu and Tubby, nothing more, to do something with in a comic book, and I took it from there,” Stanley wrote. “Marge supplied their last names, Moppet and Tompkins. The rest of the characters, all of them, till the last issue done by me, were conceived, drawn and named by me.”9 Some details carried over from the Post panels to the comic books—“No wimmen allowed” on a boys’ clubhouse in the Post became “No girls allowed” on the clubhouse in the comic books—and a frontcover drawing by Stanley might echo one of the Post drawings.10 But that did not happen often. There was no cheeriness in Stanley’s depiction of Lulu and his other child characters, none in the writing or in the drawing, not a trace of the cuteness that came so effortlessly to Walt Kelly. In some of the early one-shot issues of Little Lulu, the characters seem isolated, firmly separated by empty space even in those panels with more than one character. In plain black-and-white reproductions of the inked lines, the drawings—simpler and more uniform than Buell’s for the Post—look especially stark. There was in Little Lulu no mediation of the sort that Dan Gormley’s drawings had provided for Stanley in New Funnies. As Bud Tripp’s hard-edged ink lines came to dominate how the Lulu comic book looked, they did not add any Gormley-style warmth to Stanley’s scripts—or storyboards, as Stanley himself called them—but rather made them seem more abstract, adding what was sometimes a welcome distance from characters whose sufferings might otherwise have seemed uncomfortably real. Compared with Kelly’s stories, which were rooted in nineteenth-century illustration (by way of the Disney studio) and Victorian children’s fiction, Stanley’s early stories could seem strikingly modern. They were far removed from the likes of the Archie stories, which resembled television situation comedies in their combination of the earnest and the shoddy, but they were also far removed from stories of the kind that Oskar Lebeck had found most congenial. There was never a hint, though, in anything Stanley said that Lebeck was other than “totally supportive.” As Dan Noonan said, Lebeck was guided by his sense of

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 196

27/09/14 2:42 PM

An Arena for All the Passions |

197

“what was good, and what was genuinely funny,” and he could hardly have found Stanley’s best work anything other than good and funny. For all that Lulu’s town evoked a real city in a real part of the world, Stanley never gave it a name that stuck, and there was never any sense that it had a fixed geography, no sense that Lulu and the other characters lived in an imaginary world with constraints like those that the real world imposes. Instead, everything was more fluid, not just geography but also names and physiognomies, so that only a handful of characters at the center of the stories—Lulu, Tubby, Alvin, Lulu’s parents, and eventually a few other children—were constants. Lots of things were cloudy: Lulu’s father had a job (her mother was a housewife), but what kind of job was it? The senior Moppets and Tompkinses were acquainted, but were they really friends, since they addressed one another as “Mr.” and “Mrs.”? The stores were small and bare and emphatically old-fashioned, like something out of Communist Eastern Europe. A clergyman appeared in one early story, but otherwise it was hard to find any trace of religion. The children attended school, went to the movies, and so on, but all of those places were props that Stanley wheeled onstage as they were needed. The children in Little Lulu had remarkably little adult supervision by contemporary standards, and not very much even by the standards that prevailed when the stories were published. Lulu and her friends were presented as elementary school children of seven or eight years old (ages and grade level were changeable and usually vague), but they walked about their town as they pleased, and the same was true even of children who were supposed to be a few years younger, like Lulu’s neighbor Alvin. They were all latchkey children, entering and leaving their homes freely—a door or window was almost always unlocked—no matter whether their parents were at home. Lulu, Tubby, and their friends also found it remarkably easy to slip out of their homes and engage in extended nocturnal adventures. And not always nocturnal: in Little Lulu no. 1, January–February 1948, Lulu and Tubby scale a five-story building by using protruding bricks as handholds, stepping through one window into an apartment for a drink of water and reaching through another window to make telephone calls to their mothers (“Hello, mother, guess where I am”). Lulu does take the precaution of keeping her eyes shut throughout the climb. There was, to be sure, a corollary to this remarkable freedom of action: physical punishment, in the form of spankings not just by parents but also by other adults, was easily provoked and could be severe.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 197

27/09/14 2:42 PM

In “Mountain Climbers,” in Little Lulu no. 1, January–February 1948, written by John Stanley and illustrated by Charles Hedinger and Irving Tripp, Tubby leads Lulu up a building using protruding bricks as handholds.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 198

27/09/14 2:42 PM

An Arena for All the Passions |

199

But parents, like adults generally, were distractions in Stanley’s best stories, where, as he said, “all the passions that make a story absorbing” were concentrated not just in a small neighborhood but almost entirely in a handful of child characters. There is, however, never any suggestion in Stanley’s Little Lulu stories that he was observing real children as a source, in the manner later made famous by newspaper cartoonists like Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace) and Bil Keane (The Family Circus). In some stories, early and late, the sense of Lulu and Tubby as children is so tenuous that Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken can easily be imagined in their places. Stanley was looking at families and children from outside: he was neither husband nor parent during almost all of his time as Little Lulu’s guiding intelligence. Stanley’s version of Lulu herself initially resembled Marge’s. In the first story in the first one-shot she is a tomboyish female bully who resists wearing an angel costume to a children’s party and commandeers Tubby’s beard—he is dressed as a pirate—so that she can at least go as an old angel. But in the second story, “Lulu at the Beach,” she is already not so much mischievous as single-minded and self-absorbed, very much like Stanley’s New Funnies characters. Like those characters, she has a clear idea of what is important to her, and she is not distracted by irrelevancies, especially by what adults think is important. The stage was thus set for collisions between adults and children, all of whom were behaving reasonably on their own terms—not that it made any difference to the frequently calamitous results. Within a few years, though, Lulu was in Stanley’s stories no less self-possessed but now dealing forthrightly with destructive forces rather than being one. In a 1970 interview, long after Stanley departed Little Lulu, Marjorie Buell contrasted the humor of her Post panels with the comic book. In the comic book, she said, “Lulu was quite childlike and honest.”11 Lulu could assume that more congenial role for the title character of the comic book because “Joe,” her foil for years in the Post, was available to become Tubby, a character very much like the one she had been, only more so. Usually a victim of Lulu’s willfulness in the magazine cartoons—where she might maul “Joe” so she could put her first-aid kit to use—Tubby in Stanley’s stories blossomed into a sublimely narcissistic monster, not actively malicious but lacking any trace of a conscience. The transition was complete by “The Kid Who Came to Dinner,” in the eighth Little Lulu one-shot (Four Color no. 146, 1947). Tubby invites himself to eat dinner with Lulu and her parents, cheerfully insults his hosts without showing the slightest awareness he is

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 199

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“The Kid Who Came to Dinner,” in Little Lulu Four Color no. 146 (1947), written by John Stanley and illustrated by Charles Hedinger and Irving Tripp, was one of the first stories to showcase Tubby’s mad self-absorption. © 1947, 1974 Marjorie Henderson Buell.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 200

27/09/14 2:42 PM

An Arena for All the Passions |

201

doing so, pokes at Mr. Moppet’s food while asking if he is going to finish it (Lulu’s father transfers the compromised morsel to Tubby’s plate), eats so much that he falls ill, and finally accuses Lulu’s mother of poisoning him. When the Moppets return to Tubby’s sickbed—or sofa, actually—after calling a doctor, he is gone: he has left in a rush so that he can return to his own home in time to eat dinner there. What makes Tubby funny rather than alarming is that Stanley presents him as a child; the younger the child, the more tolerable, and even amusing, the behavior that in an adult would invite a diagnosis of, say, narcissistic personality disorder. Stanley’s stories were evolving in a way that made it impossible to think of Tubby as being very much like a real child—real children did not wander freely in a stage-set town— but Stanley made sure he resembled one just enough. His characters were never vulnerable to the suggestion so often made about the children in Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts—that they were adults masquerading as children. They were instead children whose quarrels and schemes echoed adult life. Stanley’s strategy took full advantage of his characters’ severely stylized design—their solid black oval eyes, up-pointing noses, and simple or invisible mouths—and how it discouraged too close an identification of reader and character. Over the first four or five years of Little Lulu, a small number of child characters acquired a standard appearance and consistent names—Willie, Eddie, and Iggy, the “fellers,” were Tubby’s clubhouse pals, and Annie, a buck-toothed gamine, was Lulu’s friend— but although clothing and hair color differed, their faces were identical, Annie’s buck teeth aside. Stanley introduced Gloria, a curly-haired blonde, in Four Color no. 131 (1947), and in 1949 he began presenting her as a preening beauty. Many stories thereafter turned on how much better looking she was, compared with the supposedly very plain Lulu. For anyone who paid attention to what the characters actually looked like, the joke was unmistakable. It was in the first Little Lulu one-shot in 1945 that Stanley introduced the most important of the comic book’s characters aside from Lulu and Tubby: Alvin, Lulu’s next-door neighbor. Alvin’s personality was not far removed from that of the original Post version of Lulu or Stanley’s version of Tubby, but because he was presented as several years younger, he was, compared with the other two characters, pure id. He was savagely egotistical, a three- or four-year-old child who not only disregarded all social restraints but attacked them violently. Stanley was attracted to such small horrors—as when he pitted Woody Wood-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 201

27/09/14 2:42 PM

202 | Chapter 16

pecker against a demonic baby a year earlier, in New Funnies—but they were inherently limited as foils. Nihilism lacks nuance, and Stanley had to find some way to make Alvin more interesting without diluting his personality. His solution, starting with the third Little Lulu one-shot (Four Color no. 110, 1946), had two parts: he made Alvin a little older and more articulate than he was in his first appearance; but, more important, he had Lulu subdue Alvin’s destructive nature, if only temporarily, by telling mock fairy tales. These fairy tales were, in marked contrast to Alvin himself, cool and ironical. Lulu was the featured player as well as the narrator, and she usually took the part of a cheerful Candide—almost always “the poor little girl”—in a world dominated by greedy and stupid adults. In the first such story, “Lulu in Distress,” the orphan Lulu is the victim of a fantastically cruel stepmother and a capricious stepbrother (named Alvin and indistinguishable from Lulu’s neighbor), who insists on celebrating his birthday every day and twice on Sunday. As the ragged and desperately overworked Lulu gazes longingly at the candies in a shop display, the seemingly sympathetic shopkeeper is reduced to tears—but then, when she asks if he has any samples, he yells at her: “NO!! GEDDADDA HERE!!” before he returns to bawling in the next panel. As Lulu explains in a caption, “People were so sorry for me that they just couldn’t bear to have me around . . .” In the fairy tales, Stanley relied heavily on captions like that one to achieve the effects he wanted. (He used captions sparingly in stories of other kinds.) The captions, in Lulu’s voice, exude a mock innocence and sentimentality that is completely at odds with what the panels show: a world in which adults exploit children shamelessly. What the reader sees and what Alvin supposedly hears are thus very different, although Stanley did not explore that disjunction directly, since there was never any question about who the real audience was. Stanley’s reliance on captions was, as so often with him, a procedure whose substantial risks were not immediately obvious. Comic-book captions are typically redundant, duplicating in words what is (or should be) clear from the pictures. The most lamentable examples were the celebrated EC crime, horror, and science-fiction comic books of the early 1950s, edited and largely written by Al Feldstein, and often illustrated with great skill by artists like Wallace Wood and Jack Davis. Feldstein’s captions accentuated what were too often hackneyed plots, hobbled by a conception of the short story that required an ironic

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 202

27/09/14 2:42 PM

An Arena for All the Passions |

203

“twist” ending of the sort associated with O. Henry.12 Stanley’s captions, by contrast, worked always in counterpoint to his drawings and their dialogue balloons, the stories much funnier when the captions were read along with the panels. Sometimes Stanley went so far as to fill a whole panel with words; that is, a caption took over completely. His confidence in his words was almost always justified. He ran the same sort of risk when he dispensed with words altogether, in the stories he told entirely in pictures. He dabbled in such stories in New Funnies, but he went further in Little Lulu, starting with a six-page story in the third one-shot, Four Color no. 110, and pushing all the way out to ten pages in the last Four Color issue, no. 165 (1947). Such stories required a virtuoso’s timing—there could not appear to be too much or too little elapsed time within a panel, or the story’s rhythm would be fatally disrupted—as well as construction that made the absence of dialogue, so important an element in most comic-book stories, seem natural in this instance. Stanley passed such tests easily. There was an underlying sense of experiment in Stanley’s Little Lulu stories, so formally tame on the surface. Stanley’s staging—how he positioned his characters within each panel—was from the beginning much less varied than that of many other comic-book creators, in keeping with the severe simplicity of his character designs. The characters were most often seen full figure, as if at some distance from the reader (although after a few issues he did soften the starkness of his earliest stories by bringing the characters a little more forward on each panel’s stage). The occasional close-up was in striking contrast, and Stanley rarely used one except when a character’s features were to be distorted for comic emphasis. Little Lulu made the transition from a de facto bimonthly schedule in 1947 to an official bimonthly schedule in 1948 and finally a monthly schedule in 1949—a growing success for which Stanley was almost entirely responsible. He was by the late 1940s both exceptionally productive and exceptionally facile. Even when there were dry periods, as happened in 1948 and 1949, he could produce stories that were superior by ordinary comic-book standards, for all that they slipped into predictability within a page or two. What Stanley needed were more templates like the fairy tales—starting points for stories, of a general kind. He needed such templates in the late 1940s more than Carl Barks did, because Barks did not hesitate to send his ducks to exotic locations. Stanley worked within stricter confines—by choice, as he said, but also out of near necessity, since his

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 203

27/09/14 2:42 PM

204 | Chapter 16

comic-book children could not have left their homes without arduous and unconvincing preliminaries. Besides, there was always the risk that Stanley would succumb to boredom without the stimulation that a good template could provide. In a fair number of his Lulu stories, as in some of his stories for New Funnies, there is a strong sense that Stanley—the cartoonist who claimed that he typically started a story without any idea where he would wind up—has lost interest and is ending a story as quickly as he can, even though his stories were never disfigured by the insolent carelessness of which other cartoonists could be guilty. Stanley gradually accumulated an assortment of templates of varying usefulness. When Lulu was pursued by the truant officer after being mistaken for a hooky player, not much could differ from story to story except the sight gags. Stanley sent his characters to the beach fairly often, too, without exceptional results. But the fairy tales were rich with possibilities, as were, only slightly less so, ghost stories. The first important story of the latter kind appeared in Little Lulu no. 15, September 1949, when a ghost—a real one, in comic-book context—haunts Lulu’s dollhouse. The categories sometimes overlapped, as when Lulu told Alvin a ghost story, and in stories of both kinds Stanley sometimes verged on serious grimness, even though it was always concealed behind innocentlooking cartoon drawings. In the fairy tale in Little Lulu no. 17, November 1949, there is violent death, in quantity, shown not in graphic detail but through its consequences: the complete absence of the many hundreds of people who have been devoured by a dragon. The dragon is guarding the castle where Lulu is imprisoned, and a fortune in gold is waiting for whoever can cross the moat where the dragon is lurking. The mob has rushed the castle, gambling that the dragon can kill only a few people before the rest make it inside. This turns out to be a miscalculation. In the framing story for this fairy tale, Lulu’s storytelling is revealed to be more than a means of taming Alvin: she wants to avoid him and his demand for a new story, but then, when she is successful, she misses him. He is a pest but also a challenge to her imagination. In the ghost stories, there is more than once the danger, presented seriously if sometimes in what turns out to be a dream, that Lulu or Tubby will themselves become ghosts—that is, that they will die. Such stories somehow passed Marjorie Buell’s scrutiny, but she rejected a story, scheduled for the August 1950 issue, called “The Bogyman.” It was, she said in a handwritten draft for a 1985 letter, “an ugly, taste-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 204

27/09/14 2:42 PM

An Arena for All the Passions |

205

less, scary story, entirely out of character and way below the high standards of the Little Lulu comics.”13 Given that many other stories at least as “scary” were acceptable to Buell, the fundamental problem may have been that the Bogyman was actually shown, as a grotesquely elongated and hairy monster with six ears, and not just talked about, like some of the menaces in other stories. Stanley’s most fruitful source of story ideas, apart from the fairy tales, proved to be the rivalry between groups of boys and girls. The first story of that kind was “Little Lulu Fights Back with a Club,” in the fourth one-shot (Four Color no. 115, 1946). Stanley spins out a conflict between juveniles across sixteen pages, but that story is, unfortunately, one of those that end awkwardly. (Tubby and his friends decide that they actually like crocheting doilies.) Until then Stanley, like other writers for the Dell comic books, had benefited from the opportunity to write stories longer than many other publishers permitted. In the early issues of Little Lulu a story like “The Hooky Team” (in Four Color no. 139, 1947) might fill as many as twenty pages. As Stanley elaborated on the rivalry theme in subsequent stories, Lulu herself came into focus as a “good little girl” who outsmarted the boys, instead of triumphing through sheer brass as she did in his earliest stories with the character. She became, more than that, a sly trickster, much more closely resembling Brer Rabbit than Walt Kelly’s Pogo ever did. There were no racial complications in Stanley’s stories, either; the entire cast was white and only rarely was there a hint of ethnicity. Even the butcher with a German-sounding name, Mr. Kohlkutz, had no accent. Lulu’s trickster identity was established by 1949, but it took a while for Stanley to realize fully the possibilities, as he finally did in “Five Little Babies,” in the August 1951 Little Lulu. Deceived and humiliated by Tubby and his friends, Lulu responds through a carefully worked-out scheme that ultimately delivers the boys, clad only in diapers and stacked under a blanket on a coaster wagon, into the heart of a rival gang’s neighborhood. Devising and executing such a scheme would certainly have been beyond the capacities of any real-life grade-school child who was not a precocious monster, but by 1951 Stanley was so sure-handed with his characters that Lulu’s triumph commands assent as well as laughter. Even as Stanley became more tightly linked to Little Lulu, he continued both to write and to illustrate features in other comic books, notably “Jigg and Mooch” (originally “Jigger”) in the last seven issues of

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 205

27/09/14 2:42 PM

206 | Chapter 16

Animal Comics, in 1946–47, and “Peterkin Pottle” in eight 1949 issues of Raggedy Ann & Andy. Mooch of “Jigg and Mooch,” the big canine comedian in a big/small pairing, was so willfully obtuse as to be delusional, and Peterkin Pottle was a juvenile Walter Mitty. These were, it turned out, very narrowly focused features that probably had not much more life in them when they ended their short runs. Peterkin’s daydreams would seem to have been as fertile a source of comedy as Lulu’s stories for Alvin, but, curiously, such was not the case. Peterkin daydreamed to retreat from the world, whereas Lulu in her stories for Alvin—he was her adversary, after all—engaged the world on her own terms. Unlike Peterkin, she was almost always in charge.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 206

27/09/14 2:42 PM

17

Animal Kingdoms

As John Stanley took up work on Little Lulu in the mid-1940s, what was emerging in Walt Kelly’s “Albert and Pogo” stories around the same time was constantly percolating ensemble comedy. Built less on real stories than on how eccentric characters bumped up against one another, this was a kind of comedy that was common in radio, on shows like those of Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Fibber McGee and Molly—not to mention Amos ’n’ Andy—but had no parallels in comic books and relatively few in newspaper comic strips, with prominent exceptions like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre, especially in its Sunday-page incarnation. Those cartoonists understood that the loose, open-ended comic-strip format was highly accommodating to a free flow of invention but was also forgiving when the cartoonist marked time for a few days while waiting for inspiration to return. It was a format made to order for the sort of cartoonist Kelly was becoming. Kelly was, in the “Albert and Pogo” stories from 1944–47, a sort of comic-strip cartoonist in waiting—literally so, because heavily reworked versions of some of those stories, or parts of them, turned up a few years later in the Pogo strip. The differences were often subtle—matters of staging, gesture, and emphasis—but the cumulative effect was vast improvement. Kelly also improved rapidly as a draftsman after he began drawing the comic strip, and it benefited as well from his own lettering (or lettering that he supervised) in the dialogue balloons. The underlying 207

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 207

27/09/14 2:42 PM

208 | Chapter 17

problem with “Albert and Pogo” in comic books was that the characters were not sufficiently developed—and at first not sufficiently numerous— to sustain the kind of comedy that Kelly seemed to have in mind; and so he fell back on broader and cruder expedients. In two stories, a year and a half apart, Kelly had Albert become “mean” in response to insults, suddenly looking and behaving more like a real alligator. The effect is startling because Albert, like Pogo, had become more Disney-like since his first appearance—that is, recognizable as the animal he was supposed to be, but with attributes (expressive eyes and mouth, hands that can grasp, upright posture) that permitted that animal to behave like a human being. In the fifth issue of Animal Comics, when Albert is at the train station, he indignantly declares to the humans who are fighting over who will own him: “I isn’t no dawg or hoss! I is a reg’lar hooman!” Transformations like Albert’s into a “mean” version of himself were the kind of storytelling shortcut of which comic books were often guilty, and Kelly was guilty of others. In Animal Comics no. 15, June–July 1945, in the first story to elevate Pogo to costarring status under the title “Albert and Pogo,” there is a real villain, a medicine-show huckster of wolflike appearance who threatens Pogo with a knife. (This character could be confused with Seminole Sam, the fox con man of the comic strip, but the first such fox actually appeared in Animal Comics no. 11, October– November 1944.) The villain is menacing in a direct manner and is defeated in the same way, by a skunk. There is no room in such hopelessly blunt stories for comedy of character, or subtlety of any kind. As Kelly’s feature evolved, and especially after its title became “Albert and Pogo,” it began to be handicapped by a lack of resemblance to Amos ’n’ Andy in one crucial respect. The radio show, particularly in its early years, played the sensible, low-key Amos off against the blustering, foolish Andy—the roles eventually assumed in the Pogo comic strip by Pogo himself as the equivalent of Amos, and Albert as a large reptilian version of Andy. Amos ’n’ Andy’s supporting cast was made up of such uncomfortably memorable black characters as the boastful Kingfish, the shyster lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun, and the pokey messenger Lightnin’. As those characters came to dominate Amos ’n’ Andy, Amos himself all but disappeared from the show, and its comedy became increasingly raucous and predictable. In the middle 1940s, Kelly was gradually accumulating a cast of animal oddballs that invited comparisons with Amos ’n’ Andy’s supporting  cast. The crackpot scientist Howland Owl and the pirate turtle

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 208

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Animal Kingdoms | 209

Churchy LaFemme both first appeared in Animal Comics no. 13, February–March 1945, the first issue without Bumbazine. But Pogo, unlike Amos on the radio, assumed an increasingly important role in the “Albert and Pogo” stories. Along with Albert, he had become a more Disney-like animal since the earliest issues of Animal Comics, as his snout turned up, his body acquired a generally softer and more rounded appearance, and his head grew larger, so that his body had more childlike proportions. But now he seemed to scowl a large part of the time. The problem was that Pogo had become too much like the other characters, competing with them instead of serving as a sensible counterweight to the foolishness around him. It was as if Amos, instead of retreating offstage, had assumed a more prominent role on the radio show, one that required that he be much more aggressive in dealing with his feckless friends. In “The Catfish Pirates,” in the 1947 Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shot, Pogo’s superior intelligence— always implied in these stories—is fully in evidence when he easily outwits Howland Owl and Churchy LaFemme, but they are too foolish for his defeating them to be either surprising or endearing. Occasionally, as in a story in the same one-shot, “Mr. Owl and the Atomic Bomb”—later reworked for the Pogo comic strip—there is a hint of a sweeter, more benign Pogo, concerned more with protecting weaker creatures (including his weak-minded friends) than with defeating anyone. It was such a Pogo that would provide the balance Kelly’s stories needed—not in Animal Comics, as it happened, since the necessary balance was never quite achieved there, but in the Pogo Possum comic book that began publication in 1949, and most successfully in the comic strip that began national syndication in the spring of that year. To page through the Dell comic books of the early and mid-1940s is to be reminded that even in those years Kelly drew much better than most of his colleagues. His stories, with their Disney-bred draftsmanship, stand out in the midst of work that is more labored than his, or stodgier looking, or both. Oskar Lebeck and Western Printing’s Los Angeles editors were desperately short of writing and drawing talent during the war years. Always in the Lebeck-edited comic books through the mid-1940s there is the sense that a thin line of competent artists and writers is holding chaos at bay, with the semicompetent and sometimes the incompetent filling in behind them. In such an environment, it was no wonder that Disney veterans like Dan Noonan and Moe Gollub were so welcome when they left the military and came looking for work.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 209

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Mr. Owl and the Atomic Bomb,” in Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum Four Color no. 148 (1947), later reappeared in a new version in the Pogo daily comic strip.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 210

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Animal Kingdoms | 211

Noonan recalled, I was discharged from the service in May of ‘45, on V-E Day as a matter of fact. Kelly was then at Western Printing, and I’d gone up to visit him at his home in Darien [Connecticut]. He suggested that I come to work for Lebeck, so I went in and talked to Oskar. Oskar was one of the nicest people I ever worked for—a very good man. He gave me a shot at doing a story for [Fairy Tale Parade]. I wrote this thing, and he liked it, and he asked me if I wanted to draw it. I told him I would try, and he liked that, and I was on.1

Noonan and Moe Gollub knew each other from Disney, where they had both worked in the Bambi unit, and Gollub also knew Kelly “fairly well.”2 Both took part in the 1941 strike. Gollub was let go on September 12, 1941, soon after the strike ended—the same date on which Kelly’s Disney employment ended, although under different circumstances.3 “I knew the war was going to start, and I didn’t even bother looking for a job,” Gollub said. “I was in the service”—the navy—“as soon as the war started.”4 Noonan entered the coast guard. When Gollub left the navy, he assumed he would be blackballed in the animation industry, as a striker and therefore a potential troublemaker. “I figured that if I couldn’t work in the ‘good’ places, as I thought of it, I didn’t want to work in the industry. That’s the only reason I ever got into comic books.”5 Although he had enlisted in Long Beach, California, Gollub talked the navy into discharging him at another Long Beach—in New York, on Long Island, on October 7, 1945.6 “Noonan met me at the station when I got out, and we stayed together,” Gollub said. “We had Norman Rockwell’s old studio [in New Rochelle, north of New York City]; it was also Frederick Remington’s old place. An old place, and man, it was drafty. After a while, we had to move out of there; it was too cold to work. I moved down to New York City eventually, and it was a fair life for me, in a simple sort of way.” As for paying work, “it was no time at all that Kelly had me up there seeing Oskar Lebeck, and on Kelly’s word, and Noonan’s word, I just went to work. And they were very good to me.”7 The advent of Gollub and Noonan made for a dramatic change in Animal Comics in particular because they could draw real animals better than anyone else who had been drawing for Lebeck. Kelly’s animals seemed real, certainly, but usually not in the same literal sense; Gollub and Noonan worked in much straighter styles, Gollub’s softer and more heavily modeled, Noonan’s tighter and wirier. Suddenly there were in no. 18, the December 1945–January 1946 issue, in addition to Kelly’s “Albert and Pogo” and H. R. McBride’s crabbed “Uncle Wiggily,” features by

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 211

27/09/14 2:42 PM

212 | Chapter 17

Noonan about a “fire dog” and bear cubs, both drawn in a realistic style far more persuasive than the few earlier efforts of the kind, and making little or no use of traditional dialogue balloons. Gollub’s first story for Animal Comics, “Cubby and Tubby,” also about bear cubs and also without dialogue balloons, appeared in the next issue. More such stories by Noonan and Gollub followed, and Noonan’s feature “Rover,” about a homeless spaniel, eventually displaced “Albert and Pogo” from the front cover that Kelly’s feature had seized from “Uncle Wiggily.” “Rover,” which Noonan wrote as well as drew, was a very serious and occasionally grim serial (the second installment included a murder and an implied lynching of the murderers), an animal story of the classic Black Beauty kind, although not told in the first person.8 What Lebeck had found in Gollub and Noonan, as he had earlier in Kelly, were artists who drew so well that they could bring a strong storybook flavor to his comic books. The 1946 Santa Claus Funnies oneshot was drawn entirely by those three men. Although Kelly drew a genuine comic-book story, “A Mouse in the House,” Gollub and Noonan drew, in realistic styles, stories with captions rather than dialogue balloons. Lebeck wrote “Santa and the Angel,” which Gollub illustrated, and it filled twenty-six of the comic book’s forty-eight interior pages. Neither Lebeck nor Gollub was credited in the book itself, but they were credited by name when Santa and the Angel was reprinted in its own comic book just three years later. Such reprinting was itself unusual, but that story was reprinted a second time in a 1954 giant comic book called A Christmas Treasury—several years after Lebeck left Western but with his credit intact on the title page. In 1947, there was a second Lebeck–Gollub collaboration, “A Letter to Santa.” This time both men were credited on the title page (and Lebeck’s name was somehow misspelled “Oscar” on the front cover). The story was published in that year’s issue of Santa Claus Funnies. There was another Kelly comic-book story, too, again at the back of the book, as if to emphasize that Lebeck had transferred his affection to the illustrations that Moe Gollub and Dan Noonan were now giving him. Many of Lebeck’s comic books resembled traditional children’s books in more than just their emphasis on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. If stories like “Santa and the Angel” and “A Letter to Santa” had been published in boards and on better paper than newsprint, they could have fit very comfortably in the children’s section of a bookstore. Lebeck did his best to blur the line: in 1948, Raggedy Ann & Andy published “a monthly book feature,” illustrated text stories, leading in

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 212

27/09/14 2:42 PM

The front cover of Santa Claus Funnies Four Color no. 128 (1946), by Moe Gollub, illustrated the featured story, “Santa and the Angel,” written by Oskar Lebeck and illustrated by Gollub.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 213

27/09/14 2:42 PM

214 | Chapter 17

March with Dan Noonan’s “Framingham,” about a fox. “Framingham” was evidently never published as a real book, but the April installment was a new version of just such a book, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, with Moe Gollub’s illustrations in place of Potter’s. The Potter book was in public domain in the United States, thanks to its publisher’s carelessness about registering the copyright. Raggedy Ann’s May installment, “Michael Finnegan,” illustrated by Gollub, had been published as a book two years earlier by Grosset & Dunlap. That book had been packaged for Grosset by Western’s Artists & Writers Guild subsidiary, with illustrations by a different artist. The comic-book version did not credit the author, Irene Little—probably the same person who a few years later was finishing comic-book pages in ink for Western’s New Funnies.9 A few more adaptations of stories produced by other Western subdivisions followed in 1948 before the “monthly book feature”—by then no longer identified as such—disappeared late in the year. The Western-produced storybooks adapted for Raggedy Ann occupied the lower rungs of the children’s-literature ladder when they were first published (the original Potter Peter Rabbit excepted, of course). But the fundamental problem with Lebeck’s comic books that resembled children’s books was that children—and parents—who were attracted to such material had no reason, apart from price, not to move on to real books instead. Successful comic books were not like children’s books or comic strips or anything else, but were comic books and nothing else. Given that climate, Lebeck’s aspirations had a sort of poignancy. The antic flavor of some of Walt Kelly’s stories in comic books like Santa Claus Funnies was a more realistic response to the circumstances. Moe Gollub in particular was a pure illustrator of a kind—George Kerr and Arthur Jameson were earlier examples—that had always flourished at Western alongside cartoonists like Kelly. “In the early days,” Gollub said, “I tried to write stories. I never liked writing stories; I thought it was time away from the drawing board. Noonan liked to write; he could do it better than I did, and he realized it wasn’t really such a big thing, for children’s books. I enjoyed the drawing.” Lebeck accommodated Gollub by providing him with scripts, and on top of that, he was kind enough to give me a raise over the then prevailing rate. I had no squawks with him, I must say . . . . He was really good to all of us; there wasn’t a guy there who had a squawk with Oskar. He was generous, he never was critical. He took the big view of what you did, he never picked at little things. There were any number of editors in the comic-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 214

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“Chuckwagon Charley’s Tales,” in Animal Comics no. 29, October–November 1947, was written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by Moe Gollub.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 215

27/09/14 2:42 PM

216 | Chapter 17

book business who’d make a big thing out of something that nobody would ever even notice. He had a much more intelligent attitude.10

Richard Hall, who drew for the Walter Lantz comic books from roughly 1946 to 1955—six years in New York, followed by three in Los Angeles—remembered Lebeck as “a great guy.” Another cartoonist usually made the inked drawings over Hall’s pencils, in keeping with what was becoming general industry practice. If Lebeck questioned anything in his pencil drawings, Hall said, “he would say, ‘Look, Dick, next time, don’t do it this way, do it a little different way.’ He never made me do anything over; he didn’t nitpick. But you did it the way he wanted. I used to write stories, and then finally he said, ‘Dick, it’s easier for you to just draw. And you will make more money.’ After about a year of writing and drawing both,” Hall said, he was “very glad” to give up the writing.11 Lebeck encouraged Gaylord DuBois in a different way. As DuBois’s biographer Irvin H. Ziemann has written: “In 1946, while the DuBoises were living in Westport, N.Y., Gaylord was called to Western’s Fifth Avenue office for a conference and told by Oskar Lebeck that his western comics were becoming repetitious. When DuBois asked what to do, Lebeck replied, ‘Go west, young man, go west! Find the best bargain you can in a used travel trailer and we’ll advance you the money.’ ”12 By that time DuBois had written only six to eight issues of Roy Rogers Comics, which were published as one-shots but on a bimonthly schedule, like Little Lulu; the scripts for all but the first issue, in 1944, are his. The stories are much longer and more skillfully told than the comicbook norm, but DuBois’s plots turn repeatedly on the villains’ efforts to steal ranch land that is worth more than the rightful owners realize because of the oil, gold, or radium hidden in the soil—plots of a sort that were common in cowboy movies. It may have been that sort of repetition that Lebeck had in mind. It is difficult to imagine other comic-book editors complaining about such very general repetition, but even more difficult to imagine an editor volunteering the money to cure the problem. In Ziemann’s words, “With a canvas-covered trailer that measured 14½ × 6 feet, Gaylord and Mary DuBois covered 18,000 miles, writing wherever they stopped. From Westport they went to Brownsville, Texas. On the way, Gaylord stopped to visit and ride with ranchers.” Their route after that took them along the Rio Grande to the Big Bend, and from there to New Mexico, into Navajo country—on horseback. They continued into Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and ultimately Alberta. “Gaylord and Mary’s northernmost destination was the Peace

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 216

27/09/14 2:42 PM

Animal Kingdoms | 217

River area, where their daughter Miriam and her husband were building a pioneer ranch. After a few weeks there, they returned to Westport, their heads and notebooks crammed with invaluable material for Gaylord’s Western comics. The money they had earned by writing during the long trip not only repaid the advance for the travel trailer and all their other expenses but also left them with a good financial cushion.” The DuBoises continued to travel in the years ahead, often driving hundreds of miles in a day. “Gaylord dictated comic-book scripts to Mary as he drove. When they stopped for a day or a week, he typed finished copy to airmail back to Western in New York or perhaps to the company’s Los Angeles office. At motels he would work with his typewriter on the bed—so that the sound would not disturb sleepers on the other side of the wall.”13 DuBois’s scripts always felt calmer than the stories for most of his competitors’ comic books, particularly when the former Disney artist Jesse Marsh was the illustrator. Other publishers’ comic books designed for an audience somewhat older than the Disney comic books’ target audience tended to lunge at subject matter that was simply too complex—too emotionally fraught—to fit into a comic-book story’s six to ten pages. Not only were DuBois’s stories in the 1940s and early 1950s longer than the norm, often much longer, but the characters were likely to be dealing with a concrete, well-defined problem. It might be a serious problem, a matter of life and death, but its dimensions were clear and its emotional implications relatively limited. DuBois began writing Tarzan stories with a script for Tarzan no. 2, March–April 1948. Marsh was already on board: he began illustrating Tarzan with the first of the two Tarzan one-shots, published in early 1947, but he had been illustrating Gene Autry for Western since 1945. With plentiful work from Western assured, he left his job as a Disney story sketch artist in January 1947. Marsh worked very fast and illustrated many other comic books for Western in addition to almost every page of Tarzan, even after it became a fifty-two-page monthly. That speed could take its toll at times, as in panels where Tarzan’s anatomy looks not quite right—a common failing in comic books of the time—but such flaws are subsumed in pages whose elements are unusually cohesive. There is rarely if ever any reason to be confused about what is happening, or why it is happening, because Marsh was a visual storyteller whose speed and skill mirrored Gaylord DuBois’s. He and DuBois were a highly compatible team for many years on Tarzan, even though the two men never met.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 217

27/09/14 2:42 PM

“The Men of Greed,” in Tarzan no. 5, September–October 1948, was written by Gaylord DuBois and illustrated by Jesse Marsh. On this page, as on others, Marsh’s powerful sense of design leads the eye through the page and overrides the occasional lapse in his depiction of Tarzan’s anatomy. Trademark TARZAN® and Edgar Rice Burroughs™ Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and used by permission. © 1948 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All rights reserved.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 218

27/09/14 2:42 PM

In “The Men of A-lur,” in Tarzan no. 9, January–February 1949, written by Gaylord DuBois, Jesse Marsh departed from the usual six-panel grid for the sake of more dramatic staging. Trademark TARZAN® and Edgar Rice Burroughs™ Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and used by permission. © 1949 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All rights reserved.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 219

27/09/14 2:43 PM

220 | Chapter 17

Jesse (or, sometimes, Jessie) Marsh was born in Alabama on July 27, 1907. Like Carl Barks, he became a full-time comic-book artist around the time he turned forty, after decades of other kinds of work—most important, his few years with Disney. He was hired by Disney in January 1940, left after the 1941 strike (almost certainly laid off on the same day Walt Kelly and Moe Gollub left the staff), and was rehired in July 1942. After brief military service in 1942–43 he returned to the studio for a final three and a half years in June 1943.14 Early in the life of the Tarzan comic book, Marsh wrote to a fan that he and DuBois were “limited” in how closely they could adhere to the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels on which the comic books were ultimately based because the Dell Tarzan was “constantly under the scrutiny of parent-teacher associations, etc.”15 The Burroughs novels were classic pulp adventure stories, violent and preposterous, if also fast moving and exciting, at least until skepticism’s demands could no longer be resisted. They were the same sort of thing that DuBois had written in his own prose fiction, in books like the Hurricane Kids on the Lost Islands, if much less successfully, especially in commercial terms. Many other publishers’ “jungle” comic books, such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, were like highly colored offshoots of the Burroughs novels. In the Dell Tarzan, though, thanks to Marsh’s matter-offact illustrations of Tarzan’s fundamentally bizarre adventures in an invented Africa—adventures filled with talking apes, lost civilizations, and strange races—it was as if everything excessive had been scraped away. In DuBois’s scripts, the Burroughs books’ virtues remained, but thanks to Marsh they were clothed now in eminently sane drawings.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 220

27/09/14 2:43 PM

18

Walt Kelly Branches Out

Dan Noonan said of working for Western in the last half of the 1940s: “It was really the heyday of the business. You were very well paid for the work, in those days; Western’s page rate was good, and of course it was comparably higher in the forties than it is now [because of intervening inflation]. Most of us would receive Christmas bonuses, too; and there were the Christmas parties up in the Penthouse Club.” Western’s office building, the Toy Center, “was located in a very pleasant part of the city, and the city was very pleasant in those days, too.” It was standard practice for Lebeck to treat his freelancers to drinks and lunch on Friday afternoon. “It was a very nice group of fellows to work with,” Noonan said, “and it had a sort of an easy camaraderie about it. We all worked at home, for the most part, and came in on Friday. Oskar paid everybody by check and took us downstairs for drinks and lunch at a place called the Fifth Avenue Bar; or we went upstairs to a place called the Fifth Avenue Club and had lunch up there.”1 After the cartoonists started “belting away a few martinis,” Moe Gollub said, they would “begin to rip poor old Oskar—I don’t know why, just because it was an easy thing to do.”2 On those Friday afternoons, Noonan said, the cartoonists would often “stay and talk until late in the afternoon; the bull sessions sometimes lasted almost all day. There was a lot of ego deflating; anybody who’d get to taking themselves too seriously was in for trouble, because laying in the woods were people like John Stanley and Walt Kelly. And 221

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 221

27/09/14 2:43 PM

222 | Chapter 18

even they’d get it once in a while, too. I remember the time when Kelly came in with a huge stack of fan letters he’d received. ‘For Christ’s sake, Kelly,’ yelled Tony Rivera [who was, like Kelly, a former Disney artist], ‘why don’t you pay those bills?’ ”3 That was probably in the summer of 1947. Pogo asked for mail in the final panel of the “Albert and Pogo” story in Animal Comics no. 28, August–September 1947: “Anybody wants to send us some lettuhs, us’ll spell ’em out . . . we jes’ rarin’ to hear f’um all our friends—children and grown-ups!” Kelly got fifty or more letters from his readers in July and August, letters addressed to him in care of Dell and forwarded to Oskar Lebeck, who passed them along to Kelly. He saved them in a scrapbook. Some letters were written by children, or dictated by them to their parents, but many of the letters were written by adults who had discovered “Albert and Pogo” by reading the stories to their children and had become Kelly fans as a result. Kelly’s byline had first appeared on one of his “Albert and Pogo” stories in Animal Comics six months earlier, in no. 24, December 1946– January 1947. But the first of the two Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shots had already been published by then, early in 1946, with Kelly identified as the author on the comic book’s front cover as well as in a mock introductory letter on the inside front cover. When the second one-shot was published in the spring of 1947, Kelly was again identified prominently as the comic book’s author. The one-shots inspired a steady trickle of admiring mail before the surge in the summer of 1947. Some letters were surprisingly thoughtful and perceptive, considering comic books’ general low repute in the 1940s. Lawrence Cole of Newport, Minnesota, who read Animal Comics with his five-year-old daughter, wrote on July 30, 1947, that he recognized Kelly’s hand in “Hector the Henpecked Rooster” in Animal Comics no. 16, published two years earlier—“it seems to me you invented Hector and all the hilarious misadventures his wife had with various forms of eggs, did you not?”—and offered cautious praise for other unsigned work by Kelly. Cole told Kelly he “would feel let down if you were to adapt the hard wit I find in almost all other comics, or the brassy terminology which seems to be the stock-in-trade of all but you and Dan Noonan and Gaylord DuBois” (who were credited in Animal Comics for their work on “Rover” and “Chuckwagon Charley’s Tales,” respectively). Cole asked Kelly to share his praise with Noonan and DuBois, and Kelly may have done so with Noonan, at least, at one of the Friday luncheons.4

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 222

27/09/14 2:43 PM

“Albert and Pogo,” by Walt Kelly, in Animal Comics no. 28, August–September 1947, was a story that generated dozens of fan letters to Kelly.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 223

27/09/14 2:43 PM

224 | Chapter 18

The names and likenesses of Western’s cartoonists turned up repeatedly in the comic books, testifying to the prevailing clubby atmosphere through inside jokes that almost no readers could have detected. In the 1946 Oswald the Rabbit one-shot (Four Color no. 102), which was written and drawn by Kelly, when a cannon fires it is not “BANG” or “WHAMMO” but “FRED” that appears as a visual sound effect. No telling whose name that was, but one of the characters, a bulldog pirate captain, remarks of the cannon: “In 1927 she wouldn’t say anything but ‘John Stanley.’ ” In Little Lulu no. 1, January–February 1948, a man named Mr. Gripe, fleeing the noise and disruption of Lulu and her friends, moves to a “dump” on Old Post Road—the street in Crotonon-Hudson where Oskar Lebeck lived. A resentful butler in another of John Stanley’s Little Lulu stories is named “Noonan.” And so on. As frequent as Kelly’s appearances in Animal Comics, Fairy Tale Parade, and Our Gang were, and as richly detailed as much of his work for those titles was, those efforts hardly exhausted his capacity for work in the mid-1940s. He drew and almost certainly wrote the 1945 oneshots based on the Disney feature films The Three Caballeros and Pinocchio. The Three Caballeros one-shot in particular departed widely from the film, although it was in the Pinocchio one-shot that Kelly inserted a reference to “the gleet”—no doubt accepted by his editors as a mere nonsense word, but actually a medical term for chronic inflammation of the urethra. Kelly’s inside joke went undetected through reprintings of his adaptation of Pinocchio in 1954 and 1963. Kelly was extraordinarily prolific, even if sometimes as the illustrator of very ordinary scripts and not as a writer. His drawings for what was unmistakably an outside script, for a non-Disney version of “Three Little Pigs,” turned up in the single 1943 issue of Tiny Tots Comics, and in 1944 and 1945 he illustrated the second and third issues of Mother Goose and Nursery Rhyme Comics—not really so much a comic book as a nursery rhyme compilation for very small children. In 1945, with Fairy Tale Parade near the end of its run, Kelly illustrated a new title for Lebeck called Christmas with Mother Goose, which was followed in the spring of 1946 by Easter with Mother Goose. Kelly was credited by name on the covers of both comic books, the Christmas credit coming a full year before his first credit for “Albert and Pogo” in Animal Comics. Both Mother Goose titles continued throughout the 1940s, always with Kelly credited on the cover, until the last Christmas with Mother Goose appeared in the fall of 1949, but he was present mostly as an artist, and only rarely as a writer.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 224

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly drew all of Easter with Mother Goose, Four Color no. 140 (1947), as well as the other Christmas and Easter Mother Goose one-shots published between 1946 and 1949.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 225

27/09/14 2:43 PM

226 | Chapter 18

Kelly’s drawings for the Mother Goose titles are far more polished than some of his other comic-book work, and giving him a cover credit was perhaps Lebeck’s way of acknowledging that superiority. Kelly was by 1945 a parent himself—he and Helen had the first of their three children, a daughter, Kathleen, in 1942—and that circumstance may have contributed to his interest in such work, and in making a better living from it through work outside the comic books. Mike McClintock, the editor Kelly met when he was first looking for work in New York, left Whitman in October 1944 and began editing children’s books for Julian Messner, another publisher with an extensive juvenile line.5 Kelly illustrated three books for Messner—all aimed at very young children and priced at $1 or $1.25—under a pseudonym, Tony Maclay, that would have hidden from Lebeck and other people at Western that he was working for a Whitman competitor. “Tony Maclay” both wrote and illustrated the first book, Trouble on the Ark, which was published in the fall of 1945 by a newly acquired Messner subsidiary, Veritas Press.6 “Maclay” then illustrated two books by other authors, The Downy Duck and Raffy Uses His Head, which Messner published under its own name in October 1946. Kelly may have found a pseudonym inhibiting: his drawings for The Downy Duck are sweet and bland even when measured against his lesser work for Lebeck’s Mother Goose titles.7 Hiding Kelly’s identity would not have been a consideration where children’s records were concerned, since Western’s first Little Golden Records were not issued until 1948. So, in 1946, Kelly “created” and “designed,” according to the credits on the labels, at least sixteen 78 rpm record sides, released in two sets of four records each, for Story Book Record Company. These were picture records—cardboard records six and a half inches in diameter, whose color illustrations by Kelly on each side were covered with transparent plastic into which the record grooves were pressed. Story Book Record was housed at 200 Fifth Avenue, the address of Western Printing’s New York office, and it undoubtedly had some connection with Western, however informal. The first set of four records credits three narrators, including Kelly, but he is actually the sole narrator on all the records, not just telling familiar stories (Little Red Riding Hood, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and so on) but acting out all the parts. He is variously male or female, animal or insect, gruff or falsetto. He barks and roars and growls and quavers. Andrew “Andy” Barnes, who first met Kelly a couple of years after the records were made, when Barnes was in his teens, remembered

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 226

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Branches Out |

227

that Kelly was always “on,”8 and that is exactly how the records sound. They are filled with broad, emphatic vocal acting that is an aural equivalent of Kelly’s most boisterous comic-book stories. It is as if Albert Alligator were the narrator. A third set of picture records was planned— the titles for the additional stories were listed on the record sleeves in the second set—but evidently never materialized, so a Kelly career as an equivalent of radio’s storyteller “Uncle Don” also never materialized.9 Mike McClintock’s wife, Inez Bertail, edited Complete Nursery Song Book, a hardcover collection published in the fall of 1947 by a respected publisher of children’s books, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard. It was no doubt through McClintock that Kelly was hired to illustrate Bertail’s book, although he had by then demonstrated through the Mother Goose comic books how well suited he was for such work. In her foreword, Bertail thanked Kelly for entering “so wholeheartedly into the planning of the book to make the pictures complement the music.”10 Bertail’s book had actually been announced for publication in November 1945, around the time that Kelly’s Trouble on the Ark was published under the Maclay pseudonym. If its publication had not been delayed, Complete Nursery Song Book would also have been illustrated by a disguised Kelly. The announced illustrator was “Jan MacAnulla,” as in Kelly’s mother’s maiden name (minus one “n”).11 Kelly’s relationship with Western Printing had changed by 1947, though, becoming more formal through new written agreements between artist and publisher, and presumably he no longer felt it necessary to conceal his identity. Even as Kelly produced handsome drawings for nursery rhymes, his drawings for “Albert and Pogo”—conspicuously better than any other drawings in Animal Comics in its first few years—began to look a little rougher in the middle 1940s. His stories always varied a great deal in the quality of their finish, so that, for example, his handful of stories with Famous Studios cartoon characters—Cilly Goose, Blackie the Lamb, Hector the Henpecked Rooster—in 1945 issues of Animal Comics are much simpler in drawing and hastier in execution than “Albert and Pogo,” as if in response to the generally poor quality of the Famous cartoons. Earlier stories with those characters, some of them illustrated by Famous Studios animators, were based on John Stanley scripts produced as hastily as Kelly’s work.12 But now the “Albert and Pogo” stories began to look a little blunt and almost crude when set beside some of the other comic books Kelly was illustrating at the same time. Even within Animal Comics, some of his last stories for that title—three 1947 stories about a mouse named Nibble—had the same fluency and charm

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 227

27/09/14 2:43 PM

228 | Chapter 18

as his work for the Mother Goose comic books, and considerably more of both than “Albert and Pogo.” But what was happening in the “Albert and Pogo” stories was simply more interesting, and held the seeds of work of greater substance, than the “Nibble” stories or anything in the Mother Goose titles. It was as if Kelly were deliberately suppressing any tendency toward cuteness in his “Albert and Pogo” stories so that cuteness of the Mother Goose kind would not be an obstacle to the adult readers that by 1947 he knew he was attracting. Stories like “Nibble” were, for Walt Kelly then, almost too easy. “Albert and Pogo” was not the only one of Kelly’s features that was going through significant changes in the mid- to late 1940s. “Our Gang,” his other longest-running feature, was passing through a remarkable evolution of its own. Starting in 1944, the “Our Gang” stories took a strong turn toward crime melodramas. It was inconceivable that Western would produce such nakedly exploitative comic books as Crime Does Not Pay, but the publishing climate in the mid-1940s undoubtedly pushed the Dell titles a little in that direction. Such material was not entirely unknown in the Our Gang movie shorts—in one of the last shorts, Little Miss Pinkerton (1943), criminals murder a kindly janitor and threaten the Gang members themselves with death—but it was certainly unusual, whereas in the comic books homicidal villains turned up several times a year. The most striking of these villains was The Barrel, swarthy and stocky, thus his name. He was of uncertain ethnicity and spoke in an unclassifiable accent but was given to exclamations (“Sacre!” “Santos!”) that suggested variously he might be French or Hispanic or, perhaps most likely, French-Canadian. Kelly would have encountered that ethnic group as a resident of Connecticut in the 1920s, when hundreds of thousands of French-speaking Canadians crossed the border to work in New England’s textile and shoe factories. The Barrel appeared first in Our Gang Comics no. 14, November–December 1944, returning frequently thereafter. He and many of the other villains showed themselves to be perfectly willing to murder children if the need and the opportunity coincided, as never quite happened. “Our Gang” was a feature that differed in almost every way from “Albert and Pogo,” as if Kelly were going out of his way to test his abilities. The exact authorship of those stories is open to question, although Kelly certainly shaped them even if he did not write the initial scripts. Sometimes the link between the “Our Gang” stories and Kelly’s later newspaper-strip work is unmistakable: Professor Hector Hannibal

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 228

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Branches Out |

229

Horatio Gravy, the flamboyant proprietor of a pocket circus consisting of a lion and a tiger, is an early version of P. T. Bridgeport, the even more flamboyant bear (Professor Gravy is of course human) who was a member of the Pogo cast starting in 1952, and whose name and dialogue balloons, lettered like circus posters, recalled P. T. Barnum, the great nineteenth-century circus man who lived in Kelly’s hometown. In the Professor Gravy stories, Kelly seized every opportunity to indulge in comically overripe language, just as he would when P. T. Bridgeport entered his comic strip. Occasionally words were all too abundant in Kelly’s “Our Gang” stories, as when a character’s long-winded explanation, perhaps covering several panels, was required to wrap up some messy plotting, or when the criminals indulged in exposition by telling one another what they had done or were going to do. And those stories were problematic in other ways. As was true of his Animal Comics stories, Kelly’s drawings for “Our Gang” in the last half of the 1940s never looked as finished as his work for some of the other Lebeck-edited titles. His “Our Gang” pages often looked more spontaneous, compared with the likes of the Mother Goose titles, but as beautiful as his brushwork usually was, it sometimes looked merely hasty, especially toward the end of the decade. Our Gang Comics changed to a monthly schedule as of the July 1946 issue, so that Kelly’s workload on that feature—which now most often filled sixteen pages a month— more than doubled. Since Kelly was still filling about as many pages as before in Animal Comics and other titles, he had every incentive for haste. Kelly’s staging of action sequences in these comic books was frequently awkward. The farces that pop up in the “Our Gang” series amid the much grimmer adventures often seem labored—silly more than funny—because their slapstick has been cut up and parceled out among the panels with greater regard for clarity than for a comic-book equivalent of comedic timing. One could say that Kelly never flinched from the challenges posed by slapstick in his comic-book years, starting with the clowning in his “Pat, Patsy & Pete” stories—or that he kept making the same mistakes (which recurred in some of his Sunday Pogo pages). Kelly was hardly alone in that. A common problem in comic-book stories of all kinds is that when a relatively complex action is broken up into a series of panels, seen from a uniform point of view or close to it, such an action is likely to seem chopped up rather than coherent and complete, even when it is clear enough what is going on. In this way, as in others, comics differ significantly from the movies. Action that might

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 229

27/09/14 2:43 PM

230 | Chapter 18

be encompassed in a movie’s single shot, lasting as long as several minutes, can almost never be accommodated in a single panel, and when divided into several panels it often seems fragmented. Bernard Krigstein, years later in a famous EC story, “Master Race,” used such fragmentation to achieve the effects he wanted. In “Master Race,” published in a “New Direction” comic book called Impact in 1955, a former concentration-camp inmate has recognized the camp’s Nazi commander on a New York subway car. The fragmentation cools the intense events in the panels, so that what could have been merely lurid becomes instead solemn and momentous, almost as if the story were being told in slow motion. But not many stories lent themselves to such handling. For most cartoonists, the task was different: to minimize the complexity of the actions they were drawing. The best ones found creative ways to do that; it is hard to find an awkwardly staged passage in Carl Barks’s stories once he was a few years away from drawing Disney storyboards. In “Letter to Santa,” Barks resisted the temptation to show too much of the climactic battle of the steam shovels, relying instead on a few carefully composed panels and, especially, one astonishing half-page panel depicting the full scale of the battle. In the superhero comic books of later years a similar battle might rage across a dozen repetitive pages or more, but Barks confined his warfare to five panels that fill the equivalent of one page. The appearance of Kelly’s “Our Gang” characters could vary a great deal not just from story to story, but also within a story, particularly as the real-life models for the characters receded in importance. The character variously called Janey or Janet—the name of a member of the movie cast, although by the middle 1940s the comic-book Janet bore scant resemblance to the movie Janet—is alternately a pretty girl or a pug-nosed tomboy in Our Gang Comics no. 19, September–October 1945, depending on the panel. Such variability was a virtue, not a weakness, when Kelly was drawing the Pogo comic strip in the early 1950s, because the variations in a character’s appearance usually spoke so clearly of what was going on in the character’s mind. The “Our Gang” stories, however, skated closer to differences that were merely arbitrary, or even careless. Kelly rarely spoke publicly about his comic-book work, perhaps because his comic strip achieved great popularity in the early 1950s just as comic books of all kinds were coming under increasingly hostile scrutiny. When he did say anything in later years, he was dismissive, as

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 230

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Branches Out |

231

when he told the television interviewer Edward R. Murrow, on New Year’s Day 1954: “I decided I would recreate the whole comic book industry and take this business away from those who were teaching children how to stab their mothers to death. . . . Well, after this effort of mine folded, out of this wreckage I plucked this one spear carrier named Pogo.”13 In April 1954, when he testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating the links between comic books and juvenile delinquency, he spoke almost as if he were Oskar Lebeck: I got into the comic-book business at one time back in 1940 or 1941 and had some experience with its early days as before the 1947 debacle of so many crime magazines and so on. In those days there was even then a taste on the part of children for things which are a little more rugged than what I drew. So that I was faced with the problem of putting into book form, into comic form, comic-book form, things which I desired to make popular, such as an American fairy story or American folklore type of stories. I found after a while that this was not particularly acceptable. . . . I decided I would help clean up the comic-book business at one time, by introducing new features, such as folklore stories and things having to do with little boys and little animals in red and blue pants and that sort of thing. So when my comic book folded, the one I started doing that with [Animal Comics], I realized there was more to it than met the eye. Perhaps this was the wrong medium for my particular efforts.14

He made no mention of his “Our Gang” stories and their murderous villains, or, for that matter, of the parents and children who had written admiring letters about “Albert and Pogo.” In 1965, in a brief, hand-printed autobiography, Kelly dismissed his comic-book career with sarcasm: “Returned to N.Y. and set out to (HA!) improve comic books.”15 He painted with an even broader brush at a National Cartoonists Society banquet in November 1969: “I worked in the comic book industry for quite a while,” he told an audience of fellow cartoonists, “and I made a lot of money by slapping the stuff out fast, and some of that stuff was terrible, awful. . . . We want to be good, but actually we don’t work at it hard enough, and a lot of the slop stuff I was putting out during the ‘40s and early ‘50s reflected that attitude.”16 Some of his “stuff” was indeed the product of haste, but Kelly always worked with exceptional speed even when he was drawing newspaper comics, and even taking into account that he usually had the help of at least one assistant. A 1952 profile in Collier’s said that it took Kelly just an hour to turn out a daily strip, three hours for a Sunday page, and a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 231

27/09/14 2:43 PM

232 | Chapter 18

week for a comic book.17 That would have been, in 1952, a fifty-twopage issue of Pogo Possum, almost every page of which Kelly wrote and drew in pencil himself. The awkwardness of a fairly high percentage of Kelly’s comic-book stories had another source. Unlike many other comic-book artists, Kelly clearly had difficulty settling into formulas that would carry him through patches when he lacked either the inspiration or the time, or both, to do his best work. In reading his stories (and the Pogo comic strip, especially when it was at its peak in the early 1950s), there is thus a much stronger sense of encountering an artist in the throes of creation than is usual in the comics. It is, finally, this artistic integrity that most distinguishes Kelly’s comic-book work, and is most admirable about it, even when it leads him down a blind alley. Moe Gollub described Kelly as “one of the brightest guys you’d ever want to know, really very sharp, but a little insecure, and I never knew quite why. That was my feeling about him. He was nervous and anxious, and he had a lot of little perverse streaks. He used to call Noonan and me periodically and talk about some big projects that he had. We knew he was lying, and we couldn’t figure out what his motivation was.”18 Kelly could be harsh in his evaluations of his colleagues. Writing in 1952 to a Western Printing executive, Kelly said that “the miserable son of a bitching experience in trying to help other artists back in 1947 will never be forgotten by me. I learned then to never listen to carpers or gripers and never to offer to help any co-worker in his business dealings.” He did not identify his targets by name, but his resentment against not just his fellow freelancers but some of Western’s own employees fairly boiled: “The misguided and completely stupid assumption that Kelly wanted Oskar LeBeck’s [sic] job left me with something less than admiration for the ability of frightened and/or ambitious men to analyze the motives of anybody who is trying to be helpful. . . . My affection for Western Printing was never increased by the vote of somebody who refused me a bonus due that year on the grounds that I had not paid obeisance to a pipsqueak god in the New York office.”19 Kelly may have been venting his bile against Oskar Lebeck himself, since Lebeck in his daughter’s recollection believed that Kelly wanted to replace him. Lebeck could have interpreted any such ambition as a betrayal, since, she wrote, “I do remember Dad was really behind Kelly, encouraging him on his ‘Pogo’ strip.”20 The details of that episode are probably irretrievable, but when Kelly wrote as an occasional memoirist in later years—in books, and in fugitive material like his 1952 third-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 232

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Branches Out |

233

person autobiography—he never mentioned Lebeck or his fellow comicbook cartoonists by name. He was in touch occasionally with some of those cartoonists, and he responded sympathetically when one of them, Tom Hickey, was seeking work.21 He wrote fondly, though, not of those former colleagues but of his former colleagues at Disney and the two newspapers where he was on the staff, the Bridgeport Post and the New York Star. Kelly’s harshness could extend to cartoonists outside Western’s circle, as it did in 1948, when he was working at the short-lived Star as its editorial cartoonist, artist and writer of a new comic strip, and, it seems, screener of talent. Harvey Kurtzman, already published in comic books and soon to become the creator and editor of Mad, remembered a deflating encounter: “I went up to the newspaper . . . when Walt Kelly was doing Pogo and he was the one who saw aspiring young cartoonists. He gave me the heave-ho. He wasn’t impressed; as a matter of fact, he gave me the bum’s rush. I just didn’t like him from that moment on.”22 When Kelly wrote to Kurtzman on November 2, 1948, probably just after giving him “the heave-ho,” his rejection letter was not as harsh as Kurtzman’s memory suggests, although Kelly in person may have been more abrasive than Kelly on paper: “We believe that your material is still too specialized for syndication. However, it’s actually ‘funny’ and I hope that sometime you will be able to work out a strip that we can use.”23

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 233

27/09/14 2:43 PM

19

Strong-Handed Friends

Over the course of Walt Kelly’s seven-year run on the “Our Gang” stories, there was an increasingly strong sense of caricature. Many of the characters that slipped in and out of the stories were strikingly lifelike, as if to confirm what Hank Ketcham said about Kelly: “He was a great observer of people and various funny types that you’d see all over the city, and he could put that down in a drawing very nicely.”1 Like just a few other cartoonists, notably Will Eisner (“The Spirit”) and Roy Crane (the Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy comic strips), Kelly at his best could combine comic exaggeration with acute observation, to the benefit of both. Sometimes his caricatures are identifiable as Kelly’s colleagues at Western, or Kelly himself. They are like extensions of the caricatures that Kelly and many other cartoonists drew so abundantly at Disney, and that testify to the friendships and admiration for one another’s work (tinged with jealousy, of course) that flourished at both places. According to Ward Kimball, “Sometimes he’d use his old friends [at Disney] as characters in his stories and send us the printed comics.”2 John Stanley said of Kelly: “Well, most of the artists were mainly concerned with their own stuff and there were some petty jealousies going on here and there but when Kelly walked into the Western office with a stack of his art under his arm, everyone would stop what they were doing to read it. Everyone knew that he was something special. He loved to play jokes and, invariably, he would whip up some special drawing involving his intended target. I must admit that Walt and 234

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 234

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 235

I painted the town many times. He was a very enjoyable guy to be with.”3 The story in Our Gang Comics no. 27, October 1946, set on a showboat, is particularly rich in caricatures, among them Kelly himself, first as a small-town lawman and then as a cook with a Yiddish accent who hurls garbage out a window onto a blue-eyed salesman introduced a few issues earlier. The salesman demands identification as a caricature, but cementing any name to that caricature may no longer be possible. The likeliest candidate is Richard Small, a Western salesman in the 1940s and later an executive at the Poughkeepsie plant. Likewise “Siwash Susie,” a diminutive barroom singer—could she be Lebeck’s secretary, Anne DeStefano? A short, fat, pipe-smoking man with a five o’clock shadow, who was caricatured not just by Kelly but by John Stanley, is Moe Gollub. Gollub was almost six feet tall, but his heartless friends translated his stockiness into shortness. Stanley himself is readily identifiable in that October 1946 story as “Gentleman John,” a top-hatted, temperamental piano player who is much shorter than the real Stanley, and Dan Noonan is present as “Aloysius,” a trumpet player. Other real people are no doubt tucked away in corners of the story, as are inside jokes like the one in no. 22, March–April 1946, when a piano mover—he looks like a real person, too—for some now obscure reason speaks for one panel in French. Caricature and stereotype are just a step or two apart, and for the first few years Kelly’s depiction of the black boy Buckwheat in the “Our Gang” stories was far more stereotypical than caricatured. But then the character changed. The cast of the movie series had turned over gradually as the child stars grew out of their roles, and the comic-book stories followed suit, so that George “Spanky” McFarland disappeared from the comic book after the first two issues. With the end of the movie series the cast of the “Our Gang” comic-book stories began to include fictional gang members—that is, children who were not among the actors in the Our Gang short subjects—starting with the unmistakably Irish Red MacDougal in no. 14, November–December 1944. By no. 31, the February 1947 issue, only Billy “Froggy” Laughlin and Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas of the movie cast remained in the comic book, and both of them were gone in the March issue. As Kelly replaced the real-life Our Gang members with fictional children, those children also grew older gradually, from year to year, in a pattern unusual but not unknown, thanks to comic strips like Gasoline Alley, whose characters famously grew older in “real time.”

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 235

27/09/14 2:43 PM

236 | Chapter 19

Buckwheat’s name left before he did—he began to be called “Bucky” in the November–December 1944 issue—and then his dialect faded, lingering for several issues as speech more informal than that of his friends before disappearing entirely as of no. 24, July 1946. In the meantime, in no. 20, November–December 1945, a white member of a rival gang disguised himself as Bucky, darkening his skin and speaking in minstrel-show dialect. The transition in Kelly’s handling of Bucky probably mirrored a change in his own thinking, since there are suggestions in other comic books from the mid-1940s that he was as casually accepting of stereotypes as most other white Americans. “The Great Egg Hunt,” the Kelly story that fills the Oswald the Rabbit one-shot for the 1946 Easter season, is loaded with broadly stereotypical black cannibals who speak in an incongruous dialect. The story is probably Kelly’s in every respect—he did not sign it, but the copyright registration lists him as the sole author—and its dialogue, like that of the contemporaneous “Albert and Pogo” stories, echoes the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show. The comedy is very broad and feather light, with an off-the-cuff quality like that in some of John Stanley’s stories for New Funnies, and as one result the racial stereotypes carry very little comic weight. It is simply too obvious that nothing serious is going on. That Oswald one-shot was published in March 1946, the same month as the first Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shot, which included a story with a stereotypical black locomotive engineer. There is a little more of the same in “Goozy,” a Kelly filler set in Africa, in Animal Comics no. 23, October–November 1946. The cultural climate that permitted such stereotypes to pass unremarked was beginning to change, although the stereotypes lingered in a few of the Dell comic books. “Beloved Belindy,” the mammy doll in the “Raggedy Ann” stories, was still speaking in what was supposed to be a Negro dialect as late as Raggedy Ann & Andy no. 28, September 1948, and there are even a couple of stereotypical walk-ons in Carl Barks’s 1949 Donald Duck story “Voodoo Hoodoo.” But stereotypes’ most visible survival in the Lebeck-edited comic books—“Li’l Eight Ball” in New Funnies—disappeared after the August 1947 issue, no. 126. Eight Ball’s grossly stereotypical screen original appeared in just three Walter Lantz cartoons, all released in 1939. The character began appearing in The Funnies with the May 1942 issue, just before it became New Funnies, and he spoke in dialect for four and a half years. Then, starting with New Funnies no. 117, November 1946, Eight Ball spoke Standard English, not some white writer’s notion of dialect. His race

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 236

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 237

then became incidental to the stories, but his hopelessly stereotypical name and appearance—in keeping with his name, his head was bald and shiny black—made him a natural target for indignation. The indignation arrived more or less on schedule, and possibly that is why Eight Ball vanished from New Funnies in 1947. The Amsterdam News, a New York African-American newspaper, published a story about Eight Ball on May 10, 1947, under the heading “ ‘Li’l Eight Ball’ Killed by Publisher.” It quotes a letter from Oskar Lebeck to the eightyear-old schoolchildren who had complained about Eight Ball. Lebeck wrote: Dear Boys and Girls: Aren’t you a little unfair to imply that our editors discriminated against the colored people in our Li’l Eight Ball stories? I can assure all of you it was not our intention to make fun of the Negroes as you put it in your letter. If you were right, wouldn’t we also discriminate against all the white children when we caricature boys and girls, such as in our Little Lulu strips or Henry or many others? Should we leave out the Irish cop or the funny Italian organgrinder or the fat German delicatessen man, etc., etc.? However, in order that there should be no doubt in anybody’s mind, I have decided to discontinue the Li’l Eight Ball stories effective with the September issue. We certainly do not want, in these troubled times, to add anything which might cause friction and hamper the efforts to build a happy and peaceful world.4

Eight Ball was by then a pretty easy call. The more interesting case, one that seems to have left no document trail, is what happened in Our Gang Comics (which became Our Gang with Tom and Jerry as of no. 39, October 1947) just as Eight Ball was making his exit. Although Bucky disappeared as of the March 1947 issue along with Froggy, the other vestige of the film gang, Bucky reappeared four months later and made a total of four appearances in the last half of 1947. He was now unmistakably an adolescent, a sexually mature and self-possessed young black male and thus inherently difficult for American popular entertainment to accommodate in the mid-1940s. To cite one conspicuous example of how that difficulty manifested itself, the Disney live-action feature Song of the South, released in 1946, has no black characters with speaking parts except the very old and very young. In the “Our Gang” story in no. 40, November 1947, which centers on a cross-country race and some white boys’ efforts to cheat Bucky out of victory, there is no mistaking that Kelly is presenting adolescent black and white boys—and white girls—as equals.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 237

27/09/14 2:43 PM

In Our Gang Comics no. 40, November 1947, published long after the Our Gang movie shorts had been discontinued, Walt Kelly not only depicted “gang” members older than the movie children but also showed black and white adolescents as equals—a radical departure from cultural norms in 1947. © 1947, Loew’s Inc., 1974, MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 238

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 239

27/09/14 2:43 PM

240 | Chapter 19

Kelly did not draw his black characters with the particularity of his white characters; there is not the same sense that close observation has preceded caricature. The black characters—Bumbazine, Bucky, and incidental characters like the locomotive engineer in the 1946 Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shot—look like one another as Kelly’s white characters do not. But in the “Our Gang” stories the similarity can be accepted as that of members of the same family, which is what the black characters are supposed to be. There is no trace of the old stereotypes. By presenting Bucky as he did, Kelly had ventured into uncharted territory. In 1947, even the U.S. armed forces were still segregated. It seems hardly accidental that after that November story, the only black characters to be seen in the “Our Gang” stories were very young children. Were there complaints from white parents, especially in the South? Did some executive at Dell or Western get cold feet? Just what role did Kelly play in keeping Bucky in the “Our Gang” stories and then removing him? There is probably no longer any way to know. But certainly there is every reason to believe that Kelly’s thinking had changed—that he had acquired a more acute awareness of racial injustice—in the little more than a year that separated his 1946 Oswald the Rabbit one-shot from his 1947 “Our Gang” stories with Bucky. Animal Comics, and with it “Albert and Pogo,” expired with no. 30, December 1947–January 1948, just one month after the stereotype-free Bucky disappeared from Our Gang with Tom and Jerry. Kelly continued to write and draw for Lebeck, but it was around that time, late in 1947, that he made an unsuccessful effort to sell a Pogo comic strip to the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate, which was the home of Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie and a particularly unlikely home for a whimsical comic strip with animal characters. Kelly knew, thanks to the fan letters, that “Albert and Pogo” had a core of discerning admirers, but the syndicate was not interested. Murray Robinson of Collier’s offered Kelly’s account of this humiliating episode: Determined to make a daily strip of his swamp creatures, Kelly hopefully took a collection of Pogo samples to the office of [the] syndicate and showed them to the boss, who happened to be a lady. She looked at Pogo and said, “We’re not buying any of these duck strips.” “But it isn’t a duck strip,” Kelly protested. The lady boss pointed to Pogo in all his pristine possum prettiness. “What, may I ask, do you think that is?” she inquired icily.5

There was no persuading the “lady boss” or anyone else that Pogo was ripe for syndication, and so Kelly retreated to comic books. What

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 240

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 241

are from all appearances two sample Sunday pages—both titled “Albert Alligator and Pogo Possum” and drawn in Kelly’s relatively astringent mid-1940s style—survived in his papers and were published in 1985.6 By mid-June 1948, still working for Lebeck, Kelly was also working for one of the dozen daily newspapers then being published in New York City: the storied left-wing tabloid PM. He was not drawing a comic strip, though, but editorial cartoons. Kelly cartoons mocking the field of Republican presidential candidates appeared in the last two issues of PM, which ended publication on June 22 and was succeeded the next day by a new morning tabloid newspaper, the New York Star. PM had been sold to new owners about two months earlier, and the change of name, along with other changes, was intended to salvage a chronically money-losing newspaper. By 1948 Kelly had close friends and drinking companions among New York journalists, and it was presumably through such connections that he became part of the Star’s makeover—a more important part, actually, than anyone originally had in mind. The Star had announced in its first two issues, with considerable fanfare, that Edmund Duffy, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun, was joining its staff. Kelly was mentioned in an Editor & Publisher piece about the new Star—his name somehow emerging as “Walt Miller”—but only as a “contributing cartoonist.”7 Then Duffy changed his mind, or the Star’s owners changed their minds about him. No new cartoon by Duffy ever appeared in the Star. Instead, Kelly was Duffy’s emergency replacement. Within a day or two of the Star’s birth he became its principal editorial cartoonist. A Kelly editorial cartoon, and sometimes more than one, appeared in almost every issue. John Horn, as cartoon editor of the men’s magazine Argosy from 1946 to 1948, had urged his friend Kelly “to try some gag cartoons” of the sort John Stanley was trying to sell to the New Yorker. “He did,” Horn later wrote, “but he confessed his heart was really not in it. . . . Looking ahead, he thought he would like to be a political cartoonist in five years.”8 Edmund Duffy’s sudden exit accelerated that timetable dramatically. Kelly’s editorial cartoons, drawn in grease pencil on textured paper, soon caught fire with their depictions of Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, as a mechanical man. Other cartoonists, notably Bill Mauldin, creator of the famous wartime cartoon “Willie and Joe,” also drew for the Star, but Kelly quickly and unmistakably became the newspaper’s principal cartoonist. Kelly said more than twenty years later: “I don’t think anybody can really do two good

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 241

27/09/14 2:43 PM

242 | Chapter 19

This Kelly editorial cartoon appeared in the New York Star on October 2, 1948. Kelly’s portrayal of Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for president in 1948, as a “mechanical man” attracted widespread attention. The dog is obviously closely related to Kelly’s comic-book animals.

jobs at the same time. He has to do one. . . . I wouldn’t want to get into the position of doing a special job, three or four times a week even, as an editorial cartoonist, and also try to do a real job on the comic strip. I draw fast but I don’t think fast.”9 But in 1948, as he was about to turn thirty-five, he observed no such restrictions. For one thing, he continued to draw “Our Gang.” It had been the lead feature in every issue of Our Gang Comics through November 1947, but it lost that position to “Tom and Jerry” the next month, and in no. 45, April 1948, it was shunted to the back of the comic book. (By then “Tom and Jerry” had also usurped the front cover.) As of the May 1948 issue “Our Gang” shrank from its usual sixteen pages each issue to eight, or in one case six. Two exceptionally grim serials, one showing

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 242

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 243

A Kelly editorial cartoon for the New York Star on January 13, 1949, targeted a notorious Georgia case in which a black man was killed by members of a white mob, all of whom escaped punishment for their crime.

the cold-blooded murder by drowning of an unconscious man, consumed most of those truncated installments until the series finally ended, five years after the demise of the Our Gang films, with no. 57, the April 1949 issue. And just in time. The fundamental problem was not the darkness of the “Our Gang” stories—even the Pogo comic strip of the early 1950s had some unsettling moments—but that by 1949 Kelly’s comic-book drawings looked very rough. As he had been signaling for some time, his interest now lay elsewhere. (In the October 1948 issue, one of Our Gang’s allies declares as he slugs a homicidal madman, “I’ve been waiting five pages for this opportunity!”—exactly the sort of self-referential joke that Kelly used occasionally in “Albert and Pogo.”) Kelly’s role at the Star had

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 243

27/09/14 2:43 PM

244 | Chapter 19

expanded while he was drawing “Our Gang,” and as the newspaper’s de facto art director—he did not use that title in his correspondence with the cartoonists whose work he was evaluating and usually rejecting—he had assigned himself to draw a daily comic strip, Pogo.10 It first appeared in the Star (and nowhere else) on October 4, 1948. Kelly seems to have had no legal right to publish such a comic strip. The “Albert and Pogo” feature in Animal Comics, like “Albert Takes the Cake” and the other early installments that bore different titles, was work for hire. Kelly did not own the characters. “Albert and Pogo” was copyrighted by Oskar Lebeck and then, through assignment, by Western Printing & Lithographing, in its Whitman Publishing incarnation. A one-page gag, “Monkey Biz,” in the ninth issue of Animal Comics, bore the line “© Walter Kelly,” in a marked departure from Western’s usual practice, but “Albert and Pogo” was always Western’s property. Kelly’s first agreement with Western about “Albert and Pogo” was dated February 1, 1946. It was subsequently amended in 1948 and 1949, after the comic strip’s debut, and then renewed on October 17, 1950. No copies of the original 1946 agreement appear to be part of Kelly’s papers at Ohio State University, perhaps because that agreement was completely superseded by an agreement dated September 20, 1951.11 Lloyd E. Smith, the Western executive who handled the licensing of characters from their copyright owners, summarized the 1946 agreement when he told Kelly in 1951 that “the entire intent of the agreement was to indicate that we own the feature because you made it originally for us for hire and that we were engaging you to continue to produce it for as long as you cared to do so under the terms agreed upon.”12 That agreement was signed shortly before publication of the first Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shot, which had Kelly’s name on the front cover, and it seems likely that the idea was to anticipate any questions about the ownership of the feature—that is, to confirm that “Albert and Pogo” was Western’s property. This was, besides, the unsettled period when Kelly was trying to find other sources of income by working for other publishers under a pseudonym and creating a series of children’s records. Whatever Western knew of that activity could only have made a written agreement seem more desirable. Subsequently, Western surrendered some of its rights in Pogo to Kelly, but not all. In particular, it was through the December 17, 1948, amendment—that is, two and a half months after Pogo began appearing in the Star—that Western released to Kelly “all of the newspaper comic strip syndication rights and all other subsidiary rights, exclusive of printed pub-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 244

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 245

lications.” Kelly thus owned the newspaper strip and had the right, if he wished, to license Pogo to an animated-cartoon producer.13 The timing of that agreement was no doubt dictated by the Star’s plan to form its own syndicate and begin selling its home-grown features like Pogo to other newspapers starting January 3, 1949.14 What had probably been an informal handshake agreement would not suffice when third parties—other newspapers—were to be involved. As it happened, though, the Star’s sudden death on January 28, 1949, made syndication rights a moot point. As to why Western was willing to surrender Pogo to Kelly without asking anything in return, Smith explained in a memorandum to Lucille Ogle of Western’s Artists & Writers Guild subsidiary that “the company’s attitude in the matter is, stated quite simply, that Pogo would never have become the famous character that it is if we had retained complete control over it. That is to say, Walt went out and by his own almost unaided efforts made it famous only because we conceded that it should belong to him.”15 In other words, Western recognized that Pogo was uniquely Kelly’s creation, and not a commercial property that others could exploit, and so, in an enlightened act of generosity, the company returned character to creator. Although the Star comic strip lasted less than four months, until the newspaper died, that was long enough to establish differences from the Animal Comics stories in a number of ways. From the start, Pogo was unequivocally the leading character—Albert did not even come onstage in the first ten published strips—and the possum’s evolution toward a sweeter, kinder, more Amos-like disposition was far advanced. Kelly’s stock company was still rather small when measured against the requirements of an eight-page comic-book story or thirty-six-page comic book, but it was big enough to fill four daily panels, and it was starting to expand. The rhythm of a humorous daily comic strip, one that relied less on a punch line in every day’s last panel than on a continuous flow of incident and the elaboration of personality, proved immediately to be congenial to Kelly. The lingering scratchiness of the Animal Comics stories gave way to fluid brushwork that soon recalled his most polished drawings for Oskar Lebeck. The dialogue in Pogo differed markedly from the dialogue in “Albert and Pogo.” Here is Albert, from the last Animal Comics story: “Owl, yo’ is allus complain ‘bout de fishes yo misses. Why, Ah is missed mo’ big fish dan yo’ is even see.” A year later, in the Star for November 3, 1948, when there is a contested election in the swamp, Albert still sounds like his southern blowhard self, but different: “You li’l rascals is claimin’

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 245

27/09/14 2:43 PM

246 | Chapter 19

stuff right and left—I gone leave judgement [sic] of who win to a impartial judge.” There is still an Amos ’n’ Andy flavor to such dialogue, but its excesses, like “Ah” and “mo’ ” and “de” and “yo,” have been purged. This is no longer dialogue that demands to be read aloud, like an Amos ’n’ Andy radio script, if it is to be fully intelligible.16 Kelly himself, writing in Pogo Parade, a 1953 giant comic book that reprinted eleven of the Animal Comics stories, explained why his characters’ speech had changed when they made the move from comic books to newspapers: “It will be noted, to the dismay of latecomers, that a sort of southern fried hash was once spoken here. Strong handed friends hammered that part of the apparatus into junk. We all grow up, fight it though we will, if we just live long enough.”17 Ward Kimball spoke of how difficult it was to read the dialect: “[I]t was like a foreign language. A lot of people wrote to the editors and complained about this, and as a result he simplified the language.”18 But that obviously did not happen when “Albert and Pogo” was running in Animal Comics, and the dialect had already been simplified when Pogo began appearing in the Star. Some of Kelly’s fans wrote in 1946–47 of difficulty with the dialect, but other correspondents liked it. They resisted his tongue-in-cheek suggestion in the August–September 1947 story, through a letter to “de swamplan’ critturs” from “Wallet Kelly,” that the animals’ comportment could be improved. (In Pogo’s words, “De man advise us to ack mo’ ree-fined so folks would write lettuhs at us.”) Kelly had a number of “strong handed friends” at the Star who remained his friends for years after the paper closed, as evidenced by, among other things, his use of their names in his comic strip and his books. Joseph Barnes, the Star’s editor, was one; John Lardner, who started reviewing Broadway shows for the Star in September 1948, and George Y. Wells, editor of the Star’s editorial page, were others. But, when writing in the third person about Pogo’s entry onto the Star’s comic-strip page, Kelly singled out another Star editor, Richard E. Lauterbach, a former Moscow bureau chief for Time and Life: After much argument pro and con with the then feature editor, Kelly was able to get the POGO strip into shape so that it could be printed daily. Fortunately, the feature editor, Dick Lauterbach, was able to convince Kelly that he should clarify the dialect. “It’s funny after you explain it,” he told Kelly, “but believe it or not we now have 165,000 readers and you’re going to have a hell of a time running around [and explaining the dialect to each reader].” “Oh, 165,000 . . . well, why didn’t you say so before,” asked Kelly and he cleaned up the dialect so that it became dialogue.19

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 246

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 247

Thomas Andrae, coauthor of a book about Kelly, has written that the original artwork for the first Pogo that Kelly drew for the Star has survived and that the dialogue bears evidence of corrective surgery: “[T] he editors had Kelly create pasteovers on the word balloons to simplify the dialogue. For example, in the first panel Pogo says, ‘H’lo ol’ worm. How’d you like a wonderful job?’ Under the pasteover he says, “H’lo ol’ worm. How yo’ likes a won’erful job?’ ” (That strip, although the first to be drawn, was the second to be published, on October 5, 1948. According to Andrae, “The strip was marked with a ‘1’ then had a ‘2’ blue-penciled over it.”)20 Lauterbach may have detected the racial condescension that was an inextricable element in dialect comedy even when that comedy was as benign as Kelly’s. Some of Kelly’s readers were certainly aware of that racial element—and they approved of it. When Kelly asked for mail from his Animal Comics readers in 1947, a few of them took his tonguein-cheek plea for more “ree-fined” behavior from his animals as evidence that he was being pressed by “one or various colored associations” to temper his stories’ language. Robert E. Kiler of Oakland, California, wrote: “The only charm the Negro can lay claim to is when he operates in his natural state, and chatters in his idiotically moronic fashion. Then, and only then, is he really funny.” Kiler urged Kelly that he not “change your very delightful strip one iota.”21 Kelly thus had good reason, apart from making his dialogue easier to read, to put greater distance between his characters’ speech and dialect of the Amos ’n’ Andy kind. Thanks to Lauterbach, any obvious connection was gone from Pogo as it began its Star run. Pogo attracted fan mail that the Star published on its editorial page, but those letters included no complaints about the dialect. In an admiring article in Editor & Publisher just a couple of months after Pogo debuted in the Star, Doris Willens wrote: “Kelly started the strip using the standard (or what is thought by Northerners to be standard) Southern dialect. He was accused of poking fun at Negroes and poor Whites [sic]. So he switched to straight English. But after experimenting, he turned to a dialect that combines the Elizabethan English still found in the South, the French of New Orleans, the Negro and the Indian. Kelly has studied phonetics, dialects, anthropology as well as social problems of the South.”22 That account is, when measured against the comic books and the early Star strips, fanciful at best, but Kelly had every reason not just to sweeten the dialect but also to deflect any questions about its origins.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 247

27/09/14 2:43 PM

248 | Chapter 19

His liberal credentials were well established by late in 1948, thanks to his work as the Star’s editorial cartoonist. A. J. Liebling, writing in the New Yorker a few weeks after the Star’s demise, singled out Kelly for praise: “It seemed to me that a young Star cartoonist named Walt Kelly, who used to be a Walt Disney draftsman, did a wonderful job during the [1948] Presidential campaign. The only bit of caricature I remember from that period is his mechanized Mr. Dewey, with a torso that might have been either a cash register or a slot machine.”23 Kelly’s Dewey cartoons made up only a small part of an output that was, in keeping with the Star’s editorial positions, consistently, insistently left of center (although not as much so as PM had been) and that depicted southern whites as degenerate bigots and blacks as their victims. By the late 1940s, no such politically liberal cartoonist would want to acknowledge publicly that Amos ’n’ Andy was one source of the comedy in his comic strip. It was much better to speak of haphazard research on American dialects. And it worked: no embarrassing questions about the racial origins of Pogo’s dialect seem to have been raised over the next few years. As the syndicated strip became wildly popular, Kelly let his liberal political views show themselves in episodes like a “trial”—Albert was the defendant—that was richly comic but also evoked the anti-Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even so, Kelly still presented himself as less liberal than he actually was. In late October 1952, when he was traveling around the country promoting Pogo’s mock campaign for president, he visited the racially segregated southern states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. He told a Kiwanis Club audience in New Orleans that “I have no social messages” to deliver through the comic strip, whose purpose, he said, “essentially is to amuse.”24 That mask would drop the next year when Simple J. Malarkey came onstage, bringing with him Kelly’s unmistakable engagement with contemporary politics. Happily, given the evanescence of most political commentary, in drawings and otherwise, there was much more to Pogo in the early 1950s. In particular, by taming his strip’s linguistic excesses Kelly not only removed any lingering racial stain but also made it possible to give his characters more interesting things to say. Over time and especially once the comic strip was well under way, Pogo’s speech became increasingly baroque, and increasingly removed not just from speech of the Amos ’n’ Andy kind but from actual speech of any kind. The language of Pogo at its peak, in the early to mid-1950s, bore no closer relation to

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 248

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Strong-Handed Friends | 249

everyday human speech than the language of Shakespeare’s plays. It was speech that could exist only in a comic strip, and as with the language of The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if very differently and of course more modestly, it made a small, confined space seem much larger, and certainly more magical, than the life outside.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 249

27/09/14 2:43 PM

20

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso

Carl Barks drew hundreds of cartoon humans for the Calgary EyeOpener, but he had no occasion to draw human characters, except for his own pleasure, once he joined the Disney staff in 1935. From then on, he was drawing only ducks and other animals. The urge to draw human characters was too powerful to resist, though, and Barks made many such drawings in the late 1940s, “just trying to keep from getting in a rut so that I couldn’t draw anything else but ducks.”1 Then such human characters began turning up in Barks’s comic-book stories. The Australian aborigines who slipped into Donald Duck’s supporting cast as early as 1947, in “Adventure Down Under,” were drawn as human characters, and Barks drew Indians as humans for “Land of the Totem Poles,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 263, published in late 1949. For a year after that, human characters, mostly drawn in a generic illustration style, multiplied in Barks’s longer stories, most conspicuously in “Dangerous Disguise,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 308. That 1950 story is, in another departure, a wicked parody of spy fiction, the sort of thing Alfred Hitchcock might have done if he had found himself drawing Donald Duck instead of directing movies. This time, though, Barks went too far for his editors, who wanted him to draw his supporting casts with doglike noses again. Barks delivered “Dangerous Disguise” to Western’s Beverly Hills office late in June 1950. “I don’t know why the office never complained about the human characters in Ancient Persia and others,” he wrote in 250

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 250

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

251

1969. “Maybe the fact I used a girl for the principal villain in ‘Dangerous Disguise’ caused them to notice the non-duckness of the cast.”2 In any case, he said in 1971, “As soon as I took ‘Dangerous Disguise’ in and Carl Buettner took a look at it, he said, ‘That doesn’t go good, having real humans. It takes the ducks out of their own world.’ ” Human characters still turned up occasionally in later stories, as in a few panels in Uncle Scrooge no. 6, June–August 1954. “At times they would slip in without me being able to control it,” Barks said. “I would draw them and get them off to the post office before I realized I’d drawn a human face.” But Barks complied with his editors’ wishes for the Donald Duck story called “In Old California,” in Four Color no. 328, published early in 1951. Barks conceived its characters as humans, but by the time he delivered the story to Western in November 1950 he had drawn them with dog faces or, in one case, a pig face. “I would have [drawn them as humans], yeah,” Barks said, “but at that time I had received my warning.”3 The story itself—an extended dream in which the ducks spend weeks in Spanish California just before the Gold Rush—is another departure for Barks, sweet tempered and nostalgic in a way that his stories almost never were, but with comic twists. “A Christmas for Shacktown,” his next story for Donald Duck, in Four Color no. 367, published late in 1951 (after three intervening issues drawn by other cartoonists), has some of the same tenderness. Mercifully, though, the poor children of Shacktown simply are not pretty enough to be adorable. Besides expanding his stories’ emotional range, Barks for a few years explored more aggressively than he had in the past his stories’ formal elements. He occasionally tinkered with the dialogue balloons, so that, as a gag in the parodistic “Dangerous Disguise,” one balloon is chopped off by the right-hand border of a page-width panel. But his more significant departures were from the eight-panel grid that was standard for the Dell talking-animal titles. He experimented with the size and shape and arrangement of the panels, and with the composition of each page as a whole. He had grown increasingly assured in his use of oversize panels, especially, since he first used a half-page panel in “The Ghost of the Grotto,” and that assurance is immediately visible in the “Donald Duck” lead stories in the first issues of the giant Disney comic books Christmas Parade (1949) and Vacation Parade (1950). The opening page of each story is taken up by a single striking panel. Panel size received Barks’s close attention in “No Such Varmint,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 318, published early in 1951. When a sea serpent—the genuine item, not a rubber phony like the one piloted by

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 251

27/09/14 2:43 PM

252 | Chapter 20

the villain in “The Terror of the River”—first surfaces in front of the ducks’ tiny boat, Barks conveys its enormous size by drawing it so that it stretches from just above the page’s baseline to almost the full height of the page. It occupies the space that would be filled by three stacked panels and even spills up onto a fourth level, at the top of the page. Over the next few pages, whenever the sea serpent is the center of attention, Barks finds a way—as by dividing the top half of a page into two panels, vertically—to make room for it while simultaneously respecting the grid. Within other stories from around the same time, like the 1950 “Magic Hourglass” and 1951 “Christmas for Shacktown,” some panels have five or six sides and fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle within the “tray” of a page. Almost always there is the unmistakable sense that Barks was seeking new ways to use such formal elements in service to his story. The odd-shaped panels rarely call attention to themselves. It is as if, instead, Barks were borrowing from one panel to give to another so that he could show more—or tell more, when dialogue was the critical element—than in a standard layout. Barks’s mastery was so complete by 1952 that he could start with a conspicuously ridiculous premise, like the one for “The Golden Helmet,” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 408, and still emerge with a marvelous story. The idea is that whoever owns an ancient parchment and a golden Viking helmet will somehow have an unbreakable claim on the entire North American continent. Barks signals clearly from the start of his story that his premise is supposed to be ridiculous. One such signal is the presence of the rat-faced Lawyer Sharkey, who spouts bogus Latin (“Hocus, locus, jocus! Which means, ‘To the landlord belong the doorknobs’ ”) in the service of his reprehensible client, Azure Blue, a descendant of the Viking who discovered America. But the story works itself out perfectly—and satirically, as one character after another succumbs to the lure of absolute rule over the continent—with never a false step. Barks himself, reading the story twenty years later, marveled at its construction in a letter to Donald Ault: “I have just read the ‘Golden Helmet’ story for the first time in many years. The amount of plotting in the script is amazing, and every device and situation seems to develop easily from what has gone before. I can offer no explanation of how I did it other than to say that I wrote and rewrote and re-polished and double checked backward and forward and counted syllables in the dialogue and read the stuff dozens of times for effectiveness and ‘flow.’ ”4 In January 1952, a few weeks after Barks delivered “The Golden Helmet” to Western, he delivered “The Gilded Man,” for Donald Duck

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 252

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

253

Four Color no. 422. Both comic books were published in the summer of 1952. Barks was about to exit the Donald Duck series. After “Trick or Treat” in Donald Duck no. 26 (the first issue on an official bimonthly schedule, independent of the Four Color series), he would be gone from Donald Duck except for rare encores. In “The Gilded Man” Barks showed again just how subtle he could be, in the midst of more boisterous pages. A wealthy, addled stamp collector has given Donald a thousand dollars as a reward for returning an album that Donald actually did not return; Gladstone Gander did, with the dismayed Donald alongside him, and the insufferably lucky cousin has already left with his own reward. But the collector thinks Donald is Gladstone and presses a thousand-dollar bill on him. Outside the house, Donald struggles with his conscience for the better part of a page before deciding to keep the money, in a mild departure from conventional comic-book morality. This page is not quite as impressive as the similar page in “Luck of the North”— Barks relies more on thought balloons than he did in the earlier story—but even so, such sustained attention to the workings of a cartoon character’s mind is simply unimaginable in most other comic books. Two of Barks’s Donald Duck stories that he submitted in 1950— “Big Top Bedlam,” for Four Color no. 300, and “No Such Varmint”— were twenty-eight pages each but still had the modest scale and neat construction of his ten-pagers for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, the stories he was not producing at the time because Western had chosen to have him concentrate on the longer stories. Once Barks returned to the ten-page stories, starting with the January 1951 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics, it was as if they now commanded his attention in the way the longer stories had in the late 1940s: they were the arena in which he scrutinized his characters most closely. Although he was still producing stories of twenty pages or more for Donald Duck, like “The Golden Helmet” and “The Gilded Man,” there were only six such stories altogether in the issues published in 1951 and 1952, and as virtuosic as they were, those stories were a shade less probing than his best ten-pagers from the same two years. One constant in the new ten-page stories was that Donald was unmistakably an adult most of the time—not really mature, and usually with no obvious job, or with a very menial one, but still, especially in relation to the nephews, a responsible person, a parent who took his obligations seriously, and overall an even more complex character than before. Although Uncle Scrooge and Gladstone Gander had appeared in the ten-page stories of the late 1940s, they had flowered in longer stories

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 253

27/09/14 2:43 PM

254 | Chapter 20

like “Letter to Santa” and “Luck of the North.” The richer characterizations of those stories now carried over to the ten-pagers. Scrooge and Gladstone brought fresh comic vigor to Barks’s stories, very much in the way that Dickens’s characters Alfred Jingle and Sam Weller enlivened The Pickwick Papers, when that novel was growing in monthly installments that invite comparison with the comic books published more than a century later. Scrooge, of course, took his name from another Dickens character, but Barks’s direct inspiration was Andy Gump’s Uncle Bim, an Australian billionaire in Sidney Smith’s comic strip The Gumps. Bim’s wealth was a catalyst for Smith’s stories in the early 1930s, just as Scrooge’s wealth would be for Barks twenty years later. The Gumps was domestic drama, though, and Bim a warm and admirable character, unlike Barks’s original version of Scrooge.5 Both Scrooge and Gladstone were more distinct and more insistently comic characters than Donald Duck himself, and they were comic, moreover, in ways that fitted them perfectly for roles in American comic books. Scrooge had become, two years after his debut late in 1947, incredibly rich, and Gladstone had likewise become incredibly lucky. Wealth and luck: children growing up in postwar America could easily recognize in Scrooge and Gladstone—or, still more to the point, in Donald’s responses to Scrooge’s wealth and Gladstone’s luck—preoccupations like those of adults they knew. Both characters were in addition excellent vehicles for Barks’s cheerful skepticism about human nature. Sometimes that skepticism dominates a whole story, as in the January 1951 Walt Disney’s Comics, Barks’s first ten-pager after Western decided to restore him to that series. When Scrooge must take leave of his cash temporarily because he has become allergic to it—oh, the irony!—he reluctantly entrusts to Donald the management of his fortune. Donald immediately begins making loans, with a misplaced sympathy for obviously unworthy borrowers (one is named Miss Lily de la Field) that he has found lacking in Scrooge. Donald also makes those loans with a self-regard symbolized by the halo that appears above his head as he doles out the cash. In debt to Scrooge for four dollars at the opening of the story, Donald has by the end squandered Scrooge’s fortune and thus incurred a debt, as a nephew remarks, of “seven hundred and eighty-eight billion, four hundred and twenty-three million, seventeen dollars and sixteen cents.” More often, though, Barks’s skepticism flavored stories that were straightforwardly comic. The sheer outrageous bulk of Scrooge’s fortune, its existence as coins and bills, lent itself to parable. In Walt Dis-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 254

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

255

ney’s Comics no. 126, March 1951, a huge tornado sucks all of Scrooge’s cash out of the enormous corncrib where he has hidden it and spreads it evenly across the whole country. Everyone is now rich and so quits working, but with no one working, there is nothing for anyone to buy— except at Scrooge’s farm, where the prices are so astronomically high that Scrooge quickly gathers in all the cash he had lost. Scrooge’s fortune lent itself even more readily to farce, and as Barks sensed the possibilities, the scale of both fortune and farce increased rapidly. In Walt Disney’s Comics nos. 134 and 135, November and December 1951, Scrooge is the target of a family gang called the Beagle Boys, dog-faced criminals who dress alike—domino masks, sweatshirts inscribed “Beagle Boys, Inc.”—and go by prison numbers instead of names. In the second of those stories Scrooge’s fortune is for the first time housed in a huge cube identified as a money bin—“ten stories deep and a block square,” as Scrooge says.6 Like the fortune itself, the circumstances of those two stories defy belief. For one thing, in the November story Scrooge and his money are alone in the McDuck Building, with no guards in sight. As always, though, Barks drew the preposterous with a disarming concreteness and told his ridiculous story with a straight face. Barks very quickly peaked in his presentation of Scrooge’s fortune as the pretext for farce. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 138, March 1952, Scrooge is outraged that his status as the world’s richest man has been challenged. To prove his bona fides he provokes a contest with the Maharajah of Howduyustan—the other claimant to the title—to erect the largest statue of Cornelius Coot, Duckburg’s founder. The climax comes in the unveiling of the two largest of a series of rival statues, identical except for their size. Both statues are insanely huge, looming over Duckburg like sculpted mountains, so gargantuan that they terrify cattle many miles away. The statues would have dwarfed the Colossus of Rhodes; they would have stunned the pharaohs. Nothing like them is even remotely possible—but there they are in Barks’s half-page drawing, offered with the solemn authority of photography. (The caption says, “[T]he camera must pull back to an extreme long shot to show the awesome finish of this third round in the battle of the titans.”) The Maharajah himself certifies the reality of what we see, his howl of rage emerging from distant Duckburg in a dialogue balloon with an exceptionally long tail: “May ten thousand demons hound that upstart! He has topped me again!” Barks strains the reader’s credulity but rewards the effort.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 255

27/09/14 2:43 PM

256 | Chapter 20

“Donald Duck” in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 138, March 1952, pitted Uncle Scrooge against a rival who seemed to be just as rich. © 1952 Disney.

Although Scrooge was so imperious that he often overshadowed Donald in their stories together, Gladstone never threatened to swallow up the stories he shared with Donald. (There could have been no serious thought of giving Gladstone a comic book of his own.) The size of Scrooge’s fortune, and the difference in ages, meant that there could not be any true rivalry between him and Donald. With Gladstone, though, rivalry—romantic rivalry included, since Donald and Gladstone were rivals for Daisy Duck’s affections—was the whole point. Gladstone’s smugness and hauteur expressed themselves not just in a dandyish appearance, complete with wavy and un-duck-like hair, but also in ornamental expression. No other comic-book artist besides Barks—except maybe Walt Kelly—would have had one of his characters denounce another as a “quacksalving slanderer,” as Gladstone denounces Donald in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 151, April 1953. What made Gladstone so intimidating to the other ducks in the best stories with the character was not his appearance, his language, or even his good luck, but how irresistibly that luck unfolded, without a trace of comic-book arbitrariness. When, in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 140, May 1952, Gladstone leaves home with a shopping list, the narrative

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 256

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

257

pattern Barks has established in earlier stories points the story powerfully in a single direction: Gladstone will return home with everything on the list, and without spending a dime or lifting a finger. But everything does not merely drop into his basket, it does so with the utmost naturalness. The story insists, gently but firmly and finally irrefutably, that something like this could happen, and it requires only one small step to conclude that since Gladstone is the beneficiary, it must happen. The problem was, Gladstone’s good luck almost invariably translated into bad luck for others, usually Donald—or, if not outright bad luck, the frustration attendant on taking someone else’s good luck too seriously. That is what happens in the May 1952 story, when Donald, the nephews, and Uncle Scrooge break into Gladstone’s house in a search for the secret of his luck and find in his safe only a dime that he once worked to earn, to his everlasting shame. To be sure, Barks mined Donald’s frustration for comedy. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 131, August 1951, Donald responds to two discouraging pages with Gladstone by locking himself into his broom closet, where he will remain, he tells the nephews, for the rest of his life. There was, however, just so much psychological punishment that an artist working in a children’s magazine could inflict on his principal character before it seemed too cruel. As Barks said of Gladstone: “I don’t think anybody likes a character who gets by with so little effort in the world. They like to feel that other people have just as much of a struggle as they themselves have, and Gladstone was a fellow who would just go along, skimming all the cream out of life, without ever sweating for it.”7 And so some of the stories with Gladstone end with an arbitrary twist that works against the plausibility that Barks has in the earlier pages so carefully nurtured. Plausibility is a dominant concern in all the stories from the years when Barks’s artistry was at its peak, roughly 1948 to 1955. In one story after another, events fall into place so surely that there is no doubting them, even if a mere summary might invite skepticism. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 133, October 1951, the nephews are determined to play hooky when school resumes, but they cannot evade teachers and schools and truant officers (and Donald), no matter how hard they try. The story’s plausibility is rooted not just in how neatly its events interlock, but in the settings—this is a story that takes place in a real-looking southern California, with palm trees and mountains and deserts—and in the way the ducks are portrayed: Donald as a conscientious workingclass parent (he drives a delivery truck for Bumblehead’s Bucket Works),

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 257

27/09/14 2:43 PM

258 | Chapter 20

the nephews as smart kids smugly certain that it is a waste of their time to attend school. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are more mature in some Barks stories than in others, but they are almost always highly intelligent, and never more so than in those stories—the first appeared in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 125, February 1951—in which are they members of the Junior Woodchucks, Barks’s parody of the Boy Scouts. The Woodchucks, in Barks’s early stories with them, are a rather prissy organization so absorbed with merit badges and with rank that the lowest rank is major. In the second Woodchuck story, in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 132, September 1951, the focus is not so much on the scouts themselves (although the Exalted Grand Marshal of Duckburg Burrow No. 13 is imposing in a distinctly military manner) as on the ducks as parent and children. The nephews, who one month later were to play hooky, are sober and industrious in the September issue, refusing to take the shortcuts Donald urges upon them as they make a canoe and a bow and arrow to fulfill the Woodchucks’ requirements. Though mature in the Woodchuck stories, the nephews are much more like real children in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 142, July 1952, when Donald determines to keep them out of trouble by spending the summer on a houseboat in Lake Erie. With the most innocent (and believably childlike) of intentions, they generate one disaster after another, until on its last page this expertly machined narrative delivers Donald over Niagara Falls in a barrel. In an interview with Edward Summer, Barks said of the nephews: “I began making them into sort of smart little guys once in a while, and very clumsy little guys at other times, and always, I aimed at surprise in each story so that nobody could pick up a comic book and say, ‘Well, the nephews are going to behave thus and so.’ They wouldn’t know until they read the story just what those little guys were going to be up to in a particular sequence.”8 The ducks, Donald and the nephews, were by this time extraordinarily mutable characters, the nature of their relationship, as Barks depicted it, shifting from month to month, sometimes radically. It was Donald who was the most mutable of all of Barks’s characters, but never to the point that he dwindled into a cipher, like so many other comic-book characters based on animated originals. By 1952, in stories like the one set on the houseboat, and even in the occasional story that might seem, by comparison, just a bit forced, Barks had proved able to place Donald in almost any situation without losing the character. There was now a psychological precision in his portrayal of Donald, in the writing and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 258

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

259

especially in the subtleties of his drawing, that permitted him to go almost anywhere he wanted. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 145, October 1952, the plausibility that Barks had for years brought to his stories was fully present not just in the ordering of the comic events but also in his depiction of Donald’s kaleidoscopic mental state. For years, Barks had made Donald seem real, but by 1952 the character’s reality was richer and more complex than ever before. Donald’s mutability within a story made him seem more real, not less. As the October 1952 story opens, the nephews are playing with a toy gun that they pretend can hypnotize. Donald’s expression changes subtly, echoing but surpassing the transformation in “Luck of the North,” as he overhears the cries of “Bing! You’re hypnotized!” Donald is for the first two pages very much the concerned parent—a foolish and gullible parent, true, but sincerely worried about a hazard to his young charges. But as he is about to pitch the gun into a river, his expression makes yet another transition, in fewer panels this time, from righteous indignation to sly cupidity: might it be, he thinks, that Uncle Scrooge could be hypnotized? Not just hypnotized, but made generous under hypnosis? Donald the stern and righteous parent has become, in the few seconds represented by three comic-book panels, a cunning would-be thief. It is difficult to imagine a comparable effect being achieved so successfully in any other visual medium. An animated cartoon or even an exceptionally well-made live-action comedy might possibly combine the broad and the subtle so smoothly, but there would not be the opportunity to savor Barks’s subtlety that the printed page allows. Scrooge is of course not hypnotized, but he plays along with the gag—and it turns out that Donald’s own belief in the gun’s power is so strong that Scrooge can use it to hypnotize him, transforming Donald into an aggressive bill collector and sending him out to collect a dollar from an intimidating deadbeat named Rockjaw Bumrisk. As the story ends, after several pages of high-octane conflict between Donald and Rockjaw, Donald is back on the bridge, carrying a sack of money that Scrooge has given him as a reward for collecting that buck. Would Scrooge have given Donald a huge reward for collecting so small a debt? The story offers plentiful reasons to believe that he would, starting with Rockjaw’s battering of Scrooge himself—Scrooge tried to collect that dollar before sending Donald after it—and ending with Scrooge’s alarm at what hypnosis has done to his nephew. And then there is Donald’s success at collecting a debt that would otherwise have

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 259

27/09/14 2:43 PM

“Donald Duck” in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 145, October 1952, was perhaps the Carl Barks story that presented the title character at his most complex—but with no sacrifice of comedy. © 1952 Disney.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 260

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

261

to be written off, a much blacker mark on Scrooge’s books than an oversized reward. Once again, Donald is about to pitch the toy gun into the river, this time with the nephews as an audience. He switches effortlessly from adolescent smugness, bragging about his success in hypnotizing Scrooge, to—in the last panel, and once again—parental rectitude, solemnly intoning about the gun’s hazards to “somebody with a gullible mind.” The story is silent as to any lessons the nephews might derive from witnessing this episode. Just as well. Not every story that followed in Walt Disney’s Comics over the next few months invites comparisons with the October 1952 story, but there are echoes even in superficially very different ten-pagers. The story in the next issue, no. 146, November 1952, in which the ducks become poultry farmers to the ruin of a town called Pleasant Valley—it is ultimately renamed Omelet, if you get the picture—is expertly constructed farce, but its comedy is much richer because of how persuasively Barks depicts Donald’s pigheaded behavior. (Although Barks had been a poultry farmer himself, he insisted there was nothing in that story based on his personal experience.) The story in no. 150, March 1953, in which Donald is a postman delivering valentines in a snowstorm, including one from Gladstone to Daisy, benefits at every stage from the exactness of its portrayal of Donald’s wildly fluctuating states of mind. Other ten-page stories from the early 1950s are comparably rich in psychological detail, like the nephews’ skeptical posture in no. 149, the February 1953 issue, as Donald tries to track down “Professor Batty,” a crackpot philosopher who peddles “Flipism”—Flipists make decisions by flipping a coin—and has skinned Donald out of a dollar. Those stories are also rich in detail of other kinds, like the surprisingly realistic settings in which the “Flipism” story takes place. It is winter in Duckburg, and there is snow on the ground, but it is only patches from a snowfall a few days earlier. Everything works toward making what happens on the page seem real. Donald threatened to emerge as a distinct but correspondingly limited personality in the May and June 1953 issues, nos. 152 and 153. In both stories he believes in cutting corners—in the May story by trying to pass off a phony talking dog as the real thing, in June by using teams of powerful worms to haul in fish. Gyro Gearloose, a gawky chicken inventor whom Barks introduced in 1952, is in both cases the source of inventions that Donald misuses. But then, in no. 156, September 1953, after a couple of stories in which Donald is little more than a bystander, Barks

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 261

27/09/14 2:43 PM

262 | Chapter 20

made him an expert, for the first time—an expert rainmaker, a rainmaker so remarkably skillful that he can ream out a section of a cloud so that rain will not fall on a farm wife’s drying clothes while he waters the farmer’s gooseberry patch. Donald’s expertise is funny because it is so extreme, and also because it is so easily undermined by his jealousy of Gladstone and Daisy. His expertise exists only for comic overthrow. Two issues later, in no. 158, November 1953, Donald is again primarily a parent, this time coping with the bees the nephews are raising as a Junior Woodchuck project, and the nephews are again real children, absorbed with their project and oblivious of the havoc it creates. The several dozen ten-page stories published in Walt Disney’s Comics in the early 1950s differ remarkably from one another in the nature of their comedy and in how the ducks are characterized, but one story, in no. 129, June 1951, stands apart from all the others because it is the only story that is unequivocally satirical from start to finish. That satire is, besides, essentially independent of the ducks; Donald is the victim of characters who are themselves Barks’s target. In this story, the pessimism that undergirds all of Barks’s best stories—pessimism that never descends into despair, that is never sour or spiteful, but is instead insistently comic—had perhaps its clearest expression. The nephews are absent for almost the whole of the story, away at camp when Donald, weary of his vegetable garden, replaces it with a swimming pool. Instantly he is besieged by neighbors who claim the pool as their own and pelt Donald with ripe tomatoes when he tries to assert his rights. Donald is surrounded by overbearing mothers and hideous children; he is, really by default, the only sympathetic character. The story is, however, not about him but about the Swiftian portrait of humanity (dog noses notwithstanding) that Barks paints around him. When the nephews return from camp, they find the swimming pool—which they have not seen before and do not recognize as such—filled in and transformed into a sunken vegetable garden, complete with what they see not as a diving board, but as a springboard for Donald’s assaults on marauding insects. Although such full-fledged commitment to satire was rare, throughout the early 1950s as in the late 1940s there were passages within Barks stories that passed beyond farce into something more pointed. In the March 1952 Walt Disney’s Comics, the Maharajah’s contest with Scrooge leaves him penniless; Scrooge, by contrast, has spent only his petty cash. For all that it is broadly comic, the story also has satirical sharpness. Defeated and impoverished, the Maharajah immediately becomes the target of scorn from those who have been fawning over

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 262

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Carl Barks: The Virtuoso |

263

him. It is Duckburg’s mayor who demands that he yield up his fancy clothes—the mayor holds a mortgage on them, it seems—so that the Maharajah is left with nothing to wear but a barrel. There is a similar moment in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 157, October 1953. When Donald tries to prove to Scrooge that he can make more friends because he is young and charming, he immediately encounters surly hostility from the people he greets warmly on the street. “Brr!” Donald says, “People sure are cranky this morning.” Scrooge replies brightly: “They’re always cranky! But watch me!” As he pushes a wheelbarrow full of coins and bills down the sidewalk, the cranky onlookers instantly melt. Scrooge was the Barks character who evolved in what turned out to be the most consequential way. Having exploited the possibilities of farce in three “Donald Duck” stories with Scrooge in Walt Disney’s Comics, and no doubt aware of farce’s limitations—for one thing, Donald and the nephews do not have a great deal to do in any of those stories, all of them centered on Scrooge and his money—Barks left farce behind. Early in 1952, alongside the duel with the Maharajah of Howduyustan in Walt Disney’s Comics, Dell published another comic book, written and drawn entirely by Barks, that was strikingly different in tone. This was the first issue of Uncle Scrooge, Four Color no. 386. Barks’s editors had asked him to write and draw a comic book starring Scrooge that would test the market for a regular series. Barks remembered drawing that comic book in September 1951, in a motel room in Los Angeles, while his second marriage was falling apart. He said of Clara Balken, his second wife: She had a lot of talent for cooking, sewing, and drinking. I taught her to black in my stuff—that is, put in the solid blacks, with the brush—and she did that for me for several years. But as she became more and more of an alcoholic, she got to where she would get on belligerent spells, and try to tear up a bunch of my drawings. In fact, that first Uncle Scrooge . . . I drew that in a motel down in Los Angeles, where I had taken refuge. She would have torn up my drawings, and probably chopped me up with a meat cleaver or something, on one of her big drunks. So I had taken all of my drawings and drawing paper and skipped out, in the dark of night . . . and got into a motel on the corner of Alvarado and Seventh Street, I believe it was.9

This was not the first time that Barks had worked on one of his longer stories under less than ideal conditions. Clara’s rages could well have been fueled by something more than alcoholism. In July and August 1950, she was hospitalized for weeks at La Jolla, California, for cancer surgery that resulted in the loss of a leg below the knee. Barks took his

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 263

27/09/14 2:43 PM

264 | Chapter 20

drawing board, paper, and ink with him to the hospital and worked there on the Donald Duck story “No Such Varmint.” Tom McKimson’s letter directing him to return to work on the ten-page stories for Walt Disney’s Comics was addressed to him in care of Scripps Memorial Hospital. Barks subsequently built a prosthetic leg for Clara.10 It is not clear when Barks left Clara, but he said that they divorced in December 1951, a little more than a year after her surgery. Over that span in 1950–51, Barks did some of his best work—the ten-page stories for all of the 1951 issues of Walt Disney’s Comics and most of the 1952 issues, the thirty-two-page Donald Duck stories “In Old California,” “Christmas for Shacktown,” and “The Golden Helmet,” the first issue of Uncle Scrooge—despite the exceptional stress in his personal life. He made this connection: “It seemed like the more difficulties I had, why, the bigger the inspiration that would come when there was just a moment of calmness. When the dishes would stop flying, the bottles breaking, why, I could sit down and the ideas would just flow in on me. I could forget all of the pains and the scratches and so on, and go right to work.”11 When Barks left Clara, he moved into one of five small apartments in a converted warehouse, with no possessions other than his drawing board, clothing, two blankets, and his issues of National Geographic.12 The divorce brought neither peace nor an interruption in the flood of ideas, as Barks wrote to Donald Ault, recalling his situation as it was in November 1951: I had just given everything I owned to my alcoholic wife in exchange for my freedom. Broke and in debt and facing years of stiff alimony at the age of 50 I chose to keep on working, and I can recall one day when all the bad news had struck me and I should have been heading for a bar, and instead I sat like a zombie with a pad of paper and jotted down gags and plots and situations that seemed to pour onto me from somewhere. . . . I recall that three nearly complete story plots were on my pad before the ideas finally began to dry up.13

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 264

27/09/14 2:43 PM

21

Walt Kelly Escapes

By the time the New York Star folded in January 1949, Walt Kelly was working with an assistant, George Ward, who had joined the Star’s art department the previous August.1 Kelly had surrendered a little to the demands of his workload and delegated the lettering of Pogo’s dialogue to Ward after the comic strip began its Star run in October 1948. “Walt was on such a tight schedule that we always sweated out his showing up with the daily Pogo and also drawing his editorial cartoon,” Ward said, adding that Kelly “never missed a deadline.” After the Star’s demise they continued to work together, on comic-book stories and the syndicated Pogo comic strip. Ward told Bill Crouch Jr. that he spent days at a time in Darien, Connecticut, at the home where Kelly lived with his wife Helen and his three children. “After dinner Walt and I would play with the children and maybe by 8 p.m. we’d sit down at the drawing boards. Walt had two regular drawing boards in his living room in front of a large fireplace. . . . I never saw him work from a script. Walt would just start and write and pencil [drawing with a light blue drawing pencil] as he went along. One night on an eight-page story he looked up and said, ‘Hey, George, I’m on page 6 and I don’t know how this story is going to end.’ ” By then Kelly was delegating to Ward more than just the lettering: “He would ink all the main characters and skip where he felt I could ink. Or he’d draw in half a tree or house and leave the remainder for me 265

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 265

27/09/14 2:43 PM

266 | Chapter 21

Walt Kelly posed for these publicity photos around 1951. Author’s collection.

to complete.” If the work had to be delivered the next day, the morning would begin with a mad dash to catch a train to Manhattan.2 It is an open question whether Kelly gave any serious thought to continuing as an editorial cartoonist, or whether that was even possible in New York in 1949. He found newspaper life congenial, certainly, especially the sociable, drinking side of it. Andy Barnes, the son of the Star’s editor, Joe Barnes, said many years later: “My child’s eye images of Kelly are vivid and positive.” But he also remembered that when Kelly visited the Barneses’ Connecticut country home in the Litchfield Hills, he began drinking immediately upon his arrival and was not outside for more than fifteen minutes at a time before retreating to the house in search of alcoholic refreshment.3 He was in that way indistinguishable from countless other newspaper people.4 It was, however, comic strips that offered the more promising career path. Kelly was actually about to launch a second one for the Star, called Bobo Larkin, with human characters, when the newspaper died. Two and a half weeks after the Star’s death, the newspaper’s owners executed a copyright assignment to him of all rights in both Pogo and Bobo Larkin.5

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 266

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Escapes |

267

Although Bobo Larkin never escaped from limbo, Pogo’s fate was different: the comic strip was very quickly picked up for national syndication. It is not clear who initiated contact, Kelly or the syndicate, but George Ward remembered delivering “the first 42 daily Pogo strips [from the Star, presumably] to Bob Hall at the Post-Hall Syndicate in the New York Post Building” in late February 1949. He delivered “a pile of letters—fan mail” from Star readers to Hall in March.6 By then, Kelly and Post-Hall had already signed a contract, dated March 2, 1949.7 Post-Hall announced Pogo as one of its features in mid-March 1949, barely six weeks after the Star’s death.8 The first Pogo strip under the new arrangement appeared in the New York Post on Monday, May 16, 1949. By 1949 the nature of Western Printing’s comic books, the home of Kelly’s characters since 1942, had changed considerably. There had been a steady retreat from proprietary material of the “Albert and Pogo” kind—features that Western owned within anthology titles like Animal Comics and Popular Comics—and toward more licensed subjects like the Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, and Lantz cartoon characters and movie cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Such licensed material was more expensive because royalties had to be paid, but potential sales were greater because the characters came with public awareness built in. Other publishers also published comic books with licensed characters—among them Fawcett, with the cowboy star Hopalong Cassidy, and DC, with the actors Alan Ladd and Bob Hope—but Western signed up more of the most popular characters. Always, successfully translating such material into the comic-book format required ingenuity. Although the lead character in the Roy Rogers movies, like the lead character in Roy Rogers Comics, was called “Roy Rogers,” Rogers’s western musicals were not otherwise much like the comic books. For one thing, there could be no trace in the comic books of supporting regulars like Gabby Hayes and Dale Evans, both of whom had their own licensing deals and their own comic books. Rogers and Gene Autry in their movies could assume different roles even under their own names, but their comic-book equivalents were almost always depicted as wandering cowboys, or maybe ranchers out running errands. Those two stars, like the less stellar cowboys (Bill Elliott, Johnny Mack Brown) who were also published by Dell, were latter-day equivalents of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a real man whose fictional adventures filled hundreds of dime novels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The difference was that the dime-novel Cody’s adventures

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 267

27/09/14 2:43 PM

268 | Chapter 21

had a slender basis in fact—his exploits as an army scout on the frontier—whereas the Dell comic-book cowboys were simply actors. The stories in the Dell western comic books were typically longer and more complex than the short, abruptly told stories in other publishers’ comic books, stories that were essentially interchangeable with the ones in the same publishers’ crime comic books. The difference between Dell and its competitors was amplified starting in 1948 when Western began adapting Zane Grey’s novels, with Gaylord DuBois as the adapter. Those adaptations filled whole comic books—first of thirty-six pages, covers included, and then, for a couple of years, fifty-two—with complete stories whose length naturally made them attractive to older readers. As western comics in particular grew in popularity, there was a diminution in the number and frequency of comic books intended for a very young audience—that is, comic books of the kind that had been Oskar Lebeck’s specialty and that Walt Kelly had often illustrated. After Animal Comics ended in 1947, a few new ones did appear. In 1948 and 1949, Kelly drew the first two one-shot issues of The Brownies, a property that Western had bought from the estate of the Brownies’ originator, Palmer Cox, and he also drew stories about those tiny characters for Raggedy Ann & Andy.9 But Raggedy Ann, still a monthly in 1949, was cut back to the occasional one-shot in the summer of that year. Kelly’s Mother Goose annuals were gone after the 1949 Christmas issue. The nature of Kelly’s work for Western was changing as his old venues disappeared, but he was still producing a great deal of comic-book material. Even after Pogo began syndication, he was writing and drawing every issue of the Adventures of Peter Wheat, an eighteen-page monthly giveaway comic for a bakery, made up of fairy tales about the Tom Thumb–like titular character and the other tiny creatures—birds, animals, and insects— living with him in a wheat field.10 He continued to draw front covers for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories into 1950. Also, around the time Pogo went into national syndication, he wrote and drew the first fifty-two-page issue of a new quarterly comic book called Pogo Possum. That first issue, dated October–December 1949, was copyrighted by Western Printing & Lithographing, even though Kelly had by then become the Pogo comic strip’s owner. The copyright had no legal significance—Kelly’s contract with Western was controlling, and it established Kelly’s ownership of everything about Pogo—but Western apparently was determined to maintain some connection with Kelly and his popular comic strip. It was, after all, a property that Western had once owned and that gave every sign of becoming increasingly popular and

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 268

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Escapes |

269

prestigious, even though Kelly resisted commercializing his characters. But despite the apparent goodwill on both sides, the Kelly–Western relationship yielded up difficulties frequently over the next few years. Kelly divorced Helen on Halloween 1950, in Mexico, and married Stephanie Wagonny soon afterward.11 She was the daughter of immigrants from central Europe, unskilled laborers whose origin is listed variously in census records as Austrian or Ukrainian, no doubt in a reflection of shifting European borders.12 It was a familiar situation: Stephanie had been Kelly’s secretary—her sister Julia succeeded her in that job—and she was about twenty years younger than Helen, who by the time of the divorce was well into middle age.13 In the early 1950s Kelly was supporting two households, both with young children; he and Stephanie had a son in 1951. (Stephanie eventually gave birth to five children in all, although two died in infancy.) The Pogo comic strip was increasingly popular but had yet to produce an income that would separate Kelly decisively from his family’s blue-collar life in Bridgeport. Everyone involved—Kelly, Western Printing, Dell Publishing—thus had every incentive to make the Pogo Possum comic book a success. But determining how to do that was not easy. The need for a new agreement between Western and Kelly arose in 1951 when Kelly wanted to publish a paperback collection of his newspaper strips through Simon and Schuster, since in Western’s view it had retained the right to publish such Pogo books under its contract with him. In a September 20, 1951, agreement, Western released “any claim that we may have had or may have under said agreement or otherwise, and we acknowledge that the imaginary character know as POGO or POGO POSSUM, and associated imaginary characters, including ALBERT THE ALLIGATOR and others . . . are your property.” Western retained only the exclusive right to publish Pogo comic books, and a more limited right to publish Pogo children’s books of the kind that made up its huge Whitman line. Kelly was to be paid Western’s standard royalty on his comic books of one-fourth cent for every copy printed, as well as “regular rates” for writing and drawing the comic books. He could terminate the agreement if his royalties fell below five thousand dollars a year.14 Those “regular rates,” as reflected in statements sent to Kelly by Western in September 1951 and March 1952, were $32.75 for writing and drawing each comic-book page (plus $2.25 if he did his own lettering), $50 for a front cover, and $25 each for other covers—rates comparable to those paid then to other cartoonists who did not own the properties they worked on.15

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 269

27/09/14 2:43 PM

270 | Chapter 21

While the available record of Kelly’s dealings with Western in the 1940s is skimpy, there is fuller documentation of what was going on in the early 1950s. Kelly’s position—as the owner of his comic book’s copyright as well as its cartoonist—was not unique but it was certainly rare, and his unusual status undoubtedly contributed to the irritable tone of many of his exchanges with Western’s editors and executives. He had to be concerned with much more than writing and drawing funny stories. The U.S. Post Office Department was one source of irritation because Western had to meet the post office’s often peculiar requirements for mailing at second-class, or periodical, rates. In 1951, postal officials wanted Kelly’s name removed from the front cover of the comic book. In 1952, when Pogo Possum skipped a quarterly issue, the post office noticed, and, as Richard Small of Western told Kelly, it warned that “any other departure from its authorized frequency would call for a cancellation of the second class entry permit. As you know, this means several thousands [sic] dollars difference to Dell and would further upset their entire argument about the Dell magazine having a continuing periodicity over many years.”16 Anne DeStefano, who was Oskar Lebeck’s secretary throughout the 1940s but by the early 1950s was an editor in Western’s New York office, fretted to Kelly about the need to “have at least 8 pages of art without Albert or Pogo” to meet another postal requirement.17 His immediate reply was acid: The majority of sales on the book is of the newsstand variety, and for me it is a great handicap to try to meet a non-important second-class entry requirement. Pogo is the lead character with whom the Post Office Department is concerned. They should not be concerned with Albert. Pogo does not appear in a number of pages here. In fact, he does not appear at all in at least one story, and I feel that I have met all the requirements which should be placed upon me in delivering this material. Furthermore, if there is to be any discussion on this, I think that Dell and Western should place in my hands a review or a record of POGO comic book sales so that I can more accurately judge whether such stupid requirements are in any way necessary.18

Kelly groused about Dell, and especially its decision to raise the price and page count of Pogo Possum, in a letter to Lloyd E. Smith on May 13, 1952. After four fifty-two-page issues in 1949 and 1950, Pogo Possum, like other Dell comic books, had been cut back to thirty-six pages in 1951. But then, starting with no. 9, April–June 1952, the page count

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 270

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Escapes |

271

went back up to fifty-two, with an increase in price to fifteen cents. By the time Kelly wrote to Smith, one fifteen-cent issue had been published, with another soon to follow. The nagging problem, as Kelly knew, was how to distinguish Pogo Possum from all the other comic books on the newsstands and get it into the hands of its natural audience—the older and more educated readers who followed the daily comic strip and had no interest in comic books in general. Dell’s solution was to raise the price to fifteen cents for a fifty-two-page comic book, at a time when the company’s other titles were priced at ten cents for thirty-six pages (covers included in both cases). Kelly believed, correctly, that such a solution was no solution at all. I think Dell should either publish or get off the pot. The comic book if correctly distributed will sell according to all accounts we get from colleges and other spots where the book cannot be found. So far as I am concerned I am sorry that I did not put on the record my objections voiced to you and Richard Small on separate occasions before the 15 cent mag came out. If you’ll recall I said that even a novice at distribution could plainly foretell what would happen. The extra nickel did not discourage the buyers but it surer than hell made every other dealer hide the bastard-priced comic so that he wouldn’t get stuck for an extra nickel every time a kid bought a clutch of comics. I saw not one copy of the book displayed in Grand Central for one place when it retailed for 15 cents. It should not come as any surprise to anyone that Dell’s activities only irk me and I am not happy with the relationship at all. Why they think they have any sort of claim on POGO or an expectation of reward is beyond every concept of fairness that I picked up as an Eagle Scout. How in hell can they even hope to retail a 25¢ or 50¢ or for that matter a dollar book and give me as good a break as [Simon and Schuster]? This POGO thing has gone because I have worked my can off, night and day. The fruits of the effort are not going to [be] shared with any johnny come lately with the editorial judgment of a codfish.19

Dell tried at one point to stake a claim of some kind on the paperback books—or so Kelly believed—and it may have been for that reason that he agreed to the 1953 reprinting of Animal Comics stories in the giant comic book Pogo Parade. As of no. 14, October–December 1953, Dell dropped Pogo Possum’s price to ten cents and the page count to thirty-six. Moreover, about one-third of those pages were now taken up by a reprinted story from Animal Comics. The change was not working, as Small, the liaison with Dell at Western’s Poughkeepsie plant, told Kelly early in 1954:

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 271

27/09/14 2:43 PM

272 | Chapter 21

Dell had hoped that the change in price from 15¢ to 10¢ on POGO would make a big increase in the sale of the comic magazine. However, the reverse has proved to be so. Apparently although dealers did not like the unusual 15¢ price, it at least made them keep it separate and adults found their way to it more readily than they now do when it may be buried with all the other 10¢ comics. In addition to this, Dell has received quite a few adverse comments about the reprint material. Dell advises that they are currently losing $4,000 per issue and while we are all pogophiles, it is hard for us to insist that Dell continue to shell out that kind of money in order to keep the magazine as part of their line. So, it would appear we have two choices: either to go back to a 48 page all original material 15 [cent] item or reluctantly to give up.20

Kelly drafted but apparently did not send a brusque reply, reminding Small that he had told him the previous May that “96 pages [a year] is the utmost I can deliver and I have trouble doing that. Also, despite royalties and page rates I lose money too on the comic books. Similar material in the other forms pays twice and four times as much.”21 Another, undated draft expressed his frustration in greater detail: It doesn’t seem to me that Dell’s comic line is the place for adult material in the first place. This conclusion I’ve reluctantly reached after 12 years of having Dell Pub. tell me so through Oskar [Lebeck] and others. Therefore I blink a little when told that the way Dell can best deliver POGO to his readers is to have the newsdealer hide a 15¢ item so the adults will ask for it. This method of distribution is novel but should be tried with somebody else. The sole remaining value of a POGO comic book, to me, is publicity and promotional. If it’s not displayed on the stand, I work for nothing.22

Kelly finally sent a more conciliatory reply on February 3, 1954: “As you know, producing even [as] much POGO material as Dell currently publishes is a severe tax on my powers of ingenuity. We discussed the problem perhaps a year ago. Since then the situation has worsened. I have no desire to knock myself out. Comic book work pays only a third as much as the other books.”23 Kelly also complained that the Pogo Possum comic book robbed him of ideas that he could have used more profitably (in every sense) in the newspaper strip. As time went on the comic book began to look more and more slapdash, written and drawn in haste. From the beginning, many of the Pogo Possum stories had a free-association quality more pronounced than anything similar in the comic strip. Kelly surely started such stories in John Stanley fashion, without knowing where he was going to wind up, but, like the good Disney man he was, he never completely abandoned comic plausibility, even when he had enlisted his characters in escalating foolishness.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 272

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Escapes |

273

What made the comic strip invariably better was not just its superior execution—the sense that Kelly was taking more time and care with his dialogue and drawings—but the way that the added time and care translated into stronger characters who were doing funnier things. Albert in particular was vulnerable to misuse, as in the story called “Fire Bugs,” in Pogo Possum no. 2, April–June 1950, when he lunges out of character by bursting into a recitation of poetry. A couple of years later, in “Mother’s Gooseberry Rinds,” in Pogo Possum no. 10, July–September 1952, Kelly had Albert recite Lewis Carroll, again at the cost of diluting his comic personality.24 In the comic books Kelly’s characters were also susceptible to speaking in very ordinary language that testified through its ordinariness to just how much trouble Kelly took with the rich, strange dialect his characters spoke in the comic strip. Kelly may have been deliberately suppressing dialect in the comic books for the sake of young readers, but if so, there seems to be no record of that—and he had not shrunk from using an even thicker dialect in Animal Comics. The lettering of Kelly’s Pogo Possum stories was farmed out, as so often had been the case with his earlier stories. Anne DeStefano wrote to Kelly in 1952 to tell him that Raymond Burley, a veteran illustrator for pulp magazines and early comic books, had lettered forty-six pages for no. 11, January–March 1953.25 As before, the results, compared with lettering done by Kelly himself or under his direct supervision, were limp (the lettering is mostly italic) and all too uniform. George Ward said that Kelly was “very pleased” with Burley’s work, even though it seems clear that the expressive possibilities had been suppressed. In the comic strip, by contrast, those possibilities were sometimes realized flamboyantly, in dialogue that resembled a circus poster or black-letter printing, but even more often in subtle variations of size and weight that made Kelly’s increasingly intricate language all but audible. Kelly put even his panel borders to expressive use. The “Albert and Pogo” panels were stacked four deep in almost every issue for two years, in 1944–46, when paper shortages were driving down comic books’ page counts. Then, in Animal Comics no. 20, April–May 1946, they were again stacked three deep, as in Kelly’s earliest stories with those characters. Kelly’s panel borders had been ruled until that time, like most comic-book borders, but starting with no. 20 he drew them freehand, with an attractive but not overbearing irregularity (and he often dispensed with borders altogether). Ruled panel borders

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 273

27/09/14 2:43 PM

274 | Chapter 21

“Feelin’ Mighty Hale, and Farewell,” by Walt Kelly, in Pogo Possum no. 3, August– October 1950, was a successful reworking of an earlier Animal Comics story.

disappeared from Kelly’s “Our Gang” stories around the same time, as of the July 1946 issue, and freehand borders were from then on a distinguishing mark of Kelly’s comic-book and comic-strip work. The shortcomings of Burley’s lettering aside, the best stories in Pogo Possum were still far advanced over their Animal Comics predecessors, a point that Kelly himself underlined in Pogo Possum no. 3, August– October 1950, when he reworked a story from the 1946 Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum one-shot. The new version, “Feelin’ Mighty Hale, and Farewell,” is one of the many stories in which Albert has accidentally ingested another animal or thinks he has, and also one of a number in which Albert is impenetrably certain of his own attractiveness—in this case, when he is disguised as a female (a cigar-smoking female, at that). Hailed as “Uncle Albert” by passing rabbits, Albert concludes, reasonably enough by his standards: “Natural, they mus’ of

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 274

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Escapes |

275

mistooken me fo’ a li’l gal rabbit name of ‘Uncle Albert.’ ” Where the old story is tight and awkward in drawing and staging, the new version is open and relaxed, and the characters, Albert especially, have been drawn with a confidence that says Kelly has come to think of them as good friends. When he was not equipped with a story that saved him the work of thinking up a new one, Kelly could be tempted into cutting corners: simplifying his characters’ dialogue or descending into an aimless running in place that merely filled up pages with static panels. The thicker the comic book, the greater the risk, and the stories in the fifty-two-page, fifteencent comic books of 1952–53—there were five of them—are often very thin indeed. It was at this low point that George Ward, after several years as a freelancer, began working for Kelly again, inking his pencil drawings for the last few issues of Pogo Possum.26 Ward remembered: “The early Pogo comic books were something Walt had a lot of fun doing and we turned them out very fast. Walt would write everything and do the pencils and I would letter some of them and do most of the inking.”27 Unfortunately, not much of that fun wound up on the printed page. Kelly found one happy solution to his comic-book predicament when he turned to fairy tales of the kind he once drew for Oskar Lebeck. Starting with “A New Jag on the Old Beanstalk” in Pogo Possum no. 7, October–December 1951, he began putting his characters into burlesques of familiar stories. Several more such burlesques followed—the most successful was “Cinderella and the Three Bears,” in no. 8, January–March 1952—but there was a complication. In June 1953, when Simon and Schuster published its third Pogo paperback, Uncle Pogo So-So Stories, it was made up not of reprints of the newspaper strip but of new material that included a Mickey Spillane parody and comic retellings of classic tales. Fairy-tale burlesques fit perfectly not just in the comic book but also in the new paperback. Kelly’s 1951 agreement with Western was modified in 1953 to make it unmistakably clear that juvenile books, and not a book like Uncle Pogo So-So Stories, were its subject matter. Kelly had good reason to wall off books like Uncle Pogo So-So Stories from his work for Western and Dell: his Simon and Schuster royalties were higher than his comicbook royalties or any other royalties Western might pay him. Three months after So-So Stories was published, Simon and Schuster announced that the book had sold more than 160,000 copies, at a dollar a copy. It was approaching the sales of the first two daily-strip compilations, Pogo and I Go Pogo, which had sold more than a quarter

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 275

27/09/14 2:43 PM

“Cinderella and the Three Bears,” by Walt Kelly, in Pogo Possum no. 8, January–March 1952, was a burlesque of classic fairy tales like those that Kelly once drew more seriously for Fairy Tale Parade.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 276

27/09/14 2:43 PM

Walt Kelly Escapes |

277

million copies each. Kelly was receiving royalties of five cents a copy on the first 25,000 copies of each book sold and seven and a half cents on most sales after that. Surviving royalty statements in Kelly’s papers show that when he next produced a book of original stories—The Pogo Stepmother Goose, published in the summer of 1954—Simon and Schuster sold more than 100,000 copies in the first few weeks, generating a payment to Kelly of more than nine thousand dollars.28 Western was prepared to continue with the comic book,29 but from Kelly’s point of view, continuing with it could have made no sense. As he told Richard Small, stories he drew for a new paperback book were likely to earn him several times the royalties he would earn by drawing an equivalent number of pages for comic books. If he had needed comic books as a source of income a few years earlier, before the Pogo paperbacks’ great success, such was no longer the case. Pogo Possum expired with no. 16, April–June 1954. With it ended Walt Kelly’s association with the Dell comic books. He was furiously active throughout the rest of the decade, promoting his comic strip and traveling widely, in the United States and abroad, but he produced nothing more in comic-book form, other than paperback books that were really comic books in disguise. He scaled back in the 1960s, dogged increasingly by ill health—his own and his wife’s. Stephanie died in 1970, and Kelly himself succumbed to the complications of diabetes on October 18, 1973, at age sixty. As early as that death might seem, Kelly had lived longer than many of the close friends, New York Star editors and writers in particular, with whom he had raised a glass at his favorite bars: Tim Costello’s on Third Avenue, and Bleeck’s (more formally known as the Artist and Writers Restaurant) on West Fortieth Street. Joe Barnes, John Lardner, George Y. Wells, Richard Lauterbach, the New Yorker writer John McNulty, the Newsweek editor Niles von Wettberg—all died before Kelly, some at a much younger age. Kelly’s closest comic-book colleagues lived much longer, with one conspicuous exception: Oskar Lebeck.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 277

27/09/14 2:44 PM

22

Oskar Lebeck in Exile

By the time Walt Kelly’s relationship with Western ended, Oskar Lebeck had been gone from Western for several years. He did not leave under the happiest circumstances. Moe Gollub thought that Lebeck shared some of his own pugnacity: “He insisted on being his own man. And he was right, as far as I’m concerned, most of the time. He had a crazy kind of integrity, and I liked him for it. I was so spoiled by him that any subsequent employer I could have had would never have seemed as good. I can’t regret having worked for Lebeck, even though I never made a lot of money. But they were getting incensed at him up in Poughkeepsie, because he wouldn’t follow directives; they couldn’t move him around. He was not a sycophant, that was all.”1 Lebeck was still hiring cartoonists in 1950, when he hired Tom Gill to illustrate the Lone Ranger comic book (until then one of the few remaining Dell titles devoted to reprints of a newspaper strip), but his major project that year was the Surprise Books. Those dozen hybrids, published in the fall of 1950, were the clearest expression yet of his desire to bridge the gap between traditional children’s books and comic books. Eight of the Surprise Book stories were traditional (Little Black Sambo, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland), and four were modern. Lebeck adapted or wrote all of them, including a new version of his own 1939 book Clementina the Flying Pig. The artists, like Sheilah 278

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 278

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Oskar Lebeck in Exile |

279

Oskar Lebeck posed with members of his comic-book staff around 1950, not long before Lebeck’s departure from Western Printing. Standing behind Lebeck are, from the left, Mel Crawford, Dan Noonan, John Stanley, and Dan Gormley. The photo was probably taken for an article for Western’s house organ, the Westerner, that was planned but never published.

Beckett and Tony Rivera, were veterans of either Whitman’s children books or book-like features in Lebeck’s comic books. Dan Noonan, who illustrated two Surprise Books, The Emperor’s New Clothes and Teddy B.B., described them with general accuracy: The Surprise Book was exactly half the size of a comic book [half as tall, that is, with sixty-four pages, not counting covers, the equivalent of a thirty-twopage comic book]; it wasn’t a true comic, but it did tell the same kind of story, only with fewer pictures and no dialogue balloons—just a running text. [Actually, most of the Surprise Books had dialogue balloons, but they were stylized, with upper- and lower-case lettering, and only generally resembled typical comic-book balloons.] He felt that by making it this size, and by taking it out of the comic book display racks, it would give kids the

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 279

27/09/14 2:44 PM

280 | Chapter 22

Teddy B.B. was one of the dozen Surprise Books—this one was illustrated by Dan Noonan—that Oskar Lebeck shepherded into print in the fall of 1950.

basics of a modified comic and at the same time would open new areas of publishing for the Western line. . . . His idea was to force it off the newsstands and up onto the counter, where it would amount to a partially parentpurchase. . . . Oskar always fought against violence in comics; and in 1950, and for a few years afterward, there was quite a bit of it in other publishers’ comics. To Oskar, it was all very lurid sensationalism. He would have none of it. It outraged him. He wasn’t a prude by any manner or means, but he just felt that this wasn’t for the youngsters’ market. He wanted to go into the real young market with the Surprise Books, and he felt that a parent-purchase would insure even a much greater sale than the comic book did. And maybe it would have, with stronger promotion. We’ll never know.2

Lebeck cared about the Surprise Books, and there was a trace of bitterness in what he wrote about them to his agent, Toni Mendez, in 1954. He said he had written the stories for the Surprise Books “on my own time. Four of them while I was on a leave of absence (without pay) in the Bahamas. Artwork for two additional Surprise Books was completed but the books were never published.”3 In the wake of the Surprise Books’ failure and Lebeck’s departure, Western wanted to be rid of the Surprise Books completely. In January 1953, the company sent Lebeck the paperwork for a transfer to him of the copyrights.4

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 280

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Oskar Lebeck in Exile |

281

For some reason, the transfer never took place, and Western ultimately renewed its copyrights on eight of the books, including the new version of Clementina. In 1957, the flying pig returned in another new story, this one illustrated by Mel Crawford, a deft practitioner of various storybook styles who had begun working for Western at the very end of Lebeck’s tenure. The new Clementina appeared in the ninth issue of Dell Junior Treasury, a very Lebeckish comic book devoted to classic stories like Gulliver’s Travels (and costing, for the first few issues, a premium price of fifteen cents). Dell had already published a sequel to Lebeck’s “Santa and the Angel” in another Junior Treasury issue, also illustrated by Crawford. Both comics were copyrighted in Lebeck’s name, so he and Western evidently reached a rapprochement of some kind. The Lebeck era at Western’s New York office had ended sometime in 1951. Lebeck was listed as a vice president of K.K. Publications in Western Publishing’s annual reports for 1949 and 1950; he was gone from the 1951 report. He was still working for Western in March 1951, when he was involved in the early stages of work on the new Tom Corbett Space Cadet comic book, but he left sometime soon after that.5 His successor, George Brenner, previously an editor for another publisher, Quality Comics (Plastic Man, Blackhawk), held the job only briefly before his death in March 1952. He was succeeded by Matthew H. Murphy, who had been an artist for King Features Syndicate and then an editor of the Harvey comic books, which resembled the Dell comic books in their reliance on licensed characters. Murphy remained with Western until 1970.6 Lebeck moved on. He collaborated on a science-fiction comic strip called Twin Earths with Alden McWilliams, who had illustrated many of the stories in the comic books Lebeck edited, starting in the 1930s. More recently McWilliams had drawn the first few Tom Corbett comic books for Western, which were published early in 1952. In June 1952, just before the launch of Twin Earths by the United Features syndicate, Editor & Publisher reported that Lebeck was “in semi-retirement, though still a consultant to Dell.”7 After Lebeck left Twin Earths, he tried to float projects of various kinds, as reflected in his correspondence with Toni Mendez, but without success. He and his wife ultimately moved to California, to be closer to their daughter. He died there, suddenly and unexpectedly, on December 20, 1966. He was sixty-three years old. By the time Lebeck died, Western’s comic books had changed fundamentally from what they had been in his hands. Formula storytelling

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 281

27/09/14 2:44 PM

282 | Chapter 22

Oskar Lebeck in the early 1950s, around the time his Twin Earths comic strip was launched. Courtesy of Letty Lebeck Edes.

and drawing had become increasingly dominant. A holdover like Carl Barks still stood out from the crowd; Jesse Marsh and Gaylord DuBois were two others. Marsh continued to draw the Tarzan comic books, his work coarser and scratchier as his eyesight deteriorated (he suffered from diabetes) but distinguished still by the calm and order, to the point of stoicism, that separated it so firmly from other “jungle” titles in the late 1940s. Like Carl Barks, Marsh kept his distance from other comic-book artists. That was not because he did not take his work seriously. As Alex Toth, a fellow artist for Western in the late 1950s and a great admirer of Marsh’s work, wrote, “Jesse did it all, always: penciled, lettered and inked the lot. . . . Jesse experimented constantly, finding new methods and techniques to do the job—restless, knowledgeable, astute—but unwilling to ‘talk shop’ with colleagues.” As Toth said, Marsh’s was a low-key style, far removed from the “wild and wooly” drawings of many New York-based cartoonists, but with an exceptionally solid underpinning: “[B]efore laying out a page”—usually three panels deep, with six or seven panels to the page— “Jesse would create an overall abstract design on the page blank—once done, he’d block in his panels, [the dialogue and captions], figures,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 282

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Oskar Lebeck in Exile |

283

props, backgrounds—within the context of that design. . . . His inking would either accent or diminish that design, by turns, according to his mood of the moment.” Toth had been a New York–based cartoonist before moving west. He encountered Marsh by accident at Western’s Beverly Hills office one day and tried thereafter to see him socially and talk about their work, but Marsh would have none of it: “Jesse had a wall up and few of us could penetrate it, but I kept at it,” until finally Toth realized the effort was futile.8 Marsh was a complete professional and valued by Western for that reason, but, like Gaylord DuBois—and, for that matter, Carl Barks—he seemed to understand that anyone working in the comicbook industry courted heartbreak if he let himself think about his work too seriously—that is, as a kind of art and not just as a job that was a little more interesting than many others. Speaking as the professional he was, DuBois told a correspondent: The sort of script I have turned out for comics is, so to speak, a factory product. I have never owned one after it left my hands, because I always sold all rights to the company who assigned me the writing of it. Moreover, the writing of the script was not, strictly, a one-man job. In the case of the Tarzan comics, I was given the characters of Tarzan, Jane, and Boy to build my stories around. Sometimes I was told that all three must feature in a certain story; and always my instructions were clear as to editorial policy—and many things were taboo. Among the taboos were ungrammatical speech by the principals; sex emphasis, and everything that might honestly be called horror.9

Despite working within such constraints, DuBois spoke of “buying and digesting all the good books on Africa I could get, treasuring National Geographics and even delving into the Encyclopedia Britannica. Oh yes, my hat is permanently off to Sir H. Rider Haggard—in my mind he has done for 19th century Africa comparable to what Zane Grey has done for the Old West.”10 There were, to be sure, modest compensations for adhering to a modest view of the work. According to his biographer, DuBois for many years received bonus checks “based on the sales over a specified number. More than any of DuBois’s other writings, Tarzan brought in consistently high bonus checks.”11 And then there was John Stanley, another highly productive worker. As his Lulu workload grew in the early 1950s, Stanley drew less, but his writing style is unmistakable not just in Lulu but in some other titles, notably at least a few issues of Henry Aldrich, a comic book based on a

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 283

27/09/14 2:44 PM

284 | Chapter 22

popular radio show about teenage characters. Western may have envisioned Henry Aldrich as competition for the increasingly popular Archie titles, but Stanley’s scripts, illustrated with considerable energy and flair by Bill Williams, were more sophisticated than the typical Archie story, and that may have been a major reason that Henry Aldrich lasted only about four years, from 1950 to 1954. Stanley spoke of getting some of Dell’s new titles started before turning them over to other writers. Henry Aldrich may have been in that category—later issues, and some stories in the early issues, are pedestrian—and the scripts for a number of other Dell comic books of the 1950s, including Howdy Doody, Krazy Kat, and The Little King, have been identified as probably his by the Stanley scholar Frank Young. Those stories, if they are Stanley’s, are on a much lower level than his best Lulu work, which continued to mature and grow in interest. That was especially true of the Little Lulu fairy tales of the early 1950s, many of which have the flavor of children’s books written for exceptionally intelligent young readers. (Stanley ultimately wrote one hardcover children’s book, It’s Nice to Be Little, which was published by Rand McNally in 1965, long after his Lulu days; he did not illustrate it.) “Fairy tales” is perhaps too loose a title for these stories, some of which could just as easily be labeled fables or picaresque adventures. Whatever they are called, their sharp edges are often barely concealed by the poor little girl’s smile and rags, and sometimes there is no concealment at all. In “The Little Rich Boy,” in Little Lulu no. 40, October 1951, the fairy-tale Lulu is an ingenue indeed, grateful for the kindness she thinks is being shown to her by the preposterously rich little rich boy—kindness that is, of course, nothing of the kind. Overcome with pity for the poor little girl when he sees her looking longingly at a Ferris wheel—he has happened to pedal by on his six-wheel solid-gold cycle—the little rich boy buys the Ferris wheel, dismantles it (with the unfortunate riders still in their seats), and has it rolled down a hill. “Now,” as a caption tells us, “the poor little girl wouldn’t have to look longingly at the Ferris wheel . . .” The poor little girl is overcome with love for this unselfish little plutocrat (“Gosh! How c’n anybody be so GOOD?”) and pursues him relentlessly, even though he buys the police department and has her jailed. Finally he convinces her of his hatred and gives her a shovel so that she can dig a deep, deep hole and crawl into it. But ah! When she digs she strikes oil. She is rich, richer than the little rich boy, and now she takes revenge, with a chilling thoroughness, on the one who has scorned her love.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 284

27/09/14 2:44 PM

“The Little Rich Boy,” in Little Lulu no. 40, October 1951, written by John Stanley and illustrated by Irving Tripp, was Stanley at his most savagely satirical. © 1951, 1979 Marjorie Henderson Buell.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 285

27/09/14 2:44 PM

286 | Chapter 22

Such savage satirical comedy—and there were other stories of the same kind—invites comparison, if only in terms of temperament, with Harvey Kurtzman’s EC comic book Mad, which first appeared the next year, in 1952. Kurtzman said in 1990 that he “wasn’t a Little Lulu fan, but for some reason I knew it was good. I probably had read some Little Lulu and was impressed, but I didn’t read any more.”12 He and Stanley worked very much alike, since Kurtzman, as the editor and writer of titles like Frontline Combat and Mad, made layout drawings for other cartoonists that were directly comparable to Stanley’s in purpose (although very different in style and tone, especially when war comics were involved). Like Stanley, Kurtzman told his stories visually, with captions that amplified rather than duplicated what each panel showed. Where Stanley is concerned, the most fruitful comparison may be to Carl Barks’s “Donald Duck” stories of the same period. There is in Stanley’s best stories—as in Barks’s best, not that either man ever spoke in such terms—an intensity of feeling arising from a wholehearted engagement with the comic-book medium and a corresponding delight in its capacity for expression. Both Barks and Stanley had found a way, at least for a time, to add depth to their stories without losing their child readers or alienating their editors. In addition to the fairy tales for Alvin, and the stories that pitted Lulu against Tubby and his pals, Stanley found other ideas that could be nursed into comic life and exploited in one story after another. Tubby had very early assumed Lulu’s old role as the serenely egocentric child, resenting all adult efforts to deflect him from his course, and he played that role brilliantly in a string of stories that began with “The Case of the Purloined Popover” in the last Four Color issue, no. 165 (1947). In those stories Tubby was a self-styled detective, wreaking all the havoc necessary to solve a case that usually involved Lulu’s being spanked unjustly. Lulu’s father was invariably the culprit, although he was no culprit at all by adult standards. In Little Lulu no. 55, January 1953, after a few years of such detective work, Tubby began calling himself “the Spider” (because, he explains, the spider spins a web to trap the unwary). When Little Lulu began regular bimonthly publication in 1948, Western added short “Tubby” stories to each issue to meet postal requirements. (Those same requirements meant that Lulu could not appear in the stories.) In the “Tubby” stories, Stanley occasionally presented his hero as the selfish monster he had been in the 1947 “Kid Who Came to Dinner.” The story in Little Lulu no. 5, September–October 1948, titled

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 286

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Oskar Lebeck in Exile |

287

“The Gourmet,” is essentially a reworking of the earlier story into something grander and more fiendish. This time Tubby is in a restaurant, running up a tab so large that the kindly couple who invited him to join them cannot pay it. Tubby is indignant at the thought that anyone would come to a restaurant without enough money to pay for their meal—or, as it has turned out, his. Such a character, however fascinating in occasional appearances, had to be toned down to be tolerable over the long haul, so the Tubby of the early 1950s was merely self-absorbed—although the line separating mere self-absorption from mania could be fuzzed over profitably, as it was in Little Lulu no. 52, October 1952. In that issue, determined to prove to the beauteous Gloria that he is a gentleman, Tubby brings a sack of corn on the cob to her house in order to impress her with the gentlemanly manner in which he eats it. Remarkably, she is not impressed. So successful was the character Tubby that Dell began putting him into one-shots in 1952, then a quarterly of his own in 1953. Stanley illustrated as well as wrote the first seven issues before surrendering the drawing to a Western veteran named Lloyd White, who also drew for New Funnies. Stanley spoke of White more warmly than he did of Irving Tripp, calling him “a dear friend [who] followed my storyboards faithfully” and also drew the “cover finishes”—in contrast to Little Lulu, whose covers Stanley always drew.13 White’s drawings have a surface similarity to Stanley’s but are looser and coarser, a description that might be applied to the Tubby stories generally. In the four Tubby one-shots of 1952–53, one story fills thirty or thirty-two pages of each comic book—that is, the complete comic book (minus covers) or all but a couple of pages. Length was important in Stanley stories, but thirty-two pages were too many. At their best his stories are distinguished by relaxed, open storytelling in which certain panels are not strictly necessary to convey information, but their presence enriches the prevailing tone. In the fairy tales, for example, comedy that might seem merely sardonic, as could be the case with the short stories in Mad (typically six to eight pages), is made slyer and funnier through the judicious addition of panels that expand the scope of the poor little girl’s naïveté and the “generosity” of her supposed benefactors. “The Little Rich Boy” could have been told in ten pages, but it fills thirteen and benefits immensely from the added length. The full-length Tubby stories, though, are a little padded. For other stories, eight or even six pages are enough. What matters is that any given story was allowed to grow to its best length. For Carl Barks, the monthly ten

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 287

27/09/14 2:44 PM

288 | Chapter 22

pages for “Donald Duck” in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories were a comfortable discipline, but Stanley worked very differently, and such constraints were not helpful to him. The general excellence of Stanley’s work on Little Lulu and Tubby was rewarded not by any favorable critical attention (although there is slender anecdotal evidence that Little Lulu, like Uncle Scrooge and Mad, enjoyed a larger literate adult readership than other comic books) but by very healthy sales. In December 1951, Marjorie Henderson Buell and Western agreed to a new contract covering the next six years, a contract that reflected the success of the Little Lulu comic book. Buell was to receive eighteen thousand dollars upon signing the contract— money that was not an advance on royalties but was instead a signing bonus. Western could extend the contract further each year by paying a similar bonus amounting to 10 percent of Buell’s royalties for the previous year. She would receive royalties of one-fourth cent on each copy printed, Western’s standard royalty rate for its comic-book licenses. As always, Western would pay the royalty upon completion of the print run.14 Copyright holders in the early 1950s could expect an advance on royalties of at least a thousand dollars on the first issue of a new title, based on a printing of at least four hundred thousand copies. The actual number of copies printed could be, and usually was, much higher—Western aimed for a minimum of six hundred thousand copies—with a corresponding increase in the royalties paid.15 Advances could be higher, too, depending on how large a minimum print run for each issue a contract envisioned. An April 20, 1951, contract for the Cisco Kid comic book called for an annual advance of $7,500, or $1,250 for each of six bimonthly issues, based on a minimum print run of a half million copies per issue.16 Western’s liability, in the event it decided to stop publication of a comic book, was limited to the advance it had already paid a licensor. Western wrote to Buell on November 9, 1953, to ask to extend its contract. Her royalties for 1952 (exclusive of her earlier signing bonus) totaled $46,924.42, and so she was entitled to a new signing bonus of almost five thousand dollars. The Little Lulu comic book and its offshoots were not the sole source of those royalties—Western published a variety of other Lulu items, including a coloring book, a storybook, a puzzle, and a record—but the comic books accounted for the bulk of her earnings. Even more than was true of Disney and the ducks, Marjorie Buell as the copyright holder reaped the benefits of popularity that was due

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 288

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Oskar Lebeck in Exile |

289

overwhelmingly to the creative efforts of a cartoonist who had no ownership stake in what he created. But as with Carl Barks, it is hard to argue that John Stanley was being exploited. Marge’s Lulu, like Disney’s Donald Duck, gave a gifted artist the head start he needed to do work that was far more impressive than anything he did, or may have been capable of doing, completely on his own.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 289

27/09/14 2:44 PM

23

Manifest Destiny

It was somewhere around the time his second marriage fell apart, early in the 1950s, that Carl Barks briefly thought about leaving Western. One of Western’s artists contacted me outside the building one day, and said, “Say, why don’t you do some comic books for this outfit”—I think they were publishing comic books with Heckle and Jeckle, or some of those fellows [St. John Publishing, which had licensed Terrytoons characters like Mighty Mouse and the magpies Heckle and Jeckle]. He said I’d make more money, and so on. I thought, well, I’ll wait a while before I make any changes, I want first to see how permanent this outfit is, and see if I can find out from somebody else if their checks bounce, and all that sort of thing. One thing I respected Western for was that their checks never bounced. So, I guess it was a good thing that I was hesitant about it. . . . It was not too long after that that I was talking with Bob Karp, who does the gags for the [Donald Duck] newspaper strip. His brother Lynn was doing some comicbook work in New York, and he knew of this outfit that the Western artist had tried to get me to go with. “Watch out for them,” Bob told me, “because they’re just liable to fold up and disappear some night.” . . . He said, “Don’t make any changes,” so I didn’t, and I never regretted it, because that outfit did fold up later.1

Other significant publishers of comic books with animated characters and talking animals had long since shut their doors or curtailed production by the time the St. John company left the field in 1956. Benjamin Sangor shut down his Los Angeles operation, run by Jim Davis, in the summer of 1948.2 That ended what some cartoonists 290

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 290

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Manifest Destiny | 291

remembered as a cozy and collegial working life. Davis, Jack Bradbury, and two other cartoonists, Al Hubbard and Hubie Karp, had set up a little office “and worked together full time,” Bradbury said. Ken Hultgren “preferred working at home, but would join us for lunch every day.” The pay was good: before the Davis shop closed, the per-page rate for writing, drawing, and inking had risen to twenty-five dollars.3 “It was most unfortunate, really,” Davis said, “that Sangor didn’t realize what he had his hands on, or never tried to make use of it. Sangor was after the quick buck, he was selling half the stuff that we produced to his son-in-law [Ned Pines] and a lot of it to [DC].”4 Mark Evanier, a writer for and about comic books, has written that Sangor closed the Davis shop because he was cutting back on such work for other publishers. “There is disagreement as to whether this was by choice or because companies like Standard [one of the labels under which Ned Pines published comic books] no longer wished to pay the cost of production plus a profit for Editorial Art Service [Sangor’s packaging arm]. Either way, Sangor opted to lay off Davis and his crew.”5 Jack Bradbury put it succinctly: “The bottom sort of fell out.” He was recruited briefly to work for Standard but by 1949 had begun working for Western. When Carl Barks’s ten-page “Donald Duck” story disappeared from Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories as of the February 1950 issue, it was Bradbury’s “Donald Duck” that took its place. “When I first went with Western,” Bradbury said, “[comic books] were selling like hotcakes; they couldn’t get enough of the stuff. They’d practically tell you, don’t spend too much time on it, but do as much as you can. We did some pretty rotten stuff, too. And everybody and his brother was working for them.”6 For someone who had grown used to the routine in the Davis shop, Western could seem rigorous by comparison. The changes that had started gathering speed in the 1940s, pointing toward greater editorial control over the stories, were now firmly in place. Carl Barks was more of an anomaly than ever. “There was plenty of work over there,” Bradbury told Dave Bennett, “but the only trouble was that you couldn’t write your own material. By only doing the drawing you couldn’t make as much money. Your work couldn’t be as fast either, because it all had to be okayed by some editor before you could ink it. Western’s comics also had eight panels to the page instead of six. It was a whole different process working at Western.”7 Whereas Roger Armstrong remembered more isolation for the artists after Robert Callender took charge (Armstrong had stopped working

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 291

27/09/14 2:44 PM

292 | Chapter 23

for Western by early in 1950, when he began drawing the Ella Cinders comic strip), Bradbury remembered crossing paths with old colleagues: “I’d go over to Western once in a while . . . and I’d meet more guys I knew. That’s the last time I saw Carl Barks, was over there. I’d see a lot of old animators over there, guys from the different studios, who had left the studios and were doing comic-book work because they could work at home.”8 Bradbury may have seen more of his fellow cartoonists because more of them were working on Western’s comic books; there was, as he said, “plenty of work.” By 1949 Western’s Beverly Hills office had contracts with “almost 30” freelance artists, according to an in-house publication, although only “about 14” were working steadily on its comic books.9 There is no such figure available for the early 1950s, but the total had undoubtedly grown along with the number of Dell comic books. The paper shortages that constrained comic-book publishers during World War II had persisted for a few years after the war. When Western signed a contract with Gene Autry on December 7, 1945, it called for Gene Autry Comics to be published monthly “as soon as manufacturing conditions and available paper permit,” but to be published quarterly for the time being.10 As it happened, Dell published Gene Autry Comics bimonthly at first, switching to monthly with the January 1948 issue. Western anticipated just such swelling popularity: its contract with Autry provided that he would receive fifteen thousand dollars as a signing bonus, independent of his royalties on the comic books. Western took a similar long view when it launched a new series of Dell Tarzan one-shots in 1947. The planned print run of 600,000 copies for the first issue had to be cut to 456,946 because, as Western’s Lloyd Smith explained, “we could not secure the necessary paper.” Western paid Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. the full royalty on 600,000 copies anyway, and absorbed the loss, cementing what turned into a comic-book partnership of more than twenty years.11 With paper becoming less of a problem, late 1947 brought a flood of new monthly and bimonthly titles (Tarzan was one of the latter) as Western put comic books it had published as one-shots on new regular schedules. The publishing schedules of one-shots could be juggled if paper shortages demanded it, but once a comic book had been put on a regular schedule and had thus qualified for a permit to mail subscription copies at the reduced second-class rate, maintaining that schedule was very important. The post office frowned on publications that

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 292

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Manifest Destiny | 293

claimed to publish on a regular schedule but in fact did not, and subscriptions were, of course, a foundation of Western’s business. Throughout the 1940s, the comic books based on the Disney, Warner Bros., and Lantz cartoon characters were limited mostly to the monthly anthology titles, plus one-shots that were devoted to two of each studio’s characters: Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, Andy Panda and Oswald the Rabbit. There were occasional one-shots based on Disney movies, too. As paper became more readily available, most of the one-shots with the established characters increased in frequency, from one a year to three or more, and Western also began publishing one-shots based on some of the backup features from its anthology titles. Woody Woodpecker from New Funnies was one of the first, in 1947, and by the early 1950s new one-shot titles were spilling out in growing numbers. Mary Jane and Sniffles and Tweety and Sylvester were one-shots based on features in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics; likewise with Li’l Bad Wolf and Little Hiawatha from Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. Some of these new one-shots gave birth to series on a quarterly or bimonthly schedule, others to more one-shots. Still others, like the Mary Jane comic book, died after a trial issue or two. Dell was publishing a growing number of giant comic books, too—a hundred pages for twenty-five cents—with the Disney characters and other licensed cartoon characters. By the early 1950s, Western was expanding well beyond the core of licensors whose characters dominated its line in the 1940s. There was a flood of new titles, based on comic strips (Beetle Bailey), movies (Gerald McBoing Boing), radio shows (Sergeant Preston of the Yukon), and especially television (Howdy Doody, Beany and Cecil). Dell’s monthly cowboy comic-book stars Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were by the early 1950s stars of weekly television shows. George Delacorte wrote to Autry on January 4, 1951, a few months after the Autry show’s debut, to tell him that television’s power was making itself felt: the comic book’s sales were about 5 percent higher in areas where the show was seen.12 So popular were the Dell cowboys that Dell published quarterly spin-offs starring their horses, Autry’s Champion and Rogers’s Trigger. The Lone Ranger went them one better, with a bimonthly devoted to the Lone Ranger’s Indian companion, Tonto; and a quarterly about his horse, Silver. This expanded schedule was the work of Robert Callender. He came to the West Coast “to enlarge the office,” Chase Craig said, “and that he did . . . building it up from a one-man office to an office of perhaps

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 293

27/09/14 2:44 PM

294 | Chapter 23

30 people.” In June 1951, Western moved its growing staff into its own Whitman Building at 9916 Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.13 Although the New York office continued to produce comic books like Little Lulu and Pogo Possum, among many others, the greater part of Western’s comic-book output was shifting westward. Comic books that in Oskar Lebeck’s day had originated in New York, like New Funnies and Tom and Jerry, became West Coast products. As Chase Craig put it, “[I]t was Callender’s idea that all the comic books based on Hollywood’s production should be actually produced here, close to the studio contact.”14 Craig, after freelancing as a cartoonist and then as a writer for the comic books in the 1940s, was hired by Callender (in January 1950, Craig said) “to come into the organization as co-editor with Alice Cobb, to work on comics exclusively, as editor and art director.” By 1956 Craig was overseeing at least twenty comic books a month, with Cobb by then listed as one of his “chief assistants,” along with the former Disney writer Del Connell.15 As Western’s line expanded, cartoonists like Jack Bradbury began to do most of their work for Western. Other artists who had not worked in comic books before also became regular contributors to the Dell titles. Richard “Sparky” Moore was cleaning swimming pools in Beverly Hills when he saw a magazine advertisement announcing: “[A]rtists wanted to draw cowboys and Indians. . . . So, I went home and bundled up some of my cowboy drawings and mailed them off.” A few weeks later—this was probably in 1951—Moore was summoned to meet with Tom McKimson, who by then had succeeded Carl Buettner as the comic books’ art editor in the Beverly Hills office. (Buettner was still supervising the comics’ covers and the artwork for the children’s books that Western produced for Simon and Schuster and its own Whitman line.)16 Once a story’s script had been approved by an editor like Craig, it was forwarded to McKimson for assignment to an artist. McKimson gave Moore the script for his first drawing job, for the Johnny Mack Brown comic book.17 “They gave me one picture of [Brown],” Moore said. “That was it, and you were cut adrift. You never had the feeling that you were launching one for the art league. Here’s the book, it’s thirty-two pages, and get out of here.” As was typical of Western, Moore never met any of the writers whose scripts he illustrated, and there was little or no thought given to the compatibility of artist and writer. “In my case,” Moore said, “dogs and horses were very strong, and anything Tom would get like that, I’d get it, usually. . . . At that time, the Western office was made up of a number of small offices,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 294

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Manifest Destiny | 295

and you really had no knowledge of the script you got, who had handled it or what they had done with it. . . . [I]t was pretty much like a factory.” Moore remembered starting at twenty dollars a page for his drawings, “and the rate never went higher than thirty dollars. I could never get the thirty dollars. I got up to twenty-nine dollars, but I could never make it [to thirty].” For that figure, Moore penciled and inked each page but left the lettering to a specialist: “You’d do the pencils, and he’d letter it, and then you could build the picture around that.”18 In addition to the ongoing Zane Grey series, Dell in 1952 began publishing in its Four Color series comics based on the work of other popular western novelists, including Johnston McCulley (Zorro), Max Brand (Silvertip), Ernest Haycox (Western Marshal), and Luke Short. Starting with the first Silvertip (Four Color no. 491, 1953), and for the next few years, all of those comic books, each with a story filling thirty-four pages (including the back covers), were illustrated with great panache by Everett Raymond Kinstler, whose editor was Matt Murphy, Oskar Lebeck’s successor in Western’s New York office. Kinstler’s staging and brushwork were flamboyant as the Dell comics seldom were, his villains seamier and slimier, his action deadlier and often far more violent, especially in early examples like the first Western Marshal (Four Color no. 534, 1953). Kinstler’s skills were so imposing that almost every melodramatic panel was self-justifying. There are echoes of Lebeck in what Kinstler recalled about Murphy. He said that Murphy “gave me two things I really appreciated: longer stories—that let me cut back on the time I spent searching for work— and a degree of freedom to tell the story my way. . . . The instructions I actually received from the scriptwriters were more staid, but Matt trusted me and allowed me to reinterpret the story if I thought I could make it more exciting.”19 Unfortunately, the scripts remained wordy when they got to Kinstler, their frequently overloaded dialogue balloons getting in the way of the dynamic drawings. In the 1950s, as in the 1940s, the most important cartoonists and writers at Western—people like Barks, Stanley, DuBois, Marsh, and, for a time, Kinstler—were closely associated with that publisher and a few distinct sets of characters. Barks even became a Western employee, he believed in 1953, and so became eligible after five years for what he called “their big package of fringe benefits.”20 When Barks went onto Western’s payroll, he received regular advances every two weeks and accumulated a “credit balance” for work beyond that covered by the advances. It was then that he began receiving vacation pay and bonuses

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 295

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Western Marshal Four Color no. 534 (1953), illustrated by Everett Raymond Kinstler, was uncommonly melodramatic for a Dell comic book.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 296

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Manifest Destiny | 297

twice a year—bonuses that, he said, “averaged around 10 percent of what I’d been earning.”21 The company could afford to be generous. As Western’s comic books flourished in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories was easily the most successful, accounting for about 10 percent of all the Dell comics printed. The print run—the number of copies on which Western paid a royalty to Disney—crested at 3,038,000 copies with the September 1953 issue.22 The figures for the Dell line as a whole were no less impressive: an in-house publication said that year that “we create and manufacture no less than 375,000,000 comic magazines annually, at the current rate of 30,000,000 or more per month, or about 1,400,000 to 1,500,000 every working day.”23 Starting late in 1949, and coinciding with the expansion in the number of Dell titles, Western made all of its comic books forty-eight pages plus covers and began emblazoning on each front cover: “52 pages all comics!” Most other publishers’ comic books carried advertising, much of it tawdry—notably the ads for the novelty seller Johnson Smith and the bodybuilder Charles Atlas. Between 1940 and 1952 advertising was almost completely absent from all Dell and K.K. titles; the few exceptions (like a General Mills cereal ad on the back cover of the November 1946 Walt Disney’s Comics) may have been relics of old contracts. In its 1951 contract for the Cisco Kid comic book, Western agreed “that in none of the publications contemplated hereunder will it permit or cause to be permitted any advertising matter to appear, intended to publicize any products other than its own publications.”24 Only subscription ads were permitted. Presumably other contracts contained similar wording. Unfortunately, Western’s campaign to set itself more clearly apart was poorly timed. In mid-1950 the Korean War arrived, with attendant inflation, and in early 1951 Dell scaled back all of its titles to thirty-two pages, except for the monthlies and a rare one-shot like the comic-book version of Walt Disney’s animated feature Alice in Wonderland. In the fall of 1951 the monthlies, too, fell to thirty-two pages. The change came so abruptly that the November 1951 Tom and Jerry Comics bore ghostly traces of the “52 Pages” slogan in the lower left-hand corner of its front cover. Western attached importance to the missing pages. It began to move carefully into advertising, assuring its licensors that they need not fear being associated with ads of the Johnson Smith kind. In December 1951, with ads in the Dell comic books about six months away, Lloyd

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 297

27/09/14 2:44 PM

298 | Chapter 23

Smith wrote to William C. Erskine, Marjorie Buell’s representative, that Western would give him and Buell ample opportunity to object to any ads contemplated for Little Lulu and would, besides, do its best to see that any ads appearing in Little Lulu also appeared in other Dell comics, so that Little Lulu would have company if there was any negative reaction.25 In the summer of 1952, Dell’s monthly titles returned to forty-eight interior pages and began running advertisements—on the back cover only—for a highly respectable advertiser, General Mills. The rather stiff new slogan on the front cover was “a 52-page comic magazine” (or, in the case of adventure titles like Tarzan and Roy Rogers, “a 52-page magazine”). It is open to question how much weight child readers attached to the page count and the presence or absence of ads. The surviving figures for titles like Walt Disney’s Comics and Little Lulu reveal no obvious pattern of sales that rose or fell with the number of pages. But it was undoubtedly important to Western’s executives and editors that their comic books be separated from the competition in as many ways as possible. By their glossier appearance, for one thing. On the covers of the comic books with screen cowboys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were photos of the stars—not publicity stills but Kodachrome or Ektachrome transparencies from shoots staged by Kellogg Adams and Polly Harrison of Western’s staff, sometimes with elaborate props. And not always in a studio; one photo surviving from the 1950s shows a shoot under way in the desert, with the canine star Rin Tin Tin and Lee Aker, the boy who played the dog’s companion in the TV series.26 The Autry covers were photographed at the Newhall, California, ranch where Autry shot his movies and TV shows.27 For other comics, especially westerns, the covers were impressively expert paintings, sometimes in oils or acrylics, usually in gouache. The shift from drawings to paintings for such Dell adventure titles got under way in the late 1940s, when Moe Gollub—who had already been producing covers in brush and ink for The Lone Ranger and Tarzan, and the occasional painted cover for Santa Claus Funnies—began painting covers for the new series of Four Color one-shots based on Zane Grey’s novels. Gollub was Western’s first specialist in such covers. He devoted an increasing amount of time to them, and less to illustrating comicbook stories, although sometimes he did both, as with Zane Grey’s Drift Fence (Four Color no. 270, 1950), whose cover and forty-eight interior pages are all his work.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 298

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Manifest Destiny | 299

When Dell began publishing comic books with painted covers in the late 1940s, Moe Gollub made many of the paintings, notably for the Four Color series based on Zane Grey’s western novels. His wraparound painting in gouache for Zane Grey’s Sunset Pass, Four Color no. 230 (1949), is poised and quiet, as the covers of other publishers’ western comic books never were. Gollub’s painting invites comparisons not with other comic books but with the work of illustrators from earlier in the twentieth century, like J. C. Leyendecker.

Gollub was joined in the 1950s by a half dozen artists of comparable skills. All these cover artists tended to specialize. For example, Gollub painted Tarzan covers (except when the cover was filled by a photo of a movie Tarzan like Lex Barker), and Sam Savitt painted covers dominated by horses, like those for Gene Autry’s Champion and The Lone Ranger’s Famous Horse Hi-Yo Silver.28 The paintings, the products of consultations between the illustrators and Western’s New York art editor, Ed Marine, almost never had any connection with the stories inside the comic book. Instead they usually seemed to be illustrations for intense dramas whose origins were unclear and whose outcomes were perilously in doubt. One Dell hero, King of the Royal Mounted, was depicted on a 1953 front cover trying to repel an attack by a ravening wolf while armed only with a knife, and with more wolves on the way. On the next issue’s cover, King was bound and underwater, clearly in imminent danger of drowning. Other hazards awaited him on future

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 299

27/09/14 2:44 PM

300 | Chapter 23

covers. The movie cowboys on their carefully posed photo covers usually looked much more relaxed. It was not just adventure titles that enjoyed the prestige of painted covers. In 1953, the multiplying twenty-five-cent giant comic books with cartoon characters began to be set apart from their ten-cent brethren through covers showing versions of Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and their like painted in gouache. Paintings were rare on the covers of competing comic books, one notable exception being Ziff-Davis’s G.I. Joe, a war comic and thus inconceivable as a Dell title in the 1950s. In smaller ways, too, the Dell comic books simply looked different from their competitors. Other comic books’ covers tended to be heavy with type, hooks for the stories inside, but the Dell comics rarely did more than identify a featured story in a Four Color one-shot through part of a comic book’s title, as with Porky Pig in Ever-Never Land or Donald Duck in “Lost in the Andes” or Gene Autry and the Wildcat. Even that very limited sort of promotion ended in the early 1950s. Likewise, it was common for other publishers’ humor titles to use dialogue balloons on gag covers, but such balloons almost never appeared on a Dell cover—except in the case of a series based on the Francis the Talking Mule movies, where the balloon affirmed the “talking” part of the character’s name. Dell’s covers were remarkably chaste, the gags, such as they were, required to stand on their own. It was not until deep into the 1950s that the comics began promoting their featured stories with a line or two on the front cover. Over the years, the most restless element on the covers was the Dell symbol itself, whose design changed repeatedly and frequently. Typically Western’s licenses for animated characters, TV shows, and cowboy stars extended well beyond comic books, to printed merchandise of many other kinds—games, puzzles, books, stamps. Not much survives to show how closely licensors worked with Western in the early 1950s, but from a little later there is the agenda for an April 1, 1958, meeting between “16 associates of Western Printing Co.” and three executives of Warner Bros., one each representing the studio’s cartoons, theatrical motion pictures, and television series. That morning, each executive outlined production plans for the forthcoming season’s releases—twenty cartoons, four western TV series, and about three dozen feature films, all of them potential grist for Western’s mill. After lunch, everyone watched a few cartoons.29

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 300

27/09/14 2:44 PM

24

Uncle Scrooge: Play Money

Of the many cartoon characters given their own Dell comic books in the early 1950s, Uncle Scrooge McDuck was the most unusual. He was not the star of a backup feature; he appeared in support of Donald Duck, in stories bearing that character’s name, and for all practical purposes only in stories by Carl Barks. Other writers and cartoonists had begun incorporating Scrooge in their stories as early as the December 1950 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, when he appeared in a “Grandma Duck” installment, but it was only in Barks’s stories that he was a character of any substance. Measures of his popularity, as with sales of the comic books in which he appeared, could only have been vague and highly subjective, since he had been seen, barely, on just two front covers, both in 1951. Barks’s editors must have hoped that readers would share their own high opinion of his work. When Barks started work on the new Uncle Scrooge comic book, he immediately had a problem. Scrooge had been a perfect foil for Donald Duck and his nephews. The question now was how to elevate him to a leading role without fatally diluting what had made him attractive as a supporting player. “When he became the hero with his own book,” Barks wrote in 1969, “I had to be careful how bad I made him.”1 In “Only a Poor Old Man,” the thirty-two-page story that filled the first issue of Uncle Scrooge, Barks softened Scrooge’s character a bit, taming his greed. He gave the miser’s attachment to his fortune a sentimental basis by emphasizing how he had acquired it. In doing so, he made Scrooge a little 301

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 301

27/09/14 2:44 PM

302 | Chapter 24

more complex than before, without sacrificing a great deal of what had made him funny and appealing. There are dozens of stories in which Barks demonstrated his mastery of his medium, but “Only a Poor Old Man” may be the one where the nature of that mastery—how he reconciled exercising a mature artistry with meeting the demands of a purely commercial publication for children—is most clearly visible. In earlier stories, Barks had casually identified Scrooge as a “financier” or the owner of a “mortgage business,” but now the ornery old duck spoke of prospecting for copper in Montana in 1882—a full seventy years before the publication of “Only a Poor Old Man,” making Scrooge perhaps ninety years old—and of taking gold out of the Klondike in 1898. Barks was reaching back to the decades just before his own birth, when his father led a hard but less lucrative life of the sort Scrooge was describing. Scrooge now scorned the idea that he might have made his money through banking or some other sedentary pursuit. “I made it on the seas, and in the mines, and in the cattle wars of the old frontier,” he told the nephews. “I made it by being tougher than the toughies, and smarter than the smarties. And I made it square. . . . You’d love your money, too, boys, if you got it the way I did—by thinking a little harder than the other guy—by jumping a little quicker—” Needless to say, a real billionaire who had made himself rich from Montana copper would not have plunged into the goldfields, alone, sixteen years later. There may be echoes of Andrew Carnegie in Scrooge’s Scottish surname, but the real Carnegie, unlike the fictional duck, hired other people to do such work for him as soon as he could. Scrooge was not a true capitalist, but that was beside the point. What Barks was doing, with his young audience in mind and with remarkable thoroughness and ingenuity, was making the reasons for Scrooge’s attachment to his wealth as concrete as possible. If Scrooge carried gold out of the Klondike himself, then of course he would care about it. Barks made Scrooge’s fortune concrete, too. For children, money is bills and coins—rare is the child who grasps that money can be something else—and in “Letter to Santa” in 1949, Scrooge’s desk was already awash in the stuff. In the story in the December 1951 Walt Disney’s Comics, Barks had gone further, so that Scrooge’s wealth was not only measured in cubic acres but actually filled his huge money bin. Scrooge had the kind of fantastic wealth a child could understand, and he hoarded that money in what amounted to a giant piggy bank. A child with a lot of cash might want to spend it on toys, but for Scrooge his money itself was an enormous toy. As early as the “Donald

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 302

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Uncle Scrooge: Play Money |

303

“Only a Poor Old Man,” in the first issue of Uncle Scrooge, Four Color no. 386 (1952), marked a turn by Carl Barks toward a more sympathetic and likable Scrooge than the crusty billionaire of his first few appearances. © 1952 Disney.

Duck” story in the March 1951 Walt Disney’s Comics, published one year before the first issue of Uncle Scrooge, a sense of play had joined the acquisitive urge as one of Scrooge’s dominant characteristics. Staring over his three cubic acres, he muses: “Now, me, I know that money isn’t worth anything! It’s just a lot of paper and metal!” Then he plunges into the cash: “But I love the stuff! I love to dive around in it like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And toss it up and let it hit me on the head!”2 At the end of “Only a Poor Old Man,” after the ducks have fended off a determined criminal assault, Donald tells Scrooge: “You may not

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 303

27/09/14 2:44 PM

304 | Chapter 24

know it, Uncle Scrooge, but your billions are a pain in the neck. You’re only a poor old man!” Scrooge stares bleakly after Donald, but then declares defiantly: “Bah! Kid talk! No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while!” Barks had created a bridge between Scrooge’s actions and a child’s understanding, without fatally compromising the adult nature of Scrooge’s greed and entrepreneurial drive. Scrooge’s adversaries in “Only a Poor Old Man” are again the Beagle Boys, this time not silent bit players, as in their first two appearances in Walt Disney’s Comics, but instead the anti-Scrooge: bureaucratic criminals who represent all the large organizations—thus their “Inc.”—dedicated to imposing uniformity on prickly individualists. The Beagles care about Scrooge’s money only as money, not as the source of the pleasure he takes in it, and the money itself exacts a sort of revenge. At the climactic moment, when the Beagles seem to have won, they cannot resist following Scrooge’s example and diving as a group into his cash. Unlike Scrooge, they smash themselves unconscious against all that metal. The number of Beagle Boys would fluctuate from story to story, according to each story’s requirements. In “Only a Poor Old Man,” there are seven of them; in the fourth issue of Uncle Scrooge, Scrooge says there are thirty. The Beagles are identical in appearance—only their prison numbers vary—and they are sometimes identified as brothers, members of what must be a very large and genetically very unusual family. Rather than remove their domino masks, when the need arises they disguise themselves with sunglasses. As is almost always true of Barks’s stories of the early 1950s, in “Only a Poor Old Man” everything follows without hesitation or strain from the core comic premises—Scrooge’s monomaniacal love for his preposterously tangible fortune and the Beagle Boys’ matching obsession. That the Beagles have a laboratory that develops “super termites” seems perfectly reasonable, given what Barks has shown of them by the time the termites appear. After the termites do their work, there is a wonderful mock-solemn moment, set in late-afternoon shadows, as Scrooge is about to suffer what looks like defeat. The Beagles will be gleeful in a moment, but Barks has them pause respectfully, like warriors who have finally conquered a tenacious adversary. As successful as this story was on its own terms, it held the seeds of future trouble. Scrooge was not nearly as mutable a character as Donald. He could not change as much from story to story. Every story in which he was the principal character would have to be not just about him but also about his money. In “Back to the Klondike,” in the second

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 304

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Uncle Scrooge: Play Money |

305

Uncle Scrooge one-shot, Four Color no. 456, Scrooge is, however, an even more sympathetic character than in “Only a Poor Old Man.” That one-shot was published early in 1953, a year after the first one. Here an editorial hand, as well as Barks’s, was shaping the character. “Back to the Klondike” as published was censored, in the worst such mutilation since the alterations in “The Golden Christmas Tree.” Barks submitted “Back to the Klondike” to Western in September 1952. Atypically, he had written and drawn that story on the road, during a late-summer driving trip to the Pacific Northwest, “away from the heat. . . . I was working on the story for at least a month, but not steadily. It was in Seattle that I got the idea of going down to one of the bookstores and finding some books on the Klondike. I found an old book that was practically an eye-witness account.”3 That book, Klondike ‘98, by Ethel Anderson Becker, was actually published in 1949, just three years before Barks found it, but it is made up of photos from the Gold Rush days of a half century earlier, accompanied by Becker’s commentary. The book inspired five pages by Barks that showed a young Scrooge accumulating his fortune in the Klondike at the turn of the twentieth century. Scrooge in those deleted pages is mean and tough, the decisive victor over a mob of miners in a barroom brawl. He forces Glittering Goldie, a dance-hall girl who has drugged and robbed him, to work on his claim for a month. The half-page panel showing the brawl was one of Barks’s very rare miscalculations at this stage of his career. There is a great deal going on in that panel, many simultaneous actions ignited by Scrooge, but no suggestion that the panel is a composite stretching over a brief period of time (as might have been the case if Scrooge himself were depicted more than once, battling the mob at different spots in the bar). The brawl might be more convincing, and seem less contrived, if Barks had presented it in a few more panels, as he did the battle of the steam shovels in “Letter to Santa.” Hyperbole was an important element in Barks’s stories, but usually with a more solid grounding than in this case. Barks wrote in 1972 that the deleted pages were “cut out of the story at the editorial office in Beverly Hills in 1952. I was a little skeptical of whether I could get by with such a bar room atmosphere but I did it anyway for fun. . . . The sequence was cut because of violence and dance hall atmosphere.”4 And, he added in 1974, because of the month Scrooge spent alone with Goldie on his claim: “That was kidnapping, he picked her up and carried her out to his claim and made her go to work. . . . It didn’t look very much like kidnapping, yet it was.”5

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 305

27/09/14 2:44 PM

306 | Chapter 24

In both Barks’s original version (which was restored and published in 1981) and the published story, the latter-day Scrooge is, beneath the crust, a tenderhearted soul who still cares for Goldie, now a lonely old woman scratching out a living on Scrooge’s claim, but in the published story this sympathetic Scrooge more than occupies center stage. When Western made major cuts in “Back to the Klondike,” it was the third time in 1952 that Barks had been at cross-purposes with his editors. In January he had submitted a ten-page “Donald Duck” story that he notated as the “golden apples” story. It was originally scheduled for the September 1952 Walt Disney’s Comics, but it was shelved and the next story in line substituted. Although the artwork vanished long ago, Barks remembered the story as a modern retelling of the myth of Atalanta and the golden apples. He said in 1974: I only recall that I had Daisy quite angry with Donald because he was trying to win the hand, I guess, of this queen of the apple festival. . . . Every time Donald would be about to catch up with this fleeing queen, or princess, or goddess, whatever she was, she would drop her golden apple and he would pick it up and then he had to chase her again. . . . Daisy was so jealous that she was throwing things at Donald, and she was not acting in a ladylike manner. That was the objection. . . . That was the only excuse they ever gave me.6

At the end of March, Barks submitted the finished pages for “Trick or Treat” in Donald Duck no. 26, the first issue numbered as part of a standard bimonthly series; that comic book was dated November– December 1952 and scheduled for publication in September. “Trick or Treat” was based on a Donald Duck animated cartoon directed by Jack Hannah, Barks’s former partner in the Disney story department. The cartoon was scheduled for release in October, a few weeks after publication of the comic book. It was by then standard procedure for Dell to anticipate the release of a Disney feature film by publishing a comicbook version a few weeks in advance, but such a tie-in with a short cartoon was unprecedented. Barks wrote in 1971: Alice Cobb . . . gave me photostats of the story board sketches and asked me to adapt them to a comic book version. I believe it was sort of open end as to length. Anyway, in the part where Hazel [a witch] is trying to bust into Don’s closet [where he has locked away the Halloween candy], I departed from the movie script and added some business with an ogre that Hazel summons. [Barks’s departures from the film story were actually more extensive than that, but the introduction of the ogre was the major change.] Alice Cobb deleted the extra business and didn’t pay me for the unwanted pages. She was that mad.7

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 306

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Uncle Scrooge: Play Money |

307

What Barks had completed as a thirty-two-page story was twentythree pages as published, the final version adhering closely to the story line of the animated cartoon. The comic book’s remaining nine pages were filled with a Halloween story starring the nephews and Gyro Gearloose that Barks submitted to Western in May 1952. Likewise, he came up with a five-page filler story for the second Uncle Scrooge one-shot after Western cut that many pages from “Back to the Klondike.” Barks had no record that he was paid for that five-page story, and it seems likely that he was not, as with the deleted pages from “Trick or Treat.” In an interview with Bill Spicer, the editor Del Connell described Barks’s status as it appeared to someone who began working for Western almost a decade after Barks. Connell started by writing comic-book stories in 1950. “When Carl stopped doing the Donald Duck book to concentrate on Scrooge,” he said in 1983, “I wrote the duck stories and much of the other Disney material for the regular line of Dell comics and Dell annuals.” Connell joined Western’s staff as an editor in 1956. “The fact that Carl turned in finished stories and art, without first having his scripts okayed, was established before my time with Western. I presume it came about because he was so good at his craft and because he knew more about the ducks than anyone in editorial. Carl did send in finished art. Other artists had to have pencils okayed before inking. Carl’s material was read and then shipped to Poughkeepsie for coloring and printing. I wasn’t involved with checking his stories and art, since I was busy with other books.”8 Other Western artists were also aware that Barks was treated differently. “Sparky” Moore, as an artist for cowboy titles in the 1950s, spoke of being in the office when Barks—whom he remembered as “kind of a formally dressed and elderly fellow” (Barks was in his fifties)—delivered his work: “[Western] had a little office with a display board that you could lay a full page of comics on, and that’s where you usually went when you’d bring your work in. Carl didn’t do that. He just went to the desk where the receptionist was and laid down his work. They didn’t examine his work like they did the rest of us. He thanked everybody and left.”9 By the fall of 1952, it was clear that Barks would pay a price for the freedom he enjoyed in submitting finished art without first having his scripts and then his pencil drawings approved by his editors, as was required of Western’s other writers and artists. In less than six months he had collided twice with his editors over the content of his longer stories, and he had not been paid for fourteen pages of finished

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 307

27/09/14 2:44 PM

308 | Chapter 24

art—at least two weeks’ work. He was newly divorced and burdened with alimony payments to Clara. He had no choice but to be more cautious. For the rest of 1952 Barks produced nothing but ten-page stories. Then in February 1953, he submitted all the interior pages for the third Uncle Scrooge one-shot, Four Color no. 495. It had been six months since he submitted the drawings for “Back to the Klondike,” and that mutilated story was published just as he finished work on the new issue. This time Barks submitted two stories—a lead story of twenty-two pages and a backup story of ten pages. Four Color no. 495 was published in the summer of 1953. The villain in the untitled lead story is named Chisel McSue, and he is trying to use the law—which had bruised Barks, as he saw it, in his divorce from Clara—to wrest Scrooge’s entire fortune away from him. In sharp contrast to Glittering Goldie, McSue is a vicious and even murderous adversary. But perhaps because Barks saw something of himself in this mistreated Scrooge—or, at least as likely, because he remembered what had happened to “Back to the Klondike”—he made Scrooge wholly admirable. Scrooge even overcomes (with considerable effort) the temptation to free himself from McSue by letting his odious enemy drown. As Barks told Edward Summer, “It made Scrooge much more likable. If I had had the nephews tie Scrooge down so that they could rescue the crook, you wouldn’t have had much sympathy for Scrooge, but the fact that he helped to rescue the darn guy and then got kicked in the face again made him sweet.”10 Sweet is a word that does not come readily to mind to describe the earlier Scrooge. Ultimately, in that pivotal story, it is thanks not to Scrooge himself but to Huey, Dewey, and Louie that McSue is defeated. Scrooge, facing ruin, has not summoned help from a vast corporate apparatus but has chosen to rely instead only on Donald and his nephews. The McSue story established a workable pattern for Barks’s stories in Uncle Scrooge, which Dell began publishing on a quarterly schedule with the fourth issue, late in 1953. In those stories, Scrooge is much less a greedy and aggressive entrepreneur than a fundamentally benign skinflint who battles not to enlarge his fortune but to protect it. His money is a prop that permits Barks to send the ducks to exotic locales (the Caribbean, in the McSue story) or drop them into unlikely situations. Although Scrooge is supposedly old in the Uncle Scrooge stories, he moves without a hint of physical debility (and there is no reason to believe, as in earlier stories, that his passion for money is so intense that

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 308

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Uncle Scrooge: Play Money |

309

In the third Uncle Scrooge one-shot by Carl Barks, Four Color no. 495 (1953), Scrooge must fight the impulse to protect his fortune by letting his mortal enemy Chisel McSue drown. © 1953 Disney.

it outweighs his age). Despite the resources presumably at his command, there is almost never a suggestion that Scrooge’s wealth confers on him any power. For help, he calls upon only Donald and the nephews, and it is almost always Huey, Dewey, and Louie who step forward at a crucial moment to save the day. This was a template for children’s adventure stories that recalled not just comic strips like Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, but also nineteenth-century novels like those of G. A. Henty, who inserted child protagonists in the midst of great events. Like the young heroes in those books and comic strips, the nephews were the child reader’s surrogates, the central nature of their roles camouflaged by Scrooge and his dazzling wealth. Having Scrooge rely only on Donald and the nephews meant that the surrogates could be put into action that much more quickly. There is, besides, scarcely a hint that the nephews attend school, or, for that matter, that Donald has any kind of steady job. Scrooge’s fortune was useful as a pretext for adventures, but the price was an erosion of the plausibility Barks had once worked so hard to maintain.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 309

27/09/14 2:44 PM

310 | Chapter 24

In the first few quarterly issues Barks worked ingenious variations on his new template, notably in no. 6, June–August 1954. There, for once, Scrooge’s fortune is a believable burden, a burden so demanding—he is besieged by anxious employees, corrupt foreigners, obscure charities, and even a revolutionary who demands that he contribute a billion dollars to his own destruction—that he seeks refuge by parachuting into Tralla La, an idyllic variant on Shangri-La in an impossibly remote Himalayan valley. The residents have no knowledge of money, but Scrooge inadvertently introduces them to the concept when they begin lusting after the bottle caps on his nerve medicine. Then the Tralla Lallians turn vengeful, and it is—of course—Huey, Dewey, and Louie who persuade them to let the ducks go free. Despite the flexibility it permitted, the new template was confining compared with the freedom Barks had enjoyed a few years earlier, when there was no predicting the tone and shape of any of his stories. And even the template could not provide a perfect defense in the panicky climate that prevailed at all comic-book publishers, Western included, in the mid-1950s.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 310

27/09/14 2:44 PM

25

Carl Barks in Purgatory

For comic-book publishers, the mid-1950s were dark and frustrating years, marked by increasingly widespread condemnation not just of the titles specializing in horror and crime but of all comic books. Sales fell as the criticism increased. Dell weathered the storm better than most, since almost all of its comic books enjoyed the protection that came with characters that had already won wide acceptance in other media: not just animated cartoons, as with the Disney characters, but also radio, television, newspaper comic strips, live-action movies, books, and even, in the case of Bozo the Clown, phonograph records. But there was no escaping such broad-brush attacks as Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent, a sensational and highly effective condemnation of comic books that attracted a great deal of favorable attention when it was published in April 1954. Wertham’s publisher, Rinehart & Company, placed an aggressively worded advertisement for Seduction—it promised “[t]he startling truth about the 90,000,000 comic books American children read every month”—on the cover and the first two pages of the March 6, 1954, issue of Publishers’ Weekly. Western’s Lloyd E. Smith surmised, correctly, that Wertham would make no exception for comic books like Dell’s. Whitman Publishing sent a telegram protesting the ad to Publishers’ Weekly on March 9, and Smith followed up with a letter that the magazine published in its March 20 issue. “To say that we regard the publication of this book as well as the publication of the advertisement 311

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 311

27/09/14 2:44 PM

312 | Chapter 25

for it as irresponsible is to put it mildly,” he wrote. The Dell line, he insisted, “is well known for its wholesomeness.”1 George Delacorte and a half dozen of Western’s licensors sent strongly worded complaints to Publishers’ Weekly and Seduction’s publisher, Rinehart & Company. Delacorte got right to the point: attacks like Wertham’s could cost Dell a lot of money. “This is a tremendous publishing enterprise and one which I must protect to the best of my ability,” he wrote to Rinehart, concluding: “You can realize that we can’t sit by idly and allow you, or anybody else, to give the general public the impression that all comic books come in the category discussed in Seduction of the Innocent.”2 For all their bluster, there was never any chance that Wertham’s critics would derail publication of his book. Rinehart’s lawyers had reviewed the manuscript carefully the previous fall, suggesting changes that would make clear that Wertham’s more extreme statements were expressions of opinion and so legally protected.3 Seduction was not vulnerable to a libel suit. When the book was published on April 19, 1954, it enjoyed what Publishers’ Weekly called “an appearance of complete cooperation from the United States Senate,” since a Senate subcommittee opened hearings two days later in New York City on the supposed connection between juvenile delinquency and comic books.4 The hearings attracted a great deal of press attention, most notably to the testimony of William Gaines, EC’s publisher, whose defense of his company’s horror comic books was widely ridiculed. Gaines was lured into defending the “good taste” of a cover drawing that depicted a severed head. The drawing would have been in bad taste, he said, if the murderer had been shown “holding the head a little higher so the neck would show with the blood dripping from it,” but it was instead in good taste—for a horror comic book.5 “Good taste,” always a deadening standard when applied to any kind of art, was especially such where comic books were concerned, since they were inherently offensive to so many educated adults. Dell and Western took Wertham’s bait by defending their comic books as uniformly “wholesome” or “harmless.” That meant that a mere handful of questionable episodes in a few comic books could be cited as evidence that the whole publishing enterprise (to use George Delacorte’s phrase) was rotten. Wertham responded in Publishers’ Weekly to Lloyd Smith’s letter without mentioning him or Western or Dell by name, but to devastating effect:

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 312

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

313

Your correspondent [Smith] singles out one comic book publisher [Dell] for the “wholesomeness” of his product. In recent specimens of this firm’s comic books a child will find such episodes as these: mugging; a youth held with arms twisted behind his back being hit in the face with a rifle-butt; a child hitting a man over the head from behind (“CRUNCH!”) with such force that he knocks out the man and breaks the bottle. What should be considered “appalling,” “irresponsible,” “most extreme,” and “to be deplored” [all quotations from Smith] is that this kind of thing is found “wholesome” by your correspondent.6

That such violent episodes might have some artistic rationale, might be justified by some dramatic purpose, was simply inconceivable to the people on either side of the debate, which left the advantage with Wertham and other critics of comic books. By 1954 one major comic-book publisher, Fawcett, home of the very popular Captain Marvel titles, had already left the business, and over the next year or two it was joined by many smaller publishers. Most of the surviving publishers banded together in September 1954 to form the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and within it a Comics Code Authority (CCA) headed by a New York City magistrate named Charles Murphy. The CCA was entrusted with reviewing all of its members’ comic books so that objectionable material, as it was strictly defined in the new code, could be excised before publication.7 Insipidity was no longer simply the desired outcome, as had often been the case, but was instead to be relentlessly enforced. Dell was one of three publishers that refused to adhere to the code, the others being EC and Gilberton, publisher of what had been called Classic Comics but were now the more respectable-sounding Classics Illustrated. Dell’s complaint was that the code was not strict enough. On October 1, 1954, Helen Meyer, Dell’s vice president, wrote to Milton Caniff, whose Steve Canyon comic strip was licensed to Western for Dell comic books, about Dell’s refusal to join the CMAA: “Of course the main point . . . is that Dell does not publish any crime, horror or love and romance comics, and yet we have 40% of the comic book business. Publishing a crime or horror comic doesn’t necessarily spell success. In fact our average comic book sale is over 750,000 copies, and I am certain that this average is greater by more than a hundredfold what any crime, horror or love and romance comic has ever been able to attain.”8 The slogan “Dell Comics Are Good Comics” began appearing at the bottom of the first page of each Dell comic book in the late summer of 1954. Early in 1955, Dell and Western struck back more directly at the

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 313

27/09/14 2:44 PM

314 | Chapter 25

Comics Code with “A Pledge to Parents,” published in each Dell comic book. It said in part: “The Dell code eliminates entirely, rather than regulates, objectionable material.” In the summer of 1955, Dell went further, not just publishing the “Pledge to Parents” on the inside front covers of one month’s comic books (as it had already done earlier in the year) but also insisting through a cover blurb headed “Important!” that readers pay attention to it. Western’s president, W. R. Wadewitz, the founder’s brother, had warned in March 1955 of declining sales, in Western’s annual report to stockholders: One of our vexing problems in 1954, and for that matter up to this writing, has been the blanket criticism directed towards comic magazines. . . . [I]n the face of publicity linking comic magazines to delinquency, it is a job of no mean proportion to get across to the public that our magazines have always maintained a high editorial standard and are not injurious to anyone. Until our story is put across, we can expect less than the natural market for our comics, even though in the long run we are sure to benefit from a resurgent demand for clean comics.9

By 1956, though, comic books accounted for only 19 percent of Western’s revenues, down from 30 percent in 1952.10 The shift of emphasis in Western’s comic-book operations from New York to Los Angeles, under Robert Callender, had already resulted by the early 1950s in a spreading blandness and uniformity, and the comicbook scare made things worse. The atmosphere was one in which even the most creative comics artists found it hard to avoid becoming a little more self-conscious and uncomfortable. Dell’s titles were increasingly as uniform, stylistically, as those of its principal competitors, so that most of its animated-character stories in particular shed the traces of individuality and even eccentricity that were common in the comic books of the 1940s. The typical story in a Dell talking-animal comic book of the mid- to late 1950s was drawn simply and sometimes awkwardly, the writing a string of coincidences and forced gags. It was as if a Barks story like the one in the October 1951 Walt Disney’s Comics, in which the nephews are repeatedly thwarted in their efforts to play hooky, were stripped of everything except the coincidences that make up its narrative skeleton—that is, stripped of everything that makes the story worth reading. Greater editorial control was resulting in a crudely efficient kind of storytelling. Carl Barks told Malcolm Willits that when comic books were the subject of national controversy, “[t]hey did tell me from the office to be

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 314

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

315

awfully careful. Don’t put in anything that suggests any kind of horror. Don’t use the word ‘horror.’ . . . Oh, I was kind of pinned down there for a while on that.”11 Barks remembered in 1966 that “the rules got real strict in the 1950’s. The office never told me what I couldn’t draw until I’d made some bad bungle, then I’d get back a page or two of stuff to correct. Luckily, my natural bent in writing was as clean as newfallen snow.”12 But what constituted a “bad bungle”? And what were “the rules”? Del Connell remembered a “dos and don’ts list for writers in the early 1950s, but I have been unable to find a copy. I know I haven’t sent such a list to writers in over twenty-five years”—that is, since around the time Connell became a Western editor in 1956.13 One such list is part of a document titled “Hints on Writing for Dell Comics” that is mostly concerned with story structure: “Make sure your story is not just a series of incidents. Avoid counter and sub-plots.” It also includes a section titled “Taboos” that advises writers to “avoid showing or mentioning the following items: anything dealing with minority races, politics, religion, labor, suicides, death, afflictions (such as blindness), torture, kidnapping, blackmail, snakes, sex, love, female villains, crooked lawmen or heavies of any race other than the white race. At all times keep the stories absolutely clean and in good taste.”14 The novelist Charles Beaumont worked briefly as an assistant editor in the Beverly Hills office where Western, under its Whitman Publishing name, was producing most of the Dell comic books. When he wrote about the taboo list in 1955, it sounded even more comprehensive: “A Whitman story must not mention disease, evil, foul odors, blood, death, spiders, snakes, religion, politics, minority groups, atom bombs or sex. In no story may knives appear as weapons. Characters may carry guns, but must not shoot them (except in the Western department, where arm and leg wounds are permissible). Justice positively must triumph and the villain must be punished. . . . The list is rewritten often, as new taboos are thought up.” Beaumont quoted Kellogg Adams, who edited cowboy titles from the Beverly Hills offices for a few years in the middle 1950s, as saying that hanging scenes had recently been outlawed because a Canadian boy had tried to kill himself that way; “claimed he picked up the idea from Red Ryder.”15 What is most deadly for any artist is not being required to observe rules like those on a “dos and don’ts list,” but not knowing what the rules are because they are constantly changing, as was the case at Western in the mid-1950s. Barks’s publisher was trying to adapt to a hostile

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 315

27/09/14 2:44 PM

316 | Chapter 25

environment by anticipating every possible complaint, a hopeless task; thus the constant changes in the taboo list, which from all appearances served more as protection for the editors than as guidance for writers and artists. That was certainly true with Barks, who said in 1983: “Western didn’t give me much direction. It was years after I had made a few mistakes that I found out that they had a list of taboos. Alice Cobb got me the sheet one time and showed it to me. You couldn’t use the word ‘kill’ or use a gun in a dangerous way; you couldn’t have poison or sickness or crippled people.”16 Western was an honorable company whose dealings with its writers and artists were exceptionally straightforward, compared with many other comic-book publishers. As Barks said, its checks never bounced, and Lloyd E. Smith, who was in effect editor-in-chief of Western’s publications, believed in paying artists and writers quickly. Royalties to licensors were paid monthly. But there was nothing about the company to suggest that it would ever recognize or encourage artistic accomplishment if that accomplishment entailed the slightest risk of controversy or lost sales. Western’s editors were classic bureaucrats, and taking risks of any kind was simply alien to them, as it was to the company as a whole. Although Barks was well regarded in the 1950s, Del Connell said, “there were many good artists and writers working on comics for Western Publishing. They were busy producing, and the editors were trying to get material together to meet deadlines on the numerous monthly books. It left little time to admire one person’s efforts for too long. We all knew Carl was exceptionally good, and we left it at that.”17 But not really. By the late spring of 1955, when Barks submitted to Western a story for Uncle Scrooge no. 12, to be published that fall, the atmosphere had become so sickly that, as Barks wrote, “I almost had to eat those 32 pages of drawings because I’d used some harpies as menaces.” The story’s harpies are those of Greek mythology, but Western required him to reletter each mention so that the reference is to “larkies” instead. The reason being, Barks said, that harpies “are street walkers in some obscure synonym in somebody’s slang dictionary.”18 Perhaps there is such a definition somewhere, but if so, it is more than obscure; there is no definition of the sort in standard dictionaries. There was no way Barks could protect himself against such irrationality without surrendering whatever artistic freedom he had left. The ducks, wondrously elastic as personalities in the stories of the late 1940s and early 1950s, were by 1955 in Uncle Scrooge much more the same characters from one story to the next. They were also blander

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 316

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

317

and more generalized as both written and drawn. Necessarily so: the Uncle Scrooge stories were almost always well constructed, as Barks’s stories had been since the mid-1940s; but the template, because it was a template, could not accommodate the character variations of the earlier stories. Moreover, because it was a template for children’s stories, it could rarely accommodate believable adult motivations. Barks even transferred the nephews’ resourcefulness from the characters themselves to a book, the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook. Initially a parody of the Boy Scouts’ handbook—it first appeared in the Tralla La story—the Guidebook very soon became something like a crutch.19 Faced with a dilemma, the nephews were more likely to rely on the Guidebook, seemingly a compendium of all human knowledge, than on their wits. As for Scrooge himself, there is a measure of how radically he changed in the contrast between the 1951 Donald Duck story “A Christmas for Shacktown” and “Land Beneath the Ground,” published in Uncle Scrooge no. 13, March–May 1956. In both stories, Scrooge’s hoard vanishes into a hole in the ground, abruptly and with seeming finality. In the 1951 story, Scrooge’s dismay first unmans him—Barks depicts his physical collapse in vivid detail, from rubbery muscles to stunned eyes—but then yields in an instant to mad fury as he attacks the handiest target, which happens to be Donald. In the 1956 story, Scrooge simply gives up and limps away. “I’ve had it!” he says. Granted, he makes that declaration after pages of struggle to preserve his fortune, but any such statement would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. Scrooge would sometimes show a little fire in the stories that followed, but he was overall a far more passive character. Scrooge’s fortune is restored by the end of the 1956 story, but the 1951 story ends with him retrieving his money a bit at a time with the help of a toy train—a process so slow, he groans, that “I’ll be here for two hundred and seventy-two years, eleven months, three weeks, and four days!” He was, of course, as rich as ever in the next story. In the early 1950s, Scrooge’s occasional loss of wealth was no more permanent than the occasional windfall that Donald and the nephews enjoyed. Stories began (or ended) with whatever was best for the tale Barks wanted to tell. In “The Magic Hourglass,” Scrooge owes his fortune to the hourglass, a lucky charm, but there is no hint of such supernatural intervention in other stories from around that time. By the mid-1950s, even though direct references in one story to another story were rare, the sense was building that the stories were bound together in a sort of web that made all but impossible the sharp variations of a few years earlier.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 317

27/09/14 2:44 PM

318 | Chapter 25

So rigorous was Barks’s craftsmanship, not just in Uncle Scrooge but in the ten-page “Donald Duck” stories in Walt Disney’s Comics, that this deterioration was at first barely noticeable. In the ten-page stories there was the same concern for plausibility, the same painstaking construction that recalled nothing so much as perfectly assembled two-reel silent comedies. But the stories were not building as the best ones did; now they more often just stopped, with an air of how-do-I-end-this-thing frustration. Sometimes, as in the story in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 165, June 1954, plausibility itself came under strain, even though in that story Donald’s obsession with becoming a television performer is ultimately worked out in convincing detail. More often, what was leaking away was not fundamental plausibility but, as in Uncle Scrooge, the characters. Increasingly, the ducks were too simple to hold interest. Now the plot and the gags had to carry almost all the weight, and sometimes, when Barks let down his guard and settled for the merely silly, the results were embarrassing. As Barks’s life as an artist became more constrained, his personal life finally offered some compensations. On July 26, 1954, he married for a third time, to Margaret Wynnfred Williams, known as Garé, herself an artist who by then had been assisting Barks for almost two years. “Garé started doing lettering and a little of my inking in about October of 1952,” he said in 1973. Her first work on her future husband’s stories was in the “Donald Duck” story for the June 1953 Walt Disney’s Comics; she inked the scales on the fish in that story.20 “She kept doing more and more of it, and I was paying her more and more, and finally we decided, hell, what’s the use of going on like this, we might as well get married, and pool the money all in one bundle.”21 During Barks’s descent from the peaks, there were still wonderful departures from an increasingly pedestrian norm. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 178, July 1955, Donald moves to a quiet neighborhood to escape the noise that will not let him sleep—and then seeks out noise that he can retaliate against. The story is a marvel, combining as it does perfect construction—no Laurel and Hardy short was ever better in that regard— and much more psychological comedy than was typical of the midfifties stories. “At the time Carl was writing that story,” Garé Barks told Klaus Strzyz, “we lived in an apartment house, and had awfully loud neighbors; it was only quiet upstairs.”22 The story in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 180, September 1955, in which Donald is an insurance salesman, has some of Barks’s satirical fire, but also, even more important, much of the energy of his best stories; Donald’s bombastic boss, Mr. Brasshorn, all but leaps off the page.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 318

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

319

The passion visible in Brasshorn’s exhortations and sobs and furious outbursts was mostly felt through its absence in the stories that came after. Even in the rare story with Donald and the nephews in conflict, the sharp edge of their earlier battles was missing—and so was its counterpart, the ducks’ intense attachment to one another. Barks’s stories lost their emotional immediacy in the middle 1950s, as comic books of all kinds retreated from anything with a strong flavor, anything that might be seen as threatening to slip out of control. Gladstone Gander, while continuing to turn up in one or two stories a year, proved to be an especially problematic character because the air of contrivance hung so heavily around his stories. The problem was not that Gladstone’s luck was preposterously good; that was the point of the character. To be funny, his luck had to seem preposterous, to the verge of the supernatural. The problem was instead that any victory by Donald over this rival was almost certain to seem forced; and yet such victories were now all but required in the increasingly censorious environment in which Barks was working. It was when Donald took Gladstone’s good luck seriously and was undone by his mistake in doing so that the stories with Gladstone came to life; but such stories—giving unearned victory to a reprehensible character—were awkward when the emphasis was on providing what the Dell “Pledge to Parents” called “clean and wholesome juvenile entertainment.” As to how Barks felt about the changes that were being imposed on his stories, directly and indirectly, the best evidence is not in what he later told fans and interviewers—the first such letters and interviews are dated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after the major changes had already taken place—but in the furious response he drafted to a letter from Alice Cobb. He kept Cobb’s letter and his draft reply, uncharacteristically for the time; he said later that he had discarded 90 percent of his correspondence with Western, and almost nothing survives from the 1940s and 1950s. In June 1956, Cobb had sent Barks a letter that Dell received from a woman named Ruth Downing. Cobb wrote: “Enclosed is a letter from a mother, which we feel is a fair criticism. We should all watch for this sort of thing, we think—and avoid it as much as possible. In addition, we usually use ‘Quiet!’ instead of ‘Shut up!’ “23 There is no knowing the exact nature of Downing’s complaint, since Cobb asked Barks to return that letter, but to judge from Barks’s handwritten draft for his reply to Cobb (which he believed he mailed in highly similar finished form), Downing objected to the rivalry between Donald and the nephews in the story in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 186,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 319

27/09/14 2:44 PM

320 | Chapter 25

March 1956. In that story, the ducks operate competing ice taxis. Barks wrote: Very well, I will avoid any more stories using conflict or rivalry between Don & the kids. Also no more “shut ups.” . . . In the past few years I have returned from time to time to the early duck plots that I used in the years when Disney comics were moving up. Thinking that the increased sales of the magazine in those times proved that these story-types were sure fire and as I didn’t want to stray too far from the beaten track, I switched the plots. The objectionable Ice Boat Taxi plot is a switch on a story in June 1944 Disney Comics called “Rival Boatmen.” . . . When I worked in the Disney story department in the Duck unit the basic theme in a great number of the Donald Duck shorts was rivalry between the kids & Donald. Certainly the main body of the public didn’t object to this theme, for during those years Donald and his nephews overtook and passed Mickey Mouse and his nephews in box office popularity. After starting to work for Whitman I kept to the proven story lines as much as possible. The 10 page Donalds through the first several years were liberally sprinkled with rivalry plots and with no crime stories among the offerings it’s possible that the contests between Don & the kids satisfied the reader’s desire for triumphs of good over bad. The boastful over the meek, etc. At any rate the magazine didn’t seem to go broke. Now comes a neurotic female with a cramped fault-finding mind and a cry-baby son, and proves that all of those millions (well, dozens at least) of boys and girls who have bought and read Disney Comics over the years were and are sadists, masochists, murderers, lechers and worse! I agree with her. From now on you will see changed stories coming from this former breeding place of vice. You will see stories that will cause Ruth Downing to write another letter to say that she just loves the Donald Ducks. For every time she reads to her little nose-picking cry-baby, he goes to sleep in the middle of the second page. . . . P.S. All of this letter except the first paragraph is so much jousting with windmills.24

Cobb’s persona may have tempted Barks into such a response: not only was she an up-from-the-ranks company loyalist, but she was, in Charles Beaumont’s description, “a tall, angular woman with a voice startlingly like Minnie Mouse’s.”25 If she replied to Barks, her letter has not survived. But she may have answered him in another way. Six months earlier, in December 1955, Barks had submitted a tenpage story for the January 1957 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. It was identified in his records as “bobsled race.” It was never published; “Don’t know what became of this story,” Barks noted on a list of his work.26 As with some of his other censored stories, the art-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 320

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

321

work has long since vanished, almost certainly destroyed (like almost all of the artwork published in almost all of the Dell comic books over the years). The Cobb–Barks exchange took place around the time that Cobb would have been assembling the January 1957 issue, and it seems likely that she scrapped the bobsled story because it involved conflict between Donald and the nephews, and replaced it with a safer story that Barks had submitted later in December. One more of Barks’s ten-page stories was completely suppressed after he submitted it in September 1957. In that story, Donald is a milkman besieged by the villainous McSwine, a pig character who covets Donald’s job and pulls one nasty trick after another trying to get it. It was shelved, Barks said, “because Donald was too mean to the villain.” In this unusual instance, the artwork survived. Barks was like many another conscientious middle-aged worker who feels the foundations of his working life shifting under him but has no choice but to try to stay on his feet. He was wedded to the ducks, and thus to the Disney comic books and to Western. But his disgust and impatience surfaced in various ways, and his resentment did not cool with the years. In December 1960, he wrote to one of his first fan correspondents: “About Donald being less vital than he was in the old days. I can only point to the fact that tabu after tabu has been imposed upon us scripter’s [sic] freedom of material. My early stories were in many instances based on an intense and violent rivalry between Don and the kids. Can I do that now? Ha!”27 However much he resented the damage his stories were suffering, Barks was above all a practical artist, one who in 1966 advised an aspiring cartoonist to “keep the number of characters as limited as possible. . . . All introductions of characters take up story panels. Soon you’ve used so many there is no room left for the action sequences. . . . One or two shots of a complex machine is about all an artist can do in any one story and make a living wage.”28 He wanted to please his editors: “They knew when an artist was padding his stuff, and that’s one thing they liked about my stuff, there was seldom any unnecessary padding. My stories were kind of stripped, they were just naked bones in a lot of cases.”29 And, as much as possible, he wanted to please himself. Not infrequently, Barks revised stories that he had already drawn in ink; some of the excised panels have survived from mid-1950s stories. He said in 1974: “It was just second nature, reading through there, to spot those dull spots and change them. . . . I was always a very severe critic of whatever I had done.”30

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 321

27/09/14 2:44 PM

322 | Chapter 25

There is a measure of his growing frustration in how he dealt with the occasionally troublesome language question: how do the ducks and these exotic foreigners communicate? In 1954, in the Tralla La story, Scrooge speaks the local language. As he explains, “It’s the speech of ancient Cathay, which I learned when I was a yak buyer in Tibet”—a funny but entirely believable explanation, in context. But three years later, in “The Mines of King Solomon,” in Uncle Scrooge no. 19, September–November 1957, Scrooge speaks Arabic that he learned “selling lawnmowers in the Sahara.” In the next issue, in “The City of Golden Roofs,” Scrooge speaks “ancient Bengali” that he learned selling “road maps to Marco Polo.” Rather than devise an explanation that might get a laugh but also give Scrooge a richer past, Barks threw up his hands and went for the easy joke. By this time the expansive environment of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Dell’s comic-book sales were rising steadily, had vanished, and comic books were a declining part of Western’s business. Even in their physical appearance, the Dell comic books were losing some of their earlier luster. By 1954, all of the monthlies were slipping back to thirty-two pages (Walt Disney’s Comics was one of the last to shrink, as of its October 1954 issue), advertising had spread to the inside covers, and some issues looked surprisingly cheap. By the late 1950s, comic books based on television shows of various kinds were starting to dominate the Dell line, especially the comic books based on animated cartoons. Western acquired the comic-book rights to Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound in October 1958 and Quick Draw McGraw in May 1959, and then to all the Hanna-Barbera properties under a comprehensive agreement with Screen Gems, the cartoons’ distributor, in January 1960.31 The new comic books echoed the coolly formulaic writing and drawing of the TV cartoons all too closely. A comic book like Uncle Scrooge, whose author had a more elevated conception of storytelling, was an anachronism even in that comic’s debilitated state. On “orders from the office,” as Barks said in 1978, the stories in Uncle Scrooge became shorter. “They’d tell me how long I could make a story. Unless they gave me specific orders to cut down the length, I just assumed that they would be the length they had been before. If I had been doing 24-page stories, I just kept on doing 24-page stories until I suddenly received word that they wanted to cut them down to 17, and here I’d be with one already on the drawing board.”32 The change from one long story to two shorter stories was dictated by the greater advertising content in the Dell comic books. (In addition, story length was constrained by the need for a four-page “Gyro Gear-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 322

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

323

loose” filler in each issue to meet postal requirements for second-class matter.) Whereas ads had once been restricted to the back covers of the monthlies, then to the inside covers as well, they were by 1956 appearing on interior pages, as had been the case for years with almost all competing companies’ comic books. In that year, too, ads began appearing for the first time in Dell comic books other than the monthlies—quarterlies like Uncle Scrooge and bimonthlies like Donald Duck. With sales declining, Dell and Western were trying to take up the slack with advertising revenue. The plan was to cut back the comics pages to twenty-five in each issue, the remaining seven interior pages to be filled with advertising; but when Dell increased the price of its comic books from ten cents to fifteen cents, starting with the issues published on December 15, 1960, the planned increase in advertising pages was halted.33 After years of producing stories that ranged in length from ten to thirty-two pages, Barks did not adjust well to the new regimen. His Uncle Scrooge stories from this period often end abruptly, as if they had been conceived longer and then forced into fewer pages. Other stories are like sketches for something longer and better. In these years, it was only in the occasional story that took the ducks to outer space that Barks indulged himself in a relaxed sort of fantasy. He spoke in 1982 of “Island in the Sky,” in Uncle Scrooge no. 29, March–May 1960, as the story “that I like best now after all these years in looking back over the whole chain of them that I did.”34 Such stories could have been more enjoyable for him only because he felt free in them to ease back on his concern with plausibility, which had fallen under increasing strain. In “Island in the Sky,” the implausible and the impossible cascade through pages in which Scrooge flies a rocket ship far into space to hide his money on a barren asteroid that happens to be populated by tiny savages. By way of compensation for the loss of plausibility, such stories offered not imaginative extravagance but rather endorsement of the characters’ good intentions, so that the reader must step outside the stories to find the greatest value in them. The gap between such Barks stories and the painfully earnest stories in some other publishers’ comic books—the “Little Archie” stories by Bob Bolling in the Archie comic books, for example—is remarkably small. Barks at his best concerned himself almost exclusively with bringing his characters fully to life. He found certain kinds of characters particularly congenial—that is, more likely to generate good comic ideas—but there is never the sense in his best stories that his view of the world is determining what his characters do, that he is manipulating them in the service of an uplifting message.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 323

27/09/14 2:44 PM

324 | Chapter 25

Although Western’s editors occasionally sent him complaints like the Downing letter, Barks otherwise continued to work in isolation, as he had since the early 1940s. He was not entirely invisible to the outside world, but the occasional mention of his name and his work in local newspapers caused no ripples, and neither, more curiously, did the article that Charles Beaumont wrote for the May 1955 issue of a California magazine called Fortnight. In an article otherwise devoted to how industriously Western’s editors scrubbed from their comic books anything that might conceivably offend an anxious parent, Beaumont paused to acknowledge the special status of Carl Barks, whose work had “a freshness and originality which both inspire and depress colleagues.” He wrote of Uncle Scrooge’s “popularity among the ‘intelligentsia,’ ” and of the “flood of fan mail” that Barks’s stories evoked, especially the complaints when other cartoonists filled in on the monthly “Donald Duck” story for Walt Disney’s Comics—the story that Beaumont called “the best-loved story in the comic world.”35 Apparently no one who read Beaumont’s article seized the occasion to try to get in touch with Barks. Barks himself never saw such evidence of his stories’ popularity, and when he wanted to see his stories in print, he bought his own copies of the comic books at a newsstand. It was another five years before some of his admirers wheedled his name out of Western and began to write and then visit him. When he got the first fan letter, from John Spicer of Aptos, California, in April 1960, Barks was suspicious at first, thinking that the letter might have been concocted by Bob Harmon, a cartoonist friend and a practical joker. He wrote to Spicer: I might be justified in wondering how you know my stuff from the other guys’ work but I have met people before who knew that difference and not all of them were professional comic bookers. I always try to write a story that I wouldn’t mind buying myself. Maybe that is what distinguished it from the writing of those who try only to get a story past the editors. . . . The front office tells me they get many letters, but over the past 17 years they have shown me only three. Two of which were pan letters that left me cringing for weeks. I suppose it’s just as well I don’t get much mail. Writing and drawing these comics is a full-time job 7 days a week. I would have little time to answer.36

One of the first visiting fans, Malcolm Willits, got from Barks what Willits called a “letter of introduction” to Western. When Willits appeared at Western’s offices in Beverly Hills, he wrote to Barks in October 1960, “[t]hey were quite surprised, shocked I should say, to have a REAL FAN

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 324

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Carl Barks in Purgatory |

325

When Carl Barks got his first fan letter in 1960, he thought at first it was a joke played by Bob Harmon, a gag writer for the Dennis the Menace newspaper comic, seen here in a 1956 photo with Barks and Harmon’s wife, Eileen. Author’s collection.

of yours turn up. They were sure it was a plot for me to try to get a job from them or pawn off some artwork on them. But one man was very good to answer my questions and I spent about 45 minutes there. The man said they give you the most freedom of any artists, and that they do not know whom they will replace you with.”37 Within days of Willits’s visit, Western’s editors, aware now that the game was up, began sending Barks’s address to anyone who asked for it. After the price increase, Western began cutting some of Barks’s stories after he submitted them, to make room for the pages of Dell contests it was hoped would lure readers who were resisting the higher price. The page rate for Barks’s drawings did go up, though, by one dollar.38 In the early 1960s he was receiving $11.50 per page for writing the stories and $34 per page for drawing them.39 Barks had always illustrated an occasional story that he did not write, but now a full one-third of his pages were based on other writers’ scripts. He was turning out a much larger number of pages—a total of 358 in 1960—in order, as he told one correspondent, to “build up the family bankroll.”40 With work on the stories themselves offering less and less satisfaction, Barks was now seeking satisfaction of another kind.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 325

27/09/14 2:44 PM

326 | Chapter 25

One of Western’s efforts to economize in the late 1950s affected Barks strongly, though, as he explained: When I was first drawing, back in the years when my stuff was supposedly at its best, they were furnishing me with a very good grade of Strathmore paper, for pen and ink. Then they got to buying some West German paper [that] was coated with kind of a clay surface, and it was very difficult to draw on. They got it much cheaper, they’d buy it in trainload lots, I guess. There were so many complaints came in from the artists on the first batch of that stuff, they got this German company to make a better grade.41

Barks blamed the inferior paper for deterioration in the way he drew the ducks, a loss of plasticity as his characters grew tall and spindly: “I’ve always drawn that duck too tall, and with good paper I would just erase it and redraw him. But since there was a trench already made there by my pencil from making that tall duck, I was always getting my pen line stuck in that trench, and drawing him that way anyway. So I thought, oh heck with this, I’ll just draw that duck the way he comes out in the first rough.”42 More was at issue than inferior paper, though, as Geoffrey Blum has noted: “By 1960, with the new batch of paper on hand, the ducks have become short and bouncy again—but they are so much simpler. Pie cuts disappear from their eyes, line weight is more consistently thick, and gestures have become less extrovert.”43 All complexity, and with it almost all interest, was disappearing from Barks’s stories.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 326

27/09/14 2:44 PM

26

The Slow Fade

As advertising took up more space in the Dell comic books, and as shorter, simpler stories became the rule in most titles, there were still a few comics—feature-film adaptations— that necessarily offered fulllength stories. A few of these, as it happened, were among the most attractive and interesting Dell comics of the mid- to late 1950s, particularly when Alex Toth was the illustrator. Before he worked for Western from 1956 to 1960, Toth illustrated stories for Harvey Kurtzman’s war comics at EC, and Kurtzman could not suppress his skepticism: “[H]e had this technique of lots of black. Which is legitimate; but sometimes I had the feeling that Toth was just covering space with black, and was shortcutting.”1 But even in a Dell potboiler like Gun Glory (1957), based on a western movie starring Stewart Granger, Toth’s careful spotting of blacks, combined with his economical drawings, gave his work greater power and elegance than could be found in most other cartoonists’ work. The typical comicbook illustrator in the late 1950s, for the Dell titles especially, produced drawings that showed too much, too literally—sins of which Toth was rarely if ever guilty. Toth was, however, entirely typical of many comic-book illustrators—Everett Raymond Kinstler was a prominent exception—in his impatience with length, with a story’s having enough pages to reveal itself fully. “I’d rather have twenty 10-page stories than one 200page story,” he said in 1968. “I found this to be the case when I was 327

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 327

27/09/14 2:44 PM

328 | Chapter 26

freelancing; I could be tired as hell, having just come off a job, when a new script would arrive in the mail and I’d be perked up by it. . . . Even those 34-pagers”—that is, the Dell movie comics—“used to drive me up the wall.”2 Yet the scripts that Toth illustrated for the comic books that Ned Pines published under the Standard label—scripts that crammed far too much violence and emotional turmoil into very few pages—were beyond rescue even by a talented artist stimulated by their very novelty. As Toth flourished, almost against his will, by illustrating stories longer than he liked, circumstances were conspiring to diminish what was most distinctive and valuable in John Stanley’s work, by depriving his Little Lulu stories of length they needed. Stanley’s stories had always varied in length—and in quality, given that he was so prolific—but stories that would have benefited from length were now limited to fewer pages than they needed. The plots were Stanley’s, but everything that made his stories special was being squeezed out. The plots began to sag, too, as Stanley submitted himself increasingly to the tyranny of that most hackneyed of comic-book writers’ tools—the far-fetched coincidence. He had used coincidences before but had made them funny in the context of a tongue-in-cheek story. Now the coincidences were being asked to do too much work. Stanley’s most consistently funny and inventive work, the fairy tales, also suffered, especially after Stanley began using a witch, Hazel, and later her niece, Little Itch, as continuing characters that simply appeared too often. By 1955 the fairy tales’ dry, ironic tone had mostly vanished from stories that had become conventional comic-book conflicts. What were useful templates when a comic-book artist was at his best could turn into crutches when it was difficult or impossible for him to be at his best, and by the mid-1950s that was happening to Stanley. There were still bright moments, stories better than anyone might have expected, like the five-page “Two Foots Is Feet” in Little Lulu no. 94, April 1956, in which a typical Stanley cascade of events is triggered by, and mostly consists of, repetition of the single word foot. Sometimes Stanley even seemed to pick up speed for months at a time, as he did in much of 1956. But he was sailing against the tide. It took a long time before the decline in Little Lulu’s quality was reflected in declining sales, and even then the general shrinkage of the comic-book market was undoubtedly more important. In the 1950s Western was printing more than a million copies of most issues of Little Lulu.3 When Western wrote to Marjorie Henderson Buell on November 22, 1955, her royalties for the year had grown to $81,183.08, and her

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 328

27/09/14 2:44 PM

The Slow Fade |

329

signing bonus had risen to more than $8,000.4 Her royalties leveled off after that but stayed above $60,000 throughout the 1950s. Buell’s supervision of the comic book, very loose but still permitting of the occasional crack of the whip, was not unusual. Although Western produced “all of the art work and story at our own expense,” as Lloyd E. Smith wrote to one literary agent, the company was prepared to “submit it, when required, for approval before publication.”5 Walt Kelly was of course intensively involved with the Pogo Possum comic book, as its writer and artist as well as its copyright holder and licensor. Other comicstrip creators, like Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey, were likewise active in the production of their comic books, even when the industry as a whole was in a downward spiral and attention to quality could seem quixotic. Milton Caniff, one of the comic strip’s aristocracy thanks to his enormous success with Terry and the Pirates and then Steve Canyon, oversaw the Steve Canyon comic book so carefully, first for Harvey and then for Western and Dell, that at one point he not only was reviewing the penciled comic-book pages by Ray Bailey but was inking what Alfred Harvey called “the Steve Canyon heads.”6 As it happened, Harvey published only one issue of Steve Canyon before notifying Caniff in 1952 that newsstand competition was so severe that “the success of any venture, no matter how well conceived, seems questionable.”7 After Caniff switched Steve Canyon to Dell in 1953, it never sold well enough to move out of the one-shot category. There was never more than one issue published in a calendar year, and there were ultimately only seven issues altogether. Even so, Caniff remained actively involved in production of the comic. For the first Dell issue, he said, he “paid the artist I called in on the job [William Overgard] in full so that there will be no hitches in the bookkeeping aspects of the contract.”8 When Western renewed its Steve Canyon contract in January 1955, Chester Weil of King Features Syndicate wrote to Caniff: “The entire comic book business is shot, as you well know, and I am happy to keep this alive with Dell and I hope you are.”9 Caniff evidently was. Even when the Canyon comic book was at the end of its run in 1959, Matt Murphy submitted the plot for a sixteen-page story to Caniff for his approval and asked for some help: “Could you suggest the type twoseater new plane, with dual controls installed for instructional purposes, that we might use in this story. Any material you might have available on it would be very much appreciated.”10 The last of John Stanley’s stories for Little Lulu were also published sometime in 1959. The exact date is difficult to pinpoint because

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 329

27/09/14 2:44 PM

330 | Chapter 26

although first-rate Stanley is immediately identifiable as his work, second- or third-rate Stanley of the sort that was turning up in Little Lulu by the mid-1950s bears fewer identifying marks. But 1959 is certainly the latest year when Lulu stories can with any confidence be identified as his. He had stopped writing for Little Lulu by the summer of 1958, when he began writing for the Nancy comic books based on Ernie Bushmiller’s strip. They had become Dell titles after many years with another publisher. The little girl Nancy and her rough-edged friend Sluggo were a combination reminiscent of Lulu and Tubby, but nowhere near as ingratiating, thanks mainly to Sluggo’s indistinctness compared with the occasionally magnificent Tubby. There were supporting characters, too, who recalled the Little Lulu cast, notably Oona Goosepimple, a macabre girl who was close kin to Witch Hazel and Little Itch. Western and Dell would have been happy for Stanley to continue with Lulu. In July 1959, Dell’s Helen Meyer asked Matt Murphy, as he told Stanley, “to inquire about your interest in doing some Little Lulu stories. The last time we talked I know you were not interested but if you feel there are still some story ideas kicking around, we would be glad to have them.”11 There is no reason to believe that Stanley accepted that invitation. Stanley’s long bachelor life ended just before Christmas 1957, when, at forty-three, he married a German-born woman named Barbara Tikotin Widmer.12 Soon after they married they moved from the Hudson valley and its small cities like the one where Lulu lived. For a year or so the Stanleys lived in Manhattan, on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, until they relocated to Peekskill, on the Hudson north of Croton. Stanley had children of his own—a daughter and then a son—only when Little Lulu was completely in his past. By the time Dell and Western ended their long comic-book association in 1962, Stanley had already moved over to Dell. He wrote two of that publisher’s first new titles, Around the Block with Dunc and Loo, in the general Archie or Henry Aldrich vein; and Linda Lark, a soapopera comic book about a nurse, drawn in a realistic style (not by Stanley). The first issues of both comic books appeared in the fall of 1961, almost a year before the Dell–Western split was formalized by publication of Western’s first comic books under its Gold Key label. For the next few years, Stanley would write and draw many more comic books for Dell, notably Melvin Monster, about the green, sweet-tempered child in a family of horrors. (His “mummy” is exactly that.) The adults in Melvin’s world, like the adults in Stanley’s Little Lulu fairy

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 330

27/09/14 2:44 PM

The Slow Fade |

331

tales, are cruel and thoughtless, but at least they have an excuse, since they are literally and not just metaphorically monsters. Stanley also wrote a few serious horror stories for Dell, for a one-shot called Tales from the Tomb and the first issue of a continuing title, Ghost Stories, both in 1962. Western had never published any horror comics. After the split with Dell it came no closer than Gold Key titles based on the Twilight Zone television show and a short-lived TV series presided over by Boris Karloff; but Dell, which like Western never adhered to the Comics Code, took advantage of its freedom by publishing the most aggressive examples of the genre since the code had squelched other publishers’ titles eight years earlier. The stories identified as Stanley’s rely on devices so easily imaginable as starting points for Little Lulu stories—a monstrous arm rises from a manhole; a harmless-looking throw rug is actually the entrance to the lair of a hideous man-eating creature—that they reveal just how close some of the Lulu stories came to being more frightening than comic. Western’s editors surely would have rejected some of the Lulu stories if Stanley had submitted them in the censorious climate of the late 1950s. As it was, Matt Murphy did reject a few of Stanley’s scripts for the Nancy comic book, asking him to revise a story called “Nancy Meets the Yoyos” “to make the sequence more ‘believable’ and eliminate the more ‘horrible’ aspects.”13 The finished twelve-page story was published in Nancy no. 169, August 1959. While not “horrible” in the manner of some of the Little Lulu stories, it still reads like a bad dream that is taking place inside another bad dream, as Nancy is manipulated and pursued by supernatural creatures. It is a story that if drawn in a realistic style instead of a simple, Bushmiller-like cartoon style (by Dan Gormley) could invite nightmares. As to why Stanley left Western for Dell, the closest thing to an answer is in a letter Lloyd E. Smith wrote in 1966: John Stanley might still be working for us except for the fact that he made certain demands as to compensation which as a matter of business policy we were unable to meet. He even went to the extent of consulting an attorney in the matter, not so much to determine his rights, which were always clear and limited, but to insist that there was a legal obligation on our part to make a kind of standing arrangement with him. He found on consulting an attorney that this was not so but nevertheless he refused to continue with us and consequently he has not been engaged by us since that time.14

Irving Tripp, the longtime Little Lulu artist, remembered that on one of Stanley’s visits to Poughkeepsie “John was very disgruntled. I don’t

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 331

27/09/14 2:44 PM

332 | Chapter 26

John Stanley made a rare public appearance in 1976, at the Newcon comics convention in Boston. Photo by E. B. Boatner.

think he was happy and he also had these other characters that he wanted to get involved in, too. He had some of his own.”15 Possibly Stanley wanted Western to publish titles of his own that Dell ultimately published—like Melvin Monster and Thirteen Going on Eighteen—but under terms that Western found unacceptable. As it happened, both Melvin and Thirteen lasted only a few years before Dell canceled them, and other Stanley titles had even shorter lives. After his Dell titles expired, Stanley worked again for Western. He wrote the single 1969 issue of a Gold Key comic book called Choo-Choo Charlie, a candy tiein. His very last comic-book work, published late in 1970, was the first issue of another of Western’s Gold Key comic books, O. G. Whiz. In 1976, Stanley said of his comics work, “I haven’t put a pencil to paper for seven or eight years.”16

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 332

27/09/14 2:44 PM

The Slow Fade |

333

Over the course of his comic-book career Stanley depicted every phase of childhood from the elementary grades through high school, in Little Lulu, Melvin Monster, Nancy, Henry Aldrich, Thirteen Going on Eighteen, and Around the Block with Dunc and Loo, and just beyond with Kookie. The demise in the 1960s of all his own titles just preceded his exit from the comic-book industry and no doubt contributed to the bitterness he expressed toward it. He was truly successful as a writer and cartoonist only when he was enlarging upon characters originated by other people. After living in Manhattan again for a few years in the 1960s, Stanley and his family moved to Cold Spring, New York, eighteen miles up the Hudson River from Croton-on-Hudson, late in that decade. His marriage, under strain for years, ended in separation and divorce in the 1970s. At Cold Spring he worked in a factory making silk-screened aluminum rulers—very good ones, apparently—for a company called Fairgate Rule. When Fairgate’s small plant was demolished early in 2012, a local government official remembered that “Fairgate made the best rulers. . . . I still have one here on my desk and it is terrific!”17 Stanley’s son James said: “I think at [my father’s] core he was an artisan, a perfectionist who wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty—so it isn’t a stretch to understand where he ended up. He used to complain about the cranky old SOB who owned Fairgate Rule, Charles Brody. He did some advertising artwork for him as well.” Brody asked Stanley to run the place, James Stanley said, “and he turned that opportunity down. I clearly remember my father telling me this. Later in life, I ran into locals who worked alongside him as young guys in their 20’s, and they made it a point to say what a great guy he was. Hard to reconcile with the nasty stuff at home, but I can understand it now.”18 John Stanley retired sometime in the late 1980s. He died on November 11, 1993, at the age of seventy-nine.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 333

27/09/14 2:44 PM

27

Disasters

It was the decline in comic-book sales that undermined and eventually ended the long-standing Dell–Western partnership. The partnership was very sociable as well as very profitable. Every fall, the annual “Western–Dell Day” brought members of Dell’s New York City staff, including George Delacorte, north to Poughkeepsie for golf, tennis, meals, and tours of Western’s plant.1 In 1957, according to a Western Printing prospectus from that year, the Dell comic books and paperback books that Western produced were being distributed by Dell to “more than 100,000 newsstand and supermarket outlets.” That arrangement was, however, severable at will by either party. Western reserved “the right to produce and distribute two other comic magazines of its choice”—by 1957 those titles were Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories and Red Ryder Ranch Comics, which would soon cease publication— “and these reserved sales are handled through one of its subsidiaries, K.K. Publications, Inc.”2 K.K. also published the Boys’ and Girls’ March of Comics giveaway, which was distributed mainly through shoe stores. Three years later, in the words of a 1960 Western prospectus, discussions were under way “which could materially alter this arrangement. Western has proposed the elimination of the exclusive features of the comic book contract with respect to new material which would allow [Western] to create comic-type books for publication and distribution through other channels and permit Dell Publishing to create its own comic books or purchase from other producers.”3 Western was still 334

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 334

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Disasters | 335

producing more than 250 million comic books a year, a total that it estimated was 40 percent of the industry’s output, but, the company said, “[d]ollar sales of comic books have declined in recent years in the industry overall and for Western.” By 1960, comic books accounted for only 7 percent of Western’s total sales—less than half the percentage just five years earlier. The company changed its name to Western Publishing in July of that year, retaining the Western Printing & Lithographing name for its “principal operating unit.” Among the major comic-book publishers, Western and Dell were uniquely dependent on publishing revenues. They paid licensors for the rights to use popular characters, but they owned almost no characters of their own. Publishers like DC, on the other hand, owned almost all of the characters in their comic books and thus could license them to toy manufacturers, television networks, and movie studios. In other words, there was a powerful incentive for both Western and Dell to try to increase comic-book revenue, not just go on taking the same slice of a shrinking pie. By early in 1961, as the price of their comic books rose to fifteen cents, they had agreed on “a new nonexclusive comic book contract covering live and animated characters under licenses held by Western.” The two companies were still on friendly terms and still doing business with each other. Around the time they signed the new comic-book contract, they signed a ten-year agreement for Western to print Dell’s paperback books. But if a higher price for comic books did not generate more revenue, Western could now publish under its own label; and, of course, so could Dell.4 Dell had tested the fifteen-cent price in some unspecified part of the country in 1957, unsuccessfully,5 and then again in several western states in 1959 with mixed results. But the logic of a price increase carried the day. As the new price went into effect, William F. Callahan Jr., Dell’s executive vice president, noted in an article published in Bestsellers, a trade publication for book and magazine retailers, that items whose prices were comparable when comic books first appeared in the mid-1930s—candy bars, hamburgers, cigarettes, movies—had all at least doubled or tripled in price by 1960. “Yet the comic book alone of all these popular items has remained at a dime. This despite the fact that kids’ allowances have increased to keep pace with higher prices.”6 Bestsellers paired Callahan’s article with one by Irwin Donenfeld, Harry Donenfeld’s son and the publisher of what had become generally known as “Superman DC Comics.” Donenfeld scorned the idea of a 50

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 335

27/09/14 2:44 PM

336 | Chapter 27

percent price increase. His company had tried to sell its World’s Finest Comics for fifteen cents but had been unsuccessful even with extra pages (and with both Superman and Batman on the cover). When DC cut the price to ten cents—and reduced the page count correspondingly—sales went up instantly and an unprofitable comic became profitable. “Two of our closest competitors tried the fifteen cent price on their entire line,” Donenfeld wrote, “and in both cases the tests were discontinued. Youngsters are the greatest shoppers in the world because of the limitations of their allowance, and they definitely resist paying fifteen cents for comics.”7 As Donenfeld all but predicted, Dell’s price increase turned out to be a disastrous mistake. For the October 1960 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics, Disney’s records showed it receiving royalties on 1,375,000 copies. A year later, after the higher price took effect, the number of copies had fallen to 900,000. For October 1962 the figure was 461,000. American News Company, Dell’s distributor for many years, had been under assault by smaller distributors and the federal government for its supposedly monopolistic practices, until finally in the spring of 1957 it announced it was leaving magazine distribution altogether. By then, Dell had already decided, as Business Week said, that it “would shift to distribution through independent channels,” not just of its comic books but also of its many magazines and books of other kinds.8 Dell’s comic books, which had once enjoyed a clear path onto newsstands thanks to powerful American News, now had to compete with many other publications for the attention of wholesalers, even as the higher price drove down sales. Western’s affiliation with Dell, and the huge success of the Dell comics, had insulated Western from such grubby realities of distribution, but now that was at an end. Another problem was that some of the rival publishers’ comic books, those starring costumed superheroes, were enjoying a rebirth. Only a few of DC’s heroes—notably Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—had survived into the 1950s, but late in the decade DC began introducing new versions of such “golden age” characters as the Flash and Green Lantern. Then in 1961 a company that went under several names—Timely, Atlas, and ultimately Marvel—introduced superheroes that were not simply reworked versions of old characters; rather, the new superheroes incorporated characteristics of some of the other comic-book genres that had flourished since the superheroes’ first burst of popularity in the early 1940s. Marvel’s comics were as much soap operas as adventure stories, echoing the romance comics that flourished in the postwar years. Young

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 336

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Disasters | 337

readers who would have recoiled from television soaps were hooked as firmly by the continuing stories in the Marvel books as their parents were by the stories on TV. Superheroes, always the vehicles for fantasies of wish fulfillment, were even more attractive when pubescent anguish was stirred into the mix. Moreover, Marvel’s protagonists successfully united the two strains that had dominated superhero comics until then: heroes who were supposed to be taken seriously, like Superman and Batman, and parody superheroes like Captain Marvel and Plastic Man. Marvel’s editor, Stan Lee, and his collaborators treated the heroes seriously—the reader was never asked to regard them as jokes—but the heroes themselves mocked who they were and what they were doing. They could laugh or groan and shake their heads at the craziness of it all, or at their own mistakes, but they had earned the right to do that by being heroes in the first place. This potent mixture was given greater vitality through furiously energetic drawings by Jack Kirby for Fantastic Four and dry, almost sinister drawings by Steve Ditko for The Amazing Spider-Man and Strange Tales. They were far more distinctive artists than the cartoonists confined by DC’s homogenized house style. Both Kirby and Ditko were involved heavily in the writing of their stories—to what extent was a matter of ongoing dispute in later years—and their involvement gave the stories a more personal flavor than the superhero stories in the DC comic books. Increasingly in the 1960s, the Marvel comic books relied not just on continuing stories but also on crossover appearances, so that the featured character from one comic book turned up in another character’s comic. There was risk in tying the books together in that fashion—the risk that young readers would be discouraged by the need to keep up with most of the line if they were to understand what was going on— but it was a risk that paid off, because Marvel cultivated a relatively small but devoted fan base. Continuing stories were not unknown in the Dell comic books, especially Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. A “Mickey Mouse” serial was part of the package from the beginning, at first in reprints and adaptations from the Floyd Gottfredson comic strip and then, starting in 1952, in new stories in the same vein (Mickey as a sort of detective) that were written by Carl Fallberg and drawn by Paul Murry, both Disney animation veterans. But it was Walt Disney’s Comics’ huge subscriber base that made continuing stories work. There was never much chance that readers would be swept up by the “Mickey Mouse” stories as they were by the Marvel stories.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 337

27/09/14 2:44 PM

338 | Chapter 27

After feasting on customers’ resistance to Dell’s higher price for about a year, DC and Marvel raised their prices, too—but only by two cents, to twelve cents a copy, for a standard thirty-two-page comic book. Dell had no choice but to cut its price by three cents a few months later, starting with issues dated June 1962. Western also priced its standard comic books at twelve cents when it began issuing Gold Key comic books through its subsidiary K.K. Publications in July 1962. But the damage turned out to be irreparable. As of the January 1967 issue, Disney received royalties on only 317,000 copies of Walt Disney’s Comics—a figure far below what had once been Western’s usual base print run of 600,000 copies.9 Not until 1961 did the published statements of ownership that the post office required of periodicals mailed at the second-class rate include circulation figures. The first paid-circulation figure for Uncle Scrooge appeared in no. 33, March–May 1961; it showed each issue selling an average of 1,040,543 copies for the period ending October 1, 1960. Number 33 was, however, the first Uncle Scrooge to sell for fifteen cents, and the effects of the increase did not begin to show until the next year’s statement, when the figure fell to 835,928. For some reason the 1962 figure covered only subscription copies. When next an accurate paid-circulation figure was published, for 1963, it showed a precipitous decline to 296,255 (from a print run of 425,900). Circulation recovered a bit over the next few years, but only to around 330,000—less than one-third of the figure before the price increase. In an echo of earlier efforts, like Oskar Lebeck’s Surprise Books, to blur the line between comic books and children’s books, Western in 1962 transformed some of the former Dell monthlies and bimonthlies— Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Little Lulu—into twenty-five-cent Gold Key quarterlies with more pages, thicker-thanusual slick paper for covers, and panel borders that were strips of color, rather than lines, when they were not missing entirely. In a reversion to the early 1950s, the Gold Key line did not carry outside advertising. The new design was also inflicted on other comic books, like Uncle Scrooge, that continued to be the standard thirty-two pages. Writing to Malcolm Willits in April 1962, Carl Barks lamented a reduction in the size of the drawings: “[T]he old size of 2½ times up gave [the artists] room to operate with big pens or brushes when advantageous. Now the size is 2 times up. This wouldn’t be a calamity, except that some bright boy in the East thought that the pages would look ‘different’ if the dialogue balloons were inset a minimum of ¼ inch from the top and sides

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 338

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Disasters | 339

of the panels. Naturally, this compresses the drawing area. . . . I think the pages will look different, all right. So different the kids will leave the books lie right on the stands.”10 Barks was right. Western acknowledged in its annual report for 1963 that it was losing money on its comic books, blaming the loss on “conservatism growing out of initial experience as a comic publisher in issuing comic magazines which, both in subject matter and quantities printed, proved not to be commercially sound.”11 Although Western continued to tinker with formats, within a year titles like Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry were back to thirty-two pages, and by 1965 they were filled with reprinted stories from the 1950s.12 Of Barks’s stories, only the two in the first Gold Key issue of Uncle Scrooge (no. 40, January 1963) suffered the indignities of the new design before someone in authority recognized the mistake. It was, however, too late for any sort of rescue. By the early 1960s Barks’s drawings had settled into a persistent blandness and his stories into mechanical patterns disturbingly similar to those of most other Disney comic books. Like his colleagues’ work, Barks’s stories now contained far too many arbitrary coincidences and far too much strained dialogue. There were other lapses in craft, like the occasional use of ungainly thought balloons as exposition. Barks was aware of the decline in his work. He wrote to Willits in 1963: “As a refresher last night I got out my 1953 Disney Comics [Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories] and read all twelve stories. Then I read the first two I did in 1962. The difference is alarming. . . . My stuff certainly has deteriorated. But in the cold light of a new day I can easily see why. It’s simply that twenty years is too long to be writing one type of story for one set of characters.”13 Barks was by nature a serious storyteller, a man with a bent toward his own kind of realism, and the sheer silliness of many of his later stories in the Gold Key issues of Uncle Scrooge is like the exaggerated sigh of a man who is eager to be gone. Toward the end, he was allowed once again to extend his stories to as many as twenty-four pages, and some of them benefit from the greater length; they are more carefully worked out, and they do not end as abruptly. But it was too late for greater length to make much difference. Any lingering sense of Scrooge as a dynamic, irascible capitalist completely disappeared, as Barks continued to drop him into questionable roles. In one story he is a status seeker in pursuit of the world’s top status symbol, in another a scorned applicant to the archeologists’ club, in still another a teller of tall tales.14 In many others Barks had him frantically trying to protect his “Old

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 339

27/09/14 2:44 PM

340 | Chapter 27

Number One Dime,” the first money he earned, from the sorceress Magica de Spell. That dime (which Barks introduced in a backup story in the third issue of Uncle Scrooge, in 1953) became in the 1960s the same sort of overworked prop as the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook in the 1950s. “Some Uncle Scrooge fans have complained that in late years I turned the Uncle Scrooge stories into mere adventure strips,” Barks wrote in 1968. “They are right. I was afraid to keep repeating money and miser gags over and over, and the lack of contact between me and my readers left me ignorant of the fact that readers liked the money-miser gags.”15 By 1963 the exceptional freedom Barks had enjoyed, submitting stories in finished form without clearing them with his editors first as scripts or penciled artwork, had been severely curtailed. At Western’s request, Barks began submitting outlines for his Uncle Scrooge stories to Chase Craig. Barks told Malcolm Willits that he felt hobbled by the new procedure: “[A]t times I thought, ‘There are so many things I’d like to have that duck do—brand-new original stuff.’ But I was a little afraid to try it. I was afraid to write a continuity or synopsis and send it down to the office for fear they might not see it the way I saw it in my own mind. I haven’t got the vocabulary to write it out.”16 On July 9, 1965, after receiving the outline for what was eventually published under the title “House of Haunts” (Uncle Scrooge no. 63, May 1966), Craig wrote offering praise that probably made Barks cringe: Your story synopsis sounds fine! The only thing that did not sound so good to me was your reference to the Beagle Boys learning all kinds of new crime tricks while attending Prison School. The idea of teaching crime in prison does not sound very well [sic] for our law-enforcing friends. You no doubt have something else in mind here, but the way I read it it would put our prisons in a rather bad light. Why not just have the Boys going to Crook School somewhere and Scrooge gets word that they’re about to graduate, etc. Other than that, your story is very pleasing and uplifting.17

The irony was that Barks’s politics were very conservative, and any implicit criticism in the story would have been not so much of the prisons as of the politicians in charge of them. On those rare occasions in the later stories when Barks’s politics rose close to the surface, the stories benefited from the additional energy. “The real truth,” Barks wrote in 1973, “is that I had a great fear of ‘preaching’ in scripts and avoided any sort of social or economic or political slanting unless such slanting aided the entertainment value.”18 “House of Haunts” in Barks’s finished ver-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 340

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Disasters | 341

When Chase Craig was photographed in 1969 at his desk, Western’s Los Angeles offices were in a building on Hollywood Boulevard. The framed painting visible on the wall behind Craig is by Moe Gollub, for the front cover of Tarzan of the Apes no. 140, February 1964. Photo by the author.

sion is very much like the outline he had sent to Craig a few weeks earlier, although when the Beagles leave Studious Hours Prison “rehabilitated,” they have learned not “crime tricks” but legitimate skills that they put to criminal uses. After Craig received the finished art, he wrote to Barks to tell him how much he liked it: “I just wanted you to know how much I enjoyed your commentary on our kooky society.”19 Craig’s letter came from yet another new address: more than twenty years after moving from downtown Los Angeles to Beverly Hills, Western’s editorial offices had moved back downtown again, to 1313 West Eighth Street, in December 1963.20 That move, from Western’s own building on Santa Monica Boulevard to half of the third floor in a threestory office building, was one measure of the comic books’ diminished stature in their industry. Western’s comics made a gradual comeback until by 1965, the company reported, it was producing about four hundred thousand comic books a day: “The demand is firm at this level,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 341

27/09/14 2:44 PM

342 | Chapter 27

and is carried on at a profit.”21 But production was far below the million-plus copies a day of the early 1950s. By the time Barks retired, he had clearly exhausted, if not his ability to write and draw stories with the ducks, his interest in doing so. Chase Craig wrote to Barks on November 1, 1965, telling him: In [a] recent contest-survey . . . we discovered this magazine has a great girlreader interest. In fact, we got more letters from girls than from boys. Many of them were quite insistent that Daisy should be featured and many were indignant that we didn’t up-date her dress, makeup, etc. Anyway, we do feel that if we add Daisy as a regular in the DONALD DUCK [feature in Walt Disney’s Comics] we will make a lot of readers happy, so we would like to try it. You might also like to use Daisy’s nieces.22

Barks’s next-to-last story for Walt Disney’s Comics, “Donald and Daisy,” in no. 308, May 1966, not only elevates Daisy to a costarring role, but also gives her nieces a much larger role than the nephews, who exit on the third page. The story has Donald as, of all unlikely things, a beautician, and it is uncharacteristically cruel—not dry and satirical, but cold and contemptuous—in its depiction of Donald’s female customers, like the very old and desperately unattractive Mrs. J. Crowsfoot Dryskin. Daisy herself does not escape; she is fretful and anxious, at first ashamed of Donald’s new business and then jealous of his success with other females. She emerges “beautiful” at the end of the story thanks not to Donald but to the brutal ministrations of her nieces; and it is, of course, beauty of a clownish kind. Daisy had been an incidental character in almost all of her appearances in Barks’s stories, beginning with a two-panel walk-on in Walt Disney’s Comics no. 36, September 1943. She was usually no more than a pretext for conflict between Donald and Gladstone, and only very rarely was she presented as a clearly defined character. In Walt Disney’s Comics no. 101, February 1949, when she learns from the nephews that Donald has been ordered by his doctor to crochet doilies as therapy to cure his nightmares, she leads a phalanx of determined women in search of this rare specimen, so that he might lecture on crocheting at her needlework club. Confronted by a reality more terrifying than any nightmare, Donald takes refuge in the lions’ cage at the zoo; his bad dreams are at an end. But it is Donald’s hypermasculine recoil from crocheting that is the story’s comic engine, not Daisy’s frilly excitement that Donald is sharing a traditionally female pastime. Like the other ducks, Daisy rose with the arc of Barks’s stories in the early 1950s, becoming a more substantial and interesting character,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 342

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Disasters | 343

quiet and womanly and compassionate in her most important appearance—in “A Christmas for Shacktown.” She made only a few indistinct appearances in Barks’s stories in the next dozen years or so—not counting his illustrations of other writers’ thin scripts for a comic book called Daisy Duck’s Diary—before reemerging diminished, like the other ducks, in that May 1966 story. Barks submitted only one more “Donald and Daisy” story. He officially retired on June 30, 1966, although he made a few more deliveries before the end of the year—of cover drawings and of stories for which he had received advance payments so that they would not count against the earnings limit for Social Security. He knew it was time to go. Writing to Chase Craig on July 4, 1966, Barks said of himself and his wife: “Our sentiments about leaving the duck work are all of great relief. We’d like nothing better than to be able to jump into a new career of painting without a backward glance at the long drudging years we spent in comic books.”23 In retirement he would receive a small pension. “The company was under no legal requirement to pay me anything,” he wrote in 1975. “Bob Callender got me $100 a month. This comes from the company treasurer, not from the pension insurance company.”24 Despite the distaste for comic books that Barks expressed so often in later years, Chase Craig prevailed upon him to provide scripts (in the form of sketches like those John Stanley made for Little Lulu) and occasionally finished artwork for the Disney comic books for another seven years. His last such story was published in 1974. He never expressed much pleasure in the work. His concern for plausibility, so liberating for him when his characters were most real, had by the 1960s become a lead weight. In 1968, writing about his script called “Pawns of the Loup Garou” (a story penciled by Tony Strobl for Donald Duck no. 117, January 1968), Barks complained: I get anti-nostalgia every time I approach my files of old [Donald Duck] comics. There’s so little about my years of comic book work that I care to remember that I shudder when I pick up a stack of comics and become snowed under with recollections. . . . Always there were decisions to make. . . . Could a witch be a real witch? How far can I stretch the ridiculous without getting in trouble with the office? How far can I push pure fantasy before some sophisticated 5-year-old kid complains that Donald Duck is only a fairy tale character like Hans C. Anderson’s [sic] people? I leaned toward logical explanations of [phenomena] in every day terms and mechanics—just to be safe. I hate to go back into those old stories and relive the struggles I had trying to make the explanations interesting and funny and not a dull let-down.25

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 343

27/09/14 2:44 PM

344 | Chapter 27

In retirement in 1974, Carl Barks painted the Disney ducks at his home in Goleta, California. The large painting to the left is based on “The Terror of the River” in Donald Duck Four Color no. 108 (1946). Photo by E. B. Boatner.

Barks and his wife moved from San Jacinto to Goleta, near Santa Barbara, and he joined her in painting in oils—landscapes and the like at first, but then, starting in 1971, at the suggestion of a longtime fan, Glenn Bray, subjects of an entirely different kind. Those paintings proved to be tremendously popular, some of them eventually selling for upward of a hundred thousand dollars, even though, considered strictly as art, they were vulnerable to criticism on many grounds. Their subjects were Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, the nephews, and the other characters Barks had drawn for comic books. For most comic-book artists there could be no “late period,” no Indian summer of distinctive work like that enjoyed by a Titian or a Verdi or other famous painters and composers, but Barks actually had one—of a sort—and it lasted for about as long as his comic-book career. He painted the ducks for almost thirty years (with an interruption) under licenses from Disney. At first he fulfilled commissions from fans for paintings based mostly on comic-book covers. In 1976, Disney revoked his license when a purchaser made unauthorized prints from one of the paintings, but the license was restored in 1982 at the instigation of an entrepreneur named Bruce Hamilton. The paintings Barks made under Hamilton’s aegis were larger and more elaborate than before. They were reproduced as

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 344

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Disasters | 345

expensive lithographs, and the paintings themselves were sold to wealthy collectors whose interest in Barks’s comic books was often negligible. As he painted, Barks moved first to Temecula in Southern California in 1977, and then, in 1983, to Grants Pass, Oregon, a little more than a hundred miles from his childhood home. He continued to work into his nineties, less in oils than in watercolors and colored pencils, and often under pressure from the managers who succeeded Hamilton—pressure that equaled or exceeded the deadline pressures of his comic-book work.26 A widower after Garé Barks’s death in 1993, he died on August 25, 2000, at the age of ninety-nine.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 345

27/09/14 2:44 PM

EPILOGUE

Can These Bones Live?

When Western began publishing under the Gold Key label (derived from the names of two of its subsidiaries, Golden Press and K.K. Publications), the emphasis shifted slightly toward titles like Magnus, Robot Fighter and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, which Western itself owned. Such characters were, if not exactly superheroes, more directly competitive with the resurgent DC and Marvel characters, and, perhaps just as important in Western’s reduced circumstances, using them did not require paying royalties to a licensor. Magnus was science fiction of a sort Western had rarely attempted. It was an exceptionally handsome comic book, illustrated by Russ Manning in a sleek, athletic style that fitted a hero who was, as Manning said, “a Tarzan of the future.”1 Late in 1965, Manning succeeded Jesse Marsh as the illustrator of the “Tarzan” stories. Marsh died a few months later, in April 1966. Tarzan of the Apes, as the comic book was now called, would follow a trajectory like that of the Gold Key line as a whole. Manning drew it for about three years (with interruptions) and then was succeeded by a lesser artist until Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. ended its long affiliation with Western in 1972 and licensed Tarzan to DC. By then the comic book’s average paid circulation had declined from more than 350,000 per issue in the mid-1960s to less than 250,000. Manning’s Magnus, despite its quality, had never cracked a quarter million per issue. Gaylord DuBois wrote most of the stories for Tarzan of the Apes until the end, although his affiliation with Western ended soon after 346

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 346

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Epilogue | 347

that, evidently because Gold Key was no longer publishing adventure stories of the kind he preferred to write. He died in Volusia, Florida, on October 23, 1993, at the age of ninety-four. The Gold Key comic books’ mild prosperity in the mid-1960s was short-lived. Western lost other longtime characters—the Hanna-Barbera characters, King Features stalwarts like the Phantom and Popeye the Sailor—as licensors sought better deals in a shrunken comic-book market and even in some cases launched self-publishing efforts. Late in the decade, as Western renewed license agreements for its comic books, licensors agreed to drop the guarantees based on print runs that had been a standard element of its contracts. Western’s J. J. Barta wrote to Marjorie Buell’s representative William C. Erskine on December 3, 1970: “Western is not now nor have we for well over a year been making or paying any royalty guarantees to Walt Disney Productions or Warner Bros. Inc. on our Gold Key comicpubs [sic] that use or feature the Disney or Warner Bros. characters or properties. The royalties are payable strictly on our sales, and when we close out and render the final sales on each comicpub.”2 The only exception was Little Lulu, for which Western was still paying the guarantees required by a contract that had taken effect on January 1, 1962, during the transition from Dell to Gold Key. Under that contract, Buell was no longer paid a royalty on each copy printed. She received instead a royalty of 2.5 percent “of the retail cover price on the net sales thereof,” but with minimum guarantees of two thousand dollars on twenty-five-cent comic books and a thousand dollars on comic books selling for less.3 Barta asked Buell to surrender even that scaled-down guarantee. By 1969 the circulation of Little Lulu had shrunk to just over two hundred thousand copies, little more than half the print run and not enough to cover the guarantee.4 “Our Periodical Department simply cannot continue to absorb such overpayment of royalties on the comicpubs,” Barta wrote.5 Buell and Erskine agreed to a change, and a new agreement dated December 14, 1970, provided for an advance on royalties but no guarantee.6 Two years later, Buell sold all her rights in Little Lulu to Western for ninety-nine thousand dollars. The payments were spread over seven years, no doubt for tax reasons.7 Officially Marge’s Little Lulu from the beginning, the comic book became simply Little Lulu, the name everyone had always known it by. After Western bought Lulu, the company produced a manual to guide artists and writers working on the comic book and presumably merchandise of other kinds. A final section

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 347

27/09/14 2:44 PM

348 | Epilogue

explained the characters and their relationships: “The outlines of some typical stories will point the direction to take in creating new ones.” The “typical stories” were all from the mid-1950s and all written by John Stanley.8 The Gold Key comic books continued to decline, and by 1980 they were indistinguishable in their general shabbiness from most other comics. In the February 1980 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, once the crown of the Dell line, almost one-third of the pages were devoted to advertisements, including one for a company selling novelty items like “talking teeth” and “vampire blood.” All the stories were reprints except for one weakly illustrated five-page story with the Disney chipmunks, Chip ’n’ Dale. The lead story—as was almost always the case— was a Carl Barks “Donald Duck” ten-pager, this one a reprint from January 1963. The February 1980 Walt Disney’s Comics was the last to bear the Gold Key label. The Gold Key line expired after the toy company Mattel, which had acquired Western Publishing the year before, decided to sell Western’s comic books under the Whitman label—and to sell them, moreover, not like newsstand magazines but like toys, in bagged sets at variety and department stores, places where the Whitman name was already familiar. Sales were poor, and in May 1984 yet another new owner, the real-estate tycoon Richard A. Bernstein, closed down Western’s comic books altogether, less than three months after buying the company from Mattel.9 Dell’s demise as a comic-book publisher preceded Western’s by more than ten years; the last Dell comic books were published in 1973. Eventually both Western and Dell were absorbed into the Bertelsmann media empire, whose most important publishing brand was Random House. Remnants of the long Dell–Western collaboration, including bound volumes of Dell comic books embossed for George Delacorte’s personal library, were sold at auction and subsequently bobbed up on Internet auction sites. The disappearance of Western Publishing’s comic books in the 1980s coincided with major changes both in how comic books were sold and in who made up their audience. As comics’ traditional retail outlets— newsstands, drugstores, and retail chains—dwindled, the direct market took their place. Whereas traditional retailers had returned unsold comic books (or parts of their covers) for credit, the new retailers that made up the direct market gave up the return privilege in exchange for a larger discount. By the 1980s the direct market was thriving, but with

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 348

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Epilogue | 349

stores and comics devoted more specifically to superheroes. Customers tended to be collectors who were older than the children who made up the core comic-book audience in earlier years. Now comic books were much more expensive than before and sold in smaller quantities—but because they were tailored to the collectors’ market and sales were more predictable, they could still be profitable for all concerned. Some fans, attracted as teenagers by superheroes, wound up as young adults writing and drawing for the titles they had read so avidly a few years earlier. They strained to come up with superhero stories that were somehow more “adult,” but superheroes are not just impossible, as Carl Barks’s ducks are impossible; they are impossible in ways that seal off pathways for the imagination rather than opening them. They are rooted in wish fulfillment; thus the typically superfluous secret identity that conceals the superhero behind an appearance like that of the comic books’ readers. “Serious” stories about the superheroes—like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight (1986), devoted to an aging Batman; or Alan Moore’s apocalyptic Watchmen series (1986–87), also for DC—could assert their maturity only by becoming ever more grim and bloody and ridiculous. In a field desperate for new ways to use old heroes, ingenious writers—who did not draw at all, in contrast to the best comics writers of the past—assumed new importance. But the work of even the most intriguing of those writers had a secondhand air. Neil Gaiman, for instance (whose Sandman series for DC appeared between 1989 and 1996), acknowledged his debt to the fantasist James Branch Cabell. In this increasingly self-contained and ultimately claustrophobic marketplace, there was no room for comic books of the kind Western had published. There were sporadic efforts to revive the Disney comic books from 1986 on, in various formats and under several different publishers, including Disney itself, but ultimately none was successful. The echoes of the Dell comic books were heard not in new comics of the Dell sort, but in reprints, some encompassing long runs of titles like Little Lulu and Uncle Scrooge. Like the far more numerous superhero reprints, they were intended for an audience of older and affluent collectors. There were also faint echoes of the Dells in comic books of a very different kind. The “underground” comics of the 1960s and 1970s—black-and-white comic books that were variously experimental and outlandishly vulgar— rose and fell with the counterculture. They bore scant resemblance to comic books as most Americans knew them. Most underground comics

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 349

27/09/14 2:44 PM

350 | Epilogue

were devoted to explicit sex and language, drug taking, radical politics, scatological criticism of American society, and, almost incidentally, aggressive design. The smooth, featureless illustrator’s style that was the norm in superhero comics had no place in the underground comics, many of whose cartoonists embraced the grotesque with a gusto that even Will Eisner never approached. The few distinctive creators who emerged from the underground comics might have enjoyed success in more traditional environments. Gilbert Shelton, whose characters the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers appeared in a series of comics, could be readily imagined working for Oskar Lebeck on the Dell comics of the forties. There is in Shelton’s stories some of the same predilection for rowdy physical activity found in much of Walt Kelly’s work. Robert Crumb, a superb draftsman, brought his characters onto the page with a physical presence that was rare if not unique. Although there was plenty of detail in his drawings, more important was a rich, bending line that traced the contours of each character’s body (women’s bodies especially) with loving precision. In earlier comic books, dominated as they were by the narrowest commercial considerations, even the most personal work by creators like Carl Barks and Will Eisner stood at one or more removes from the artist’s life. Crumb, by contrast, went so far as to make himself a character—eventually the dominant character—in his stories, inviting the reader to share in his fantasies and frustrations. There was an even more powerful autobiographical element in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the most significant single publication by an underground cartoonist. Maus was based on the harrowing experiences of Spiegelman’s parents, survivors of the Holocaust, and on Spiegelman’s own troubled relationship with his widowed father. What made this story so arresting was that its characters, including Spiegelman himself and his wife, were drawn as talking animals—Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs—and not in a reassuring Disney-like manner, but simply and directly, almost crudely. Maus was first serialized between 1980 and 1991 in Raw, an adult comic book edited by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. The first half was published as a book in 1986 by the mainstream publisher Pantheon. In 1992, after the second and concluding volume of Maus was published, Spiegelman received a special Pulitzer Prize. The very term underground had already all but lost its meaning by the time Maus appeared, and the virtually unanimous praise for Spiegelman’s book proved to be a tremendous stimulus to serious efforts by

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 350

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Epilogue | 351

other cartoonists and their publishers, especially in the form of what were now called graphic novels. That term was used as early as the 1960s in fan publications by the pioneering critic Richard Kyle, expressing a hope more than a reality. By the 1980s it had been appropriated by the superhero publishers for fancy comic books with stiffer covers, better printing, and higher prices. But as applied to Maus and to other books that followed, it actually meant something: the comic-book form was being used to tell a long story that in its complexity and subtlety rivaled the best prose fiction. In the most important of these books, like Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World (serialized 1993–97) and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, or The Smartest Kid on Earth (serialized 1995–2000), there is the sense that the cartoonist is marshaling all the elements of a comic-book story— how the panels are broken down, the weight assigned to dialogue and drawing within a panel, the balance within an entire page or a two-page spread—as skillfully as the best contemporary novelists manipulate words alone. The medium’s power may have been revealed most impressively in a 2009 book by Robert Crumb, a version of the book of Genesis, sober and faithful to the biblical text but startlingly alive in the comic-book format. There are reminders in some of these books of the work of cartoonists like Carl Barks and John Stanley. Jimmy Corrigan is particularly Stanley-like in how Chris Ware maintains a steady distance from his character, resisting the sentimental urge to make him at least a little more sympathetic. The appalling drudge Jimmy Corrigan is, the reader learns when he works his way through the book’s intricate jacket (as much a part of its content as anything inside the covers), a comic-book collector—a fact whose implications it may pay the comics-fancying reader not to examine too closely. Ultimately, though, such graphic novels are separated from the Dell comic books of Western Printing’s heyday by much more than a few decades. The cartoonist of the mid–twentieth century, if he caught sight of the possibilities in his medium and wanted to realize them, almost always had to work undercover, concealing his ambitions in comic books that appeared to be as trivial and disposable as those from the competition. Most publishers, even a publisher as upright as Western, tolerated nothing else. In recent years, though, artistic ambition has been acknowledged and celebrated not just in real graphic novels but also in superhero comic books, where adolescent grandiosity has reigned cloaked in art’s mantle.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 351

27/09/14 2:44 PM

352 | Epilogue

Despite the superhero comic books’ pretensions, superheroes have now become preeminently movie characters. The movies once had to struggle to reproduce on film the feats superheroes performed effortlessly on paper, but special effects that were necessarily awkward in a 1940s serial are now convincing in movies that are largely the products of computers. The superhero comic books have for some years served mostly as spawning grounds for new movie characters. So much has happened in so short a time that it is a little as if the centuries separating the composers and painters of the early Renaissance from the comparable artists of our own time had been compressed into a few decades, so that, say, Guillaume de Machaut overlapped with Philip Glass. Those much earlier artists worked within constraints at least as severe as those binding Carl Barks and John Stanley. They worked for patrons who regarded them merely as useful artisans, and the market for their work was limited almost entirely to religious subjects. Opportunities for expression in the modern sense would seem to have been terribly limited; but in the hands of the greatest artists—the Giottos and Machauts—they were surprisingly plentiful. An even better comparison might be with American jazz, regarded early in the twentieth century as a disreputable popular music but by the end of the century accepted as art music worthy of concert halls. That evolution in jazz’s public acceptance did not mirror an evolution in artistic quality, which was as high when Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington played early in the century as when successors like Miles Davis and John Coltrane played decades later. Opportunities for expression existed for a little while, too, in the Dell comic books, even though Western Printing’s editors were ultimately successful in shutting them down. Today, those editors are long gone and comic books in general enjoy a respectability that was never theirs when they were truly popular, but the psychological obstacles to perceiving an artistic triumph in the work of a Carl Barks or John Stanley or Walt Kelly have by no means disappeared. It is easy to believe that as graphic novels multiply and their experiments in storytelling become ever more radical (or they abandon stories altogether), straightforward, unapologetically comic stories like “Lost in the Andes” and “Five Little Babies” and “Feelin’ Mighty Hale, and Farewell” will come to seem as exotic and remote to the average reader as a fourteenth-century mass. Does that matter? Probably not. The best art, art that survives its own time, will always seem a little strange to its new audiences. All that really matters is that the art itself has the chance to live, to find those audiences.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 352

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Epilogue | 353

There was a time when nothing could have seemed more ephemeral than a comic book. Many people undoubtedly shared the opinion Lloyd E. Smith expressed in 1963, when he questioned whether comic books— including the ones he published—were deserving of preservation. But the Dell comics, and many others besides, have survived, collected and read by people who find lasting value in them. Often that value seems remote from anything resembling artistic or literary merit, the comics surviving as objects of nostalgia or simply as investments whose initial value to readers, whatever it was, no longer has anything to do with the much greater market price today of, say, Superman no. 1 or Archie Comics no. 1. At the same time, though, the best stories, like those of Carl Barks, have been reprinted not just with increasing frequency but also with increasing attention to just how difficult it is to reproduce a page from an old comic book satisfactorily. The better such stories look, the likelier that they will be read, or so their admirers hope. In any case, in years to come those stories will have the opportunity to make their case to new readers. With luck those readers will prove to be as perceptive as the midcentury children and parents who recognized and sought out the work of the “very good ones.”

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 353

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 354

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Abbreviations

AC

Author’s collection.

Dell/Nedor Record

Dell Publishing Co., Inc., v. Ned Pines et al., 266 A.D. 837, 42 N.Y.S. 2d 937, N.Y. A.D. 1 Dept. 1943. The case record and appellate briefs are held by the New York State Library, Albany.

ERB

Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., Tarzana, CA. Burroughs’s files of its dealings with Western Printing & Lithographing Company from 1933 to 1960 were made available to the author by Robert R. Barrett, an expert on the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs who was permitted to copy the files for such research purposes by the late Danton Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s son.

GA

Autry Library, Autry National Center, Los Angeles.

JS

John Stanley papers, courtesy of James Stanley.

Kimball

Ward Kimball papers, courtesy of John Kimball, Virginia Kimball, Kelly Kimball, and Amid Amidi.

Marge

Marge [Marjorie Henderson Buell] Papers, 1856–1994, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

OSU, MAC

Milton Caniff Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus.

OSU, TM

Toni Mendez Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus

355

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 355

27/09/14 2:44 PM

356 | Abbreviations

OSU, WK

Walt Kelly Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus. The Pogo Collection and the Walt Kelly Collection are separate collections. Because of the size and complexity of the two Kelly collections in particular, all OSU citations include both box and folder numbers.

SS

Steve Schneider collection

WDA

Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, CA

Wertham papers

Fredric Wertham papers, 1818–1986, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 356

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes

A NOTE ON REPRINTS

Many of the comic-book stories discussed in this book are far more accessible now than they were just a few years ago, thanks to extensive reprint programs. In the most important of these programs, Fantagraphics Books of Seattle is reprinting all of Carl Barks’s stories for the Disney comic books, starting with his best work from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Fantagraphics is also reprinting Walt Kelly’s daily and Sunday Pogo comic strips, and Floyd Gottfredson’s daily and Sunday Mickey Mouse, among many other worthy projects. All of Kelly’s comic-book stories with Albert and Pogo from 1942–54 are being reprinted in a set of three volumes by Hermes Press. John Stanley’s stories for Little Lulu are also available now in a reprint series from Dark Horse, as are many stories from the Jesse Marsh–Gaylord DuBois collaboration on Tarzan.

PREFACE

1. Harlan Ellison, as quoted in the preface to Superman at Fifty, ed. Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle (Cleveland, 1987), p. 12.

INTRODUCTION

1. John R. Vosburgh, “How the Comic Book Started,” Commonweal, May 20, 1949, pp. 146–47. 2. Coulton Waugh, The Comics (New York, 1947; reprint, Jackson, MS, 1994), p. 339. 3. Ibid., p. 341 (illustration caption). 4. ibid., p. 342. 5. Vosburgh, “How the Comic Book Started,” p. 148. 357

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 357

27/09/14 2:44 PM

358 | Notes to Chapter 1

6. For a full account of Wertham’s career, which extended far beyond his attacks on comic books, see Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson, MS, 2005). 7. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York, 1954; reprint, Laurel, NY, 2004), p. 127. 8. Lloyd E. Smith to the author, February 22, 1963, as quoted in Smith to the author, November 12, 1963. Unfortunately, Smith’s earlier correspondence with the author has been lost. Smith, as head of Western Printing & Lithographing Company’s rights and royalties department, negotiated with the proprietors of many popular characters for the rights to use them in comic books and other products. He was also the owner of a library of perhaps forty-five thousand books and donor of thousands of rare books to the Library of Congress and college and university libraries. “A Titan in the World of Books,” Racine (WI) Journal-Times, December 16, 1971, p. 10A, is a memorial editorial and a fuller account of Smith’s career than the obituary that the newspaper published two days earlier. 9. Smith to the author, November 12, 1963. 10. John Benson, preface to “Art & Commerce: An Oral Reminiscence by Will Eisner,” Panels no. 1, Summer 1979, p. 3. 11. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 54–55. The book is a collection of Warshow’s essays for Commentary, including “Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham,” in which the quotation appears; that essay was published originally in the June 1954 issue. 12. Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, April 22, 1954, p. 197. 13. Murray Kempton, “Pogo’s So-So Stories (So, So Wonderful),” New York Post, June 21, 1953, p. 12M. It seems doubtful that Mark Twain was a major influence on Kelly, although characters like the King and the Duke in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn resemble some of the rascals in Kelly’s “Our Gang” stories, in particular.

CHAPTER 1

1. Irving Brecher as told to Hank Rosenfield, The Wicked Wit of the West (Teaneck, NJ, 2009) p. 61. 2. “Biggest Gag Factory on Earth Has 6,000,000 Jokes on File,” Milwaukee Journal Green Sheet, December 11, 1935, p. 1. 3. As evidenced by the book’s copyright registration. 4. “Screen Notes,” New York Times, July 26, 1935, p. 14. 5. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., v. Ned Pines et al., 266 A.D. 837, 42 N.Y.S. 2d 937, N.Y. A.D. 1 Dept. 1943 (hereafter cited as Dell/Nedor Record), p. 153. 6. “Purely Personal,” Motion Picture Daily, July 20, 1931, p. 5. 7. Cecil Munsey, Disneyana: Walt Disney Collectibles (New York, 1974), p. 144. The figures reproduced by Munsey were presumably sent by Horne to the Disneys. In 2010 the Walt Disney Archives could find no such figures for later issues of the magazine.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 358

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 1 |

359

8. “Kay Kamen to Take Hal Horne Magazine,” Motion Picture Daily, June 2, 1936, p. 10. 9. “Hal Horne to Radio; To Become Producer,” Motion Picture Daily, June 17, 1936, p. 14. 10. Walt Disney to Roy O. Disney, August 10, 1936. Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, CA (hereafter cited as WDA). 11. “Mickey Mouse Now Editor!” New York Morning Telegraph, May 15, 1935, p. 4. 12. As reflected in 1932 correspondence in the Leo Hart Printing Co. Inc. papers, University of Rochester. Kamen wrote to Hart from New York as well as from Los Angeles, in the latter case writing on Walt Disney Productions stationery. 13. L. H. Robbins, “Mickey Mouse Emerges as Economist,” New York Times Magazine, March 10, 1935, p. 8. 14. “The Western Story,” Westerner, March 1949, p. 3; Don Black, E.H.: The Life Story of Edward H. Wadewitz (a privately published memorial volume, ca. 1955); “The Story of Western,” Westerner, April 1962, p. 10. The dates and other figures in these official histories differ slightly. The figures adopted here, in cases of conflict, are those that seem to have been best supported by documentary evidence. 15. “Happy Anniversary to Western at Poughkeepsie,” Westerner, December 1964, p. 4. 16. Lowe’s letter is reproduced in Leonard S. Marcus, Golden Legacy (New York, 2007), p. 13. Also see “Western and Disney Extend Agreement,” Westerner, February 1961, p. 14. 17. The Westerner’s 1961 article incorrectly identifies the first Mickey Mouse Big Little Book as Mickey Mouse Sails for Treasure Island, also published in 1933 and also based on the comic strip. 18. One of those books, published by Whitman in 1936, was titled 40 Big Pages of Mickey Mouse. It was a reprint of the first, oversize issue of Hal Horne’s Mickey Mouse Magazine, with a different cover and no advertisements. 19. Howard Anderson to John C. Worrell, memorandum, March 21, 1979. Anderson wrote his memo to Worrell, who was Western Publishing’s vice president for product development and planning, in response to the author’s letter to Western’s president, G. J. Slade, asking for information about the company’s history, and Worrell sent a photocopy to the author. Author’s collection (hereafter cited as AC ). It is not clear why ownership of K.K. was initially placed in the hands of three individual Western executives instead of Western itself, since K.K. was always a subsidiary of the parent company. 20. Jack and Jill advertisement, Printers’ Ink, June 29, 1939, pp. 54–55. 21. Georges Duplaix’s byline, as “George” Duplaix, appeared on “TopsyTurvy Circus,” a story with no Disney content in the October 1938 issue of Mickey Mouse Magazine. 22. Leonard S. Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe (New York, 2008), p. 164. 23. Anderson to Worrell, memorandum. 24. E. H. Wadewitz to C. R. Rothmund (secretary of Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.), January 26, 1940. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., Tarzana, CA (hereafter cited as ERB). Burroughs’s files of its dealings with Western Printing & Lithographing

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 359

27/09/14 2:44 PM

360 | Notes to Chapter 2

Company from 1933 to 1960 were made available to the author by Robert R. Barrett, an expert on the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was permitted to copy the files for such research purposes by the late Danton Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s son. 25. Malcolm Willits, “George Sherman: An Interview with Another One of the ‘Men Behind the Mouse,’ ” Vanguard (a comic-book fan magazine published by Robert Latona), 1968, p. 33. The pages are unnumbered except on the contents page. 26. Ibid., p. 34.

CHAPTER 2

1. Morris Gollub, interview with the author, Hollywood, CA, November 2, 1976. 2. Donald Phelps, “John Stanley,” Newcon 1976 program booklet (Boston), n.p. When Lebeck registered for the draft on February 14, 1942, the registrar’s report showed his height as six feet and his weight as 182 pounds. National Personnel Records Center, Saint Louis. 3. Letty Lebeck Edes, telephone interview with the author, January 29, 2011. 4. Lebeck’s application for a Social Security number, showing Whitman as his employer in Poughkeepsie, was dated March 17, 1938. Oskar Lebeck, application for Social Security number, Social Security Administration. The first issue of Super Comics was dated May 1938; the first issue of Crackajack Funnies, June 1938. 5. “The Story of Whitman,” Westerner, January 1966, p. 7. 6. Ron Goulart, “Before Superman: Part II, Popular Comics,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, June 17, 1983, p. 93. 7. Ron Goulart, “Before Superman: Part III, The Funnies,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, July 29, 1983, p. 20. 8. Oskar Lebeck to John Coleman Burroughs, May 4, 1939. ERB. 9. Oskar Lebeck to John Coleman Burroughs, July 18, 1939. ERB. 10. Oskar Lebeck to John Coleman Burroughs, August 11, 1939. ERB. 11. Oskar Lebeck to John Coleman Burroughs, October 23, 1939. ERB. 12. Oskar Lebeck to John Coleman Burroughs, May 20, 1940. ERB. 13. Oskar Lebeck to John Coleman Burroughs, October 31, 1940. ERB. 14. U.S. Federal Census, 1940, Cortlandt, Westchester, New York, roll T627_2802, page 10A, enumeration district 60–18. 15. Frank Thomas to “Jerry” (probably Jerry DeFuccio), August 12, 1965. AC. 16. Letty Lebeck Edes, telephone interview with the author, July 11, 2010. Oskar arrived in New York on March 8, 1927, and Ruth on December 19, 1927. Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897–1957. Microfilm publication T715, 8,892 rolls. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Washington, DC. The “certificate and record of marriage” in the New York City municipal archives shows that the Lebecks were indeed married on December 19, 1927—the date of Ruth’s arrival from Germany—but officially, at least, the ceremony took place at the New York City Municipal Building.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 360

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 2 |

361

17. U.S. Federal Census, 1930, Queens, Queens, New York, roll 1610, page 4A, enumeration district 1554, image 265.0. 18. Erwin Knoll, “UF Adds ‘Twin Earths’ to Space Fiction Ranks,” Editor & Publisher, June 7, 1952, p. 48. 19. U.S. Federal Census, 1940; Lebeck to Burroughs, May 4, 1939. 20. Goulart, “Before Superman, Part II,” p. 94. 21. “Ray Dirgo Remembers Walt Kelly,” in The Best of Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1982), p. 71. 22. Walt Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo (New York, 1959), p. 5. 23. On Bridgeport when Walt Kelly grew up there, and specifically on the Remington and General Electric plants where his father worked, see Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana and Chicago, 2001), pp. 21, 38, 101, 108; and “Huge War Plant Turned to Peace,” New York Times, March 18, 1920, p. 1. Remington had two factories in Bridgeport. There was an older plant on Barnum Avenue, the Union Metallic Cartridge Company, which Remington continued to operate until the 1980s, in addition to the Boston Avenue rifle factory where Walter Sr. worked and that was built in 1915. The senior Kelly’s occupation and the family’s address were recorded in the 1920 census (U.S. Federal Census, 1920, Bridgeport Ward 12, Fairfield, Connecticut, roll T625_177, p. 13B, enumeration district 90, image 106), in city directories in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1930 census (U.S. Federal Census, 1930, Bridgeport, Fairfield, Connecticut, roll 254, page 23A, enumeration district 86, image 138.0). 24. Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, p. 6. 25. Gil Kane, “Walt Kelly Interview,” Comics Journal, February 1991, p. 58. According to the Journal, Kane—himself a well-regarded comic-book artist—interviewed Kelly “for an audience at the National Cartoonists Society banquet in November 1969, which was no mean feat, since Kelly had apparently been celebrating and was not initially in a cooperative mood.” 26. Martin Levin, ed., Five Boyhoods (Garden City, NY, 1962), p. 112. The book is made up of memoirs by five writers who grew up in the first half of the twentieth century. Kelly’s memoir represents the 1920s. 27. “Ray Dirgo Remembers Walt Kelly,” p. 70. Kelly, in Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, p. 44, said of the circus-poster lettering for P. T. Bridgeport’s dialogue that “one editor wrote me that the speech was hard to read. I could only reply that it was mighty hard to letter, too. In those days I did it myself, having a set of younger eyebones.” 28. “The Land of the Elephant Squash: A Biography of Walt Kelly,” Walt Kelly Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus (hereafter cited as OSU, WK), box 5, folder 16, was published in Pogo Even Better, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1984), pp. 49–50. 29. Levin, Five Boyhoods, p. 112. 30. Ibid., pp. 113–14. Possibly Kelly was referring to unsigned political advertisements, with unflattering caricatures of McLevy’s opponents, that appeared in the Post just before the 1931 election.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 361

27/09/14 2:44 PM

362 | Notes to Chapter 2

31. Confirming the dates of Kelly’s employment is probably no longer possible, since the Bridgeport city government’s archives include no personnel records more than thirty years old. David Dunn, Bridgeport civil service director, email to the author, February 4, 2013. 32. “The Land of the Elephant Squash,” p. 49. This was probably what Kelly’s Disney personnel record called, under the heading “employment history,” work in the “art department of a department store.” Early in 1939, Disney employees were asked to complete questionnaires about their education, employment history, hobbies, and athletic pursuits; the results, along with start dates, salary information, and other personal data, were transferred to sheets to which small photographs of the employees were attached. The sheets were apparently updated with supervisors’ comments, as in Kelly’s case, at least until late in 1941. The purpose of the questionnaires, the Disney manager Paul Hopkins explained, was so that the studio could make the best use of what its employees had to offer: “First, for your personal benefit and secondly, for the studio’s progress.” Some employees apparently were skeptical; thus Hopkins’s stress “on the immediate need of your cooperation in answering the questionnaire AT ONCE, for our mutual benefit.” Hopkins to Homer Brightman, memorandum, April 5, 1939. AC. 33. Kelly was listed as a commercial artist in the Bridgeport city directory for 1935, with his address shown as his parents’ home on East Avenue. 34. Murray Robinson, “Pogo’s Papa,” Collier’s, March 8, 1952, pp. 20–21. There is a detailed version of that episode, clearly the source of Robinson’s version, in an untitled Kelly biography, written by him in the third person, that survived in carbon copies in his papers. Internal references date the biography to early 1952. The same file includes a draft version of the biography, with emendations in Kelly’s handwriting. OSU, WK 5 16. 35. Don Maley, “Walt Kelly Muses on His 20 Years of Playing Possum,” Editor & Publisher, April 10, 1969, p. 46. Maley has Kelly studying under Booth in 1931, rather than the more likely 1935, but establishing the correct date is probably not possible, since the Phoenix Art Institute’s records have long since vanished. The school merged with other institutions twice, becoming first the New York Phoenix School of Design in 1944 and then a part of the Pratt Institute in 1974, as well as changing locations several times, and any records were lost along the way. Paul E. Schlotthauer, librarian and archivist, Pratt Institute, email to the author, February 5, 2013. 36. Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr., on a Web page devoted to Kelly, has pointed out the unmistakable Booth influence on the inside front and back covers of the Dell comic book Fairy Tale Parade no. 5, February–March 1943. www.bpib.com /kelly.htm. 37. Robinson, “Pogo’s Papa,” p. 54. 38. Kelly’s Disney personnel record. 39. Bill Crouch Jr., “Two Mavericks at the Disney Studio,” in Phi Beta Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1989), p. 131. Helen De Lacy announced her resignation from the Girl Scouts, effective in September 1937, in June of that year. “Girl Scouts Entertained at Los Gatos,” Oakland Tribune, June 24, 1937, p. 15.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 362

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 2 |

363

40. Clair Weeks, interview with Milton Gray, Los Alamitos, CA, May 13, 1978. The interview was recorded for the author as part of the research for his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. 41. Ward Kimball, interview with the author, Burbank, CA, June 6, 1969. A studio memorandum noted that Kelly had been transferred to the inbetween department—that is, moved into animation—effective January 4, 1937, but that was probably only a temporary reassignment prompted by Snow White’s demands. John Rose to Herb Lamb, memorandum, December 31, 1936. WDA. 42. Thomas Andrae and Geoffrey Blum, “Ward Kimball Remembers Walt Kelly,” in Phi Beta Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1989), pp. 134–35. The interview was not dated in either of its published appearances, but according to Blum, he and Andrae recorded their interview with Kimball on September 8, 1981. 43. Kimball, interview, June 6, 1969. 44. Kelly registered for the draft in Los Angeles on October 16 (or possibly October 18; the handwriting is not clear), 1940. Selective Service System records, National Personnel Records Center, Saint Louis. His wife, Helen, was the registrar for his local draft board, no. 227, in Los Angeles; she signed the “Registrar’s Report” when he signed up. 45. Ward Kimball, interview with the author, San Gabriel, CA, November 7, 1976. 46. Hank Ketcham, interview with the author, Monterey, CA, June 10, 1991. Rebecca Cline, archivist for the Walt Disney Company, provided the dates of Ketcham’s employment (October 9, 1939, to November 24, 1941) in an email to the author, November 26, 2012. 47. Kelly’s Disney personnel record. 48. Kimball, in preparation for his 1981 interview with Geoffrey Blum and Thomas Andrae, assembled two typewritten pages headed “From Record Book (Kelly),” consisting of entries from his journal in which Kelly was mentioned. The first page only is reproduced at the end of that interview. The entry for Tuesday, May 27, 1941, reads as follows: “Kelly is leaving on the 5:15 train for Bridgeport Conn. ‘On vacation’ he says. We doubt this. We guess he is leaving Disney’s for good to work on a newspaper.” The wording but not the substance is different in the relevant entry in the journal itself; Kimball’s biographer, Amid Amidi, sent a scan of that hand-printed journal entry to the author on March 6, 2013. It reads as follows: “Kelly leaving on the 5:15 for Bridgeport Conn ‘on vacation’ I doubt it—I think he’s quitting to go back to work on the newspaper!” Ward Kimball papers, courtesy of John Kimball, Virginia Kimball, and Kelly Kimball, Pasadena, CA (hereafter cited as Kimball). 49. Kimball, interview, November 7, 1976. 50. David Hilberman, interview with the author, Palo Alto, CA, October 24, 1976. 51. Kelly’s Disney personnel record. 52. Bob Abel, “The Man from Pogo,” True, October 1966, p. 74. 53. Kelly to Kimball and Fred Moore, ca. June 14, 1941 (the postmark date on the envelope). Kimball. 54. Levin, Five Boyhoods, p. 111; Abel, “The Man from Pogo,” p. 74.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 363

27/09/14 2:44 PM

364 | Notes to Chapter 3

55. Selective Service System records. National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. 56. Kelly to Kimball and Moore. 57. Kimball wrote in his journal of seeing Kelly at the studio on Friday, July 18, 1941, when Kimball returned at 3:30 p.m. from an extended lunch break: “Kelly there! Not coming back to work. Has to stay in Conn. with sister! Gave me a rough outline of his book that he’s submitting to a publisher. About Hitler and Mussolini. Looks good.” Kimball’s biographer, Amid Amidi, sent a scan of that hand-printed journal entry to the author on February 27, 2013. That entry seems to be the basis of the entry that is misdated Thursday, July 17, 1941, on the second of Kimball’s typewritten pages of journal excerpts. That version, altered in other respects, reads as follows: “Kelly surprised us by showing at the Tam O Shanter [sic] restaurant. He says that he is not coming back to work. Says he has to stay in Conn. with sister. Gave us a rough outline of a book that he is submitting to a publisher. It is about Hitler and Mussolini. It looked good.” Kimball. Kelly’s address on his draft registration card was changed from Los Angeles to his parents’ home in Bridgeport as of August 11, 1941, the day Walt Disney departed for South America. 58. According to Ed Ovalle of the Walt Disney Archives, “Walt’s desk diary does have ‘Walt Kelly’ on the morning of July 25, 1941.” Ovalle, email to the author, August 21, 2013. 59. Crouch, “Two Mavericks.” 60. Walt Disney to Kay Kamen, Leo F. Samuels, and Mike McClintock (three separate letters), August 11, 1941. WDA. 61. Samuels to Walt Disney, August 25, 1941. WDA. 62. Crouch’s notes were published as footnotes to a “work in progress” biography by Don Thompson and Maggie Thompson, “Walt Kelly,” Okefenokee Star, vol. 1, no. 2, Late Summer 1977, n.p. 63. Kelly to Walt Disney, undated letter date-stamped as received at the studio on November 6, 1941. WDA. Kelly wrote to Disney again on May 25, 1960, a friendly letter—mostly about fund-raising for epilepsy research—that includes this paragraph: “Just in case I ever forgot to thank you, I’d like you to know that I, for one, have long appreciated the sort of training and atmosphere that you set up back there in the thirties. There were drawbacks as there are to everything, but it was an astounding experiment and experience as I look back on it. Certainly it was the only education I ever received and I hope I’m living up to a few of your hopes for other people.” OSU, WK, box 3, folder 44.

CHAPTER 3

1. The book is titled A Story of Our Gang on its cover, A Day With Our Gang on its title page. 2. “Eleanor Lewis Packer, w’19, Directs National Publicity for Famous Movie Stars of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Company,” Ohio State University Monthly, May 1930, p. 365. 3. U.S. Federal Census, 1930, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, roll 124, page 3A, enumeration district 829, image 481.0.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 364

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 3 |

365

4. “Two Publicity Women Opening New Agency,” Hollywood Reporter, May 2, 1933, p. 4. 5. When Packer applied for a Social Security number, her application was dated December 2, 1936, and showed Western Printing & Lithographing Company as her employer; the company presumably provided the form to its employees, since its name was stamped on it. Eleanor Lewis, application for Social Security number, Social Security Administration. 6. “McCarthy’s Boswell,” Ohio State University Monthly, December 1939, p. 9. 7. Roger Armstrong, interview with the author, Laguna Beach, CA, June 5, 1969. 8. Ibid. 9. Chase Craig, undated autobiographical notes written at the request of Mark Evanier. Courtesy of Mark Evanier. 10. “McCarthy’s Boswell.” 11. C. R. Rothmund to Lloyd E. Smith, May 27, 1941. ERB. Rothmund, who as secretary of Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. had his office in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana, mentions having seen Lebeck in California in March 1941. 12. Dell/Nedor Record, p. 171. 13. Chase Craig to the author, July 25, 1978. 14. Armstrong, interview. Craig’s comic strip, Odd Bodkins, was syndicated for about a year, from June 1941 to June 1942. 15. “Snappy Stories Has New Owners,” Printers’ Ink, January 13, 1921, p. 28; “G. T. Delacorte, Jr., Forms Dell Publishing Co.,” Printers’ Ink, January 13, 1922, p. 189; George T. Delacorte, “Dell Rings the Bell,” American News Trade Journal, March 1952, p. 12. 16. The 1900 census has the Tonkonogy family listed on two separate pages, both dated June 7, 1900 (although one is dated “June 7 or 8”). One shows George’s mother, Sadie, as head, and the other George Tonkonogy Sr. as head. Neither do the addresses match. The citation for George Tonkonogy as head: U.S Federal Census, 1900, Brooklyn Ward 26, Kings, New York, roll T623_1064, page 14B, enumeration district 453. For Sadie as head: U.S. Federal Census, 1900, Brooklyn Ward 30, Kings, New York, roll T623_1069, page 7B, enumeration district 559. The address shown for Sadie, 135 Osborn Street in Brooklyn, is the address listed for George Tonkonogy in a 1901 Brooklyn city directory. 17. “Our New York Letter,” Jewish Exponent, October 4, 1907, p. 10. 18. George Tonkonogy Jr.’s graduation from Public School no. 84 was reported in the Brooklyn Standard Union, June 27, 1906. Online version: http:// bklyn-genealogy-info.stevemorse.org/Graduate/1906/1906.PS84.June.html. 19. Order in the Matter of an Application of GEORGE TONKONOGY, JR. for Leave to Assume the Name of GEORGE DELACORTE, JR., Monmouth County Common Pleas Court, December 6, 1917. New Jersey State Archives, Trenton. The name change took effect on January 6, 1918. Although Delacorte was routinely identified in the press and elsewhere as “George T. Delacorte, Jr.,” and even signed letters that way, the “T.” presumably standing for Tonkonogy, his legal name was “George Delacorte, Jr.” 20. Dell/Nedor Record, pp. 105–6.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 365

27/09/14 2:44 PM

366 | Notes to Chapter 4

21. Ibid., p. 85. 22. K.K. Publications had published a sort of Donald Duck comic book two years earlier—reprints of comic strips in black and white—but that book, with its formal title page, was more like a Whitman children’s book than a true comic book. 23. Except as noted otherwise, David R. Smith, head of the Walt Disney Archives until 2010, provided the figures for the number of copies of Disney comic books on which Western Printing & Lithographing Company paid royalties to Walt Disney Productions. 24. Dell/Nedor Record, p.176. 25. Max Hastings, “Grandma Keeps an Eye on the Books,” London Evening Standard, July 28, 1976, p. 15. 26. Dell/Nedor Record, p. 48. New Funnies may have been a special case, too, since it originated as The Funnies, published by Dell before its affiliation with Western. 27. What would have been Red Ryder no. 2 was published instead as HiSpot Comics no. 2 before the title reverted to Red Ryder with no. 3. 28. Dell published Gene Autry Comics nos. 11 and 12 in 1944 and then brought out subsequent issues as part of its Four Color series of one-shots until it began publishing Gene Autry Comics on a bimonthly schedule in 1946. 29. John C. Worrell to the author, March 22, 1979. 30. Mary Spillane, “Western Tells Its Stand on Comics: No Crime, Horror or Romance,” Racine (WI) Sunday Bulletin, May 23, 1954, p. 2. 31. Howard Anderson to John C. Worrell, memorandum, March 21, 1979. AC.

CHAPTER 4

1. Roger Armstrong to the author, October 8, 1967. 2. Dell’s black-and-white series lasted roughly five years, from 1937 until late in 1942. 3. Armstrong to the author. Armstrong was actually twenty-four years old at the time. 4. Buettner’s Federal Schools employment was recorded in the Minneapolis city directory from 1928 to 1930 (he was identified as an instructor in 1930) and the 1930 federal census. The 1931 city directory showed him as an instructor at a company called the Bureau of Engraving. In 1932 he was listed simply as a cartoonist, and he was absent from the directory from 1933 on. According to an online biography by David Saunders (www.pulpartists.com/BC.html), Buettner contributed cartoons to Wilford Fawcett’s Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang and eventually worked for Fawcett in New York (where he was living in 1935, according to the 1940 federal census). Buettner’s employment in Minneapolis overlapped Carl Barks’s employment there by Wilford’s former wife, Antoinette “Annette” Fawcett, who owned a competing magazine, the Calgary EyeOpener, but if the two men ever became aware of their common roots in such magazines when they were both working for Western Printing, Barks never mentioned it. 5. Armstrong to the author.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 366

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 5 |

367

6. Roger Armstrong, interview with the author, Laguna Beach, CA, June 5, 1969. 7. Armstrong, letter dated October 2006 and published in The Comics (“an original first-person history” by Robin Snyder), October 2007, p. 75. Armstrong wrote: “I knew absolutely nothing of the [New York] office, other than Oskar Lebeck’s kindly and helpful letters. I never met him, but remember him with great affection.” 8. Armstrong, interview. 9. Roger Armstrong to the author, September 23, 1970. 10. Veve Risto to John Carey, May 16, 1943. Steve Schneider Collection, New York (hereafter cited as SS). 11. “New Tryout Class,” Bulletin (Disney in-house newsletter), January 17, 1939, p. 1. 12. Chase Craig, undated autobiographical notes written at the request of Mark Evanier. Courtesy of Mark Evanier. 13. “We Mourn” (a Buettner obituary), Westerner, April 1965, p. 16. The two studios most commonly cited as Buettner’s employers are Disney and Harman-Ising, but Disney has no record of Buettner’s employment there (Rebecca Cline, Disney archivist, email to the author, March 3, 2011), and there is no mention of Buettner in a list of Harman-Ising employees that survived in Hugh Harman’s personal papers. Photocopy. AC. Buettner’s only work in animation may have been for Cartoon Films Ltd., a small Hollywood studio that made advertising films; he is identified as one of the cartoonists in a 1941 photo of the staff. Dana Larrabee, “Ed Benedict on Animation—the Facts of Life,” Film Collectors’ World no. 14, May 1, 1977, p. 33.

CHAPTER 5

1. Bill Spicer and Vince Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” Graphic Story Magazine, Summer 1968, p. 13. 2. Randall W. Scott, Alphabetical List of Comic Book Stories by Gaylord Du Bois (East Lansing, MI, 1986). Scott’s Alphabetical List is identified as a working paper rather than a formal bibliography. DuBois’s account books are part of the comic art collection at Michigan State University. The dates from the account books are difficult to align with the published stories, but he evidently wrote a number of “Pat Patsy & Pete,” “Chester Turtle,” and “Ringy Roonga” installments that were published in 1943–44. 3. Roger Armstrong, interview with the author, Laguna Beach, CA, June 5, 1969. 4. Lebeck copyrighted in his own name the comic books he edited (apart from material copyrighted by licensors like Walter Lantz and Johnny Gruelle) until 1948. He then assigned those copyrights to Western Printing, which, as it turned out, renewed none of them. In 1948, Western began copyrighting in its own name the comic books and features that it originated. 5. The fullest account of the campaigns against comic books is David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York, 2008). Sterling North’s role is discussed on pp. 39–47.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 367

27/09/14 2:44 PM

368 | Notes to Chapter 6

6. William B. Jones Jr., Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, with Illustrations (Jefferson, NC, 2002), p. 9. 7. Morris Gollub, interview with the author, Hollywood, CA, November 2, 1976. 8. The fullest account of Jameson’s life and career is by David Saunders at the Pulp Artists website: www.pulpartists.com/Jameson.html. 9. “London Calling: Kelly Interviewed by the Sunday Times,” in Pluperfect Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1987), p. 96. The interview, by Henry Brandon, Washington correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, took place in the fall of 1959. Brandon provided a transcript to Kelly, and the published version incorporates Kelly’s revisions. 10. Hall Syndicate, “Walt Kelly Biographical Sketch,” a mimeographed press release dated “10/5,” probably October 1955. AC. 11. Japanese: A Guide to the Spoken Language, no. TM [Technical Manual] 30–341 (Washington, 1943); and Dutch: A Guide to the Spoken Language, no. TM 30–307 (Washington, 1943). That is how those booklets are identified on their title pages, but each is identified as a “language guide” on the front cover. As the Kelly scholar Steve Thompson has pointed out, Kelly put his work on the Japanese guide to use in his “Our Gang” stories by having one of the enemy soldiers speak phonetic Japanese in the episode published in Our Gang Comics no. 12, July–August 1944. Steve Thompson, “Returning to Our Gang,” in Walt Kelly’s Our Gang, vol. 2 (Seattle, 2007), p. 6. 12. A I. Spangler, The Mechanics of English: A Self-Teaching Course, illustrated by Walter C. Kelly Jr. (Madison, WI, 1944); and Spangler, Building Good Sentences: A Self-Teaching Course, no. EM [Education Manual] 102, illustrated by Walter C. Kelly Jr. (Madison, WI, 1944). 13. Bill Crouch Jr., footnote to Don Thompson and Maggie Thompson, “Walt Kelly,” Okefenokee Star vol. 1, no. 2, Late Summer 1977, n.p. Surviving records for the language guides, which were classified as “technical manuals,” are at the U.S. National Archives, College Park, in Record Group 407, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, but they deal only with the printing and distribution of the manuals, and not with how they were prepared or how artists like Kelly were hired and assigned to particular manuals.

CHAPTER 6

1. Walt Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo (New York, 1959), p. 9. 2. Disney had begun preliminary work on an Uncle Remus animated feature by June 24, 1939, the date on a sheet of “suggested models” that includes an opossum character. Kelly was still in the Disney story department then, but the sheet is initialed by John Miller and Campbell Grant, members of the Disney “model department,” and there is no reason to believe Kelly had anything to do with it. 3. Thomas Andrae and Geoffrey Blum, “Ward Kimball Remembers Walt Kelly,” in Phi Beta Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1989), p. 140.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 368

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 7 |

369

4. Harrison Fisher, “Pogo’s Pal Kelly,” Maclean’s, April 15, 1950, p. 52. The Pennsylvania roots of the senior Kelly and his parents were recorded in every U.S. census from 1900 on. 5. Nancy Beiman, “Walt and Selby Kelly,” Cartoonist PROfiles, December 1983, p. 27. 6. Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, p. 6; Martin Levin, ed., Five Boyhoods (Garden City, NY, 1962), p. 109. 7. Bill Crouch Jr., footnote to Don Thompson and Maggie Thompson, “Walt Kelly,” Okefenokee Star, vol. 1, no. 2, late summer 1977, n.p. 8. Levin, Five Boyhoods, p. 107. 9. Arthur Frank Wertheim, Radio Comedy (New York, 1979), p. 28. 10. Ibid., p. 48. 11. Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana and Chicago, 2001), pp. 20, 106. 12. Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, p. 6. 13. Levin, Five Boyhoods, p. 93. 14. Murray Robinson, “Pogo’s Papa,” Collier’s, March 8, 1952, p. 65. 15. Julian May, “Aesop Takes to the Swamp,” Today, November 1951, p. 8. 16. From the untitled Kelly biography, written by him in the third person, that survives in carbon copies in his papers. OSU, WK, box 5, file 16. 17. Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, rev. ed. (New York, 1896; reprint, 1921), p. viii. 18. Doris Willens, “Walt Kelly’s ‘Pogo’ Ribs Stupidities of Mankind,” Editor & Publisher, December 11, 1948, p. 42. Willens quotes Kelly as saying, in regard to his admiration for Milne: “I sometimes think we’ve lost something of the human element in becoming so slick and modern in our living, in our writing.”

CHAPTER 7

1. Dell/Nedor Record, p. 68. 2. Ibid., p. 154. 3. Roger Armstrong, tape-recorded letter to the author, January 18, 1975. Chase Craig, who wrote the early stories with Mary Jane and Sniffles, named the girl after Mary Jane Green, a fellow tenant in his rooming house on Gramercy Place; they later married. 4. Carl Barks remembered that Buettner, as art editor, required him to redraw a buxom girl duck in the “Donald Duck” story for the June 1943 Walt Disney’s Comics, a story that Barks’s records showed him delivering to Western on January 29, 1943. Barks spent several hours at Western’s Beverly Hills office redrawing those pages to reduce the girl’s bust line. Gottfried Helnwein, “Conversation with Carl Barks,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 151. Helnwein interviewed Barks on July 11, 1992. An official company history of the Los Angeles office showed Buettner freelancing for Western in 1940, then becoming a part-time art director in 1941 and a fulltime art director in 1942. The two earlier dates are difficult to line up with what is known of Buettner’s work otherwise. “The ‘West’ in Western,” Westerner,

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 369

27/09/14 2:44 PM

370 | Notes to Chapter 7

August 1949, p. 7. Buettner’s obituary in Western’s house organ said: “Carl’s first association with Western was on a free lance basis, but in 1942 he became a permanent member of the Western staff, having been employed as art director for Western products created on the West Coast.” “We Mourn,” Westerner, April 1965, p. 16. 5. Roger Armstrong, interview with the author, Laguna Beach, CA, June 5, 1969. 6. Lynn Karp, interview with the author, Lancaster, CA, September 25, 1990. 7. Armstrong, interview. 8. From a biographical questionnaire Risto completed for Who’s Who of American Comic Books, ed. Jerry Bails and Hames Ware (a privately published four-volume set, published between 1973 and 1976). Courtesy of Hames Ware. 9. Roger Armstrong to the author, August 11, 1968. Armstrong wrote the day after having dinner with Carl Barks, whom he saw for the first time in perhaps twenty years. “I did find out one astounding thing from Carl: he told me last night that he was paid exactly the SAME PAGE RATE as all the rest of us . . . .he got only $10.00 per 8 panel page, inked, lettered and delivered to the Beverly Hills office!” 10. Veve Risto to John Carey, December 14, 1942. SS. There is nothing readily identifiable as Risto’s work in any of the Fawcett and early Dell issues of Gene Autry Comics, so whatever Risto drew may not have been published. 11. Veve Risto to John Carey, June 2, 1944. SS. 12. Roger Armstrong, tape-recorded letter to the author, May 9, 1975. 13. Risto to Carey, June 2, 1944. 14. Will Friedwald, “An Interview with Jim Davis,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, November 2, 1984, pp. 40–42 15. Naturalization record, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 16. Royal Indemnity Co. v. Sangor et al., 166 Wis. 148, 164 N.W. 821, October 23, 1917. Pietsch v. Sangor et al., 173 Wisc. 301, 181 N.W. 312, February 8, 1921. 17. The 1920 U.S. Federal Census showed “Benjamine Sangor” and his parents as born in Wisconsin, rather than Russia, and Sangor himself as several years older than he actually was, but those were probably either the enumerator’s errors or—at least as likely given his history—Sangor’s misrepresentations. U.S. Federal Census, 1920, Chicago Ward 3, Cook (Chicago), Illinois, roll T625_313, page 9A, enumeration district 180, image 811. Jacquelyn Sangor’s presence at the academy was recorded as follows: U.S. Federal Census, 1920 Chicago Ward 6, Cook (Chicago) Illinois, roll T625_309, page 13A, enumeration district 299, image 349. 18. “Public Auction Sale of Real Estate,” advertisement, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 26, 1922, p. A18. Sangor was listed as a Chicago attorney in Martindale’s American Law Directory for 1922 and 1924–28. 19. “Major E. S. Farrow Dies in Street Here,” New York Times, September 10, 1926, p. 21. As noted in that article, Sangor’s office was at 1457 Broadway in Manhattan, but B. W. Sangor & Co. was incorporated in New Jersey on August 26, 1924.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 370

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 7 |

371

20. “Jersey Bankers Guilty,” New York Times, November 3, 1935, p. 33. 21. Sangor arrived on June 11, 1940, aboard the S.S. Mexico. Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897–1957 (National Archives Microfilm Publication T715, 8892 rolls); Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Washington, DC. 22. Dell/Nedor Record, p. 163. Cinema Comics Inc. certificate of incorporation filed September 15, 1939. New York State Department of State, Division of Corporations. 23. The passenger list for the S.S. Queen of Bermuda, which sailed from Hamilton, Bermuda, to New York on September 10, 1938, arriving on September 12, includes the names of both Ned and Jacqueline [sic] Pines, but a line has been drawn through their names, presumably indicating a change of plans, although there appears to be no record that the Pineses departed from Hamilton on another ship. Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897–1957 (National Archives Microfilm Publication T715, 8892 rolls); Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Washington, DC. 24. Dell/Nedor Record, p. 164. 25. Gordon Sheehan, interview with the author, Evanston, IL, April 20, 1973. Jim Davis remembered Sangor rather differently, as “a short man . . . way overweight, and he smoked big, black cigars.” Michael Vance, “Forbidden Adventures: The History of the American Comics Group,” Alter Ego no. 61, August 2006, p. 15. 26. The title on the cover of no. 65 is The New Funnies, but the official title in the indicia is still The Funnies. Cover title and indicia title were again aligned in no. 66, as New Funnies. 27. Dell/Nedor Record, p. 7. 28. Ibid., p. 218. 29. Sangor incorporated as Creston Publications Corporation in August 1942. His name is nowhere on the certificate of incorporation for either Creston Publications or Cinema Comics, perhaps because of his criminal record, but he was listed with Creston as the owner of, for example, Giggle Comics in the statement of ownership required by the post office in the February 1947 and April 1953 issues. His estate owned all the stock in both companies when they were dissolved after his death. 30. Dave Bennett, “An Interview with Jack Bradbury,” Ace Comics Presents no. 2, July 1987, p. 6. 31. Friedwald, “An Interview with Jim Davis,” p. 42. 32. Briefly in 1945–46, many of the Dell comic books shrank even further, to thirty-two pages, plus covers. The stories had about as many panels as before, but the panels were smaller, and as many as a dozen were crowded onto a page. The effect was claustrophobic. 33. Vance, “Forbidden Adventures,” p. 14. 34. Friedwald, “An Interview with Jim Davis,” p. 42. 35. Ibid., p. 44. 36. Lloyd Turner, interview with the author, Shady Cove, OR, May 13, 1989.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 371

27/09/14 2:44 PM

372 | Notes to Chapter 8

37. Jack Bradbury, interview with Milton Gray, Irvine, CA, March 23, 1977. The interview was recorded for the author as part of the research for his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. 38. Friedwald, “An Interview with Jim Davis,” p. 44.

CHAPTER 8

1. Bruce Hamilton, “A Tripp Down Memory Lane,” in The Little Lulu Library, ed. John Clark, set 6, vol. 16 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1985), p. 13. 2. Ibid. 3. “The Little Field Mouse,” in Our Gang Comics no. 3, January–February 1943, appears to be the product of the same sort of tracing. 4. Dell began publishing one-shot color comic books in late 1939, two years after it launched its series of black-and-white one-shots. After a couple of years, Dell began numbering each color one-shot as a “Four Color Comic” on its cover. The series went through no. 25, in mid-1942, then for some reason resumed with no. 1. The “Four Color Comic” designation was dropped after the first hundred issues of the second series, but the numbering of the series continued for twenty years. 5. Carl Barks to the author, May 17, 1981. 6. When Lebeck registered for the draft on February 14, 1942, he listed his residence address in Croton-on-Hudson, but in the separate line for his mailing address he listed the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles—an address that was then crossed out, probably because he or someone at his draft board realized that it was a permanent mailing address that was wanted. 7. The interviews with Barks were conducted by Donald Ault and Thomas Andrae on August 4, 1975 (a videotaped interview), and by Bruce Hamilton (from questions by Hamilton, Geoffrey Blum, and Andrae) on September 24, 1983. Blum provided the author with the relevant pages from his transcripts of both interviews. A composite account “by Carl Barks” that includes material from the 1983 interview and is titled “Sailing for Pirate Gold” was published in The Carl Barks Library, ed. Bruce Hamilton, set 1, vol. 1 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1984), p. 131. 8. Jack Hannah, interview with the author, Glendale, CA, November 3, 1976. 9. Barks, interview with Hamilton, September 24, 1983. 10. Geoffrey Blum, “It Started with Pluto,” in Carl Barks Collection, ed. Geoffrey Blum, vol. 1, p. 34. Carl Barks Collection, a thirty-volume set reprinting all of Barks’s Disney stories in color, with extensive commentary by Blum, was translated into the languages of five European countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Finland) and published in those languages between 2005 and 2009, but it has not yet been published in English. Blum made available to the author the English originals of his essays for the set. 11. Transcript of story meeting, “Pirate Story, Mickey Feature #11,” March 25, 1941. Photocopy originating with Homer Brightman, one of the four Disney writers—the others were Harry Reeves, Roy Williams, and Gilles de Tremaudan—who attended the meeting with Disney. Barks was not present. AC.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 372

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 9 |

373

12. Hannah, interview. 13. Carl Barks to Hal Adelquist, November 9, 1942. WDA. 14. The date on the title deed is mentioned in endnote 27 on page 32 of volume 1 of Carl Barks Collection. 15. Carl Barks to the author, April 17, 1996. He mentioned his operation in an interview with the author in Goleta, CA, on November 22, 1973. 16. Barks, interview with Hamilton. 17. Barks, interview with the author. 18. Carl Barks to the author, April 17, 1967. 19. Barks, interview with the author. 20. Barks to the author, April 17, 1967. 21. Dorothy Strebe to Carl Barks, n.d. (ca. December 1942). WDA. Strebe likely wrote that script. She wrote stories for other Western Printing publications in the 1940s, including the first “Li’l Bad Wolf” story in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 52, January 1945. That story caught the eye of the Disney executive Hal Adelquist, who wrote to Walt Disney on December 13, 1944, to suggest that it could be the basis for an animated cartoon: “The attached story, ‘The Li’l Bad Wolf,’ seems to me to be a good possibility for a short subject. The twist on the little wolf who doesn’t want to be bad and prefers being a vegetarian seems to suggest swell possibilities. In checking to find out who did the original story, I find that it was done by Dorothy Strebe, edited by Eleanor Packard [sic], and the art work done by Carl Betner [sic].” Hal Adelquist to Walt Disney, memorandum, December 13, 1944. WDA. No such cartoon was ever made. 22. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 23. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, May 30, 1971. 24. Barks, interview with the author, November 22, 1973. 25. Geoffrey Blum, “Imagining Egypt,” in Carl Barks Collection, ed. Geoffrey Blum, vol. 1, pp. 223–34. For a comprehensive examination of Barks’s use of National Geographic for the settings of his stories, see Thomas Andrae and Geoffrey Blum, “The Far Away and Long Ago” in The Carl Barks Library, ed. Bruce Hamilton, set 1, vol. 1 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1986), pp. 229–52. 26. Barks, interview with the author, May 30, 1971. 27. Martin L. Greim, “Crusader Comments,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, December 17, 1976, p. 16.

CHAPTER 9

1. Jim Korkis, “An Animated Life: The Story of Jack Hannah,” Persistence of Vision no. 8, 1996, p. 32. 2. Malcolm Willits, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson, “The Duck Man,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault, p. 7. This article is based on an interview Willits recorded with Barks in December 1962 and subsequently edited and expanded for publication in the Thompsons’ mimeographed fan magazine Comic Art in 1968. 3. Geoffrey Blum, “Animating Scrooge,” in Carl Barks Collection, ed. Geoffrey Blum, vol. 13, p. 83. 4. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, November 22, 1973.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 373

27/09/14 2:44 PM

374 | Notes to Chapter 10

5. Ibid. 6. Carl Barks, interview with Patrick Garabedian, Goleta, CA, October 30, 1971. Garabedian made the tape recording available to the author. 7. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, May 30, 1971. 8. Roger Armstrong to the author, July 16, 1967. 9. Roger Armstrong, interview with the author, Laguna Beach, CA, June 5, 1969. 10. Roger Armstrong to the author, August 18, 1967. 11. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Temecula, CA, August 13, 1978. 12. Armstrong, interview. 13. Chase Craig to the author, July 25, 1978. 14. Barks, interview, August 13, 1978. 15. For Chase Craig: undated autobiographical notes written at the request of Mark Evanier. Courtesy of Mark Evanier. For Armstrong: U.S. World War II Enlistment Records, 1938–1945. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 64, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 16. Armstrong, interview. 17. Ibid. 18. Carl Barks, Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times (Millbrae, CA, 1981), p. 365. Barks’s comments, based on interviews with Edward Summer, accompany recolored versions of a dozen stories from Uncle Scrooge. 19. Barks, interview, October 30, 1971.

CHAPTER 10

1. Irvin H. Ziemann, “Gaylord DuBois, King of the Comics Writers,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, October 6, 1989, p. 64. 2. According to Colin D. Riley, Boston University’s executive director of media relations: “There is a record of Gaylord DuBois attending BU’s College of Liberal Arts . . . from 1925 to 1927. Unfortunately our records do not indicate that he received a degree.” Riley, email to the author, February 21, 2012. 3. “A Titan in the World of Books,” Racine (WI) Journal-Times, December 16, 1971, p. 10A. 4. Mary Robison, reference librarian, General Theological Seminary, New York, email to the author, January 19, 2012. 5. Lou Mougin, “Gaylord DuBois,” Comics Interview no. 17, November 1984, p. 10. 6. Ziemann, “Gaylord DuBois,” p. 65. 7. The Burroughs company, through its secretary, C. R. Rothmund, initiated what became a long relationship with Whitman by writing a short, stiff letter to the publisher on December 7, 1933, advising Whitman to deal with the Burroughs company directly on “all negotiations of any nature for the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, or books concerning any of the characters originated by Mr. Burroughs.” ERB. 8. St. Clair McKelway, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: The Literary Character in Business & Commerce,” New Yorker, October 26, 1935, p. 90.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 374

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 11 |

375

The January 6 date was on the website of Stephen Slesinger Inc.: www. stephenslesinger.com. 9. S. E. Lowe to C. R. Rothmund, July 8, 1935. ERB. 10. The Big Little Books’ credited author was Leon Morgan, who was also credited as the author of several other Big Little Books in the mid-1930s. 11. Fred Harman, “New Tracks in Old Trails,” True West, October 1968, pp. 59–60; Mario DeMarco, “Fred Harman, Master Draftsman of the Western Figure,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, April 17, 1987, p. 114. 12. Siegel v. Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., 658 F. Supp. 2d 1047. 13. Andy Rooney, Out of My Mind (New York, 2006), p. 288. 14. Ziemann, “Gaylord DuBois,” p. 65. 15. Camille Cazedessus Jr., “Gaylord DuBois, Veteran Tarzan Script Writer,” ERBdom, October 1962, p. 7. 16. Ibid., p. 9. The distinction DuBois described between “Art Editor” and “Script Editor” reflected the division of responsibilities in Western’s Los Angeles office in the 1950s and 1960s. That office was then handling the Tarzan comic book that DuBois wrote for many years. 17. Randall W. Scott, Alphabetical List of Comic Book Stories by Gaylord Du Bois (East Lansing, MI, 1986). 18. “George F. Kerr Dies; Illustrator Was 84,” New York Times, October 23, 1953, p. 23. In fact, Kerr was probably eighty-three at the time of his death. The fullest account of Kerr’s career, by David Saunders, is at the Pulp Artists website: www.pulpartists.com/Kerr.html. Kerr’s career as an illustrator ended a few years before his death when he lost his eyesight, which had been failing for years. 19. Gil Kane, “Walt Kelly Interview,” Comics Journal, February 1991, p. 53. Goldberg was a member of the audience for the interview. 20. Cazedessus, “Gaylord DuBois,” p. 7.

CHAPTER 11

1. U.S. Federal Census, 1920, Manhattan Assembly District 13, New York, New York, roll T625_1209, page 5B, enumeration district 972, image 812; U.S. Federal Census, 1930 Bronx, Bronx, New York, roll 1490, page 3B, enumeration district 694, image 240.0. 2. Jim Amash, “Quality Control: A Conversation with Gill Fox,” Alter Ego no. 12, January 2002, pp. 5–6. 3. “Pupils Get Awards in Art Tomorrow,” New York Times, June 26, 1932, p. 28. 4. Donald Phelps, “John Stanley,” Newcon 1976 program booklet (Boston), n.p. 5. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” Comics Journal, February 2003, p. 159. The “interview” was a panel discussion moderated by Bruce Hamilton, with questions from the audience. The quotations from Barks and Stanley in this transcript, as edited by Milo George, differ in immaterial details from the quotations published by Martin L. Greim in his column “Crusader Comments,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, December 17, 1976, p. 16.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 375

27/09/14 2:44 PM

376 | Notes to Chapter 11

6. Fleischer’s Animated News 1, no. 9, August 1935, n.p. 7. Ibid., no. 6, May 1935, n.p. Stanley was also credited for a caricature of Dave Fleischer, the studio’s co-owner, in the first issue of the Animated News, dated December 1934. 8. According to Phelps, one of those covers “may have been the very first large-size Mickey Mouse Magazine cover!” (Phelps, “John Stanley”) but that is unlikely, since that first cover was published in May 1935, when Stanley was still on the Fleischer staff. It is possible, though, that Stanley drew the cover of the October 1935 issue—the second issue and the first published on a monthly schedule. 9. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” p. 162. 10. Phelps, “John Stanley.” Stanley was on Kamen’s staff when he applied for his Social Security account number on November 26, 1936. John Patrick Stanley, application for Social Security number, Social Security Administration. 11. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” p. 159. 12. A scan of Stanley’s Art Students League registration card was provided to the author by Stephanie Cassidy, editor for the League. Cassidy, email to the author, March 26, 2012. 13. Phelps, “John Stanley.” The reference is to lithography in Phelps’s article rather than etching, perhaps as the result of a lapse of memory on Stanley’s part. 14. U.S. Federal Census, 1940 New York, Bronx, New York, roll T627_2493, page 2A, enumeration district 3–1305. 15. Dorothy Krumeich, “Stanley Comics Help Quell Furor,” Peekskill (NY) Evening Star, August 11, 1965. 16. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” p. 159. 17. Bill Spicer sent a copy of Stanley’s letter to the author together with a letter dated March 29, 1971. 18. Martin L. Greim and Bob Cosgrove, “Crusader Comments,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, March 11, 1977, p. 17. 19. Stanley registered for the draft in the Bronx on October 16, 1940, probably the same day that Walt Kelly registered in Los Angeles. Selective Service System records, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. 20. Bill Spicer and Vince Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” Graphic Story Magazine, Summer 1968, p. 13. 21. Phelps, “John Stanley.” 22. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” p. 159. 23. Dan Noonan, interview with Milton Gray, Pasadena, CA, December 12, 1977. The interview was recorded for the author as part of the research for his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. 24. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” p. 159. 25. Phelps, “John Stanley.” 26. Robert Ingersoll, “Comic Star Is Real Lulu,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 20, 1966, p. NW5. 27. Contract dated March 15, 1944, between Marjorie Henderson Buell and Western Printing & Lithographing Company Inc. Marge [Marjorie Henderson Buell] Papers, 1856–1994, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter cited as Marge).

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 376

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 12 |

377

28. Contract dated October 23, 1944, between Marjorie Henderson Buell and Western Printing & Lithographing Company Inc. Marge. 29. “News and Notes of the Advertising Field,” New York Times, September 29, 1938, p. 44; “Lulu of a Visit,” Westerner, January 1954, p. 13. 30. Gordon Sheehan, interview with the author, Evanston, IL, April 20, 1973. 31. Bruce Hamilton, “A Tripp Down Memory Lane,” in The Little Lulu Library, ed. John Clark, set 6, vol. 16 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1985), p.14. 32. William C. Erskine to Marjorie Henderson Buell, May 14, 1946. Marge. 33. Maggie Thompson, “The Almost-Anonymous Mr. Stanley,” Funnyworld no. 16, Winter 1974–75, p. 34. 34. Hamilton, “A Tripp Down Memory Lane,” p. 16. Scripts of this kind were common in the comic-book industry by the mid-1940s and thereafter, as with, for example, the scripts for the Sangor comic books, many of whose authors were accustomed to drawing real storyboards for animated cartoons. 35. There was a single exception: Stanley was among those credited—in his case, for the front cover specifically, as well as a more general credit—on the inside front cover of the July 1952 issue. Among the others receiving general credit were Irving Tripp, Al Owens (who lettered the dialogue), and Gordon Rose (who drew backgrounds). 36. Thompson, “The Almost-Anonymous Mr. Stanley,” p. 34. 37. Hamilton, “A Tripp Down Memory Lane,” p. 16. 38. Ibid., p. 17. 39. Phelps, “John Stanley.” 40. John Stanley to Bruce Hamilton, September 12, 1985. Marge.

CHAPTER 12

1. Carl Barks to the author, May 8, 1975. 2. Carl Barks to Dick Blackburn, March 8, 1968. Courtesy of Dick Blackburn. 3. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, November 22, 1973. 4. That is the wedding date and place in Arminta’s obituary in the Klamath Falls (OR) Evening Herald for November 13, 1916. 5. Stan Turner, The Years of Harvest (Eugene, OR, 2002), pp. 115–16. 6. “Merrill’s Beginnings,” Lost River (OR) Star, Special Edition, July 1995, p. 5. 7. “Carl Barks, the Early Years,” Lost River (OR) Star, Special Edition, July 1995, p. 10. 8. Barks, interview. 9. Carl Barks in conversation with the author, Grants Pass, OR, August 4–5, 1988. Or maybe not. Barks also said, in a letter published in 1995, that he had seen his first movie in Merrill around 1908. “Carl Barks, the Early Years,” p. 16. 10. Barks, interview. 11. Barks, interview. 12. Ibid. 13. ibid.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 377

27/09/14 2:44 PM

378 | Notes to Chapter 13

14. Donald Phelps, “Carl Barks,” 1976 Newcon program book (Boston), n.p. 15. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Temecula, CA, August 13, 1978. 16. Carl Barks to the author, March 17, 1984. Barks was responding to a question posed to the author by another cartoonist, Alex Toth, in a postcard dated February 5, 1984: “In all your exchanges with him, was no opinion given re the rollicking good fun, pictorialism, drama and economy of Roy’s ‘Tubbs/ Easy’ years?” 17. Carl Barks to the author, August 1969. 18. Marge Burleigh, “Cartoonist Merrill Native,” Klamath Falls (OR) Herald and News, March 13, 1983, p. 4. At the time this article—probably the only published interview with Barks’s older brother, Clyde—appeared, its author, Marge Burleigh, and her husband, Bob, were living in the old Barks family home in Merrill. Thanks to Gunnar Andreassen for a copy of this article. 19. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 20. Donald Ault and Lynda Ault, “Carl Barks Remembers ‘A Perfect Life,’ ” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 184. The Aults interviewed Barks on June 13–14, 1997, when he was ninety-six years old. 21. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 22. Barks registered for the draft in Los Angeles on February 14, 1942. Selective Service System records, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. Barks’s Disney employment record, undated but probably from 1939, shows him as a half inch shorter and ten pounds lighter than his draft registration. 23. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 24. Carl Barks to the author, July 24, 1980. 25. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 26. U.S. Federal Census, 1930, Merrill, Klamath, Oregon, roll 1945, page 1B, enumeration district 44, image 608.0. 27. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 28. Ibid.

CHAPTER 13

1. “Animated Annette,” Time, July 4, 1932, p. 21. 2. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, November 22, 1973. Philip E. Rolfsen, shown as editor in the 1930 and 1931 Minneapolis city directories, was listed again as editor in the 1936 edition. Apparently he persuaded Antoinette “Annette” Fawcett, to whom Henry Meyers had sold the EyeOpener in 1932 (and who was divorced from Wilford Fawcett) to give him his old job back after Barks left. Rolfsen was a very young man (born in 1908) when he first became editor. 3. Geoffrey Blum, The Unexpurgated Carl Barks (Prescott, AZ, 1997), reproduces dozens of examples (with color added) of Barks’s cartoons, mostly unsigned, for the Eye-Opener. 4. Sumner was listed as the Eye-Opener’s editor only in the 1932 edition of the Minneapolis city directory.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 378

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 13 |

379

5. Barks, interview. 6. Ibid. 7. Carl Barks to John Coulthard, October 8, 1961. WDA. 8. Barks, interview. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. “Decrees Granted,” Reno Evening Gazette, September 10, 1937, p. 16. 12. The Los Angeles city directory for 1938 showed Clara as Barks’s spouse; they resided at 4016 Effie Street in Los Angeles. Barks was erroneously identified as “Paul” Barks. 13. Barks, interview. 14. Donald Ault and Lynda Ault, “Carl Barks Remembers ‘A Perfect Life,’ ” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 192. 15. Donald Ault, “Ideas Flowing Like Waterfalls: Some Reflections from Carl Barks at 98,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2004), p. 219. “Ideas Flowing Like Waterfalls” is based on multiple sources (telephone conversations, faxed correspondence) from 1999. 16. Barks, interview. 17. Ibid. 18. Jack Hannah, interview with the author, Glendale, CA, November 3, 1976. 19. Carl Barks to the author, January 25, 1990. 20. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, May 30, 1971. 21. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 22. Barks, interview, May 30, 1971. 23. Carl Barks to the author, May 19, 1977. 24. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 25. Carl Barks to the author, May 8, 1975. 26. Carl Barks, interview with Patrick Garabedian, Goleta, CA, October 30, 1971. This is the rare instance when Barks’s statements in different interviews are at least superficially inconsistent. In the June 1997 interview with Donald Ault and Lynda Ault, he spoke of this self-directed education as occurring much earlier, years before he worked at Disney: Well, I got to digging into that stuff in the 1920s, and I realized if I was going to write jokes and things I needed to be able to write intelligible sentences. So I began studying, got my old school books out and studied those things. So, by the time I got a job back on the Eye-Opener, when I was in my thirties and became editor of the darn thing, I knew enough about sentence structure that I was just as well off as the guys in there with college educations, as far as that little simple bunch of writing was concerned. . . . I would take about an hour or two every evening and look at the old grammar books and see how they phrased a sentence, and I would do it and take a line out of a newspaper or a letter and analyze it and finally I got so I could just look at a sentence and realize which words were the subject words and which were the predicates, which were back and forth. (Ault and Ault, “Carl Barks Remembers,” p. 190)

Barks spoke in a 1991 interview of trying to write short stories in the 1920s—this would have been when he was trying to break in as a magazine

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 379

27/09/14 2:44 PM

380 | Notes to Chapter 14

cartoonist—“but I hadn’t enough education to write English fluently. I was always stuck on sentence construction, just like building a fence in front of me. . . . When I got the opportunity to draw comic books, all those things were taken care of for me. I only had to write simple little dialogue balloons.” Geoffrey Blum, “A Conversation with Carl Barks,” The Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories in Color, no. 2 (Prescott, AZ, n.d. [ca. 1992]), n.p. 27. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 28. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 29. John Benson, “Editor’s Note,” Panels, no. 2, Spring 1981, p. 2. 30. Transcript of story meeting, “Pirate Story, Mickey Feature #11,” March 25, 1941. Photocopy originating with Homer Brightman. AC.

CHAPTER 14

1. Roger Armstrong to the author, January 5, 1968. 2. Lloyd E. Smith to C. R. Rothmund, April 1, 1947. ERB. 3. Armstrong to the author, January 5, 1968. 4. “Elected Vice President of Western Printing Co.,” New York Times, December 24, 1955, p. 22. 5. Chase Craig to the author, July 25, 1978. 6. Nielsen was identified as a proofreader in Poughkeepsie city directories as late as 1946. 7. “The ‘West’ in Western,” Westerner, August 1949, p. 4. Nielsen’s 1932 start date was reported in “Beverly Hills Twenty Year Club,” Westerner, January 1961, p. 24. 8. Roger Armstrong to the author, August 18, 1967. 9. Roger Armstrong to the author, August 16, 1967. 10. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, November 22, 1973. 11. Carl Barks to the author, December 18, 1966. 12. Bruce Hamilton, “The Mouse Man and the Duck Man: An Interview with Floyd Gottfredson and Carl Barks,” in Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse in Color, deluxe ed. (Prescott, AZ, 1988), p. 101 The joint interview took place on December 5, 1982, in Pasadena, CA. 13. Howard Anderson to John C. Worrell, memorandum, March 21, 1979. AC. 14. Harvey Thompson, “The Mail Goes Out,” Westerner, February 1951, p. 19. A few years later, the total number of subscription copies was pegged at 787,000 a month, an evident decline of more than 100,000 copies. “Shipping with a Capital W,” Westerner, February 1954, p. 2. 15. Malcolm Willits, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson, “The Duck Man,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 5. 16. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 17. Paul Ciotti, “Writing to Please Myself: An Interview with Carl Barks,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 33. The interview was recorded in September 1972. 18. Barks said in 1974 that twenty-six pages a month of story and art was “as much as I could physically do and do it comfortably.” This figure is gener-

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 380

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 16 |

381

ally consistent with the number of pages his records showed him submitting annually. Barks, interview, October 5–6, 1974. 19. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Temecula, CA, August 13, 1978. 20. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 21. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, May 30, 1971. 22. Geoffrey Blum, “Gracious Living in Plain Awful,” in Carl Barks Collection, ed. Geoffrey Blum, vol. 6, pp. 155–60. 23. Barks, interview, May 30, 1971. 24. That model sheet is reproduced in Michael Barrier, Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book (New York, 1981), p. 43.

CHAPTER 15

1. The artwork for this story survived for years in Barks’s hands before all but a half page of its ten pages passed into a private collection. The top half of the first page had disappeared many years before, probably given away by Barks. He reworked the story, eliminating its Christmas aspects, as “The Terrible Tourist,” a ten-page “Donald Duck” story for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories no. 248, May 1961. 2. Carl Barks to John Verpoorten, March 22, 1961. WDA. 3. Carl Barks to the author, December 18, 1966. 4. Carl Barks, interview with Patrick Garabedian, Goleta, CA, October 30, 1971. 5. Carl Barks to the author, June 9, 1966. 6. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 7. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, book 3, chap. 2, “Of Repentance,” in The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald Frame (New York, 2003), p. 740. 8. Barks, interview, October 5–6, 1974. 9. Tom Gill with Tim Lasiuta, The Misadventures of a Roving Cartoonist: The Lone Ranger’s Secret Sidekick (Chandler, AZ, 2008), p. 39. 10. Barks to the author, June 9, 1966. 11. Malcolm Willits, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson, “The Duck Man,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 13. 12. Barks, interview, October 5–6, 1974. 13. “Hair-Raising Episode,” Westerner, February 1950, p. 10 14. Tom McKimson to Carl Barks, August 4, 1950. WDA. 15. Alice Cobb to Carl Barks, August 21, 1950. WDA. 16. Donald Ault, “Ideas Flowing Like Waterfalls: Some Reflections from Carl Barks at 98,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 216.

CHAPTER 16

1. Selective Service System records, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 381

27/09/14 2:44 PM

382 | Notes to Chapter 17

2. Bill Spicer and Vince Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” Graphic Story Magazine, Summer 1968, p. 13. 3. Dan Noonan, interview with Milton Gray, Pasadena, CA, December 12, 1977. This interview was recorded for the author as part of the research for his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. 4. Spicer and Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” p. 13. Geraghty became New Yorker’s art editor in 1939 and held the job for thirty-four years. 5. Lee Spilberg, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, email to the author, January 20, 2011. 6. Morris Gollub, interview with the author, Hollywood, CA, November 2, 1976. 7. Martin L. Greim, “Crusader Comments,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, December 17, 1976, p. 16. 8. Marjorie Henderson Buell, notes accompanying a letter to John Clark, August 5, 1984. Marge. Clark, as an editor for Another Rainbow Publishing, was involved in the preparation of the multivolume hardcover reprint collection called The Little Lulu Library and had sent Buell questions whose answers could be used in preparing text features for the books. “Life With Lulu: An Interview with Marge,” by John Clark and Bruce Hamilton, was published in The Little Lulu Library, ed. John Clark, set 1, vol. 1 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1992), pp. 13–16, and incorporated material similar to that in Buell’s notes. 9. John Stanley to Bruce Hamilton, September 12, 1985. Marge. 10. For example, the cover of the February 1953 Little Lulu shows Tubby, Alvin, and Gloria crowding onto a scale as Lulu divides the total poundage the scale shows by three. The same idea, with four children instead of three, is present in one of the Post cartoons reprinted in Little Lulu and Her Pals (Philadelphia, 1939). Another cartoon in the same book, in which Lulu uses a vacuum cleaner to clear a snowy sidewalk, probably inspired the cover of Little Lulu no. 1, January–February 1948. 11. Charlotte Astor, “Tubby, Today,” Florida Accent (Sunday magazine of the Tampa Tribune), September 6, 1970, p. 13. 12. Only Bernard Krigstein, in a celebrated story called “Master Race” in the first issue of Impact (1955), one of the ill-fated EC “New Direction” titles, was able to shed completely the weights attached by Feldstein’s methods. Although Feldstein’s captions came to him already lettered on sheets of illustration board, with the panels drawn in, Krigstein cut those sheets apart and expanded the number of pages and the number of panels. 13. Marjorie Henderson Buell to John Clark, draft, October 30, 1985. Marge.

CHAPTER 17

1. Dan Noonan, interview with Milton Gray, Pasadena, CA, December 12, 1977. 2. Morris Gollub, interview with the author, Hollywood, CA, November 2, 1976. 3. Rebecca Cline, archivist for the Walt Disney Company, provided the dates of Gollub’s employment in an email, November 26, 2012. Disney has a record

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 382

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 18 |

383

only of Dan Noonan’s brief employment in the 1960s, not of his earlier employment. 4. Gollub, interview. Gollub entered the navy on January 17, 1942. Official Military Personnel File for Morris Gollub, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. 5. Gollub, interview. 6. Official Military Personnel File for Morris Gollub. 7. Gollub, interview. 8. In 1950, more than two years after the demise of Animal Comics and “Rover,” Moe Gollub illustrated a strikingly similar serial about a dog, written by Gaylord DuBois. In keeping with Western’s growing use of licensed characters, the dog was Lassie, the canine MGM star. MGM’s Lassie, first published as two one-shots, was published quarterly and then bimonthly well into the 1950s, when it was superseded by a comic-book version of the Lassie television series. 9. In a strange break with Western’s usual practice of not crediting its artists and writers, full credits were published on the inside front covers of New Funnies for June and July 1952 as well as Little Lulu for July 1952. Both titles were then edited in New York. Irene Little was credited with inking Richard Hall’s pencil drawings for the “Woody Woodpecker” and “Andy Panda” stories in both issues of New Funnies. 10. Gollub, interview. 11. Richard Hall, interview with the author, Alexandria, VA, September 8, 1978. 12. Irvin H. Ziemann, “Gaylord DuBois: Chapter One, Concluded,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, October 13, 1989, p. 62. 13. Ibid. 14. Ed Ovalle of the Walt Disney Archives, email to the author, August 21, 2013. Marsh’s military records were among those destroyed in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, but he was most likely discharged early for medical reasons, since he suffered from diabetes. 15. Jesse Marsh to Ronald J. Goulart, October 18, 1948. Courtesy of Robert R. Barrett.

CHAPTER 18

1. Dan Noonan, interview with Milton Gray, Pasadena, CA, December 12, 1977. Manhattan telephone directories from the 1940s show a Fifth Avenue Restaurant at the 200 Fifth Avenue address, but no establishments corresponding to the names that Noonan remembered. He also referred to the upstairs establishment as the Penthouse Club, but there is no listing for such a place, either. Presumably the Fifth Avenue Restaurant was the “Bar” or “Club” he remembered. 2. Morris Gollub, interview with the author, Hollywood, CA, November 2, 1976. 3. Bill Spicer and Vince Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” Graphic Story Magazine, Summer 1968, p. 13. Rivera was a story sketch artist for early Disney features like Pinocchio.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 383

27/09/14 2:44 PM

384 | Notes to Chapter 18

4. Lawrence Cole to Walt Kelly, July 30, 1947. OSU, WK, box 20. 5. “Books—Authors,” New York Times, October 11, 1944, p. 19; “You Meet Such Interesting People,” Publishers’ Weekly, October 21, 1944, p. 1656. 6. “Messners Acquire Veritas Press,” Publishers’ Weekly, July 28, 1945, p. 318. Messner used Veritas, which before World War II published English translations of German books for adults, as a vehicle for issuing children’s picture books priced at a dollar. Wartime paper allocations were no doubt the major factor in the acquisition, and probably the only one: Veritas, since it was publishing before the United States entered the war, would have had a paper allocation that could be used for children’s “dollar flats” was well as adult books. Mike McClintock became Veritas’s vice president after Messner acquired what Publishers’ Weekly called “a controlling interest.” 7. Trouble on the Ark was reprinted (in black and white, along with preliminary drawings and supporting material) in two parts in the Kelly fan magazine Fort Mudge Most, April 1996, pp. 10–48, and June 1996, pp. 9–38. The Downy Duck, “Story by Edith Heal,” was reprinted (also in black and white, and also with supporting material) in Fort Mudge Most, March 1994, pp. 16–34. The third Maclay title, Raffy Uses His Head, by Rita Kissin, author of an earlier book about the giraffe title character, is more elusive. 8. Andrew Barnes, conversation with the author, Tampa, FL, June 4, 1974. Barnes reviewed and approved notes from that conversation in 2012. 9. “Story Book Records: Walt Kelly Tells More Fairy Tales,” Fort Mudge Most, June 1997, pp. 12–33. This article reproduces the labels for all sixteen sides and the covers for the two boxed sets of four records each, and also includes transcriptions of Kelly’s narration for all the records. The description here of Kelly’s performances is based on digital copies from the original records made for the author by a private collector. More readily accessible examples of Kelly the uninhibited vocal performer are several tracks on Songs of the Pogo, a 1956 record reissued as a compact disc in 2003. 10. Inez Bertail, Complete Nursery Song Book (New York, 1947), p. 1. Bertail’s husband had resigned as “general editor” of Julian Messner early in 1946. The couple remained active in publishing for years afterward, but apparently without any connection with Kelly. 11. “Fall Index of Children’s Books,” Publishers’ Weekly, August 25, 1945, p. 795. Kelly spelled his mother’s maiden name the same way when he applied for a Social Security number in 1934, but it was more often spelled “MacAnnulla.” 12. The copyright registrations for those stories show Stanley as the author. 13. Person to Person, January 1, 1954, CBS Television, transcript. 14. Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, April 21, 1954, p. 110. 15. “Walt Kelly,” in Album of the National Cartoonists Society, ed. Mort Walker (New York, 1965), p. 86. Kelly’s half-page hand-lettered autobiography was reprinted on p. 84 of the revised edition, titled The National Cartoonists Society Album (ed. Mort Walker [Greenwich, CT, 1972]). 16. Gil Kane, “Walt Kelly Interview,” Comics Journal, February 1991, pp. 52, 53.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 384

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 19 |

385

17. Murray Robinson, “Pogo’s Papa,” Collier’s, March 8, 1952, p. 65. 18. Gollub, interview, November 2, 1976. 19. Walt Kelly to Lloyd E. Smith, December 8, 1951. OSU, WK, box 19, file 5. 20. Letty Lebeck Edes to the author, March 12, 2013. 21. Kelly’s correspondence with Hickey is part of the file labeled “Artists’ correspondence.” OSU, WK, box 3, file 44. Hickey illustrated “Tom and Jerry” in Our Gang Comics in the 1940s, as well as many adventure stories drawn in a straight illustration style. 22. Harvey Kurtzman, interview with the author, Mount Vernon, NY, March 31, 1990. 23. Walt Kelly to Harvey Kurtzman, November 2, 1948. OSU, WK, box 6, file 4.

CHAPTER 19

1. Hank Ketcham, interview with the author, Monterey, CA, June 10, 1991. 2. Thomas Andrae and Geoffrey Blum, “Ward Kimball Remembers Walt Kelly,” in Phi Beta Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1989), p. 138. 3. Donald Phelps, “John Stanley,” 1976 Newcon program booklet (Boston), n.p. 4. “ ‘Li’l Eight Ball’ Killed By Publisher,” New York Amsterdam News, May 10, 1947, p. 9. 5. Murray Robinson, “Pogo’s Papa,” Collier’s, March 8, 1952, p. 65. Robinson does not identify the syndicate, which Kelly names in his untitled 1952 carbon-copy biography. A fan’s letter, written in reply to one of Kelly’s, indicates that by August 1947 Kelly was aware that Animal Comics’ days were numbered and he was contemplating syndication for “Albert and Pogo.” Betsy Curtis to Walt Kelly, August 12, 1947. OSU, WK, box 20. 6. The two pages were published in Outrageously Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1985), pp. 26–27. An accompanying note says of one of the pages, “The page definitely predates national syndication of the strip” but does not make the connection with Kelly’s unsuccessful early effort at syndication. 7. Carle Hodge, “PM ‘Experiment’ Dies and a Star Is Born,” Editor & Publisher, June 26, 1948, p. 5. 8. John Horn, “A Memory of Walt Kelly,” in The Best of Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1982), p. 42. 9. Gil Kane, “Walt Kelly Interview,” Comics Journal, February 1991, p. 58. 10. Kelly did identify himself as the Star’s “political cartoonist, art director, comic-strip editor, and comic-strip artist” in Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo (New York, 1959), p. 10, and as its “art director, senior editor, pol. Cartoonist and match game champ” in Album of the National Cartoonists Society, ed. Mort Walker (New York, 1965), p. 86. 11. At least as likely, they may have been destroyed in the flooding of the basement of Kelly’s New York townhouse a few years after his death. That

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 385

27/09/14 2:44 PM

386 | Notes to Chapter 20

flooding probably accounts for the absence of other significant documents from the Kelly papers at Ohio State. 12. Lloyd E. Smith to Walt Kelly, June 15, 1951. OSU, WK, box 5, file 19. 13. E. H. Wadewitz and Lloyd E. Smith to Walt Kelly, November 17, 1948. OSU, WK, box 5, file 20. 14. Ogden J. Rochelle, “N.Y. Star Features Become Star Syndicate,” Editor & Publisher, December 18, 1948, p. 44. 15. Quoted in Lloyd E. Smith to Walt Kelly, April 13, 1953. OSU, WK, box 5, file 19. 16. A collection of early Amos ’n’ Andy radio scripts was published as Here They Are: Amos ’n’ Andy, by Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Gosden (New York, 1931). The scripts are totally in dialect—Correll and Gosden did little or no improvising—and so reading them can be a chore; but when the scripts are read alongside “Albert and Pogo,” the resemblance to that feature’s dialogue is striking. 17. Pogo Parade was published in the summer of 1953. Kelly’s commentary appeared on the inside front cover. 18. Andrae and Blum, “Ward Kimball Remembers Walt Kelly,” p. 138. 19. Kelly, untitled 1952 carbon-copy biography. Lauterbach’s name is spelled correctly in Kelly’s draft but misspelled “Lauterback” in the retyped version. Lauterbach died in 1950 at the age of thirty-six. 20. Thomas Andrae, “Pogo’s Politics,” in Thomas Andrae and Carsten Laqua, Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo (Neshannock, PA, 2012), p. 106. 21. Robert E. Kiler to Walt Kelly, July 20, 1947. OSU, WK, box 20. 22. Doris Willens, “Walt Kelly’s ‘Pogo’ Ribs Stupidities of Mankind,” Editor & Publisher, December 11, 1948, p. 42. That characterization of Pogo’s dialect resurfaced in Editor & Publisher a few years later (Erwin Knoll, “Walt Kelly Is Named Cartoonist of Year,” April 26, 1952, p. 145), and it may have been the basis for similar characterizations. 23. A. J. Liebling, “The Wayward Press,” New Yorker, February 12, 1949, p. 55. 24. “Walt Kelly Insists Comic Strip Aims at Amusement,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 22, 1952, p. 14.

CHAPTER 20

1. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 2. Carl Barks to the author, January 15, 1969. 3. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, May 30, 1971. 4. Carl Barks to Donald Ault, September 15, 1972, in “Letters from the Duck Man Part Fourteen: Thieves and Other Nuisances,” in The Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories in Color, ed. Geoffrey Blum, no. 41 (Prescott, AZ, n.d. [ca. 1995]), n.p. 5. Martin L. Greim et al., “Crusader Comments,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, February 11, 1977, p. 27. 6. Barks first used the term money bin in “You Can’t Guess!” in Christmas Parade no. 2, 1950, where Scrooge’s cash is housed in actual bins identified

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 386

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 21 |

387

variously as “No. 739” and “Double-decker Money Bin Capacity 100 Tons.” The capacity of that set of bins is suggested when Scrooge muses, “Just because I’ve got three cubic acres of money, people think I can afford anything.” 7. Barks, interview, October 5–6, 1974. 8. Edward Summer, “Of Ducks and Men: Carl Barks Interviewed,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 83. Summer’s interview was recorded in April 1975. 9. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, November 22, 1973. 10. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Temecula, CA, August 13, 1978. 11. Barks, interview, November 22, 1973. 12. Donald Ault, “Ideas Flowing Like Waterfalls: Some Reflections from Carl Barks at 98,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 217. Also see, in the same book, “Chronology,” p. xxxviii. 13. Barks to Ault, September 15, 1972.

CHAPTER 21

1. Ward’s hiring by the Star was announced in “In the Editorial Rooms,” Editor & Publisher, December 11, 1948, p. 40, but he said he started there on August 10, 1948. Bill Crouch Jr., “George Ward Talks about Kelly, Pogo and Times Past,” The Best of Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr. (New York, 1982), p. 76. 2. Ibid. 3. Andrew Barnes, conversation with the author, Tampa, June 4, 1974. 4. Kelly dedicated Beau Pogo (1960), one of the paperback compilations of Pogo comic strips, to Andy Barnes’s father, but Kelly and Joe Barnes were estranged by the time of Barnes’s death in 1970. Kelly never wrote to Andy or his mother after Joe died, but he dedicated his next paperback, Impollutable Pogo (1970), to Joe. 5. Copyright assignment from New York Star, Inc., to Walt Kelly, February 14, 1949, vol. 704, p. 25. Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 6. Crouch, “George Ward Talks,” p. 82. 7. March 2, 1949, is the date of the original agreement as stated in an amended agreement dated April 19, 1955, a draft edited and signed by Kelly and Robert Hall, president of the Post-Hall Syndicate. OSU, WK, box 4, folder 11. The same file includes a carbon copy of an unsigned letter agreement dated December 31, 1951, in which the syndicate relinquished any ownership of Pogo, recognizing it as Kelly’s “sole property.” The copyright notice in the comic strip began appearing in Kelly’s name, rather than the syndicate’s, as of January 1, 1952. 8. “Post Syndicate Name Changed; It’s Post-Hall,” Editor & Publisher, March 19, 1949, p. 47. 9. Cox’s legatees conveyed all rights to his Brownies stories to Western Printing & Lithographing Company by an assignment dated February 11, 1946, vol. 592, pp. 139–40. Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 387

27/09/14 2:44 PM

388 | Notes to Chapter 21

10. Del Connell began writing Peter Wheat when Kelly left the comic book after the first thirty-three issues. A former Disney artist named Al Hubbard, who drew in a Kelly-like style, succeeded Kelly as the illustrator. 11. The dates of Kelly’s divorce from Helen and of Stephanie’s death are noted on Kelly’s license for his third marriage, to Selby Daley. The license was issued on October 20, 1972, and Kelly and Daley were married at Lenox Hill Hospital on October 23, just before Kelly lost a leg to diabetes. 12. U.S. Federal Census, 1930, Manhattan, New York, New York, roll 1545, page 5A, enumeration district 37, image 582.0. Stephanie is listed in that census as Estelle Wagonny. U.S. Federal Census, 1940 New York, Kings, New York, roll T627_2560, page 8B, enumeration district 24–529. 13. Don Maley, “Walt Kelly Muses on His 20 Years of Playing Possum,” Editor & Publisher, April 10, 1969, p. 20. Maley identifies Stephanie as “formerly a secretary at his syndicate,” rather than Kelly’s personal secretary, although that may be a distinction without a difference if she did most of her work for Kelly. 14. E. H. Wadewitz and Lloyd E. Smith to Walt Kelly, September 20, 1951. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 15. Remittance advice, Western Printing & Lithographing Company to Walter Kelly, September 4, 1951, and March 4, 1952. Kelly was paid a total of $1,692.50 in March 1952 for producing the fifty-two pages in Pogo Possum no. 10, July–September 1952—a figure that did not include payment for the lettering. Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus, Pogo Collection, box 14, folder 3. The Pogo Collection is a separate collection from the Walt Kelly Collection. 16. Richard Small to Walt Kelly, October 2, 1952. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 17. Anne DeStefano to Walt Kelly, September 11, 1952. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. DeStefano became office manager after the comic books moved from 200 Fifth Avenue to quarters they shared with other components of Western’s “newsstand division” at 415 Madison Avenue. “Western in New York,” Westerner, March 1957, p. 3. 18. Walt Kelly to Anne DeStefano, September 11, 1952. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 19. Walt Kelly to Lloyd E. Smith, May 13, 1952. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 20. Richard Small to Walt Kelly, January 27, 1954. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 21. Walt Kelly to Richard Small, January 29, 1954. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 22. Walt Kelly, undated draft letter to Richard Small. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 23. Walt Kelly to Richard Small, February 3, 1953 [sic]. OSU, WK, box 5, folder 19. 24. In Kelly’s trade paperback called The Pogo Peek-a-Book (1955), made up of new stories, Albert reads aloud (rather than recites) “Who Killed Cock Robin?” but he does so entirely in character, assuming one can accept an ability to read that is advanced over his virtual illiteracy in earlier stories.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 388

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 22 |

389

25. DeStefano to Kelly, September 11, 1952. DeStefano refers to him only as “Mr. Burley,” but Burley’s full name is given in Crouch, “George Ward Talks,” p. 76. 26. Crouch, “George Ward Talks,” p. 82. Ward’s principal duties subsequently were to ink the Sunday Pogo page and to finish whatever work Kelly left on the daily comic strip. 27. Ibid., p. 85. 28. Seymour Turk (Simon and Schuster) to Walt Kelly, February 28, 1955. OSU, WK, box 4, folder 10. 29. Anne DeStefano to Walt Kelly, June 15, 1953. OSU, WK, box 12, folder 3. DeStefano sent Kelly for his approval a list of four stories chosen for reprinting in Pogo Possum nos. 15–18 and due dates for the new material in each issue, including in each case “20 pages of Pogo art” and a “6 page strip without Pogo and Albert.” Only the first two of those four issues were published.

CHAPTER 22

1. Morris Gollub, interview with the author, Hollywood, CA, November 2, 1976. 2. Bill Spicer and Vince Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” Graphic Story Magazine, Summer 1968, pp. 12–13. 3. Oskar Lebeck to Toni Mendez, January 7, 1954. Toni Mendez Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus (hereafter cited as OSU, TM), box P103, folder 142. 4. Richard Small to Oskar Lebeck, January 28, 1953. OSU, TM, box P103, folder 142. 5. Oskar Lebeck to Toni Mendez, March 30, 1951. OSU, TM, box P40, folder 9. 6. Mort Walker, ed., National Cartoonists Society Album, rev. ed. (Greenwich, CT, 1972), p. 117. 7. Erwin Knoll, “UF Adds ‘Twin Earth’ to Space Fiction Ranks,” Editor & Publisher, June 7, 1952, p. 48. 8. Alex Toth, “Jesse Marsh,” Panels no. 2, Spring 1981, pp. 21–27. 9. Camille Cazedessus Jr., “Gaylord DuBois, Veteran Tarzan Script Writer,” ERBdom, October 1962, p. 7. 10. Ibid., p. 9. 11. Irvin H. Ziemann, “Gaylord DuBois, King of the Comics Writers, Chapter Four,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, January 12, 1990, p. 46. 12. Harvey Kurtzman, interview with the author, Mount Vernon, NY, March 31, 1990. 13. John Stanley to Bruce Hamilton, September 12, 1985. Marge. 14. Contract dated December 17, 1951, between Marjorie Henderson Buell and Western Printing & Lithographing Company. Marge. 15. Lloyd E. Smith to Joseph Greene, August 17, 1951; Lloyd E. Smith to Toni Mendez, February 9, 1951. OSU, TM, box P40, folder 9. 16. Contract dated April 20, 1951, between Cisco Kid Products Inc. and Western Printing & Lithographing Company. OSU, TM, box 102, folder

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 389

27/09/14 2:44 PM

390 | Notes to Chapter 23

93. The terms of the original 1949 contract are similar, but with a smaller advance.

CHAPTER 23

1. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, May 30, 1971. 2. Jack Bradbury to Walt Kelly, January 5, 1949. OSU, WK, box 6, folder 4. 3. Dave Bennett, “An Interview with Jack Bradbury,” Ace Comics Presents no. 2, July 1987, p. 14. 4. Will Friedwald, “An Interview with Jim Davis,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, November 2, 1984, p. 44. 5. Mark Evanier, “POV Point of View,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, May 1, 1998, p. 49. 6. Jack Bradbury, interview with Milton Gray, Irvine, CA, March 23, 1977. The interview was recorded for the author as part of the research for his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. 7. Bennett, “An Interview with Jack Bradbury,” p. 32. 8. Bradbury, interview, March 23, 1977. 9. Alice Cobb, “The ‘West’ in Western,” Westerner, November 1956, p. 6. 10. Contract dated December 7, 1945, between Gene Autry and Western Printing & Lithographing Company, Inc. Autry Library, Autry National Center, Los Angeles (hereafter cited as GA). 11. Lloyd E. Smith to C. R. Rothmund, April 9, 1947. ERB. 12. George T. Delacorte Jr. to Gene Autry, January 4, 1951. GA. 13. “Go West Young Man,” Westerner, December 1951, p. 11. 14. Chase Craig to the author, July 25, 1978. Craig mentioned the January 1950 start date in a typewritten note attached to the copy of the November 1956 Westerner, the Western Printing house organ, that he lent to the author in 1978. 15. Cobb, “The ‘West’ in Western,” p. 4. 16. “Go West Young Man,” p. 12. 17. Moore’s first drawings for Johnny Mack Brown are in no. 10, September–November 1952. The earlier issues were illustrated by Jesse Marsh, except for the lead story in no. 8, December 1951–January 1952, which Hames Ware identifies as an unusual collaboration between Mike Arens and John Ushler. 18. Richard “Sparky” Moore, telephone interview with the author and Hames Ware, April 3, 2013. 19. Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. and Everett Raymond Kinstler, Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist’s Journey through Popular Culture (Nevada City, CA, 2005), p. 103. Kinstler later became a highly sought after portrait painter. 20. Carl Barks to the author, July 14, 1978. 21. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Temecula, CA, August 13, 1978. Other cartoonists were employees in earlier years, at least at the New York office. Dan Noonan spoke of working as a “staff artist” for Western until 1950 or 1951, when he left to work as a freelancer, continuing to sell to Western “while moving into magazine illustration.” He ultimately left such work and returned to animation. Bill Spicer and Vince Davis, “Interview with Dan Noonan,” Graphic Story Magazine, Summer 1968, p. 17.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 390

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 25 |

391

22. Malcolm Willits, “George Sherman: An Interview with Another One of the ‘Men Behind the Mouse,’ ” Vanguard (a comic-book fan magazine published by Robert Latona), 1968, p. 34. 23. Those figures are in a “Family Day” program for Western’s Poughkeepsie plant, undated but datable through internal evidence to 1953. Thanks to Dana Gabbard for providing photocopies of two such programs, both originating with the Poughkeepsie Public Library. 24. Contract dated April 20, 1951, between Cisco Kid Products, Inc., and Western Printing & Lithographing Co., Inc. OSU, TM, box 102, folder 93. 25. Lloyd E. Smith to William C. Erskine, December 19, 1951. Marge. 26. Cobb, “The ‘West’ in Western,” p. 5. 27. “Gene Autry in Racine,” Westerner, March 1954, p. 4. 28. Savitt is the subject of the fullest examination of the work of any of the Dell cover artists. See Leo Pando, “Sam Savitt: Painter, Author, Teacher & Horseman,” Illustration, August 2002, p. 2. 29. The agenda was in the papers of John Burton, producer of the Warner Bros. cartoons at the time. Courtesy of Mrs. John Burton. CHAPTER 24

1. Carl Barks to the author, December 11, 1969. 2. Barks introduced that routine in the January 1951 Walt Disney’s Comics, but without the third variant, “toss it up and let it hit me on the head.” 3. Carl Barks, Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times (Millbrae, CA, 1981), p. 62. Comments by Barks, based on interviews with Edward Summer, accompany a version of “Back to the Klondike” with most of the excised panels (Barks had kept the drawings) restored to their original positions in the story and new panels drawn by Barks to take the place of four that had not survived. 4. Carl Barks to the author, February 17, 1972. 5. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 6. Ibid. 7. Carl Barks to the author, January 25, 1971. 8. Del Connell, interview with Bill Spicer, Los Angeles, November–December 1983. The interview was conducted for inclusion in Carl Barks Library, but it was not published there. Thanks to Geoffrey Blum for providing a copy. 9. Richard “Sparky” Moore, telephone interview with the author, August 23, 2013. 10. Edward Summer, “Fortune Favors the Bold: An Interview with Carl Barks,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 124. The published interview is a composite of material recorded from 1975 to 1981. The quoted passage was also published in Barks, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, p. 90, as part of Barks’s commentary on the Chisel McSue story. CHAPTER 25

1. Lloyd E. Smith, “Protest against Ad for Wertham Book,” Publishers’ Weekly, March 20, 1954, p. 1399.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 391

27/09/14 2:44 PM

392 | Notes to Chapter 25

2. George T. Delacorte Jr. to Stanley Rinehart, March 17, 1954. Fredric Wertham papers, 1818–1986, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as Wertham papers). 3. McLaughlin, Stickles & Hayden, counselors at law, to Rinehart & Company, November 16, 1953. Wertham papers. 4. “F.G.M.” [Frederick G. Melcher], “Senate Committee Holds Hearing on the Comics,” Publishers’ Weekly, May 1, 1954, p. 1906. 5. Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, April 21, 1954, p. 103. 6. Fredric Wertham, “Wertham Replies to Criticism of Ad,” Publishers’ Weekly, May 1, 1954, p. 1889. 7. Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson, MS, 1998), pp. 110–11. 8. Helen Meyer to Milton Caniff, October 1, 1954. Milton Caniff Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus (hereafter cited as OSU, MAC), box 110, folder 5. 9. Western Printing & Lithographing Company, annual report to stockholders for 1954, n.p. 10. A partial copy of a 1957 prospectus was provided to the author by David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives. The cited figures are from p. 9. 11. Malcolm Willits, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson, “The Duck Man,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 12. 12. Carl Barks to the author, June 9, 1966. 13. Del Connell, interview with Bill Spicer, Los Angeles, November–December 1983. Courtesy of Geoffrey Blum. 14. The list is reproduced in Thomas Andrae, “The Expurgated Barks,” in The Carl Barks Library, ed. Bruce Hamilton, set 3, vol. 2 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1984), p. 522. 15. Charles Beaumont, “The Comic World,” Fortnight, May 1955, pp. 49–50. Adams’s entry in The Who’s Who of American Comic Books, ed. Jerry Bails and Hames Ware, vol. 1 (Detroit, 1973), p. 1, based on information he provided, shows him working for Western from 1952 to 1957, initially writing and inking talking-animal titles and then writing and editing such western titles as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the Lone Ranger. 16. Geoffrey Blum, “Wartime Joys and Jitters,” in Carl Barks Collection, ed. Geoffrey Blum, vol. 3, p. 13. Barks made that comment during a September 24, 1983, interview with Bruce Hamilton (with additional questions by Blum and Thomas Andrae). 17. Connell, interview, November–December 1983. 18. Barks to the author, June 9, 1966. 19. An embryonic version, the “Junior Woodchucks’ Book of Knowledge,” is mentioned in the previous issue, Uncle Scrooge no. 5, March–May 1954. 20. Carl Barks to the author, May 17, 1981. 21. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Goleta, CA, November 22, 1973. 22. Klaus Strzyz, “An Interview with Carl and Garé Barks,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 117.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 392

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Chapter 26 |

393

23. Alice Cobb to Carl Barks, June 4, 1956. WDA. 24. Carl Barks to Alice Cobb, undated draft [ca. June 1956]. WDA. 25. Beaumont, “The Comic World,” p. 47. 26. Barks prepared that list from records of his payments from Western for the author’s use in compiling a bibliography of his comic-book work. That bibliography was published in Michael Barrier, Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book (New York, 1981). 27. Carl Barks to R. O. Burnett, December 13, 1960. WDA. Photocopy provided by John Benson. 28. Carl Barks to the author, March 27, 1966. 29. Barks, interview. 30. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Atlanta, October 5–6, 1974. 31. “Meet the Team of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera,” Westerner, October 1963, p. 9. 32. Carl Barks, interview with the author, Temecula, CA, August 13, 1978. 33. Chase Craig to Carl Barks, August 11, 1960. WDA. William F. Callahan Jr., “The Dell Move to 15¢ Means Maximum Profits for the Retailer!” Bestsellers, December 1960, p. 15. 34. Bruce Hamilton, “The Mouse Man and the Duck Man: An Interview with Floyd Gottfredson and Carl Barks,” in Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse in Color, deluxe ed. (Prescott, AZ, 1988), p. 108. The joint interview took place on December 5, 1982, in Pasadena, CA. 35. Beaumont, “The Comic World,” p. 54. 36. John Spicer to Carl Barks, April 11, 1960; Barks to Spicer, undated draft. WDA. 37. Malcolm Willits to Carl Barks, October 24, 1960. WDA. 38. Chase Craig to Carl Barks, August 11, 1960. WDA. 39. Barks, interview, October 5–6, 1974. 40. Barks to Burnett, December 13, 1960. 41. Barks, interview, October 5–6, 1974. 42. Carl Barks, videotaped interview by Donald Ault and Thomas Andrae, Goleta, CA, August 4, 1975. 43. Geoffrey Blum, “Running on Empty,” in Carl Barks Collection, ed. Geoffrey Blum, vol. 21, p. 10.

CHAPTER 26

1. Harvey Kurtzman, interview with the author, Mount Vernon, NY, March 31, 1990. 2. “Interview with Alex Toth from Graphic Story Magazine,” in Setting the Standard: Comics by Alex Toth, 1952–54, ed. Greg Sadowski (Seattle, 2011), pp. 26–27. The interview was conducted in 1968 by Vincent Davis, Richard Kyle, and Bill Spicer and was published originally in Graphic Story Magazine no. 10, Spring 1969. 3. Western Printing & Lithographing Company to Marjorie Henderson Buell, November 9, 1953. Marge.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 393

27/09/14 2:44 PM

394 | Notes to Chapter 27

4. Western Printing & Lithographing Company to Marjorie Henderson Buell, November 22, 1955. Marge. 5. Lloyd E. Smith to Toni Mendez, February 9, 1951. OSU, TM, box P40, folder 9. 6. Alfred Harvey to Milton Caniff, February 15, 1951. OSU, MAC, box P110, folder 1. 7. Alfred Harvey to Milton Caniff, March 24, 1952. OSU, MAC, box P110, folder 4. 8. Milton Caniff to Chester Weil, July 10, 1953. OSU, MAC, box P110, folder 5. 9. Chester Weil to Milton Caniff, January 31, 1955. OSU, MAC, box P110, folder 5. 10. Matthew H. Murphy to Milton Caniff, March 10, 1959. OSU, MAC, box P110, folder 5. 11. Matthew H. Murphy to John Stanley, July 24, 1959. John Stanley papers, courtesy of James Stanley (hereafter cited as JS). 12. Stanley and Widmer took out a marriage license at the Municipal Building in Manhattan on December 19, 1957, and were married there on December 23. 13. Matthew H. Murphy to John Stanley, September 26, 1958. JS. 14. Lloyd E. Smith to the author, February 25, 1966. 15. Bruce Hamilton, “A Tripp Down Memory Lane,” in The Little Lulu Library, ed. John Clark, set 6, vol. 16 (Scottsdale, AZ, 1985), p. 17. 16. “Interview: Carl Barks and John Stanley,” Comics Journal, February 2003, p. 160. 17. “The Old Fairgate Ruler Factory Is Demolished,” Putnam County (New York) News and Recorder (online edition), February 1, 2012. 18. James Stanley, email to the author, October 27, 2012.

CHAPTER 27

1. “Dell Comes to Play,” Westerner, December 1953, p. 14. Similar visits were reported in other issues of the Westerner. 2. A partial copy of the 1957 prospectus was provided to the author by David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives. The cited figures are from p. 9. 3. A partial copy of the 1960 prospectus was provided to the author by David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives. The quoted passage is from page 8. 4. Western Publishing Company, Inc., annual report to stockholders for 1960, p. 5. 5. Lloyd E. Smith to C. R. Rothmund, April 15, 1958. ERB. 6. William F. Callahan, “The Dell Move,” Bestsellers, December 1960, p. 15. 7. Irwin Donenfeld, “D-C Fast Turnover at 10¢ Produces the Biggest Dealer Profit,” Bestsellers, December 1960, p. 14. 8. “Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away,” Business Week, May 25, 1957, p. 59.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 394

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Notes to Epilogue

|

395

9. Malcolm Willits, “George Sherman: An Interview with Another One of the ‘Men Behind the Mouse,’ ” Vanguard (a comic-book fan magazine published by Robert Latona), 1968, p. 34. The pages are unnumbered except on the contents page. 10. Carl Barks to Malcolm Willits, April 19, 1962, in “Letters from the Duck Man, Part Three: A Sense of Fandom,” The Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories in Color, no. 8, ed. Geoffrey Blum (Prescott, AZ, n.d. [ca. 1992]), n.p. 11. Western Publishing Company, Inc., annual report to stockholders for 1963, p. 5. 12. Western published both a Walt Disney Comics Digest and a Golden Comics Digest (with other cartoon studios’ licensed characters) from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, in both cases shrinking standard comic pages to a barely readable digest size. 13. Carl Barks to Malcolm Willits, February 16, 1963, in “Letter from the Duck Man, Part Four: From Duckburg to Middle-Earth,” in The Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, no. 13, ed. Geoffrey Blum (Prescott, AZ, n.d. [ca. 1993]), n.p. 14. In Uncle Scrooge nos. 41, 44, and 49, respectively. 15. Carl Barks to Dick Blackburn, March 8, 1968. Courtesy of Dick Blackburn. 16. Malcolm Willits, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson, “The Duck Man,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS, 2003), p. 12. 17. Chase Craig to Carl Barks, July 9, 1966. WDA. 18. Carl Barks to the author, September 11, 1973. 19. Chase Craig to Carl Barks, August 31, 1965. WDA. 20. “Western’s New Home in the West,” Westerner, January 1964, p. 9. 21. “Western Reports Record Year,” Westerner, April 1965, p. 6. 22. Chase Craig to Carl Barks, November 1, 1965. WDA. 23. Carl Barks to Chase Craig, July 4, 1966. Carl Barks Correspondence Collection, 1963–84, Special Collections, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge. 24. Carl Barks to the author, January 8, 1975. 25. Carl Barks to the author, January 23, 1968. 26. The fullest and most accurate account of Barks’s years as a painter is Geoffrey Blum, Carl Barks Paintings and Drawings 1971–1990 (2011), a companion volume to the thirty-volume Carl Barks Collection that, like that set, has not yet been published in English. Blum made available to the author the original English version of his text.

EPILOGUE

1. Robert R. Barrett, “Tarzan’s Third Great Comic Strip Artist: Russell G. Manning (1929–1981),” Burroughs Bulletin, n.s., no. 13, January 1993, p. 17. 2. J. J. Barta to William C. Erskine, December 3, 1970. Marge. 3. Contract dated January 1, 1962, between Marjorie Henderson Buell and Western Printing & Lithographing Company. Marge.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 395

27/09/14 2:44 PM

396 | Notes to Epilogue

4. “Final Royalty Earnings Report on Gold Key Comics” for Little Lulu no. 194, published September 11, 1969. Marge. Little Lulu by that time was selling for fifteen cents per copy, and so the royalty was calculated at .00375 cents per copy, rather than the .0025 that was standard for ten-cent comic books. 5. Barta to Erskine, December 3, 1970. 6. Raymond C. Butman to Marjorie Henderson Buell, December 14, 1970. Marge. 7. Contract dated December 24, 1971, between Marjorie Henderson Buell, William C. Erskine, and Western Publishing Company, Inc. Marge. The contract was effective January 1, 1972. 8. Excerpts from the manual were published in the Hollywood Eclectern, an informal fan publication devoted to John Stanley and Little Lulu, in its summer 1997 issue, no. 23. 9. “Mattel to Sell Publishing Unit,” New York Times, December 22, 1983, p. D4; “Company Briefs,” New York Times, February 29, 1984, p. D22; “Western Suspends Its Whitman Comics Line,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, May 18, 1984, p. 1.

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 396

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Index

Page numbers referring to illustrations are in italics. Continuing features within anthology titles that are discussed in the text are listed under those titles; a number of the individual stories discussed in the text are likewise listed under such overall titles. Abel, Bob, 41 Action Comics (comic book), 3, 61, 119 Adams, Kellogg, 298, 315 Adelquist, Hal, 97, 373n20 Adventures of Peter Wheat (giveaway comic book), 268, 388n10 advertisements in Dell comic books, 297–98, 322–23 “Albert Alligator and Pogo Possum” (sample Sunday pages), 241 Albert the Alligator (character), 68, 71, 78, 208 Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum (comic book), 78, 193, 194, 209, 222, 236, 240, 244, 274 —stories: “The Catfish Pirates,” 209; “Mr. Owl and the Atomic Bomb” (1947), 209, 210 Alice in Wonderland (comic book), 297 Alley Oop (comic strip), 118 Alvin (Little Lulu character), 201–2 Amazing Spider-Man, The (comic book), 337 American News Company (distributor), 2, 50, 336 Amos ’n’ Andy (radio comedy), 72–73, 76, 77, 207, 208, 236, 246, 248

Anderson, Carl, 136 Anderson, Howard, 20, 51, 164, 359n19 Andrae, Thomas, 247 Andy Panda (character), 123, 125, 127, 293 Animal Comics (comic book), 11, 60, 122, 206, 211–12, 215, 231, 236, 240, 244, 245–46, 247, 267, 271, 273; introduction of Pogo characters, 68–71, 69, 73–78, 75 —features: “Albert and Pogo,” 207–9, 212, 222, 223, 227–28, 236, 240, 244–45; “Hector the Henpecked Rooster,” 222; “Jigg and Mooch,” 205–6; “Rover,” 212, 222; “Uncle Wiggily,” 71, 122, 138, 211 —story: “Albert Takes the Cake,” (1942) 68–71, 69 Archie comic books, 9, 196, 284, 323, 330, 353 Armstrong, Roger, 44, 53, 55–56, 81–83, 100, 122; on Carl Barks, 111–12, 113; on Carl Buettner, 54, 60, 82, 110–11, 161; on Robert Callender, 162–63, 291; on starting work for Western, 46–47, 47, 48 Around the Block with Dunc and Loo (comic book), 330

397

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 397

27/09/14 2:44 PM

398 | Index Artists & Writers Guild, 21, 26, 41, 50, 214, 245 Art Students League, 130 Ault, Donald, 192, 252, 264 Autry, Gene, 267, 292, 293, 298 Bailey, Ray, 329 Balken, Clara Ovidia. See Barks, Clara Ovidia Balken Bambi (comic book), 96, 97 Bambi (Disney animated feature), 157–58, 211 Barks, Arminta Johnson (Carl Barks’s mother), 143, 144 Barks, Carl, 11, 13–14, 82, 129, 131, 134, 203, 230, 236, 282, 283, 286, 287, 290, 291, 292, 295–97, 348, 379n26; as cartoonist and writer for Calgary Eye-Opener, 150–54, 151, 153; childhood and young adulthood in Oregon and California, 142–49, 147; at Walt Disney studio, 154–60, 156; earliest comic-book work, 93–103, 94, 100; earliest contact with fans, 324–25, 325; early issues of Uncle Scrooge, 301–10, 303, 309; early 1950s comic-book work, 250–64, 256, 260; essential pessimism, 113–14; late 1940s comic-book work, 163–64, 166–78, 167, 177; late 1940s–early 1950s comic-book work, 179–92; mid-1940s comic-book work, 104–14, 109; mid- to late 1950s comic-book work, 316–19, 322–23; 1960s comic-book work, 338–43; and publisher’s taboos, 314–16, 319–21; work in retirement, 344–45, 344 Barks, Clara Ovidia Balken (Carl Barks’s second wife), 154, 263–64 Barks, Clyde (Carl Barks’s brother), 143 Barks, Dorothy (Carl Barks’s younger daughter), 147 Barks, Garé (Carl Barks’s third wife), 318, 344–45 Barks, Pearl Turner (Carl Barks’s first wife), 146–47, 148–49, 154 Barks, Peggy (Carl Barks’s elder daughter), 146 Barks, William (Carl Barks’s father), 143, 144 Barnes, Andrew (“Andy”), 226, 266 Barnes, Joseph, 246, 266, 277 Barnum, P. T., 36, 229 Barta, J. J., 347 Beagle Boys (characters), 255, 304

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 398

Beany and Cecil (comic book), 293 Beaumont, Charles, 315, 320, 324 Beckett, Sheilah, 278–79 Beetle Bailey (comic book), 293, 329 Bennett, Dave, 87, 291 Benson, John, 6, 159 Bergen, Edgar, 46 Bernstein, Richard A., 348 Bertail, Inez, 227 Bertelsmann media empire, 348 Bierce, Ambrose, 113 Big Little Books, 19–20, 27, 43–44, 117–19 Black, Don, 33 Blackburn, Dick, 142 Blum, Geoffrey, 95, 105, 150, 174, 326 Bob Edwards Publishing Company, 150, 152 Bobo Larkin (comic strip), 266 Booth, Franklin, 36–37 Bower, B. M., 173 Boys’ and Girls’ March of Comics (giveaway comic book), 172, 334 —story: “Race to the South Seas” (1949), 181 Bradbury, Jack, 87, 88, 89, 291–92, 294 Bray, Glenn, 130, 344 Brecher, Irving, 16 Brenner, George, 281 Bridgeport, Connecticut, 34–35, 73 Bridgeport Post, 35, 36, 233 Bronc Peeler (comic strip), 119 Brooks, Walter R., 81 Brownies, The (comic book), 268 Buckwheat/Bucky (“Our Gang” character), 235–36, 237–40, 238–39 Buell, Marjorie Henderson, 136–37, 139, 195–96, 199, 204–5, 288, 328–29, 347 Buettner, Carl, 46, 53–55, 54, 56, 60, 81–82, 96, 110–12, 161, 163, 191, 251, 294, 366n4 Bugs Bunny (character), 56, 80, 81, 110 Bugs Bunny (comic book), 53–54, 54, 96 —story: “Bugs Bunny’s Dangerous Venture” (1946), 110. Bugs in Love (Disney cartoon), 106 Building Good Sentences, 67 Bumbazine (character), 68, 69, 70–71, 73–74, 75, 78, 209 Burley, Raymond, 273 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 27, 220 Burroughs, John Coleman, 27–29 Cabell, James Branch, 349 Calgary Eye-Opener, 148, 150–54, 151, 250

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Index | 399 Callahan, William F., Jr., 335 Callender, Robert S., 20, 27, 29, 49, 50, 57, 162–63, 164, 291, 293–94, 314, 343 Camp Comics (comic book), 58–59 —feature: “Seaman Sy Wheeler,” 58, 59 —story: “Elmer and Bugs Bunny,” 59 Caniff, Milton, 33, 146, 309, 313, 329 Captain Midnight (character), 33 captions, use in comic-book stories, 202–3 Carey, John, 82 Charlie McCarthy (character), 46, 53 Chatterbox (Oskar Lebeck), 25 Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate, 240 Choo-Choo Charlie (comic book), 332 Christmas with Mother Goose (comic book), 224 Cinema Comics, 84, 85 Cinema Comics Herald, 85 Ciotti, Paul, 171 Cisco Kid (comic book), 288, 297 Clampett, Bob, 82 Classic Comics (comic book), 61, 313 Classics Illustrated (comic book), 313 Clementina the Flying Pig (Oskar Lebeck), 25, 278, 281 Clowes, Daniel, 351 Cobb, Alice Nielsen, 162–63, 191, 192, 294, 306, 316, 319–21 Cole, Lawrence, 222 Collier’s, 36, 37, 74, 173, 231, 240 Comics Code Authority (CCA), 313 Comics Magazine, The (comic book), 37 Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA), 313 Commentary, 8 Commonweal, 1 Complete Nursery Song Book (Inez Bertail), 227 Connell, Del, 294, 307, 315, 316 Coo Coo Comics (comic book), 85, 86 Correll, Charles, 72 Couch, Chuck, 155 Cowboy Lingo: Boy’s Book of Western Facts (Big Little Book), 119 Cox, Palmer, 37, 268 Crackajack Funnies (comic book), 23, 26, 29, 30, 51, 120, 123 Craig, Chase, 46, 53–55, 56, 81–82, 112, 162, 293–94, 340–41, 341, 342, 343 Crane, Roy, 35, 102, 146, 234 Crawford, Mel, 279, 281 Crime Does Not Pay (comic book), 4, 228 Crosby, Percy, 35 Crouch, Bill, Jr., 35, 41, 265

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 399

Crumb, Robert, 350, 351 Curtis Publishing, 20–21 Daffy Duck (character), 56 Daisy Duck (character), 256, 261, 262, 306, 342–43 Dark Knight, The (comic book), 349 Darling, J. N. (“Ding”), 36 David Copperfield (MGM feature), 44 Davis, Jack, 202 Davis, Jim, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 290–91 Davis, Vince, 59 DC. See Detective Comics Inc. Delacorte, Albert, 51 Delacorte, George, Jr., 2, 47, 48–49, 50, 293, 312, 334, 348 De Lacy, Helen. See Kelly, Helen De Lacy Dell Junior Treasury (comic book), 281 Dell Publishing Company, 2, 9, 26, 31, 47–51, 162, 164–65, 270–72, 313–14, 334–36, 348 Dennis the Menace (newspaper comic), 40 DeStefano, Anne, 137, 235, 270, 273 Detective Comics Inc. (DC), 61, 76, 84, 90, 119, 165, 267, 291, 335–36, 337, 338, 346, 349 Diary of Terwilliger Jellico, The (Oskar Lebeck), 25 Dick Tracy (character), 19–20 Dinkjian, Anahid, 136 Dirgo, Ray, 34, 35 Disney, Roy O., 17, 20, 130 Disney, Walt, 16, 17, 19, 33, 37, 41, 42, 96, 156–57, 160 Ditko, Steve, 337 Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom (comic book), 346 Donald Duck (character), 101, 105, 106, 184, 258–59 Donald Duck (comic book), 9, 49, 93, 96, 166 —stories: “Adventure Down Under” (1947), 166–67, 185, 250; “Ancient Persia” (1950), 182; “Christmas for Shacktown” (1951), 251, 252, 317, 342–43; “Christmas on Bear Mountain” (1947), 172; “Dangerous Disguise” (1950), 250–51; “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold” (1942), 93, 95–96, 98, 99; “The Firebug” (1945), 180; “The Ghost of the Grotto” (1947), 167, 167, 175, 251; “The Gilded Man” (1952), 252–53; “The Golden Christmas Tree” (1948), 179; “The Golden Helmet” (1952), 252; “In Old California” (1951), 251; “Lost in

27/09/14 2:44 PM

400 | Index Donald Duck (comic book) —stories (continued) the Andes” (1949), 173–74; “Luck of the North” (1949), 175–76, 177, 181–82; “The Magic Hourglass” (1950), 182–83, 252, 317; “The Mummy’s Ring” (1943), 101–2; “Mystery of the Swamp” (1945), 108, 174; “No Such Varmint” (1951), 251–52, 253;”The Old Castle’s Secret” (1948), 172–73; “Pawns of the Loup Garou” (1968), 343; “Sheriff of Bullet Valley” (1948), 173; “The Terror of the River” (1946), 109, 109, 180, 344; “Voodoo Hoodoo” (1949), 174–75, 179, 181, 236; “Trick or Treat” (1952), 306; “Volcano Valley” (1947), 166 Donald Duck (comic strip), 23, 96, 114 Donald’s Nephews (Disney cartoon), 155 Donald’s Snow Fight (Disney cartoon), 102 Donenfeld, Harry, 84, 86, 90, 119, 335 Donenfeld, Irwin, 335–36 Downy Duck, The (Edith Heal), 226 DuBois, Gaylord, 27, 60, 65–66, 70, 115–26, 116, 124, 127–28, 161, 215, 216–18, 222, 268, 283, 346–47 DuBois, Mary, 27, 116, 121, 216–17 Duffy, Edmund, 241 Dumbo (comic books), 91–92 Dumbo (Disney animated feature), 23, 39 Duplaix, Georges, 21 Duplaix, Lily, 21 Eastern Color Printing Company 1, 2, 50 Easter with Mother Goose (comic book), 224, 225 EC (Educational Comics), 7–9, 202, 230, 286, 312, 313, 382n12 Edes, Letty Lebeck, 26, 232 Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., 117–18, 292, 346 Eisner, Will, 6–7, 234 Ella Cinders (comic strip), 46, 292 Ellsworth, Whitney, 90 Ely, William, 33, 120 Ernst, Ken, 33 Erskine, William C., 138, 139, 298, 347 Evanier, Mark, 291 Fairbanks, Douglas, 43 Fairgate Rule, 333 Fairy Tale Parade (comic book), 60–63, 64, 122, 211, 224 Fallberg, Carl, 337 Famous Funnies (comic book), 2, 86 Famous Stories (comic book), 61–62

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 400

Famous Studios, 84, 85, 138, 227 Fantasia (feature film), 39 Fantastic Four (comic book), 337 Farmer Al Falfa (character), 80 Fawcett (publisher), 51, 61, 165, 267, 313 Fawcett, Antoinette (“Annette”), 152–53 Fawcett, Harvey, 150 Fawcett, Wilford, 150, 152 Feldstein, Al, 7, 202, 382n12 Felix the Cat (character), 79, 155 First Swallow, The (MGM cartoon), 92 Flanders, Charles, 146 Fleischer, Max, 80, 84, 85, 129 Fleischer’s Animated News, 129 Foster, Harold, 145 Foster, Warren, 89 Fox, Fred, 46 Fox, Gill, 129 Francis the Talking Mule (character), 300 Freddy series (Walter R. Brooks), 81 Friedwald, Will, 84 Frontline Combat (comic book), 7, 8, 286 Frost, A. B., 65, 77, 79 Funnies, The (comic book), 2, 26–29, 32–33, 49, 55, 86, 120, 122, 236 Funny Funnies (comic book), 86 G.I. Joe (comic book), 300 Gaiman, Neil, 349 Gaines, M. C., 1–3 Gaines, William, 7, 8, 312 Garabedian, Patrick, 158 Garis, Howard R., 71, 79 Gary, Jim, 27, 118 Gene Autry Comics (comic book), 51, 83, 217, 292, 298 Gene Autry’s Champion (comic book), 299 General Electric, 34, 36 George, Nick, 93 Geraghty, Jim, 193–94 Gerald McBoing Boing (comic book), 293 Ghost Stories (comic book), 331 ghost stories, in Little Lulu, 204 Ghost World (comic book), 351 Gibson, Charles Dana, 53 Giggle Comics (comic book), 86 Gilberton (publisher) 313 Gill, Tom, 185, 278 Gladstone Gander (character), 171, 175, 181, 319 Godwin, Frank, 53 Goldberg, Rube, 125 Golden Press, 346 Gold Key comic books, 330, 331, 333, 338–39, 346–48

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Index | 401 Gollub, Morris (“Moe”), 25, 62, 193, 194–95, 209, 211–16, 220, 221, 232, 235, 278, 298–99, 299, 341; in Animal Comics, 211–12, 215; in Santa Claus Funnies, 212, 213 Gordon, Dan, 88–89, 89 Gormley, Dan, 134–36, 135, 196, 279, 331 Gosden, Freeman, 72 Gottfredson, Floyd, 102, 105 Goulart, Ron, 26–27, 33 Grahame, Kenneth, 79 graphic novels, 351 Gray, Harold, 309 Grey, Zane, 118, 173, 268, 295, 298, 299 Grosset & Dunlap, 25–26, 214 Gruelle, Johnny, 122–23, 125 Gumps, The (comic strip), 254 Gun Glory (comic book), 327

Hurricane Kids on the Lost Islands, The (Lebeck and DuBois), 120, 126, 220

Ha Ha Comics (comic book), 86 Hal Horne Inc., 16–17 Hall, Richard, 216 Hamilton, Bruce, 91, 344 Hamming-Whitman, 19 Hanna-Barbera, 322, 347 Hannah, Jack, 93, 94–95, 97, 101, 104, 155, 306 Hap Lee’s Radio Joke Book: Famous Gags of Radio Stars (Hal Horne), 16 Harman, Fred, 118–19 Harmon, Bob, 324, 325 Harmon, Eileen, 325 Harris, Joel Chandler, 70, 76–77, 79, 127 Harrison, Polly, 298 Harvey, Alfred, 329 Hawley Publications, 50 Hedinger, Charles, 139, 141, 198, 200 “Henry” (magazine cartoon), 136 Henry Aldrich (comic book), 9, 283–84 Henty, G. A., 309 Herriman, George, 79, 163, 207 Hickey, Tom, 233 Hilberman, Dave, 40 Hollywood Hams (comic strip), 56 Horn, John, 241 Horne, Hal, 15–17, 130 Howard, Cal, 89 Howdy Doody (comic book), 284, 293 Howdy Doody (television show), 8 Hubbard, Al, 291, 388n10 Huey, Dewey, and Louie (characters), 168–69, 258, 308–10 Hughes, Richard, 89 Hultgren, Ken, 88, 96, 97, 125, 157, 291

K.K. Publications, 18, 19–20, 23, 50–51, 57, 58, 162, 164, 281, 334, 338, 346 Kamen, Herman (“Kay”), 17–18, 20, 117, 118, 130, 138 Karp, Bob, 93, 95, 290 Karp, Hubie, 291 Karp, Lynn, 82, 290 Kay Kamen Ltd., 20, 138 Kelly, Bernice (Walt Kelly’s sister), 34, 40, 41 Kelly, Genevieve MacAnnulla (Walt Kelly’s mother), 34 Kelly, Helen De Lacy (Walt Kelly’s first wife), 37, 41, 226, 265, 269 Kelly, Selby Daley (Walt Kelly’s third wife), 72 Kelly, Stephanie Wagonny (Walt Kelly’s second wife), 269, 277 Kelly, Walt (Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr.), 11–13, 12, 14, 33–34, 80, 115, 128, 224, 230–33, 266, 268; in Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum, 78, 193, 194, 209, 210, 222, 236, 240, 244, 274; in Animal Comics, 68–78, 69, 75, 207–9, 221–22, 223, 227–28, 244; in Camp Comics and Looney Tunes, 58–60, 59; as caricaturist of himself and colleagues, 58, 59, 193, 194, 234–35; and Complete Nursery Song Book, 227; early comic-book work, 37, 38, 41; early life in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 34–37; in Fairy Tale Parade, 60–65, 64; as illustrator for “language guides” and “self-teaching guides,” 66–67; and Harvey Kurtzman, 233; in Mother

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 401

I Confess (magazine), 47 I Go Pogo (book), 275 Independent News (distributor), 86 Inside Detective (magazine), 48 It’s Nice to Be Little (John Stanley), 284 Jack and Jill (magazine), 20–22 Jameson, Arthur E., 63, 214 Jimmy Corrigan, or The Smartest Kid on Earth (Chris Ware), 351 Johnny Mack Brown (comic book), 294 Johnson, Tom, 130 Jones, Chuck 181 Judge (magazine), 148 Julian Messner (publisher), 226 Junior Woodchucks, 258, 317

27/09/14 2:44 PM

402 | Index Kelly, Walt (continued) Goose titles, 224–26, 225; at New York Star, 233, 241–42, 242–43, 246–48, 265–66; in Our Gang Comics, 65–66, 66, 67, 228–230, 234–36, 237–40, 238–39, 242–43; at PM, 241; and Pogo comic strip, 240–41, 244–49, 267; and Pogo Possum comic book, 231–32, 268–77, 274, 276; and Story Book Records, 226–27; as “Tony Maclay” (pseudonym) 226; at Walt Disney studio, 37, 39–42; in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, 60, 92, 268 Kelly, Walter C., Sr. (Walt Kelly’s father), 34, 72 Kempton, Murray, 11, 13 Kerr, George F., 63, 67, 125, 128, 214 Ketcham, Hank, 40 Kimball, Ward, 39–40, 41, 58, 71–72, 234, 246, 363n48, 364n57 King, Jack, 101 King Features Syndicate, 136, 281, 329, 347 King of the Royal Mounted (character), 299 King of the Royal Mounted (comic strip), 118 Kinstler, Raymond Everett, 295, 296, 327 Kirby, Jack, 337 Klondike ‘98 (Ethel Anderson Becker), 305 KoKo (character), 80 Korkis, Jim, 104 Krazy Kat (comic book), 284 Krazy Kat (comic strip), 79, 163, 207 Krigstein, Bernard, 230, 382n12 Kurtzman, Harvey, 7–8, 10, 113, 186, 286, 327; and Walt Kelly, 233 Kyle, Richard, 351 Landon School, 145 language guides, 66, 74–76 Lantz, Walter, 55, 83, 112, 123, 125, 236 Lardner, John, 246, 277 Lauterbach, Richard E., 246–47, 277 Lebeck, Letty. See Edes, Letty Lebeck Lebeck, Oskar, 14, 46, 50, 55, 57, 58, 92, 107, 221–22, 224, 279, 295, 338; and Animal Comics, 70; as author of children’s books, 25–26, 44, 125; copyrights in his name, 57, 61, 244; departure from Western, 281, 282; Disney studio visit, 94, 96; and Gaylord DuBois, 115, 120–21, 216–17; as editor of early comic books, 26–31, 27, 30, 32–33; and Fairy Tale Parade, 60–62;

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 402

and Moe Gollub, 211–16, 213, 215; and Richard Hall, 216; and Walt Kelly, 59, 60, 232–33, 272; and Dan Noonan, 211–12, 221, 279–80, 280; personal history, 31–32, 32; and John Stanley, 128, 131, 136, 139, 141, 195, 196; and Surprise Books, 278–81, 280; and Frank Thomas, 29–31, 30; Twin Earths comic strip, 281, 282 Lebeck, Ruth Seelig, 27, 31, 32 lettering in comics, 28, 35, 62 Leyerle, F. J., 20, 164 Liebling, A. J., 248 Li’l Bad Wolf (character), 107, 173n21 Li’l Bad Wolf (comic book), 293 Li’l Eight Ball (character), 128, 236–37 Linda Lark (comic book), 330 Little Golden Books, 21 Little Hiawatha (comic book), 293 Little Itch (character), 328 Little King, The (comic book), 284 Little Lulu (character), 199, 205 Little Lulu (comic book), 13, 14, 128, 136, 139–41, 140, 195–206, 198, 224, 284–88, 294, 298, 328, 329–30, 331, 347 —feature: “Tubby,” 286–87 —stories: “The Bogyman” (1950, unpublished), 204–5; “Five Little Babies” (1951), 205; “The Kid Who Came to Dinner” (1946), 199–201, 200; “The Little Rich Boy” (1951), 284, 285; “Lulu in Distress” (1946), 202; “Two Foots Is Feet” (1956), 328 “Little Lulu” (magazine cartoon), 136 Little Nemo in Slumberland (comic strip), 145 Little Orphan Annie (character), 19–20 Little Orphan Annie (comic strip), 67, 309 Little, Irene, 214 Live Stories, 47 Lone Ranger (comic book), 185, 278, 293, 298 Lone Ranger, The (comic strip), 146 Lone Ranger, The (Gaylord DuBois), 117 Lone Ranger’s Famous Horse Hi-Yo Silver, The (comic book), 299 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (animated cartoons), 56 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 51, 53, 56, 59–60, 79, 81–83, 85, 97, 106–7, 111, 122, 163, 293 —features: “Bugs Bunny,” 54–55, 82, 163; “Kandi the Cave Kid,” 59; “Pat,

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Index | 403 Patsy & Pete” 47, 60, 229; “Sniffles and Mary Jane,” 48, 81 Lowe, Samuel E., 19, 118, 119 Maclay, Tony (Walt Kelly pseudonym), 226 Maclean’s, 72 Mad, 8, 186, 286, 287, 288 Magazine Comics Duck model sheet, 176 Magica de Spell, 340 Magic Morro (character), 29 Magnus, Robot Fighter, 346 Maltese, Mike, 89 Manning, Russ, 346 Marcus, Leonard, 21 Marine, Ed, 299 Marsh, Jesse, 217, 218–19, 220, 282–83, 346 Martan the Marvel Man (character), 29 Marvel (publisher), 336–37 Mary Jane (character), 81, 369n3 Mary Jane and Sniffles (comic book), 293 Mary Worth (comic strip), 33 Mattel (toy company), 348 Mauldin, Bill, 241 Maus, 350 McBride, Clifford, 53 McBride, Hubbell R., 71, 211 McCabe, Norman, 82 McCay, Winsor, 145 McClintock, Marshall (“Mike”), 41, 226, 227 McClure Syndicate, 2, 49 McKimson, Tom, 83, 110, 191, 264, 294 McLevy, Jasper, 36 McNaught Syndicate, 46 McNulty, John, 277 McWilliams, Alden, 281 Mechanics of English, The, 67 Melvin Monster (comic book), 330–31, 332 Mendez, Toni, 280, 281 Merrill, Oregon, 143 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 43, 65, 92 Meyer, Helen, 9, 27, 31, 50, 313, 330 Meyers, Henry L., 150–52 Mickey and the Beanstalk (planned Disney feature), 93 Mickey Mouse (Big Little Book), 20 Mickey Mouse (comic book), 92, 96, 106 —story: “Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot” (1941), 92, 96 Mickey Mouse (comic strip), 18, 20, 23, 102 Mickey Mouse Magazine, 15–18, 20, 21–22, 23, 49, 130, 162 Milky Way, The (MGM cartoon), 92

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 403

Miller, Frank, 349 Milne, A. A., 77, 118 Modern Inventions (Disney cartoon), 155 Modern Romances (magazine), 48 Modern Screen (magazine), 48 Montaigne, Michel de, 184 Moore, Alan, 349 Moore, Fred, 39, 40, 41 Moore, Richard (“Sparky”), 294–95, 307 More Fun (comic book), 37 Morgan’s Ghost (unmade Disney feature cartoon), 93, 96, 160 Mortimer Snerd (character), 46 Morton, Jay, 84 Mother Goose and Nursery Rhyme Comics (comic book), 224 Motion Picture Daily, 17 Mougin, Lou, 117 Mouly, Françoise, 350 Moving Day (Disney cartoon), 157 Moviola, 92 Murphy, Charles 313 Murphy, Matthew H., 281, 295, 329, 330, 331 Murrow, Edward R., 231 Murry, Paul, 337 Nancy (comic book), 330 Nancy and Sluggo (characters), 330 Napoleon (comic strip), 53 National Cartoonists Society, 231 National Geographic (magazine), 98, 101, 142, 174, 185, 264, 283 Nedor Publishing Company, 80, 85 New Comics (comic book), 37 New Funnies (comic book), 50, 55, 86, 106, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 204, 214, 236–37, 294; John Stanley stories in, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 —features: “Andy Panda,” 123, 125, 128, 131, 132, 133; “Billy and Bonny Bee,” 107; “Homer Pigeon,” 132; “Li’l Eight Ball,” 236–37; “Oswald the Rabbit,” 123, 134; “Raggedy Ann & Andy,” 123, 125; “Woody Woodpecker,” 132, 134 New Yorker, 134, 193–94, 248 New York Post, 267 New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, 129 New York Star, 233, 241–48, 242, 243, 265, 277 Nielsen, Alice. See Cobb, Alice Nielsen Nights with Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris), 76

27/09/14 2:44 PM

404 | Index Noonan, Dan, 59, 131, 136, 193, 196–97, 209, 214, 221–22, 235, 279; in Animal Comics, 211–12, 222; on Surprise Books, 279–80, 280 North, Sterling, 61 Odd Bodkins (comic strip), 46 Ogle, Lucille, 245 O. G. Whiz (comic book), 332 Ohio State University, 43, 244 Oona Goosepimple (character), 330 Oswald the Rabbit (comic book), 125–26, 224, 236, 240 Our Gang Comics / Our Gang with Tom and Jerry (comic book), 55, 65, 68, 71, 83, 92, 106, 122, 123, 126, 128, 136, 229, 237, 240, 242 —features: “Barney Bear,” 122; “Barney Bear and Benny Burro,” 55, 106, 166; “Flip and Dip,” 122; “King,” 122; “Our Gang,” 35, 65–66, 67, 228–30, 234–36, 237–40, 242–44; “Tom and Jerry,” 122, 123, 124, 131 Overgard, William, 329 Owl, The (character), 29 Packer, Eleanor Lewis, 24, 43–44, 46, 53, 81–82, 84, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 111, 112, 113, 161–63, 179 Packer, George L., 43 Paiker, Frank, 129 panels, size, arrangement, and borders of, 251–52, 273 Panic (comic book), 9 paper shortages, 88, 166, 292 Parsons The New School for Design. See New York School of Fine and Applied Arts Peter Rabbit, The Tale of (Beatrix Potter), 79, 214 Phantasmo (character), 29, 33 Phelps, Donald, 129, 130, 136, 141 Phoenix Art Institute, 36 Pines, Dora, 86 Pines, Jacquelyn Sangor, 84, 85 Pines, Ned L., 17, 85, 86, 291, 328 Pinocchio (comic book), 224 Pinocchio (Disney animated feature), 23, 39 Platt, Kin, 80, 180 Pledge to Parents, A (Dell), 313–14 Pluto Saves the Ship (comic book), 93 —story: “Pluto Saves the Ship” (1942), 95–96 PM newspaper, 241

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 404

Pogo (book), 275 Pogo (comic strip), 11, 13, 68, 207, 244–49, 267 Pogo Parade (comic book), 246, 271 Pogo Possum (comic book), 11, 209, 232, 268, 269, 270–77, 276, 294, 329 —story: “Feelin’ Mighty Hale, and Farewell” (1950), 274, 274 Pogo Stepmother Goose, The, 277 Popular Comics, 2, 26, 29, 49, 118, 120, 267 Porky Pig (character), 47, 81 Porky Pig (comic book), 97, 106 Post-Hall Syndicate, 35, 267 Post Office Department, 270 Potter, Beatrix, 79, 214 Prince Valiant (comic strip), 145 Psychoanalysis (comic book), 8 radio comedy, 207 Raffy Uses His Head (Rita Kissin), 226 Raggedy Ann & Andy (comic book), 212, 214, 236, 268 —feature: “Peterkin Pottle,” 206 Random House, 348 Raphael G. Wolff Studios, 87 Real Funnies (comic book), 86 Real Screen Comics (comic book), 76, 90 Red Ryder (character), 119 Red Ryder (comic strip), 118, 119 Red Ryder Comics (comic book), 50 Red Ryder Ranch Comics (comic book), 334 Reeves, Harry, 155, 156 Reluctant Dragon, The (Disney feature film), 39 Reluctant Dragon, Walt Disney’s (comic book), 91–92 Remington Arms, 34 Rex, King of the Deep (Lebeck and DuBois), 120 rhetoric, Carl Barks’s mastery of comicbook, 175 Rinehart & Company, 311–12 Risto, Veve, 56, 82–83, 100, 132, 181 Rivera, Tony, 222, 279 RKO Radio Pictures, 17 Roach, Hal, 43, 65 Robinson, Murray, 37, 74, 240 Rogers, Roy, 267, 293, 298 Rolfsen, Phil, 151 romance comics, 9 Rooney, Andy, 119 Rose, John, 95

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Index | 405 rotoscoping, 92 Roy Rogers Comics (comic book), 126, 216, 267, 298 Saludos Amigos, 93 Samuels, Leo, 41 Sandman (comic book), 349 Sangor, Benjamin W., 84–90, 97, 290–91 Sangor, Jacquelyn. See Pines, Jacquelyn Sangor Santa Claus Funnies, 212, 213 Saturday Evening Post, 136, 173 Savitt, Sam, 299 Schlesinger, Leon, 27, 44, 56, 82, 87 Seduction of the Innocent (Fredric Wertham), 4, 311–12 Segar, E. C., 146, 207 Sequoia (MGM feature), 44 Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (comic book), 293 Sheehan, Gordon, 85, 86, 138 Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (comic book), 220 Shelton, Gilbert, 350 Shepard, Ernest H., 81 Shuster, Joe, 22, 119 Siegel, Jerry, 22, 119 Silly Symphonies (comic strip), 18, 106 Silvertip (comic book), 295 Simon and Schuster, 269 Simple J. Malarkey (character), 13, 248 Skippy (comic strip), 35 Slesinger, Stephen, 27, 50, 117–19 Small, Jon, 63 Small, Richard, 194, 235, 270, 277 Smith, Lloyd E., 5–6, 9, 29, 116, 117, 161, 244–45, 270, 292, 297–98, 311–13, 316, 329, 331, 353, 358n8 Smith, Win, 47 Snappy Stories (magazine), 47 Sniffles (character), 81 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney animated feature), 23 Song of the South (Disney feature), 237 Spencer, Harold, 27 Spencer, Roy A., 19 Spencer, Todd, 27 Spicer, Bill, 59, 307 Spicer, John, 324 Spiegelman, Art, 350 Spirit, The (character), 6–7 “Spirit, The” (newspaper section), 6, 186 Standard (publisher), 291, 328 Stanley, Anna Ahern (John Stanley’s mother), 128

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 405

Stanley, Barbara (John Stanley’s wife). See Widmer, Barbara Tikotin Stanley, James (John Stanley’s brother), 131 Stanley, James (John Stanley’s father), 128 Stanley, James (John Stanley’s son), 333 Stanley, John, 13, 14, 113, 115, 137, 138, 178, 193–95, 194, 205–6, 224, 227, 235, 279, 332, 348, 351, 352; on Walt Kelly, 234–35, 328–30; later life, 333; on Oskar Lebeck, 26, 131, 141; in Little Lulu, 136, 139–41, 140, 195–205, 198, 200, 283–87, 285, 328, 329–30; in Nancy, 330; in New Funnies, 128–36, 133, 135; in Our Gang Comics, 123, 124; in Tubby, 287–88; work for Dell Publishing ,330–333 stereotypes (racial), 236–37, 240 Steve Canyon (comic book), 329 Steve Canyon (comic strip), 146, 313, 329 St. Nicholas: The Magazine of Youth, 16, 37, 38 Stop Go: The Story of Automobile City (Oskar Lebeck), 25 Story Book Record Company, 226–27 Story of Our Gang, A (Eleanor Packer), 43 Strange Tales (comic book), 337 Stratosphere Jim and His Flying Fortress (Lebeck and DuBois), 120 Strebe, Dorothy, 99, 373n21 Strobl, Tony, 343 Sullivant, T. S., 65 Sumner, Ed, 151 Super Comics (comic book), 23, 26, 29, 33, 51 superhero comics, 3, 44, 49, 51, 349, 352 Superman (character), 3, 22, 61, 119 Supermouse (character), 85 Surprise Books, 278–80, 338 Swift, David (“Bud”), 40 taboos in Dell comics, 315–16, 321 Tailspin Tommy (comic strip), 118 Tales from the Crypt (comic book), 4 Tales from the Tomb (comic book), 331 Taliaferro, Al, 114 Tarzan (comic book), 217, 218–19, 220, 292, 298, 299; as Tarzan of the Apes, 340, 346 Tendlar, Dave, 129 Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo (Walt Kelly), 70 Terry, Paul, and Terrytoons, 80, 86–87, 290 Terry and the Pirates (comic strip), 33, 67, 309, 329

27/09/14 2:44 PM

406 | Index Textile High School, New York, 128 Thimble Theatre (comic strip), 146, 207 Thirteen Going on Eighteen (comic book), 332 Thomas, Frank, 29–31, 107 Thompson, Maggie, 141 Three Caballeros, The (comic book), 224 Tiny Tots Comics (comic book), 224 Tom and Jerry Comics (comic book), 294, 297 Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (comic book), 281 Tonkonogy, George and Sadie, 48 Tonkonogy, George, Jr. See Delacorte, George, Jr. Toth, Alex, 282–83, 327–28 Tralla La (in Uncle Scrooge), 310, 322 Tripp, Irving (“Bud”), 91–92, 139, 141, 198, 200, 287, 331 Trouble on the Ark (“Tony Maclay”), 226 Tubby (character), 199–201, 200, 286–87 Tubby (comic book), 287–88 Turner, Gil, 87 Turner, Lloyd, 89 Tweety and Sylvester (comic book), 293 Twin Earths (comic strip), 281 Two-Fisted Tales (comic book), 7 Tyer, James, 87 Uncle Pogo So-So Stories (Walt Kelly), 11, 12, 275 Uncle Remus, 70, 76–77, 127 Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (Joel Chandler Harris), 76 Uncle Scrooge (comic book), 263, 264, 288, 301–6, 307, 308–10, 316–17, 322, 323, 338–40 —stories: “Back to the Klondike” (1953), 304–6; Chisel McSue story in third one-shot, 308, 309; “House of Haunts” (1966), 340–41; “Island in the Sky” (1960), 323; “Land Beneath the Ground” (1956), 317; “Only a Poor Old Man” (1952), 301–4, 303 Uncle Scrooge McDuck (character), 172, 187–88, 189, 191, 254, 263, 301–6 “underground” comic books, 349–50 United Artists (UA) ,16 unpublished stories, 204–5, 306, 320–21 Volke, Ed, 82 Vosburgh, John R., 1, 3, 22 Wadewitz, Edward Henry, 18–19, 20, 23–24, 51, 162, 164

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 406

Wadewitz, W. R., 314 Wagonny, Stephanie. See Kelly, Stephanie Wagonny Walker, Mort, 329 Walt Disney Productions, 99, 164, 347 Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade, 187–91, 251 —story: “Letter to Santa” (1949), 187–88, 189, 190–91, 230 Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, 11, 60, 105, 106, 107, 162–63, 164, 179, 181, 191–92, 253, 268, 297, 301, 318, 322, 334, 336, 337, 338, 348; earliest issues 20, 22–24, 44, 49, 92, 97; as K.K. publication, 50, 51, 58 —features: “Bucky Bug,” 106–7; “Donald Duck,” 97–101, 102–3, 168–72, 254–64, 288, 291, 318–21, 324, 339; “Gremlins,” 60; “Li’l Bad Wolf,” 76–77, 373n21; “Mickey Mouse,” 337 —stories, “Donald Duck,” by issue number and date: no. 32 (May 1943), 99–100, 100; no. 41 (Feb. 1944), 102; no. 53 (Feb. 1945), 108; no. 54 (March 1945), 108; no. 62 (Nov. 1945), 108–9; no. 76 (Jan. 1947), 168; no. 89 (Feb. 1948), 168–69; no. 92 (May 1948), 169–70; no. 98 (Nov. 1948), 170–71; no. 101 (Feb. 1949), 342; no. 124 (Jan. 1951), 191, 254; no. 125 (Feb. 1951), 258; no. 126 (March 1951), 254–55, 303; no. 129 (June 1951), 262; no. 131 (Aug. 1951), 257; no. 132 (Sept. 1951), 258; no. 133 (Oct. 1951), 257, 314; nos. 134–35 (Nov.–Dec. 1951), 255, 302, 304; no. 138 (March 1952), 255, 256, 262–63; no. 140 (May 1952), 256–57; no. 142 (July 1952), 258; no. 145 (Oct. 1952), 259–61, 260; no. 146 (Nov. 1952), 261; no. 149 (Feb. 1953), 261; no. 150 (March 1953), 261; no. 156 (Sept. 1953), 261–62; no. 157 (Oct. 1953), 263; no. 158 (Nov. 1953), 262; no. 178 (July 1955), 318; no. 180 (Sept. 1955), 318; no. 186 (March 1956), 319–20; no. 308 (May 1966; titled “Donald and Daisy”), 342 —stories, other: “The Laughing Gauchito,” 92 Walt Disney’s Vacation Parade 185–86, 251 —story: “Vacation Time,” 185–86 Ward, George, 265–67, 273, 275 Ware, Chris 351 Warner Bros., 44, 56, 181, 300 Warren Harding High School, Bridgeport, 35

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Index | 407 Warshow, Robert, 8 Wash Tubbs (comic strip), 35, 67, 102, 118 Watchmen, 349 Watson, Jane Werner, 137 Waugh, Coulton, 1–2 Weeks, Clair, 37–38 Weil, Chester, 329 Wells, George Y., 246, 277 Wertham, Fredric, 4, 311–13 Wertheim, Arthur Frank, 72 Western Marshal (comic book), 295, 296 Western Printing & Lithographing Company, 9, 14, 18–19, 20, 22–24, 29, 49–50, 57, 84, 85, 137, 165, 232, 268, 269, 288, 291–300, 316, 325–26, 334–35; as Western Publishing Company, 335, 339, 341–42, 348 West Side Printing Company, 19 Wettberg, Niles von, 277 White, Lloyd, 287 Whitman Publishing Company, 19–20, 25–26, 43, 44–45, 57, 96, 98, 117, 118, 120, 161, 311, 315, 348

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 407

Wickersham, Bob, 88–89 Widmer, Barbara Tikotin, 330 Wiese, Kurt, 81 Wildenberg, Harry, 1, 3, 22 Williams, Bill, 284 Williams, Margaret Wynnfred. See Barks, Garé Willits, Malcolm, 166, 188, 314, 324–25, 338, 339, 340 Wind in the Willows, The (Kenneth Grahame), 77, 79, 81 Wind in the Willows, The (planned Disney animated feature), 93 Witch Hazel (character), 328 Wood, Wallace, 202 Woody Woodpecker (comic book), 293 Worrell, John C., 51 Wright, Bill, 181 Young, Frank, 284 Zerbe, A. L., 44, 46 Ziemann, Irvin H., 117, 120, 216

27/09/14 2:44 PM

Barrier - 9780520241183.indd 408

27/09/14 2:44 PM