Sunday, September 7, 2008

AAEC - History Corner

September 26, 2005

Hurd Obit

Last week Editor and Publisher noted the death of Jud Hurd, a cartoonist and longtime editor of "Cartoonist Profiles" magazine, who died September 14 of pneumonia. He was 92.

The Westport, Conn., resident had previously suffered a stroke in May. "He had a very difficult four months, but he never complained," his widow, Claudia Hurd, told E&P Online Monday.

Jud founded "Cartoonist Profiles" in 1969 after editing the National Cartoonists Society's (NCS) newsletter for several years. Claudia said Jud was able to work on the just-published issue of "Cartoonist Profiles." There will be no more issues after that.

In 2004, Andrews McMeel Publishing released a book by Hurd called "Cartoon Success Secrets: A Tribute to 35 Years of Cartoonist Profiles." The 350-page hardcover included stories and ...
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September 26, 2005

Wilson Obit

Clint C. Wilson, Sr. the longtime editorial cartoonist at the Los Angeles Sentinel died of kidney failure on Sunday, September 18, in Hawthorne, California. He was 90.

The Comics Reporter wrote: "Wilson was one of the traditional black press' most esteemed cartoonists, working in very strong, blunt style marked by a certain elegance in the way figures were depicted. He began his career as a sports cartoonist in San Antonio, and held that position at the Sentinel before becoming their editorial cartoonist. He was inducted into the Black Press Hall of Fame in 1990, and retired in 2002."

"Using a lean drawing style, often adding shading for atmosphere, he took up local and national issues including affirmative action, gang violence and police brutality," noted the Los Angeles Times.

"I deal with the problems in the black ...
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September 26, 2005

Siporin Obit

Mickey Siporin, an editorial cartoonist who freelanced to the Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and other publications, died Sunday, September 18, of kidney failure associated with lymphoma.

"He was a unique cartoonist and a great guy, and I'll miss him," wrote fellow cartoonist Ted Rall.

Editor and Publisher took a look at Siporin's career last week.

The New Jersey resident regularly did cartoons for The Westsider weekly newspaper in New York City, and also freelanced cartoons to dailies such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Toronto Star, and The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. In 1995, Siporin won the New York Press Association's second-place award for editorial cartooning.

Siporin was also a professor at Montclair State University before retiring several years ago, and a filmmaker whose short movies aired on ...
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August 15, 2005

Vic Cantone Bids Adieu

Cartoonist and long-time AAEC member Victor Cantone, 71, died on April 2, 2005.

As noted in the last issue of the Notebook, Vic had been fighting a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, for a number of years.

Cantone was a nationally syndicated political cartoonist listed in Who’s Who in American Art. He was with Newsday from 1954-1959 as newsroom cartoonist and courtroom artist, and on staff at the Daily News from 1951-1991.

At the Daily News he won a number of awards, including the Fourth Estate Award in 1976 and a Deadline Club award in 2003. His work was syndicated by King Features and appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Time.

Cantone was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times and had caricatures of Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan in ...
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February 26, 2005

Remembering Ed Valtman

Earlier this year Ed Valtman, a cartoonist and founding member of the AAEC, died at age 90. [Please see the obituary on page 17]. President Matt Davies wrote the following tribute.

On behalf of all the members of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, I would like to extend our condolences to the friends, family and readers of fellow cartoonist, Ed Valtman. Though I myself never had the good fortune to meet Ed, he sent me a signed copy of his last book several months ago.

With hat in hand, I hope that he will accept this humble and heartfelt tribute in lieu of the "thank you" I simply didn’t send out in time.

How appropriate for a gathering of tribute and remembrance to such a talented and observant artist as Ed, who left a country whose leaders frowned ...
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February 26, 2005

Black Press Cartoonist Melvin Tapley Dies After Long Illness

Melvin Tapley, 86, died Tuesday, February 8, 2005 in Valhalla, N.Y., after a long illness. He was a retired arts editor for the Amsterdam Newspapers and one of the leading cartoonists of the black press, drawing for the New York "Amsterdam" Newspaper from the 1940s until he retired in the late 1990s.

Melvin Tapley started at the Amsterdam in 1942 drawing "The Brown Family" as his first assignment. He later he took over "Jim Steel" in 1943, and drew editorial cartoons in late 1940s.

For more information on Tapley and other cartoonists, please see Tim Jackson’s Pioneering Cartoonist of Color Web site for details. ---
December 20, 2003

Arkansas' George Fisher dies at 80

TOM PARSONS / Associated Press Writer

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- Political cartoonist George Fisher, who used his art to skewer Arkansas political figures for decades but kept their respect and friendship, has died. He was 80.
Fisher's partner of 14 years, Judi Woods, said Tuesday that she found Fisher dead at his home late Monday afternoon after not being able to reach him on the phone.
"Arkansas has lost one of its best," she said.
Fisher's signature cartoon was the outline of the profile of Gov. Orval Faubus within the branches of a farkleberry tree, which he penned after Faubus claimed to have stopped state highway workers from cutting down a giant farkleberry while traveling in northern Arkansas.
Another widely remembered ...
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December 20, 2003

Library of Congress Gets Art from Wood

Cartoonist, Avid Collector and Founding Member of the AAEC Donates 35,000 Pieces of Original Art

As a teenager during world war II, Art Wood worked for two years at the Library of Congress. His tasks included staffing the check-in counter, conducting tours, and–eventually–drawing 20 cartoons for an Library handbook.
Sixty years later, Wood is donating more than 35,000 original drawings to the Library of Congress.
"I’ve always had a closeness to the library," he said, adding that about 20 universities had also expressed interest in the collection.
Wood is donating originals by thousands of artists from the U.S. and abroad. A big part of the collection includes the work of famous editorial cartoonists, including Thomas Nast, Honoré Daumier, Rube Goldberg (above) and most of the ...
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May 18, 2003

Jack McLeod, 1931-2003

Editorial cartoonist Jack M. McLeod, 72, passed away on Wednesday, April 9, 2003.
By the time he retired in the mid-1990s, he had drawn hundreds of cartoons for several newspapers owned by the Army Times Publishing and the Buffalo Evening News, said Jim Doyle, the retired executive editor for Army Times Publishing, a unit of Gannett Co. Inc. According to the family, McLeod also drew for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Doyle said McLeod had a passion for his work. He and the cartoonist worked together from 1983 to 1996.
"What I most admired about Jack is that he was the consummate professional," Doyle said. "He knew his business and he did it extremely well."
"He did what a good cartoonist does, he did his homework; he did a lot of reading – he did his research. He knew what ...
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February 6, 2003

Rest in Peace, Bill Mauldin

The influential, uncompromising, and hard-living cartoonist, 81, dies after long struggle

Members' tributes to Bill Mauldin

By V. Cullum Rogers

Bill Mauldin, the greatest American cartoonist of World War II and one of the greatest editorial cartoonists of the past century, died on January 22 at a nursing home in Newport Beach, California, at the age of 81.

He died of complications from Alzheimer?s disease, including pneumonia, said Andy Mauldin, one of his seven sons. "It?s really good that he?s not suffering anymore," he said. "He had a terrible struggle."

William Henry Mauldin was born October 29, 1921, in Mountain Park, New Mexico, one of two sons born to Sidney ...
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February 6, 2003

'Like nobody else ...'

Bill Mauldin died Wednesday. He was a tough man who flew his own airplane and ran for Congress and could draw editorial cartoons like nobody else.

If not the best and most important cartoonist of the 20th century, then he was among a handful at the top of the craft.

Mauldin did more with an ink pen to help the morale of our soldiers in World War II than 100 USO shows. Wet and cold infantrymen looked at Mauldin?s Willie and Joe and saw themselves: unshaven, exhausted, heroic in their scorn for heroism, hungry for grub, not glory, all too happy to trade a medal for a pair of dry socks.They saw themselves and laughed, and the world saw them, and both laughed and understood, a little, about the war.

Mauldin had so much heart that even the Germans looked human when he drew them, not the evil would-be ...
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February 6, 2003

With a little help from his friends

by Chip Beck

Bill Mauldin's death hit me about the same way Willie and Joe would have reacted if told one of their dogface comrades had been killed in combat -- you realize it was inevitable, but that "don't make it less sad."

As a cartoonist and combat veteran myself, I was a fan of Mauldin's WWII cartoons since I first came across "Up Front" in the 1950s. I experienced more than a dozen conflicts over 33 years, and as far as I'm concerned, Mauldin still had the last word on all of them.

In 1999, when the NCS met in San Antonio, I had the honor of introducing Bill to a seminar attended by 350 colleagues and their families. It was packed! In the audience were many of Mauldin's lifelong colleagues and friends, including WWII veterans Sparky Schulz, Mort Walker, and Fred Lasswell.

At the ...
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February 6, 2003

'The very best kind of cartoon'

By J.P. Trostle

My single favorite Bill Mauldin cartoon also turned out to be one of his favorites as well. (In fact, the joke is so funny, decades later the TV show "M ---
February 6, 2003

A Last Visit with Mauldin

By Dennis Renault

[Editor's note: The following recounts the author's visit with Mauldin after his Alzheimer's disease had greatly advanced. It is a hard read, but the story does have a happy ending.]

In March of 2001, my wife and I visited Bill Mauldin and his first wife, Jean, in Newport Beach, California, as we started on a 4-month trip around the U.S. in our camper.

Jean, who had been divorced from Bill since 1946, was his caregiver (to use the current term.) The nearby house they shared had just burned down and the meeting took place at the Radisson Hotel, where they were staying.

Planning that trip, I had arranged to visit former newspaper editors for whom I?d drawn editorial cartoons over the years, including editors of military publications, so why not look up Bill Mauldin, ...
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February 6, 2003

Remembering Mauldin

By Jeff Danziger

Bill Mauldin once drew his World War II soldiers, Willie and Joe, clutching the ground to avoid incoming German fire, and Willie complains to Joe, "I can't get no lower, me buttons is in the way."

My father, a WW II veteran, had showed this to me when I was a kid, and tried explaining the idea of thinking of something funny when people were shooting at you. Some years later in Phuoc Vinh, a miserable town about 50 kilometers north of Saigon, I was at a dinner for a departing colonel, in a rather diaphanous mess hall, when Vietcong mortars began falling out of the sky. We all dove for the ground, scattering chairs, silverware and glasses. I wound up on top of the evening?s honoree.

While the windows were being blown out of the building and all sorts of detritus was being flung about, the thought ...
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February 6, 2003

Hirschfeld Has Left the Building

By R.C. Harvey

New York City's Landmarks Conservancy pronounced him a Living Landmark in 1996. Now, alas, he no longer lives. But his drawings do, each one a landmark of the vibrant purity of his exquisite line art.

"His drawings will last for centuries," said Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of the New York Times upon hearing of the death, on January 20 at age 99, of Al Hirschfeld, whose caricatures in theatrical tableaux had defined the newspaper's Sunday theater section for decades.

"Like Daumier," Gelb continued, "Hirschfeld's drawings will be looked at and studied."

If you need to be told that Hirschfeld was the nation?s foremost caricaturist (he preferred "characterist")?that his sweeping, undulating line is matchless in supple grace and telling simplicity, that his likenesses ...
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February 6, 2003

Tribute to the Line Kings

By Dwane Powell

In a provincial community where Jim Crow held sway, our house in South Arkansas was stocked to the rafters with national magazines, newspapers and periodicals of all kinds. If I wasn't running in the fields, fishing, riding or tagging along with my dad around the farm, I was reading short stories and news articles, and devouring the cartoons and illustrations scattered through the publications, studiously going over every line and caption.

Dad, a five-year World War II veteran, had brought back some old copies of Stars and Stripes. He affectionately showed me Willie and Joe cartoons that won Bill Mauldin a Pulitzer Prize. This pair of shaggy, slump-shouldered, war-weary GIs gave comic relief to millions of soldiers, and I could see Mauldin?s early works side by side with the cartoons he drew after Dad came home. My ...
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February 6, 2003

Toasting Thomas Nast at OSU

By R.C. Harvey

Any decent editorial cartoonist must have more freedom and audacity than is likely to be good for the digestion of his supervisors, Draper Hill quipped, launching his presentation at the Thomas Nast symposium held at Ohio State University.

For a good portion of his career at Harper?s Weekly, Nast enjoyed that sort of freedom, Hill told me later?"at least until Fletcher Harper died in 1875."

Hailed, customarily, as the father of American political cartooning, Nast was not just one of the most passionate reformers of the 19th century but an accomplished pictorial journalist, and both these guises were displayed during the symposium on December 7, the centennial of the cartoonist?s death.

Nast died in 1902 while serving in a backwater consular post in Ecuador, a man forgotten ...
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February 6, 2003

Nast As Prologue: A Cartoon Pioneer is Honored in Hometown ... and on C-Span

By Dave Astor

It was "Remembrance of Things Nast" in Morristown, N.J., where several December 7, 2002, events marked the centennial of the legendary editorial cartoonist's death.

The Morris Museum was the site of a symposium that included discussion of the impact of Thomas Nast (1840-1902) on editorial cartooning today. The town library featured a film, slides, displays, and more on Nast. And the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum -- across the street from the house where Nast lived from 1872 until months before his death -- offered a large exhibit of photos, Nast artifacts such as his inkwell and walking sticks, cartoons by present-day artists showing Nast's influence, Nast's paintings (some huge), and, of course, his groundbreaking cartoons.

Visitors to the Macculloch show saw the symbols created or ...
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December 4, 2002

Daily News Frank Evers Passes

Frank Evers, an award-winning Daily News editorial cartoonist famed for his drawings of City Hall politics, died October 27, after an accidental fall at his Brick, NJ, home. He was 82. During a two-decade career with The News, he won numerous awards. In 1980, the National Cartoonists Society presented Evers with its first prize in excellence for the "wit and vitality" he brought to The News’ editorial page.
One of his best-known cartoons showed then-Mayor Ed Koch pointing toward a skeleton during a period of civic austerity and announcing, "Now I’ll discuss my budget."
Evers was a talented artist who won a baseball scholarship to Temple University but left after one year to pursue his love of cartooning.
A Coast Guard veteran and life-long Jerseyan, he ...
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September 15, 2002

William Campbell Jr., 1943-2002

William H. "Bill" Campbell Jr., whose editorial cartooning career was abruptly cut short when he was paralyzed in a 1979 car wreck, died at his home in Seaton, IL, on July 12, 2002.
From 1976 to 1979, he was the staff cartoonist for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, IA. Though he stopped cartooning after the accident, Campbell remained an AAEC member for the rest of his life.
As reported in the Quad City Times, Bill Campbell was born May 16, 1943, in Monmouth. He attended Western Illinois University, Carl Sandburg College and Knox College before joining the U.S. Army. From 1964 to 1967, he served with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C.
In the late ’60s, Bill returned home to rural Monmouth to help out on the family farm. A few years later he left farming to pursue ...
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April 6, 2002

HERB BLOCK, 1909-2001: Legendary Washington Post Cartoonist

By ROBERT C. HARVEY

A giant passed this way, takingalmost all of the lasthundred years to do it.Herbert L. Block, who signed hiseditorial cartoons "Herblock," diedon Sunday, October 7, 2001, theday we started bombing Afghanistan,just six days short of his 92birthday.

His death at just this momentwas "inappropriate," wrote MaryMcGrory, a Washington Post colleague."There never would havebeen a good time," she wenton, "but at this moment --when the worst threat sinceHitler is darkening our lives-- it is particularly hard totake." The next day, thePost, Herblock's home forthe last half century,started his obit at the bottomof the front page andjumped it inside to twomore pages. At the top ofthe front page were theheadlines announcing theair strike in bin Laden land.It was Herblock's fatherwho invented the portmanteausignature. ...
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April 6, 2002

Herblock: 'Beacuse he's a genius, it works'

By KATHERINE GRAHAM

Herb arrived at the Post the sameweek that my husband, PhilGraham, arrived in January of1946. Herb fought for and earneda unique position at the paper: oneof complete independence of anybodyand anything. Journalisticenterprises run best when writersand editors have a lot of autonomy.

But Herb's case is extreme. And becausehe's a genius, it works.

Herb's independence evolvedgradually. In the early years, hemade several sketches for the day'scartoon and dutifully submittedthem to the editorial page editor tochoose. When the editor was away,Herb began showing them to a preferredgroup of reporters and editorialwriters whose opinions hevalued. Gradually, the editor's rolewas dropped altogether.

Of course, this has produced afew tense moments. In 1952, thePost ...
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June 11, 2001

20 YEARS OF SPIKED PUNCH --A Portfolio of Bob Englehart?s Previously Unprinted Toons

By LARY BLOOM
(Hartford Courant, April 29, 2001)

Bob Englehart wants to ?provoke thought and discussion.? He has donethis over 20 years as editorial cartoonist at The Hartford Courant. Hehas also provoked adjectives from readers, many of them unflattering,and aimed in his direction: ?ignorant,? ?insensitive,? ?bigoted,??childish,? ?shocking? and its inevitable partner in outrage?appalling.? And this is when his work gets published.

On rare occasions, it doesn?t get published. It is considered by hisboss (or even by his wife, as you will see; and in rare cases byhimself) unsuitable for print. This doesn?t happen often ? the Courant?sgeneral policy is to allow the widest possible latitude and to let theeditorial cartoonist (in his own words) ?provoke the idiots to reveal themselves.?

But what is the ...
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