Review: Those Crazy Characters of ‘Cartoon County’

For 50-odd years, Fairfield County, Conn., was the cartoon capital of the world.

Once upon a time, in the middle of ye olde 20th century, Prince Valiant, Beetle Bailey, Superman, the Wizard of Id, Hi and Lois, Joe Palooka, Blondie and Dagwood, among others, lived happily in a not-so-far-away kingdom in southwestern Connecticut. Or rather, their creators did: a cohort of close-knit cartoonists and illustrators who brought a touch of nonconformity to the land of gray flannel-clad Mad Men. For five decades, toon makers living near each other in Fairfield County conjured and drew a cornucopia of famous comic strips, magazine gags and advertising illustrations. Why Fairfield? Because after World War II the combination of a bucolic, affordable home in which to raise a family, the lack of a state income tax, plus the explosion of job opportunities in nearby Manhattan’s publishing industry enticed many cartoonists and illustrators to relocate an hour north of Gotham.

This special community of midcentury print cartoonists, their lives and their contributions to American culture, get a witty, instructive and ultimately touching treatment in “Cartoon County,” written by Cullen Murphy, editor-at-large at Vanity Fair. Mr. Murphy knows intimately the milieu of which he writes. His father, John Cullen Murphy, drew the popular dramatic strips “Big Ben Bolt” and “Prince Valiant,” the latter of which the elder Murphy took over when Hal Foster, the strip’s creator, retired from drawing duties in 1970. The younger Murphy worked with his father on “Prince Valiant” for 25 years, gaining hands-on experience in the craft of popular art making. That, and his familiarity with his family’s artist neighbors, form the heart of a personal account he shares here with great affection and veracity.

A particular joy is Cullen Murphy’s eye for detail. His elegant, immersive writing welcomes the reader into his father’s Cos Cob studio, a cluttered room like so many of his fellow cartoonists’. Diffuse lighting from northern picture windows fills the room, as does the smell of oil paint, pipe tobacco and the chemical fixative used for Polaroid snapshots—taken by the artist of himself, or of family members, as a reference for drawing comic-strip poses just right. A large drawing board spattered with paint and ink is described by the author as “creating an inadvertent pattern as intricate as a Pollack.” The drawing itself, on plate or vellum paper, gets worked over with a Hunt No. 102 pen nib (“good for ordinary lines”) or a Gillott No. 170 (“best for lettering”). Sounds heard in the studio might include “Million Dollar Movie” on a black-and-white television or a joking conversation with a visiting cartoonist: “The cartoon starbursts that convey intoxication are called ‘squeans,’ ” someone might say, using terminology invented by Mort (“Beetle Bailey”) Walker, “and the wavy lines that convey aroma are called ‘wafterons.’ ”

Sketch by John Cullen Murphy for a 1991 episode of ‘Prince Valiant.’ Photo: Publisher

Cartoon Country

By Cullen Murphy

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 260 pages, $27

Fascinating, too, are the lessons in storytelling that the younger Murphy received directly from Hal Foster: how to build a narrative arc, the relationship between the pictures and words on the page, the power of the space between panels, the importance of character. Foster, who had “the look of Walter Cronkite and the manner of God’s Canadian younger brother,” turns out to have been grooming the aspiring writer to take over story-writing duties for “Prince Valiant,” which Mr. Murphy eventually did several years later and continued for close to three decades.

Cartoon artists of that era were predominantly male, straight and white. Some had fine-art studies somewhere in their eclectic backgrounds. As the chapter titled “The Art of War” demonstrates, many discovered or honed their talents as cartoonists, caricaturists and illustrators while serving as soldiers in World War II. John Murphy himself drew profusely during the war, when he served in the Pacific as part of Gen. Douglas MacArthur ’s staff. Illustrations throughout “Cartoon County” pulled from Murphy’s sketchbooks demonstrate his versatility in painting portraits and caricatures. But his start came much earlier. As a teen in New Rochelle, N.Y., his neighbor was Norman Rockwell, who engaged Murphy as a model for one of his Saturday Evening Post covers and soon recognized the boy’s ability to draw. Rockwell mentored Murphy in painting and composition and even arranged for him to receive a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York, the venerable school founded by artists in 1875.

Today the 80-year-old “Prince Valiant” survives as one of the longest-running adventure strips in the world. But the circumstances in Cartoon County have changed. “The New York newspaper strike of 1963,” Cullen Murphy writes, “had many repercussions.” Newspapers cut costs and reduced page sizes, so that “the funny strips were barely legible and the dramatic ones had shed their grandeur.” The number of periodicals and adverts declined. Ultimately, old age caught up with the community of cartoonists. John Murphy drew “Prince Valiant” until his death in 2004.

Yet the irrepressible sense of humor of so many of these men prevailed even in the end. When the paramedics found the New Yorker’s WASP-skewering Charles Saxon after he suffered a heart attack, writes Mr. Murphy, Saxon’s last words were: “I guess I’d better die; I just broke our best lamp.”
