Art of the Ancients- Revived

A Roll Call of Arizona Cartoonists

For a state of modest population, Arizona has produced or nurtured a remarkable number of prominent members of a special fraternity: those tireless artists who day after day try to make us smile, frown, or even form an opinion.

Text by Vicky Hay

Photographs by J. Peter Mortimer

"Editorial harpoonist" Steve Benson scales new heights at the Arizona State Capitol, repository for much of his subject matter.

Cartoonist Bil Keane was working in his bright, sunny studio in Paradise Valley when he decided The Family Circus needed an infant: a new baby to play out the diaper-set humor he couldn't use for Dolly, Jeffy, and Billy. "My wife Thel is the model for Mommy," he says. "She's also my editor and criticthe only kissable editor I've ever met."

"She was outside working in the garden, and I was sitting here and started roughing out the idea. I ran out to her and said, 'Thel, what would you think about adding a baby to the family?' "She said, 'Well, it's all right with mebut could I finish the weeding first?' "

Without a doubt, Arizona's most prominent cartoonist today is Bil Keane, whose home and studio occupy a desert acre on the slope of Camelback Mountain. Keane's affectionate daily comic appears in 1,300 newspapers, making it the most widely syndicated panel in history. A few other old-timers rival his renown: J. R. Williams, who drew the much-loved Out Our Way, fulfilled a boyhood dream in 1930 by moving from Cleveland to a ranch near Skull Valley. When the editors of The Arizona Republic picked up his cartoon, they called it Out Wickenburg Way. Comics aficionados will remember the panel's various subplots, which ran with such titles as "Heroes Are Made, Not Born" and "Why Mothers Get Gray."

Five years later, Zane Grey, a frequent resident of Arizona, began writing the story line for a strip based on one of his novels, King of the Royal Mounted. Walt Ditzen, who did the nationally syndicated Fanfare, was Phoenix's most famous cartoonist for many years. Fred Rhoads drew Sad Sack comic books and lived in Tucson, and Bill Freyse, another Tucsonan, took over Our Boarding House after the death of Major Hoople's creator,Gene Ahern. Dick Calkins also lived in Tucson; he drew the Buck Rogers comic strip from its 1929 inception, and later wrote its story line. Virgil Partch, who signed himself "VIP" and created Big George, studied art at the University of Arizona. Irv Phillips, long time artist of the pantomime panel called Mr. Mum, retired to Sun City, where he took up bluegrass music.

THE FAMILY CIRCUS

Gus Arriola, creator of Gordo, grew up in Florence (he now lives in Carmel, California), and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin attended Phoenix Union High School. Before achieving fame and World War II soldiers' gratitude for his perceptive and irreverent drawings in The Stars and Stripes newspaper, Mauldin was a protégé of the late Reg Manning. That syndicated artist of The Arizona Republic staff earned his own Pulitzer for a sharply aimed cartoon published during the Korean War.

Nick Dallis, a quiet resident of Scottsdale, writes the narratives for not one butthree popular "story strips": Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, M.D., and Judge Parker. Artists living in other cities draw the illustrations for each strip.

At least two younger Arizonans are on their way to fame, too. Jerry Scott, a Lake Havasu City native, has revived the comic strip Nancy. The Arizona Republic's controversial editorial cartoonist, Steve Benson, won the 1984 Headliner Award and twice has been named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Successful cartoonists command a huge audience. Comics number among the mass media's most popular features: some surveys estimate 60 percent of Americans read them. And editorial cartoons draw as many letters to the editor as the contents of the front page.

Soon after Bil Keane's 1959 move from Philadelphia to Paradise Valley, he noticed a pattern in the cartoons he was selling to magazines: the best of them featured children. From this discovery, it was an easy step to focusing on a single family with established characters.

"Dolly was based on our daughter, Gayle, who at the time was nine years old," he recalls. "Jeffy was an exact replica, a cartoon character of the real-life Jeffy, who had that same personality-just mild, warm, and loving. Billy, the oldest boy character, was a composite of our other three boys, Neal, Glen, and Chris." PJ, the infant, draws on Keane's grandchildren as well as memories of his own babies. While Keane creates all the ideas and completes every cartoon in pencil, the inking is done by Bud Warner, his assistant since 1965.

Warner was born five days before Keane in 1922. "Bud is a brilliant technician," Keane says, "which is amazing for a guy who is so much older than I."

Keane's affection for his family shows in his work. "There's very little in The Family Circus that did not come from real life, or couldn't actually have happened. Most of those things have taken place in our own home."

Gus Arriola insists that Gordo was not based directly on his youth in Florence, but the strip's setting, with its adobe houses and Sonoran ambience, looked suspiciously like the historic southern Arizona town. But then, parts of Florence still look much like Mexico. "It was almost like a Mexican pueblo," Arriola recalls. "My grandfather had owned a hacienda in northern Mexico. Gordo, the story of a fortyish, would-be womanizing tour-bus driver and his eccentric friends (human and animal), was washed with the brilliant folk art colors and motifs of old Mexico. Arriola pictured Gordo living somewhere near Oaxaca. "It was a very personal strip," he says. At its apogee before Arriola retired in 1985, Gordo reached about 300 newspapers.

Reg Manning, who as a child came to Arizona from Kansas City for his health, spent 56 years drawing cartoons for The Arizona Republic. Manning consistently seemed motivated by old-fashioned love of country and by a special affection for Arizona. From 1926 (when he started) through the 1970s, his conservative stance fit the newspaper's. For 22 years, he drew The Big Parade, a Sunday full-page cornucopia of wit, political commentary, and miscellany. Throughout World War II, the flavor of his work was passionately patriotic.

Like most editorial cartoonists, Manning did his best when he was moved to rage or pity. In 1950, as United Nations delegates debated endlessly, North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Old men argued while young soldiers died. Manning drew a two-part cartoon: the top showed the silk hats of UN diplomats hanging on a cloakroom rack; the bottom, a bullet-pierced helmet on the wooden cross of a soldier's grave. He titled it simply, "Hats." With that pristinely eloquent statement, he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Republic's current editorial cartoonist, Steve Benson, has an acerbic wit that contrasts sharply with his predecessor's self-assured country-boy style. Benson, in person a kindly family man with a sparkling sense of humor, thrives on high dudgeon. "I think the role of the cartoonist is to tell the truth as he sees it, and to worry secondarily about entertaining or humoring the reader," he says.

The morning after an airliner crashed

in Dallas, readers in 150 cities opened their papers to a Benson cartoon depicting a plane of that airline as a flying coffin. Some were stunned. "The question that faced me involved what I knew was stark reality," Benson explains. "On the one hand, we had the unfortunate deaths of several people. On the other, we had the-in my opinion-continued failure on the part of the airline industry to incorporate measures which, while cutting into profits, nonetheless enhance safety. "I'm not impressed by the airlines' argument that you're safer in a plane than you are in a car. Tell that to the people who, having survived the crash, burned to death after being sprayed with jet fuel. Or asphyxiated because they couldn't find the exit door, or from not having a relatively inexpensive smoke hood to put over their heads to keep them from choking on the toxic fumes." Anger flares in his voice.

"An effective cartoonist is one who names names and kicks a little behind," he adds. "As Benjamin Franklin said, the sting of the reproach is the truth of it. You have to be willing to get up there and holler, scream, point fingers, and say enough is enough." Similar passion colors the work of Chicago Sun-Times artist Bill Mauldin, who comes to Arizona from his Santa Fe, New Mexico, home to spend time on his desert property near Tonopah or to visit kinfolk in Tucson. During World War II, he recalls, "I was hot on civil rights. One reason was what happened to the Japanese on the West Coast. Some of my friends in the service were Nisei whose families were in concentration camps and whose property had been confiscated. They joined to prove they were good Americans. "And I never cared for the way blacks were treated in the Army. We had a very segregated army then. We had guys in hospitals, missing an arm or leg, who couldn't get a haircut in the barbershop." A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and creator of archetypal World War II dog faces Willie and Joe, Mauldin has burned off a great deal of energy running for Congress, serving as a war correspondent in Korea and Vietnam, writing 15 books, and rearing eight children. None of it has diminished his feistiness. Of the 1988 presidential campaign, he remarked that he suddenly had a newly clarified orientation: "I was drifting off toward becoming a Republican, but Bush and Quayle are saving my soul." You don't have to work the editorial page to find controversy in the cartoon business. When United Feature Syndicate asked Jerry Scott to take over Nancy, he knew the job would not be easy. The aging strip, he felt, was stiffly drawn and outdated-but the syndicate offered him a chance to redesign it, as he did successfully with an earlier cartoon called Gumdrop. "It's taken five years to really get comfortable with the character and make the necessary changes," he says. Just when Scott thought it was safe to pick up an ink brush, Berke Breathed slammed the artists of revived comic strips such as Pogo and Nancy in a scathing Sunday Bloom County strip, which supported the view that classic characters should be left undisturbed after their original creators are gone. Unruffled, Scott has continued to develop an increasingly sophisticated cartoon. Scott once drew a strip that showed Nancy opening a soft drink can. It squirts all over her, but she's prepared: she whips out a dryer and blow-dries her hair while she drinks the pop. Some editors who received the week of cartoons containing the hair dryer gag complained that this was a safety violation. Scott's editor reminded them that Nancy is not a howto manual for childhood behavior. But when the strip ran in the papers, a Los Angeles television talk show received a letter pointing out the "hazard." United Feature Syndicate gave Scott's telephone number to the show's producer, and before long the young cartoonist was asked to make a statement on the air.

He laughs as he recalls how the incident grew more ridiculous. Still, the episode indicates how closely people read the comic strips. "I get letters from people every time Nancy shows any kind of insubordination to authority-like kids hardly ever do, of course."

Nick Dallis keeps his soap-opera comic strips current by taking on controversial issues. The Phoenix Gazette dropped Rex Morgan, M.D., now drawn by Texas artist Harold LeDoux, because of a sequence portraying a woman executive as a cocaine addict. Six months later, the strip received an award from the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth.

"We maintain our strips because we treat contemporary problems, often in advance of media interest," Dallis comments.

A medical professional and the first board-certified psychiatrist to practice in his former hometown, Toledo, Dallis has dealt in the strips with such subjects as child abuse, alcoholism, and Hansen's disease, as well as the cocaine issue. Except for Arriola-who admits to an unseemly craving for oceans-Arizona as a place to live or visit has pleased these artists. Scott and his wife returned here from California so she could participate in a graduate program at Arizona State University, and when last heard from they were planning to build a house in the desert. Mauldin says he has kept his land "virgin. I'm running my own little Gila monster preserve." Nick and Sally Dallis moved here after vacationing in Scottsdale during the 1950s. "I only regret we didn't do so 10 years earlier," he says.

"I had no idea that coming out to Arizona would provide me with a wealth of seemingly unending material," says Benson, a Utah native who came to Phoenix by way of the District of Columbia. "When [former Governor Evan] Mecham came into office, I thought I had died and gone to cartoonists' heaven!" Then in a serious vein he adds that the West is a desirable place to rear his family of four children. "Arizona has a little bit of everything. It's getting more hectic, but it still has a laid-back, lazy aspect that I appreciate."

A child's coloring book by Bil Keane, The Family Circus Tours Arizona, will be available after September 1 for $6.50 plus $1.00 postage and handling from Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; (602) 258-6641.