Richard Thompson 1957-2016

My friend Richard Thompson never sought fame, but it sure chased him.

It never occurred to Richard to submit cartoons to The New Yorker. Instead, The New Yorker tracked him down and asked him to work for them. When they received his first rough sketch they told him not to bother finishing it, they liked the sketch just fine (see Perot, next page).

Richard didn’t seek syndication as normal cartoonists do. Instead, newspapers pursued him. Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post recalls inviting Richard to lunch: “I told him I thought he should be doing a weekly cartoon for [The Washington Post]. There would be no strings, there would be no editing and we’d pay him a substantial amount of money to do it. Richard said, ‘Great that sounds wonderful.’ Then I didn’t hear from him for a year.”

Again and again, people offered Richard prestigious opportunities but he couldn’t be distracted from his art. When famed political cartoonist Herblock retired, Richard was invited to fill the high profile position, but wasn’t interested. The Society of Illustrators notified Richard that one of his pictures had been selected as an outstanding illustration of the year and asked him to exhibit it at the Museum of American Illustration in New York, but he never got around to it.

I never met a cartoonist who cared less about self-promotion. Some of us wondered whether he was in a witness protection program.

All Richard cared about was his art. He loved to draw and sat at his drawing board experimenting with brushes and pen nibs, exotic inks and strange pigments. Yet, by sheer quality alone, his work levitated to the attention of the top artists in his field. Pat Oliphant called him “Michelangelo with a sense of humor.” Arnold Roth called him a “genius.” Peter de Seve said he “sits right at the top of my list of favorite artists.” Carter Goodrich called his art “a holy experience.” Ed Sorel, upon meeting Richard for the first time, actually kissed his hand.

Superstars of cartooning, recognizing that Richard was the real deal, traveled great distances to visit the gentle, whimsical cartoonist in his little house on a leafy street in Arlington, Virginia. Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) who’d spent decades hiding from his public, emerged to thank Richard for “giving me a reason to read the comics again.” Academy award winning Pixar director Pete Docter (Inside Out) also visited Richard, saying, “I’m torn between amazement and bitter jealousy.”

Once inside Richard’s house, they marveled at his treasure trove of drawings and paintings stashed behind bookshelves, under the cat box, or face down on the floor of the basement closet. His band of friends and admirers would sit around Richard’s cluttered kitchen table, laughing, sketching, comparing notes on art and telling funny stories. On one of my early visits I witnessed artist Nick Galifianakis and Richard’s wife Amy spontaneously break into the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd love aria from the cartoon, What’s Opera Doc? Richard’s table was always overflowing with what friends called Richard’s “orange food:” a disgusting assortment of Cheetos, orange soda, corn nuts and cold pizza.

Richard was finally persuaded to syndicate his comic strip, the wonderful Cul de Sac, in 2007. It was an instant success and a scant four years later he won the Reuben award for the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. In a just world, he would’ve been able to continue his strip for another 20 years, but tragically he was stricken with Parkinson’s disease and decided to end Cul de Sac in 2012. He could’ve continued to make a healthy income by employing ghost artists and ghost writers to carry on, but Richard didn’t believe in that. Last month he passed away at the far too young age of 58.

My friend Richard Thompson never sought fame. He said, “what I enjoy is to point out things and say, ‘Look, that’s kinda funny.’” But his friends were determined to share his remarkable vision with the world. In 2014, documentary film makers made an award-winning movie, “The Art of Richard Thompson,” (https://youtu.be/t8-tqh4N_EE) about his life and work. His art has now been collected in over a dozen books. And in 2013, a number of artists and friends assembled a substantial art book, The Art of Richard Thompson, in tribute to the wide range of his talents as a cartoonist, illustrator and humorist. And the circle continues to widen.

Ave atque vale, Richard.

Between the Lines

By Jerry Dumas

Iwas once in the office of the features editor of Helsinki, Finland’s leading newspaper. She opened a drawer and showed me American comic strips they normally bought and published. The clipped strips in her drawer could not be used because they were untranslatable. Anything with puns were particularly unusable.

“We are a well-read people,” she said. “But think about us when you think up your gags. We don’t mind big words. And we are willing to learn.”

In my home town there was once a bookstore devoted strictly to children. It was in a sunny location and was run by two genial, knowledgeable women.

Houghton-Mifflin had recently published my children’s novel, Rabbits Rafferty, with 20 black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings by the great artist Wallace Tripp. One day the women mentioned a girl, about 10 years old, who came into the store without fail every Saturday morning, and deposited 25 cents toward the book’s purchase. Apparently she hadn’t enough money to buy a copy outright, but used part of her allowance each week to buy it on her own, private installment plan.

I was charmed and saddened by the story of that young girl, and I like to think I resolved the situation by saying something on the order of, “For heaven’s sake! Present the girl a copy next time she comes in, give her back her money and charge it to me.” That’s what I like to think, but I truly don’t remember. We creative types have a way of reshaping the past to suit ourselves.

Later, Rafferty became a newspaper feature syndicated to papers around the world. Each day the further adventures of Rafferty were set in type, with drawings by another great animal artist, Mel Crawford, accompanying the text.

One day I received a letter from Ben Srere, the president of King Features, a division of Hearst, as they like to say. It was a nice letter, but he urged me to write the stories more simply, using smaller words. He was of the opinion that 8 to 12 year olds would have trouble reading the words I’d chosen to use.

By way of answer I sent him a list of words taken from books we had around the house. Just looking at a few pages of each was enough. Here they are: clattering peevish intrusion ponderously perambulator ventured frugal unfortunately implored exert anxious distracted unruly rummaged infested fusty critically consequence indigestible disarranged persuaded regretted shrill

BEATRIX POTTER, THE TALES OF PETER RABBIT, AND OTHER FAVORITE STORIES

Technical disabled insignificant wisdom shabbiness disinfected threadbare

MARGERY WILLIAMS, THE VELVETEEN RABBIT jubilee swathes cautiously compunctions untenable conspiracy loathed hysterics unremitting summoning vaguely metatarsus

E. B. WHITE, CHARLOTTE’S WEB ignition meddlesome reputation champagne deprive intolerable withstand destination inconclusive THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN cache assuaged exceptional dispersed culinary circulated villainous murmured apparent instinctively benign prominent oblivion disarray heritage commodious assessed loomed translucent reprimand illusion festooned nefarious apoplexy anathema

MARGERY SHARP, the “MISS BIANCA” series (about a white mouse)

Ben Srere’s reply: “I get your point. If children are going to build their vocabularies, big words ought to help.”

And that was the end of that.

■ ■ ■

Besides his comic strip work for more than 50 years (Sam’s Strip, Sam and Silo, Hi and Lois, Beetle Bailey, and others), Jerry has had two books published by Houghton, and contributed to Smithsonian, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

“Just remember, boys, they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like you do … the only difference is they got four legs.”

Fred Wagner, 1942-2016

Fred Wagner, known for his long stints on Grin and Bear It and Animal Crackers , died June 27 of pancreatic cancer. He was 74.

Born and raised in Memphis, Tenn., he was influenced by his father, who painted posters for a movie theater. Wagner attended the Memphis Academy of Art, and then spent five years as a sculptor in Memphis.

He eventually began working for the Orlando Sentinel in their electronic information and art departments.

From 1986-1994, Wagner drew Catfish for Tribune Media Services, taking the strip over from creator Roger Bollen. In 1994, he began to produce Animal Crackers , another Bollen property. He also produced, with Ralph Dunagin, Grin and Bear It , the long-running panel created by George Lichty in 1932.

Wagner departed from the panel as it ended syndication in May, 2015, and was preparing to hand over Animal Crackers to artist Michael Osbun this month.

Wagner’s retirement plans had included a pursuit of a lifelong passion of watercolor and oil painting.

Shaw McCutcheon, 1921-2016

Editorial cartoonist Shaw McCutcheon, who worked for The (Spokane, Washington) Spokesman-Review for 36 years before retiring in 1986, died July 6 in Spokane. He was 94.

Born in Chicago in 1921, McCutcheon was the son of legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon. Shaw McCutcheon received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard, but while serving in World War II, he took an interest in politics and cartooning. McCutcheon studied political science for two years at the University of Chicago and then attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for another two years.

At the urging of Chicago Tribune cartoonist Carey Orr (who succeeded McCutcheon’s father), McCutcheon applied for a cartoonist job with the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. His first cartoon appeared in the summer of 1950. In the 1970s, McCutcheon also began writing editorials for the paper, often on issues regarding economics and national defense. It’s estimated that he drew more than 9,000 cartoons and wrote some 1,000 editorials during his career at the paper.

Michael Crawford, 1945-2016

Michael Crawford, who sold more than 600 cartoons and drawings to The New Yorker after William Shawn, died of cancer July 12 in his Kingston, N.Y., home. He was 70.

Crawford was born in Oswego, N.Y., on Oct. 21, 1945. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a bachelor’s degree in English, Crawford spent a year at the university’s law school, and then took a circuitous route to a career in cartooning. Jobs included everything from working for a Washington pollster to playing baseball to “writing English papers for cash for people in college” and “an ill-advised ‘teaching’ stint at a derelict Vermont ‘academy’ for Led Zeppelin zealots,” he once told an interviewer.

“You always rush out and high-five me when I homer. How about a hug when I whiff?”

Living in the Boston area, he began to pursue a career in art and began selling his cartoons at area art fairs. He began sending work to The New Yorker in the mid-1970s.

“Eventually, started peppering The New Yorker with gags around 1975 and Whoosh! Before you knew it, it was 1981 and I had my first New Yorker check (for a grand 400 clams I think it was),” Mr. Crawford recalled in an interview with cartoonist Michael Maslin.

Crawford was also an accomplished painter, with his best-known work featuring scenes with gangsters.