Cartoons — American Style

- Mario Miranda

The third group is the comic strip cartoonist. America wouldn’t be America without the comic strip - so these lucky chaps are riding the bandwagon these days. They are all freelancers working in the comfort of their own homes (to cars, swimming pool, the works!) and under contract to powerful syndicates like King Features, Walt Disney and others who have a worldwide distribution. It is strange however, that most of them are not aware of their enormous popularity outside their own country. Dennis the Menace, L’il Abner, Pogo, B.C. and Peanuts are today household - and schoolroom - words all over the world. But these rather modest men would be quite content with just the adulation. Modesty struck me as one of the most delightful characteristics of American cartoonists.

There is also another little group that operates behind the scenes - the gag writers. In America, when a cartoonist runs out of ideas (which can happen to the best of us), he just rings up the nearest “gag writer” and “buys” a couple of ideas from him. Over here, if we ran out of ideas, we might also run out of a job.

On my arrival in Washington, one of my first visits was to the very mod offices of The Washington Post. It was a Sunday but I was lucky to meet Herblock, the doyen of American political cartoonists. Expecting to find a rather burly, serious sort of a person, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Herb was a genial old man, paunchy, grey-haired, with bright blue eyes that peered humourously through horn-rimmed spectacles.

Over coffee and doughnuts, Herblock told me his method of working. Whenever he hit upon an idea he put it down roughly on paper and showed it around to some of his colleagues in the office (including clerks, typists and even delivery boys) and studied their reactions. If the reactions were not favourable, he scrapped the whole thing.