Cartoons — American Style

- Mario Miranda

In Chicago my first visit (naturally) was to the very posh Playboy office. They pay the highest price for cartoons anywhere in the world. Most of the contributors are freelancers, so I couldn’t meet any of them - most probably they were floating around in a luxurious yacht, with a couple of Bunnies in tow. However, I did get a chance to watch some of the lovely girls being photographed. But that is another story….

Reluctantly I bade farewell to Playboy and strolled on to the Chicago Sun-Times office, a few blocks away, to pay my respects to another veteran American cartoonist, Jacob Burck. Burck is a fat little old man, who was perched on a high stool and was scribbling away furiously at innumerable rough designs which he kept flinging into his wastepaper basket - this was before the paper crisis. He came out with me to a cafeteria and we ordered, you guessed it, coffee and doughnuts. He would love to visit India with his wife when he retires, in one of those luxury liners, and see the Taj Mahal by moonlight.

Conrad, one of America’s best was out of town when I visited L.A. (Los Angeles to you) but I did meet tall, bearded Karl Hubenthal (the editorial cartoonist of the Herald Examiner, a Hearst newspaper) in his lovely home on the hills not far from Hollywood. I felt Hubenthal was the only cartoonist that I met who had a slight pro-Nixon stance. He presented me with an original Bangladesh war cartoon that was definitely pro-Pakistan.

In spite of his tilts he did seem very keen to visit India.

All these personalities that I have talked about, are just an infinitesimal part of that enormous world of cartooning that exists in America.