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Pen & ink
(by Kara Krekeler - June 18, 2008)
Blondie. Mother Goose and Grimm. Beetle Bailey.
Every day, these comic strips run in newspapers across the country, a fact that’s well known to hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers. But what they may not know is that the creator of each of these strips is from St. Louis.
Nor are Chic Young, Mike Peters and Mort Walker (who created Blondie, Mother Goose and Grimm and Beetle Bailey, respectively) the only cartoonists to hail from the Arch City; several celebrated editorial cartoonists and comic book artists also call St. Louis home.
“Certainly there are other cities that have more than their fair share of cartoonists, but for a town our size, it’s a freakish number,” said Dan Martin, another local cartoonist. “There are a lot of cartoonists here that don’t know about the others.”
Martin recently wrote a book about the history of St. Louis cartoonists called See You in the Funny Papers. The book, which includes profiles of artists from Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick to the cheery favorite of teachers, Mary Engelbreit, as well as rare examples of their work, also serves as the inspiration for an exhibit by the same name at the Sheldon Art Galleries.
For the past 22 years, Martin has drawn the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s iconic Weatherbird, as well as a weekly editorial cartoon. But it was about five years ago, while working on a now discontinued local trivia feature, that Martin first started learning about his hometown’s storied cartooning past.
“As I looked through the archives for trivia, I was always running across famous cartoonists that I didn’t know lived here,” Martin said. “I really love St. Louis history and cartoon history, and it was amazing what I didn’t know. The only thing I knew for sure was that Mike Peters was from St. Louis. I didn’t know about Chic Young or George McManus,” whose Bringing up Father strip was read by hundreds of thousands of people in the early 1900s.
When the Post-Dispatch decided to pull the trivia feature from its comics page a few years ago, Martin, left with all the random tidbits he’d happened across, decided to compile everything into a book and then called Reedy Press, which agreed to publish it.
Reedy has a long history with the Sheldon Art Galleries, having published books related to several Sheldon exhibits, including a Josephine Baker show that incorporated all five galleries and City of Gabriels, a show dedicated to early St. Louis jazz. In those cases, the books offered additional information about the subject, as well as a catalog of the pieces in the show.
But from the day that Reedy contacted Sheldon Art Galleries Director Olivia Lahs-Gonzalez 18 months ago about possibly producing a show based on the book, this partnership was different. For one thing, the book and exhibit were produced independently; for another, there are few images that appear in both the book and at the Sheldon.
“The book’s not meant to be a catalog of the exhibit,” she said. “It’s not a one-for-one partnership like the past books. But [the book] has a lot of great background about the artists.”
One of few things that the book and exhibit share is Martin, who guest-curated the show. Lahs-Gonzalez said that she was fairly unfamiliar with cartooning artwork when she first agreed to do the show and so relied on Martin’s expertise and cartooning contacts to put the exhibit together.
“For me, not being from St. Louis originally, it surprised me to learn that so many cartoonists were from here,” she continued. “I guess that’s the mission of the exhibit: to open people’s eyes to the history we have here.”
For his part, Martin said that his first stab at curating a show was a “harrowing experience” that required much harder work than he anticipated in the hunting down of original images to display. Lahs-Gonzalez said that of the approximately 60 pieces in the exhibit, just one is a reproduction.
Martin said he hopes readers of his book and visitors to the exhibition will learn a bit more about St. Louis’s role in cartooning history and come to see cartooning as a higher form of art, the latter of which is slowly happening across the country as art collectors snap up vintage cartoon drawings at auctions.
“I think this will be interesting to all St. Louisans because it’s entertaining St. Louis history and it’s entertaining to look at cartoons,” he said.
See You in the Funny Papers remains on display at the Sheldon Art Galleries through Aug. 17. Martin’s book is available at bookstores throughout the metro area.
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