Wows

A curious company of men shuffled and smartcracked their way in to a dinner one evening last week at the Astor Hotel, Manhattan. There were enough of them to have raised the census at least a decimal point, and their aggregate income would have given Secretary of the Treasury Mellon considerable satisfaction. Yet loitering lobbyites who glanced up at them as they entered the hotel, and the nimble-witted telephone girl who placed their after-dinner calls, recognized scarcely a face. James J. Walker, the mayor, they recognized. But he was only a guest. And deep-jowled Irvin S. Cobb, fat-jowled Senator Borah, curly-wolf Judge Landis, smartly tailored Speaker Nicholas Longworth, well-oiled little Roger Wolff Kahn (jazzy son of opera-patron Otto H. Kahn)--were only guests. The company itself was as anonymous as a banquet of the Boot and Shoe Retailers' Association.

The company wore dinner coats (black ties). Had each man made, upon the white space below his chin, that series of penstrokes by which he subsists, the dumbest bellhop would have caught the evening's drift. Under the florid, jovial chin of an overgrown urchin chewing a cigar, for example, might have been sketched a domestic scene so provocatively platitudinous that no lettering would have been necessary to interpret it as "Ain't it a grand and glorious feeling?" or "When a feller needs a friend."

Under a sharp, shrewd, cocky jaw, a lanky loon in a striped suit might have been bashing a smaller, silk-hatted maniac into cross-eyed insensibility.

A face full of Jewish flesh and ingenuity would have beamed forth over a nightmarish mechanical design--the canary cries, watering the sensitive plant, which blushes, warming the matchhead, which ignites, inspiring the cat to commit suicide. In this case a high-grade bellboy might have been able to name the handsome patron: Cartoonist Rube Goldberg. The desk clerk could probably have named Mr. Goldberg's companions: Cartoonists Clare Briggs and Bud Fisher. . . . The first formal and annual dinner of the Cartoonists of America was a large event in a circle where events are not numerous.

The paradox holds true in all but a few cases that a cartoonist's creatures become more famous than himself. What voter would be moved by hearing that one Sidney Smith had said thus and so about an election? Yet a recent election was visibly affected, in Texas and other states, when machine-bucking political youngsters stumped the hamlets in behalf of Andy Gump for U. S. Senator.

What newspaper reader aged 5 to 75 can name the creator of Flip, Dr. Pill, Little Nemo and "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend" (Windsor McCay)? Impostors who can imitate Mutt and Jeff, or Father, on restaurant table cloths, can and do afford Cartoonists Bud Fisher and George McManus great pain for the free meals they thus pilfer, the checks they thus get cashed. It is no longer only the artist that is put under contract but his pen- children, who are copyrighted by the middleman. The Katzenjammer Kids sprang from a fertile organism called Rudolph Dirks, and have been signed by three foster-fathers since. The Republican elephant, Democratic donkey and Tammany tiger were originated--how lately and by whom? Answer: Th. Nast, 60 years ago.

The Cartoonists of America last month adopted Ben Franklin as their patron saint for his figure of a snake cut in 13 pieces, with the legend "Join or Die," published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754. But Thomas Nast really sired U. S. cartooning. The New York World used to furnish him with 30-pound slabs of boxwood, upon which he would draw, and a carver would carve, pictures so acid that the Tweed Ring boss cried out: "I don't care what they say about me but I'd give anything to buy off that picture maker." President Roosevelt, diplomatic, made Th. Nast consul general of Ecuador.

Joseph Keppler of Puck was the second king of caricature, but neither he nor Nast achieved the celebrity of a young man from Massachusetts who started operating in Manhattan in the late '80s. Politics had been the cartoonists' field until then. He took Society for his province. He fixed his style on the thin fence that divides satire and sentiment. He drew the young ladies of his day, with their bustled foreheads and posteriors, their hourglass shapes and peekaboo waists, their swushing skirts and archly proper poses, so that young men breathed "By Gad!" and the young ladies themselves could scarcely believe their beauty, nor ever guess their simpering. It was a day when ladies played the piano with a grave swoop instead of a gay jiggle, when they made their suitors' intentions clear to the neighbors instead of leaving that till later. Beneath bushels of clothes and a thicket of inhibitions lurked desires that could not be contemplated without euphemistic metaphor. Charles Dana Gibson was exquisitely euphemistic, translating masculinity into shoulder padding and chiseled chins on the Gibson man; femaleness into coy tendrils of hair and a suspicion of ankle in the Gibson girl. Because he needed no "labels," because he held up a mirror only slightly ironic, he was called an "illustrator," not a cartoonist, though no Nastian pillory carried more force than his series for Life showing Mr. Pipp and his marriageable daughters abroad.

His subjects "stood without hitching" quite as docilely as the political satirists' figures. Every belle that was worth her smelling salts yearned to pose for him and in 1895 he married one of them, Irene of the gorgeous Langhorne family in Virginia. Collier's, McClure's, Life, Leslie's--all the magazines clamored for his work. He grew rich, socially prominent, and accepted seriously the vogue he had created with polite mockery. Nobly Roman as to countenance, with a tall son whose patrician air has won the hearts of debutantes, college men and collar-makers, he flourishes today as publisher of the magazine for which he first drew (Life). Master of hounds, rider in airplanes, host to visiting statesmen, he has developed latterly into the leonine patriarch of his profession. The Gibson charmers are behind him, and if he began the deluge of magazine cover sentiment that followed him--Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher, Neysa McMein--he has waded out of it now to champion the flapper, whom he calls "a conqueror."

The Cartoonists of America made Illustrator Gibson one of their guests of honor last week. Two others were 70-year-old Frederick Burr Opper, whose masterpiece was Happy Hooligan; and William Allen Rogers, "dean of political cartoonists."

Concerning others whose works have attained what is called the "Wow" (triumphant) class:

P: The Nestor of funnymen, older than sly Art Young or odd Tom Powers, is Eugene ("Zim") Zimmerman, active at 65 as president of the American Association of Cartoonists and Caricaturists. Born Swiss, he early removed to Horseheads, N. Y., where now the store, hotel, firehouse and railway station are as thickly hung with his sketches as Florence is with busts of Dante.

P: Harry Conway ("Bud") Fisher started A. Mutt in the San Francisco Chronicle as a race track tipster, in 1907. Little Jeff was the inmate of an asylum Mutt visited to make wild bets in peace. Swift, efficient bundle of nerves, Mr. Fisher ran with Walter Eckersall on a championship team at the Penn Relays 25 years ago. His income, somewhere near $200,000, affords him art and idea assistants.

P: Sidney Smith, Gump progenitor, is a speed fan (automobiles).

P: Jay Norwood ("Ding") Darling was ejected from Beloit College (Beloit, Wis.) for a disrespectful sketch of a professor. He settled in Des Moines, Iowa, and has not budged thence for years. His most famed cartoon: "The Long, Long Trail" (reprinted universally on the anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt's death).

P: Fontaine Fox is a "he," despite rumor, living at Port Washington, L. I., where are originals of the Toonerville Trolley, Powerful Katrinka, et al.

P: Clare Briggs uses a No. 170 pen, scorns to end his strips with "plop" or "bam," loves circuses, attended the University of Nebraska. "The Days of Real Sport" are his own never-finished childhood.