Disappearing, Inch by Inch

Sports cartooning is a vanishing art. Better action photography and bigger picture layouts are taking over the space in sports sections once saved for interpretive cartoons. Television's instant replays engrave images on a sports fan's mind that cannot be duplicated with the same drama the next day in brush strokes and ink. Today's sports editors can spare neither column inches nor salary for sports cartoonists--not even for the likes of Willard Mullin.

The creator of such enduring and endearing baseball images as the Brooklyn Dodger Bum, the eye-patched Pittsburgh Pirate, the beer-bellied Milwaukee Brave and the slew-footed New York Giant has been without a regular outlet for his art since the World Journal Tribune expired in 1967. Now 68 and with more than 10,000 cartoons to his credit in a 44-year career, the breezy, booze-loving Mullin is disappearing by inches, like a bottle of the finest Scotch whisky.

Resentments. By all odds the best of U.S. sports cartoonists, Mullin is currently having his first one-man show on Long Island (a Mullin also hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art). Eight times he has been voted best U.S. sports cartoonist and in 1954 was awarded the "Reuben" as the best of all cartoonists in the country. Later this month, the National Cartoonists Society will honor him as "Sports Cartoonist of the Century." Then Mullin will retreat to virtual retirement in Florida and do only "whatever work climbs up on my drawing board that I don't resent."

Mullin resents a lot. He has applied his pet epithet, "no-good sonofabitch," loudly and frequently to such diverse types as Damon Runyon and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as virtually every employer he ever left. His opinion of all politicians is so low that he could not even bring himself to do cartoons of them. Mullin isn't "even sure that Lincoln was a good man," and thinks Andrew Jackson "practiced genocide against the Seminoles at least as bad as Hitler against the Jews." As for the Kennedys, "you couldn't print what I think of them."

Sport is different, and Mullin admits to membership in the "hip-hip-hooray" school. It all started in a seventh-grade classroom in Los Angeles. "A teacher spotted my drawings in the margin of a textbook and sent me to the principal," he recalls. "The principal said, 'What's to become of you?' and I said, 'Well, I'm going to be a sports cartoonist.' " He learned lettering as a department store artist, and after an apprenticeship of cleaning paste pots and doing layout retouching for various newspapers became a semiregular cartoonist for the sports section of the old Los Angeles Herald. The New York World-Telegram hired him in 1935, and for three decades thereafter his cartoons dominated its lead sports page six days a week.

The Bum. Mullin cheerfully admits that "I stole from everybody." But his familiar caricatures were strictly his own inventions. The Brooklyn Bum was born one afternoon in the 1930s after the downtrodden Dodgers dropped yet another game at Ebbets Field. A cab driver carrying Mullin back to Manhattan asked him, "How'd our Bums do today?" The designation seemed brilliantly appropriate, and the woebegone tramp made his debut in the paper next day. Mullin affectionately dubbed the Dodgers Bums, and the sobriquet stuck. Before long, other cartoonists were forced to devise their own bums to denote the Dodgers.

Naturally, the Bum became Mullin's favorite caricature, but his team loyalty lay with the Giants. The New York Giants of the '30s were a team of home-run hitters who preferred powering the ball out of the park to stealing bases. Mullin drew his Giant with huge feet and a pea-sized head, explaining that his intent was "to emphasize that they were slow-footed rather than slow-headed." Those latter-day miracle makers, the New York Mets, also appealed to Mullin, who portrayed their rush to the 1969 National League pennant on TIME'S cover (Sept. 5, 1969).

For the past three years, Mullin has been doing advertising cartooning for an insurance company, Mutual of New York. He will do a few more this year, "which will buy liquor for the year." He hopes to intersperse Florida living with a little world traveling. That, of course, takes money, but presumably the Bum has already paid the bills.

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