WESTPORT — Notable work by many of the cartoonists who have called Fairfield County home over the last century are showcased in two new exhibits at the Westport Library.
On display are cartoons by: Dik Browne (“Haggar the Horrible”); Mort Walker (“Beetle Bailey”); John Cullen Murphy (“Prince Valiant”); Leonard Starr (“Little Orphan Annie”); Jack Tippit (Henry); Mel Casson (“Sparky”); Stan Drake (“The Heart of Juliet Jones”) and more.
“Cartoon County: The Golden Age of Cartooning in Connecticut,” featuring more than 40 original cartoons from Westport Public Art Collections (WestPAC) is a tribute to local cartoonists, both current and past. It is displayed in the Sheffer Gallery.
Guest curator for the exhibits is Brian Walker, from a cartooning family that included his father, the late Mort Walker. Brian Walker and several of Mort Walker’s sons continued their father’s legacy, creating new comic strips for “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois.”
Brian Walker, a comics historian, gave a talk about the history of cartooning in the Fairfield County area for the exhibits’ opening Sept. 10. He is the author of “The Comics: A Complete Collection.”
We missed the opening but there is still two months to visit the exhibit.
Feiffer fell hard for comic strips as a child, gorging on all the greats, copying them over himself and then creating his own comic strips and selling them to kids on the block and at school. Prince Valiant. Li’l Abner. He loved them all.
“Peanuts is a wonderful example,” says Feiffer. “There was no logic and no sense and there’s no way you can chart the trajectory of Peanuts from the beginning. It was simply…it just happened. You saw it grow, you saw it change as it was happening. And it all made perfect sense once you read it. But you couldn’t imagine how the f*!# he came up with it. Linus and the blanket and Snoopy. That and the extraordinary humanity of all of the characters, the good ones and the bad ones, like Lucy.”
Over at Cartoon Research Charles Gardner is up to part four of his series about “Not only cartoons about animators and the animation process, but cartoons about characters who knew they were in cartoons.”
Epitome — it’s a noun we all know and have used in our work, but chances are many of us have been using it wrong.
Recently, I wrote a story about longtime Philadelphia Eagles announcer Merrill Reese, who was awarded the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As I wrote in my story, “Reese said he thought the epitome of his career” up until that point was entering the Eagles Hall of Fame in 2018.
So, what’s wrong with my use of epitome? According to Bob Yearick, columnist and author of “The War on Words,” it’s often misused to mean “pinnacle” or “high point” when it actually means “a person or thing that is a perfect example of a particular quality or type.”
You can always learn something from a copy editor. Unfortunately, with many of us still working remotely, an unplanned chat with our colleagues on the copy desk doesn’t happen often. Even worse, many news organizations have laid off most of their copy editors and outsourced those left to regional hubs miles and miles away.
Scott Brown (1909-1982) was a nationally celebrated cartoonist and small town soda shop philosopher who came of age during the Great Depression. His cartoons appeared in Colliers, the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and many other places regularly from 1930 to 1975.
