Comics and Censorship

You Can't Say That!

When I was a kid I discovered many old books about comics and cartooning in my home away from home, the Snohomish Public Library. Almost every one of them mentioned the arcane rules regulating what you could and could not put into a syndicated comic strip.

These weren't official rules, like postal regulations. They were rules of thumb developed by editors based on feedback from their readers. "Feedback" usually meant a threat to cancel a subscription. Editors, the story went, estimated that for every person who complained there were several times that number (3, 4, and 5 were common figures) who felt the same way but didn't bother to write. So the editors passed each complaint up the line and threatened to drop the strip if the syndicate didn't keep its cartoonists in check. The result, the story went, was that newspaper strips were among the most conservative storytelling forms, their content dictated by a vocal minority of readers in the South and the Midwest.

I read so many variations of that story that I began to wonder if it was an urban legend. The alleged list of taboos included obvious stuff like nudity and profanity, but also depictions of black persons, alcohol use and snakes. Authors always mentioned snakes. Yet at the same time these strictures were supposedly in effect, major strips broke many of the rules. Just one example was Leslie Turner's Captain Easy, which offered plenty of lingerie shots and backlit semi-nudity.

I still don't know whether readers demanded those hidebound restrictions, but I'm certain editors believed they did. A case in point is this remarkable Bud Sagendorf Popeye strip I found on Segni & Disegni's site. It is dated 13 April 1976.

 
This strip was the payoff of an extended sequence in which a vampire menaces Olive Oyl. She scares him off by using the moonlight to cast a shadow shaped like...a dagger?! Anyone want to bet on what might be hidden beneath that pasteover? I didn't think so.

Obviously someone at the Syndicate got scared that some editor would figure some reader would be offended by the words "A cross!" I suspect the hypothetical editor feared not an outraged atheist, but rather a conservative Christian who found the scene sacriligeous. And this was in 1976, well after strips like Doonesbury had challenged most of the old taboos.

When I was drawing Dallas in the early 1980s I had my own brush with editorial second-guessing. One storyline had bad boy J. R. bribing a hot-pants Arab oilman by offering him a shot at his niece Lucy. J. R. presents his offer by showing the oilman a sexy photo of Lucy in a swimsuit. The "reveal" is in the final panel of a Sunday page, where there is plenty of room to show the picture that makes Abdul's mouth water.

From the beginning the Syndicate editor instructed me to be ver-r-r-y careful not to make the picture sexy, lest it shock an editor into cancelling the strip. I was to present Lucy in a demure pose in a one-piece swimsuit with a high neckline and a modest cut about the hips. I did what I was told. The result looked something like this.

And believe me, there was no cleavage--precious little bust, in fact--and the legs were chastely crossed. But when the editor saw it he still wondered if the drawing went too far. At his instruction I pasted an enormous piling over the middle of the figure, large enough to cover any conceivable area of interest, drawn large enough (and carefully placed) so as to avoid any unintended phallic suggestion. It came out something like this (I no longer have a copy of the strip to show you):

Actually, I think this sketch shows a little more than the revised art; I was charged to eliminate any chance that someone might ogle Lucy's boobs. Not the sort of thing to fire the passions, is it?

The incident spotlighted a fundamental problem with basing a newspaper strip on the Dallas TV series. The two key elements of the show were sex and booze. In the strip we couldn't do sex--period!--and the booze was limited to endless shots of  J. R. pouring from a bottle of wine. Kind of took the wind out of the sales.

Stuff I've Done--9

My Favorite Star Trek Page
I remember the years when I was drawing Dallas and Star Trek as a blur of lots of work, lots of frustration, lots of drama, and not much money.

I was originally hired to draw Dallas, but when Thomas Warkentin left Star Trek, that was the strip I really wanted to draw. Not only did I like the property better, but also Paramount pretty much left the strip alone. There was none of the nasty, iron-fisted editorial intervention that Lorimar practiced on Dallas. That was partly why I offered to take the strip on. Another piece was that I'd be earning more money. But the major reason was to provide an entry into the syndicate for a "good friend." This laid the groundwork for much of the aforementioned drama. Suffice it to say that one should keep personal and professional relationships separated. Widely separated.

My final Trek storyline concerned the Enterprise entering a regatta and running afoul of space pirates. It was my favorite story of the bunch. It followed a long, incredibly-complicated nightmare on which the writer collaborated with noted s-f author Larry Niven. That episode is a story in itself. I suppose I'll tell my side of it one day. I mostly remember the story as Advanced Lettering 101. There was lots of this:In comparison the regatta story was just the right length, focused, and well-plotted. The dialogue was good and there were nice character bits. It was a joy to work on, though I didn't stay through to the end. Thomas ghosted the last two weeks after I resigned both strips in a state of exhaustion.

I was always playing catch-up on Trek. The syndicate cared more about Dallas, which made a lot more money even after losing half its original list of papers. But one weekend I stayed up extra-late to do this Sunday. It remains my favorite bit of Trek art. It was one of the few originals I kept. The others I sold cheap in a fit of depression to some art dealers pretending to be fans.

The writer and I snickered over the suggestion in panel 3 (Kirk putting on his shoes) that Kirk had slept with Vera DiMarco. It was as close to sex as anyone got at the L.A. Times Syndicate. I luxuriated in doing the Wood inking thing and devoted loving attention to Vera's clingy gown. Here's a scan of the b&w proof sheet: The color version above is from the Houston Chronicle, one of the few papers that carried the strip.

Things I Never Did--2

Raiders of the Lost Art
Back when I was drawing the Dallas and Star Trek newspaper strips, my syndicate (the Los Angeles Times Syndicate) also distributed the Star Wars strip. One day word passed down that Lucasfilm had suggested the Times Syndicate produce a strip based on their "other" movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Indiana Jones' 1930s-serial adventures were my favorite kind of story. Not bothering to consider the fact that I was already drawing two daily and Sunday strips, I put together this promotional piece and routed it to Lucasfilm. I drew it on a 15x20 inch piece of heavyweight Crescent board and colored it with markers and Dr. Martin's dyes (note that the flesh colors have faded with time).That was the end of the story. The syndicate passed on the strip. Later I was told they thought selling their existing continuity strips was trouble enough. Raiders was nowhere near as big a deal as Star Wars and they figured an Indiana Jones strip wouldn't stand a chance. Nevertheless a short while later they launched a strip based on the already-passe (and quite dead) Bruce Lee. Go figure.

A year or so later Lucasfilm returned the art without comment. Some time after that I heard that John Prentice had been angling to draw the Indy strip. Guess who would have got that assignment.

Several years later I drew another Indiana Jones piece just for the hell of it. Thus ended my relationship with Mr. Jones.

A Sight Unseen--4

Ronnie Does Dallas--For Good
The Dallas Sunday below isn't really "unseen." Maybe a dozen people in the world read it in their hometown newspapers. These were the twelve diehards who hadn't given the strip up after the first couple of months.
Its claim to uniqueness is that it's the only Sunday I colored on the original. This wasn't a color guide; I worked it over with markers just for the hell of it after I got the art back from the syndicate . There were comparatively few pasteovers (only two J.R. heads this time around) so the color didn't look so bad. Some years ago I sold the original on ebay to a woman in the Spanish publishing industry.

I preferred to draw my Sundays twice up on large sheets of vellum bristol, but this time I used a 15x20 inch piece of cold-pressed Crescent board. Note that in the grand American newspaper comic strip tradition, nothing at all happens in this page. Maybe only 20% of the subscribing papers took the Sunday, so putting something important there would mess the story up for the other 80%.

The car in the second panel is the 1954 Hudson Itali. The Itali was an experiment in sporty design for the faltering Hudson marque. Only a couple were made. The European design was pretty slick save for some funky space-age tubular taillights. I often drew odd cars and planes into my strips as a way to keep from going crazy. Not that it worked. Once a reader recognized one of the cars and let me know in a letter.

There aren't a whole lot of Dallas originals out there. The only thing good about the nutty hours I put in on Dallas and Star Trek was that I didn't have any time to spend my money. Even at the crummy salary I wound up with enough in the bank to pursue a long-time dream: attending the international comics convention in Lucca, Italy. I took some of my originals along and ended up selling or trading a few Dallas pieces to European fans. I gave a few Sundays to family members and friends. The rest I stuck in a drawer.

Almost a year later the Syndicate called to say that Lorimar, the company that owned Dallas, wanted the originals back. This was interesting, because literally a couple of days earlier I'd chucked the remaining Sundays and the majority of the dailies into the dumpster in my latest fit of depression. I'd cut the rest of the dailies into pieces to use as brush warm-up pages. I told this to the Syndicate. They told me just to send what I had. I took a perverse delight in filling a manila envelope with mangled bits of J. R. Ewing and his dysfunctional relatives. I sent the envelope full of pieces to Lorimar and that's the last I ever heard of it.

Needless to say I had kept the above original. And I think I may still have one of the large-format Sundays somewhere. As for the rest, Good Riddance.

A Sight Unseen--2

Bill Ziegler's Dallas

During the extended period of weirdness during which I was drawing the Dallas and Star Trek newspaper comic strips for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, I seldom sought assistance. Not out of pride. The pay was so poor that no one in his right mind would work for the money I could afford to pay. But twice things got so tight I had no choice.

One of guys who pitched in was Bill Ziegler, a comics artists with a long West Coast career and a super nice guy. Bill was semi-retired after working many years for Western Publishing (Dell and Gold Key) on westerns and movie tie-ins. He drove down from Santa Barbara and sat at the kitchen table in my crummy apartment, penciling two weeks worth of strips while I lettered and inked.

Bill's work was great. Though he always seemed to draw heads too big, his understanding of body language and his knack for composition left me feeling even less competent than I already did. But Bill was too nice a person for me to take it personally. Having him around was a relief from the loneliness of round-the-clock ass-busting; while we worked we chatted about a wide range of subjects. On breaks he showed me his sketchbook, filled with lively, beautiful pencil studies of people and animals.

Bill was also no fool. By our second meeting he'd seen through me and realized that the paltry money I was paying him was more than I was making off the strip. Guilty as charged. In fact I lost fifty 1980's dollars on each week he penciled for me. He refused to take any more pay and said he'd finish the batch I'd given him without charge.

I felt both embarrassed and humiliated. I could accept myself working for nothing, because I'd gotten myself into this mess. I could accept my neighbors working for nothing because it was only now and then and they were my buddies. But I couldn't let a professional of Bill's stature and experience work for nothing. So I went back to doing it all myself.

When I'd finally had enough of the rat race and told the Syndicate I was leaving the strips, they asked me to suggest a replacement. Since Bill already knew what he'd be getting into, I tipped him off. He drew two sample dailies which I present here. To my knowledge they've never seen print before. I admit the faces are rather more cartoony than the strip called for, but all of Bill's gesture and staging are here. I like 'em.

One other cartoonist drew samples for the job: writer Jim Lawrence's friend, Australian illustrator Yaroslav “James Bond” Horak. Through Jim I learned that the Syndicate never got back to Horak after soliciting the samples; Horak was understandably annoyed and that was the end of that. Would I love to have seen his version of the strip!

The Syndicate finally realized they weren't going to get an established artist for the money they offered. They settled on giving both strips to a young kid just out of college. His girlfriend, a Syndicate employee, heard about the opening and pushed him hard to take the job. I met him once to discuss the strips and to hand over two binders full of reference material I'd collected. He was a nice guy, but even further over his head than I had been. I wished him luck.

By the way, they also gave him $50 less a week than I'd been getting. Gotta love that syndicate.