PAT OLIPHANT AND NEWSPAPERS IN THE GRAVEYARD TOGETHER

 

“You have to wake up every morning angry.” -- Pat Oliphant

Last week I wrote an appreciation of the late great Pat Oliphant (1935-2026) in The Comics Journal.

While writing it, I was struck by the fact that Oliphant's long, successful career was the result of a total fluke of time and place. 

He started out in a small town near Adelaide, Australia where nobody cared about current events.  He worked his way up to a job with the biggest newspaper in town, the Adelaide Advertiser, which Oliphant recalled "came out strongly for the weather." His drawings were heavily censored, not for political content (because there was none) but to make sure his drawings of cattle did not reveal a glimpse of a bull's pizzle.

Following in the footsteps of other great political cartoonists such as David Low, Oliphant fought his way out of rural Australia in 1964 to find a country with a market for his biting political observations and powerful drawings.  As I wrote in The Comics Journal,

It turned out that Oliphant’s talents were perfectly suited for the U.S. in the 1960s. If he had come to America today, when the newspaper industry is anemic and editorial cartoonists are on a tighter leash, he might have fallen flat and the world would’ve been deprived of thousands of brilliant and witty drawings. But the 1960s were a time of great political ferment and artistic audacity, a time of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war.... The combination of Oliphant and 1960s America proved combustible chemistry. Within months he was attracting national attention....

Oliphant's cartoons appeared in 500 newspapers around the world.

Today Pat Oliphant is in the graveyard, but so are the opportunities for talented political cartoonists whose pointed drawings used to shock millions of readers out of their reveries.  Where does a political cartoonist with great talent go today to earn a living?  

Not long ago, Jeff Bezos's Washington Post began following in the footsteps of the Adelaide Advertiser, censoring the brilliant conservative cartoons of Michael Ramirez and the brilliant progressive cartoons of Ann Telnaes leaving nothing but editorial cartoons with pablum suitable for the rapidly diminishing, addlepated American readership.   Telnaes quit the Post on principle and turned to substack.  

Looking back on Oliphant's 50 years of impressive drawings, it's painful to think how all that amazing content might never have materialized if Oliphant was off by a few years, or a few miles.  It's even more painful to think about where such talent will be able to congregate in the future. 

To quote my good friend Thomas Gray:

Many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

TRIBUTE TO AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK, part 3

The False Gods by George Horace Lorimer was illustrated in 1906 by a young J.C. Leyendecker.  It is not mentioned in any of the reference books on Leyendecker.

1906 was an interesting moment for the world's perception of ancient Egypt.  19th century colonial exploration had revealed-- but not solved-- many of the intriguing mysteries of that fabled empire.  The discovery of King Tut's tomb, which sparked the international Egyptian craze, was still 16 years away. 

The Riddle of the Sphinx by Elihu Vedder (1836)

Books such as The False Gods filled in gaps between the the initial speculations and the archaeological facts.  Without photographs or scientific evidence, the public had to rely upon the imaginations of artists.  Illustrators were the George Lucases and the Steven Spielbergs of their day, inventing the images for an insatiable public and shaping their fantasies. 

In 1906, Howard Carter was an unemployed artist who had traveled to Egypt inspired by books.  He first found work copying tomb decorations.  During long stretches of unemployment, he supported himself by painting watercolors which he sold to tourists.  He wandered around the Valley of the Kings searching for ancient tombs and eventually became a bona fide Egyptologist.

Funded by British Lord Carnarvon, in 1922 Carter stumbled upon one of the most famous Egyptian archaeological discoveries of all time, King Tut's tomb.

In an era before television or the internet, illustrated books like this one served as a stepping stone to all kinds of explorations and achievements.

COLORING BOOKS FOR GROWN UPS

In the early1960s a flurry of coloring books appeared with grown up content.  Don't ask me why.

Like children's coloring books, they were printed on cheap pulp paper with simple line drawings suitable for coloring in with crayon.  Each page might contain a sentence or two of very simple language, like a child's primer.  

The first major example was The JFK Coloring Book illustrated by Mort Drucker.  It was intended as a cheap novelty item but it unexpectedly became a smash hit. It sold out multiple printings and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. It was covered widely in the press, including Time Magazine and Newsweek. The Smithsonian Institution bought a copy for its collection.

The JFK Coloring Book was quite profitable for the authors (not so much for the artist).  Immediately, numerous imitators stampeded into the market.  Artist Jack Davis quickly illustrated a coloring book about Soviet boss Nikita Khruschev:

 

Drucker was called back for an encore performance with another coloring book about the Kennedy administration.

The same year, artist Shel Silverstein produced the wicked Uncle Shelby's ABZ book, using child-like drawings and language but again, definitely intended for adults.

The glut of coloring books soon saturated the market, and the demand subsided.  Illustrators packed up their tents and wandered off looking for the next big thing.  

Twenty five years later there were a couple of half- hearted attempts at reviving the market, including the Ollie North Coloring Book and The Ronald Regan Coloring Book, both illustrated by Mort Drucker.  The drawings were more sophisticated and the covers were now in color but by this time the moment for such coloring books had passed. 

It's difficult to explain the appeal in the '60s of putting adult content in a child-like format.  Mark Twain effectively showed the adult world through the eyes of an innocent youth in Huckleberry Finn.  In the 1950s, Charles Schulz's strip Peanuts put adult messages in the mouths of small, simply drawn children.  Perhaps these coloring books were a continuation of that device.  In any event, that fad-- like so many others in the history of illustration-- came and went, leaving some nice pictures behind.