When The N.Y. Times Did Comics
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The long held misconception that The New York Times never ran comic strips is now widely known as an “alternative fact.” As Allan Holtz writes in his The Roosevelt Bears entry at The Stripper’s Guide:
“The feature sold very well, and became somewhat famous as supposedly the only comic strip ever run by the New York Times. This has never really been true on several levels. First, calling The Roosevelt Bears a comic strip is a bit of a stretch, and second, back in those days the Sunday Times was surprisingly open to cartooning, and not just editorially. They offered entertainment cartoons on a semi-regular basis in their Sunday editions; perhaps rarely anything that could be considered a series…”
Then for decades The Times felt itself too high-toned to print a lowly comic strip unless an editorial cartoon used sequential panels. Then came the 1960s and the Pop Art movement and suddenly comic art was de rigueur across a wide swath of publications that had been ignoring the art form, including The New York Times. Most famously for comic strip fans was the famous trio of Walt Kelly, Stan Lee and John Romita, and Al Capp creating full page color comic strips for the paper in the Spring of 1972*.
The era also brought in editors that had no ingrained aversion to comics, which brings us to Steven Heller.
As an addendum to his lengthy “12 Art Directors on Bringing the Op-Ed Pages to Life” (or here) historical piece celebrating the artistic opening of The New York Times Op-ED page from last week Heller at his The Daily Heller column for Print give us more about the sequential comics revolution that came to The Times with rare samples by Lee and Romita, Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Gahan Wilson, and Robert Crumb.
“The New York Times is celebrating 175 years as a national news publication. Among the features prepared for this revue of highlights is one devoted to the evolution of Opinion Art. Twelve former art directors from the OpEd page were invited to select one example each of what during their tenure was a consequential contribution to the legacy of art in the Times.
“Among the mandates of this job was to inject traditional illustrators and comic artists to the page. By way of example, I present (below) a few of the comics I commissioned in the mid 1970s expressly for the page.”
*The first Spider-Man comic strip printed in a newspaper five years before the syndicated version.
feature image is “The Spirit” by Will Eisner
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