CSotD: Monday Classic: Storyteller J.R. Williams
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Yesterday, I said that, while I'm properly in awe of Winsor McCay's artistry, I don't feel total reverence for his classic strip, Little Nemo, because I'm a storyteller, not an artist. As Gilda suggested in the comments yesterday, his illustrations were amazing, but the actual storytelling was not his long suit.
Here's a cartoonist who appeals to the storyteller.
J.R. Williams (1888-1970) drew a daily panel called "Out Our Way" that alternated among several settings: The days of his childhood, current family life, life on a cattle ranch and life in a machine shop, with some variations within those categories.
For example, "Heroes are made – not born" is not the caption of the above panel, but the title of a series in which young boys face life's hard realities — small moments like coming home beat from backyard football, only to find that the coalman has made a delivery and guess who gets to haul it all down into the cellar?
There is so much to like about this 1926 silent panel! Without words, he tells you about the football game and about this young fellow's family's expectations: The scuttle and a second bucket are laid out on the lawn, and there's no chance they're sitting there waiting for anyone but him. There's also a suggestion of how impossible it would be for him to plead exhaustion or ask to do it in the morning. Part of Williams' sense of humor included how youngsters tried to get around their chores and how hopeless their efforts were, sometimes in "Heroes are made – not born" and sometimes in another series he called "Why mothers get gray."
For about six years at the end of the '90s, one of my tasks was to assemble the weekly "Lookback" historic feature for the paper, which entailed going through all the papers for that week from 100, 75, 50 and 25 years ago.
"Out Our Way," which ran from the early 1920s up through the 1970s, was one of a small number of comics in the "50 years ago" newspapers of the late '40s. The others were "Alley Oop," "Red Ryder" and "Freckles and His Friends." "Red Ryder" wasn't much — I suspect its iconic appeal came more from the movies than the comic strip, though the strip may have appealed to youngsters because of its simplicity. The others, however, were clever and nuanced and brought my "research" to a halt each issue.
But it was "Out Our Way" that really stuck. Williams was unabashedly sentimental and nostalgic, but he had lived the things he depicted: He'd not only grown up in an age of coal scuttles, but he'd worked ranches and he'd worked in machine shops, and, as gentle as his humor was, it was spot-on, and he managed to tell his stories in such a way that, once you'd seen enough of his work to get into the rhythms of his storytelling, you didn't have to have been there to get it.
For example, how much more do you have to be told about Wes or about working cattle to know his story from this simple panel? (In this case, the caption is specific to the cartoon.)
That's storytelling!
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