Antonio Prohías (1921-1998)

 

The cover of The All New Mad Secret File on Spy vs Spy by Antonio Prohías, his first such collection, published by Signet in 1965, plus the inside biography of the cartoonist.

Today is May Day, for normal people a day to celebrate the coming of spring, but for communists, bolsheviks, Marxists, and other socialists one to celebrate murder, oppression, poverty, misery, mass incarceration, and mass starvation. Those things aren't really what socialists celebrate (maybe) but they are nonetheless the products of the socialists' efforts. Even Nazis, who peddled just one more brand of socialism, had an official May Day celebration. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

On this day sixty-one years ago, Cuban cartoonist Antonio Prohías left his homeland for the United States. Born on January 17, 1921, Prohías had been one of Cuba's leading cartoonists until he began criticizing the new Castro regime. On May 1, 1960, he went into exile from his native country. He never returned.

Just two months later, on July 12, 1960, Prohías walked into the New York offices of Mad with a portfolio he had developed since coming to America. Although he spoke no English, he walked out with $800 in payment for his first cartoons to appear in the magazine. In all, Prohías created 241 episodes showing the never-ending battle between a nameless black spy and his equally nameless white nemesis. Spy vs. Spy must surely be considered one of the great comic strips of the twentieth century.

Although there isn't any overt political commentary in Spy vs. Spy, the cartoonist understood the machinery and imagery of oppression and of state-sponsored murder, and he depicted these things to perfection. With their comically grotesque faces, physiques, uniforms, and ornate decorations, his nameless spymasters/regime leaders are only barely exaggerated versions of the real thing. The socialist oppressor and murderer has since learned to be more subtle than that, so subtle in fact that he--and she--have wormed their way into the highest levels of Western government, academia, entertainment, media, and commerce. If he were still living and working today, Antonio Prohías would have to learn equally more subtle ways of lampooning them.

Antonio Prohías died on February 24, 1998, at age seventy-seven in Miami, Florida. If he had lived, he would have turned one hundred years old in 2021. And if he had lived to this May Day, he would have seen not the end of communism in Cuba but at least the end of the Castro dynasty, a happy yet unhappy event that occurred on April 19, 2021.

Antonio Prohías was born in the city of Cienfuegos in Cuba. If we can stretch a metaphor, we can observe that Cienfuegos means "one hundred fires" in Spanish, and we can say that in memory of Prohías and his life's work we might light one hundred fires of freedom, one for each of the one hundred years since his birth. May socialism be one day relegated not only to the dustbin of history but also to that of human thought, belief, and experience. May it soon perish and may the people of the not-very-distant future wonder why anyone would ever have believed in such utterly stupid, outlandish, and ultimately murderous things.

Text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Morrie Turner (1923-2014)

Morris Nolton "Morrie" Turner was born on December 11, 1923, in Oakland, California. He served as a mechanic with the Tuskegee Airman during World War II and contributed to Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the Armed Forces. In the 1960s, he traveled with other cartoonists to entertain the troops in Vietnam.

Turner began drawing cartoons and comic strips in the mid 1960s, mostly for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. Titles included Dinky Fellas (1964-1965), Press Gremlins (1964-1965), Reverend Smiley (1964-1965), Sepia Smiles (1964-1965), Dogbert (1965-1969), and Classified Chuckles (1966-1969). In 1965, Turner's syndicate rebranded Dinky Fellas as Wee Pals, the comic strip for which he will always be known. Wee Pals began on February 15, 1965, and is still running today, two years after the cartoonist's death.

Morrie Turner was a friend of Charles Schulz and Bil Keane, two other cartoonists of childhood. His Wee Pals is very much like Peanuts, with a large cast of kids who have their own distinct personalities, backgrounds, dress, and interests. It was and is a great strip. By the way, Nipper, the boy with the soul food stand on the cover of Doing Their Thing, wore a Confederate cap, though without the crossed swords. When asked why, he replies,"'Cause I'm non-violent!"

Morrie Turner died on January 25, 2014, in Sacramento, California.

Text copyright 2016 Terence E. Hanley

Carl Fallberg (1915-1996)

Cartoonist, writer, and railroad enthusiast Carl Fallberg (1915-1996) and his book Fiddletown & Copperopolis (River Forest, IL: Heimburger House Publishing Co., 1985), collecting his cartoons from Railroad magazine. I know the book-jacket biography of Fallberg is hard to read here, but give it a try.

Text copyright 2031 Terence E. Hanley

F.O. Alexander (1897-1993)

Here is an unusual book called Joe Doakes' Great Quest, written and drawn by F.O. Alexander and published in his retirement. Franklin Osborne Alexander was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 3, 1897. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Northwestern University. During World War I, Alexander served with the Camouflage Engineers in Europe. (I think that outfit was more properly called the American Camouflage Corps.) In so doing he would have followed a path laid down by another artist, Abbott Thayer (1849-1921).

Alexander drew three newspaper comic strips between 1925 and 1939, the most well known of which was the cliffhanger Hairbreadth Harry. In 1941, he signed on with the Philadelphia Bulletin and enjoyed a second career as an editorial cartoonist. F.O. Alexander retired in 1967. The following year, John Knox Press of Richmond, Virginia, published his book Joe Doakes' Great Quest, a cartoon odyssey in which the title character tries to discover his purpose in life. The model is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but it looks like a sequential editorial cartoon. I suppose you could make something of a connection between editorial cartooning and literary allegory.

F.O. Alexander died on January 17, 1993, in Philadelphia at age ninety-five. His papers are at Syracuse University.

The cover design of Joe Doakes' Great Quest is by Doyle Robinson. The photo of the author is by William Conn.

Text copyright 2013 by Terence E. Hanley