The comics section of the newspaper holds any number of worlds in its pages: the Norwegian village where Viking Hägar the Horrible had his mishaps, the fictional US Army military post where Beetle Bailey avoided responsibility and Camelot where Prince Valiant went on daring, epic adventures as a knight of King Arthur's Round Table.
Though they spanned to different places and time periods and could even look drastically different, most of those comic strip worlds were brought together in one place: Fairfield County, Connecticut where many of their writers and illustrators, along with other cartoonists and illustrators lived in a close community of at least 100 from the 1950s to the 1990s.
In his new book Cartoon County, Cullen Murphy tells of growing up at the heart of that world, in the town of Greenwich. His father, John Cullen Murphy, illustrated a comic strip about a prizefighter and journalist called Big Ben Bolt and later took over illustrations of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, which he worked on for the rest of his career.
John Cullen Murphy's friends, who also lived in Fairfield County, were also illustrators and writers for comic strips and magazines, including Hägar the Horrible creator Dik Browne, Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker, Chuck Saxon, who did cartoons and covers for The New Yorker, Sam and Silo collaborator Jerry Dumas, Tony DiPreta who illustrated Joe Palooka, Popeye illustrator Bud Sagendorf and Juliet Jones co-creator Stan Drake, among many others. One of the most famous cartoonists who didn't live there was Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, who lived in California.
'The group must have numbered a hundred of more, and it constituted a tightly knit subculture,' Murphy writes in his book. 'Its members sometimes referred to themselves as the Connecticut School, with the good-natured self-mockery that betrays an element of seriousness.'
Murphy, the editor at large of Vanity Fair and the former managing editor of The Atlantic, even collaborated with his father by writing for Prince Valiant until John passed away in 2004. The memoir tells stories of the cartoonists Murphy grew up knowing as well as their industry in general, its history and some of the ins and outs of the cartooning trade. Murphy mostly focuses on his father John, with whom he had a close relationship.
When John would become a cartoonist later in his life, Murphy says it wasn't necessarily the foremost thing he wanted to be doing. Instead, his desire was to be a magazine or book illustrator. The cartooning job was 'an opportunity that came his way by chance after the war'.
'His regard for the craft of cartooning was high, even if in some ways it was not what he'd rather be doing. He'd rather be sketching people on the street or taking his paints and brushes aimlessly into the Irish or Southwestern countryside, but a comic strip paid the bills and freed him to paint only what he liked when he had some spare time.
'He loved the camaraderie of the cartooning tribe, everyone slightly off register and anxious for company. And, anyway, the kind of strips he drew offered great scope for creativity. He would lose himself in the task when creating one of those giant Prince Valiant panels, and he relished adding "John Cullen Murphy" to them as the final act.'
The comic industry came to the height of its popularity in the 1950s and New York City was the center of the publishing universe, so cartoonists had to stay close by. However the 1950s also meant that families were being drawn out to the suburbs where parents could raise their children in quiet neighborhoods instead of bustling metropolises.
Because it was so close to the city, but still outside its bounds, Fairfield County was the perfect solution. Continue reading from The Daily Mail
Connecticut's Cartoon County (CT PBS)
Westport’s Cartoon History: What A Laugh (Dan Woog's 06880)
When Fairfield County Was the Comic-Strip Capital of the World (Vanity Fair)
The Comic Strip’s Heyday in ‘Cartoon County’ (NY Times)
Cartoon County, U.S.A. (Vanity Fair)
When Comics Were King (Woog's 06880)
The Rocky History of Connecticut’s Cartoon Museum (CT Post)
Connecticut Cartoonists #1: The Alex Raymond Circle (The Comics Journal)
‘Cartooning in Connecticut’ Packs the House at Bruce Museum in Greenwich (Greenwich Time)
