Alex Raymond and Rip Kirby 2

The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

What Changed? "Cupping her hands in water, she held it for him to drink. Sorry, if I frightened you, he said. I'll be all right in a minute. You. . .I thought you were a girl." The was the caption for a full page lead illustration by Pruett Carter, left, for McCall's, 1944. The illustration shows the old guard, the Saturday Evening Post style of story illustration, fully rendered in oil so the folds of the clothes have complete depth, visualizing a telling moment in the narrative and as true to the text as possible. Carter, an old hand at romance work since the 20s, was one of the few Golden Age Illustrators who successfully altered his style with every trend and would later make the transition to the flat, open approach in the 50s. The double page spread from Ladies Home Journal, 1953, was 25 year old Joe Bowler's first appearance in the Journal, although he had been appearing in national magazines, through his apprenticeship and the help of Coby Whitmore, since the age of nineteen in 1948. This illustration does have a narrative connection but what reader would care about that? Everything appealing about this story is suggested by the young girl's inviting face and vibrant expression. Note the flat color and unfinished passages, the strong black shapes, the open, free white space incorporated across two pages and center gutter, the man half obscured by the door, and most importantly, the girl's expression and body language, her full dark eyebrows, large eyes, both relaxed, graceful hands (neither grips the door in the presence of a stranger), and crooked mouth. Here's a girl ready to fall in love with the right man, caught at the moment she first sees a likely candidate. (The story's hook is she is already engaged to him.) Bowler called Whitmore, his close friend and teacher, "the most important person in my development as an artist." Whitmore was the star of the Cooper stable, a cool exciting influence that became a trademark of the times. The unframed illustrations below are all Whitmore, except the 1950 Joe De Mers Cooper trade ad. For more Cool School examples.

In New York City in 1934, Jon Whitcomb, a recent transplant from Cleveland and Ohio State University, seized the opportunity of a failing agency branch office to start his own shop and thus co-founded with the new company’s namesake, former illustrator Charles E. Cooper, the studio that eventually changed American graphic style. Along with other professional practices, Whitcomb and his studio switched from using oils to the faster-drying, easily applied designer’s colors (gouache). Out went elaborately painted backgrounds, for the new medium with its limited mixing flattened the scene and everything in it. So the Cooper artists countered with zooming in on people--mainly pretty young city girls for large format magazines aimed at a feminine audience --and everything else in the picture became design not narrative elements and now the entire double page spread was fair game.

Whitcomb, along with his main rival, the towering influence of St Louis born and St Louis Washington University educated Al Parker, started this revolution in the late 30s, left for war service in the Navy in 1942, then returned to a illustration profession ready to embrace the new changes across the board. Then Coby Whitmore, another mid-westerner and fresh from an apprenticeship with Chicago's influential Sundblom Circle, joined the Cooper Studio in 1943.

So forced by the flat medium to employ other techniques to coax some personality on the canvas, the two Cooper heavyweights Whitcomb and Whitmore, Parker, and the horde of their followers and imitators became almost line artists themselves. While they didn’t put a heavy, Art Novueau containment line around the figure, they came close to it and tried everything else: a dramatic, contrasting background, strong light to induce deep hard edge shadows, selected small props to grab and stop the viewer’s gaze, a voyeuristic, forced perspective point of view so that figures extended past the picture plane or showed bystanders half obscured, observed from behind or in the immediate foreground to suggest the viewer stands close among them, unseen

or stared at, with sight lines into the picture diving past plants, furniture, or open doors.

It was an attempt at catching the center of attention, the girl and her male admirers, as in Fred Taraba’s observation in a recent magazine profile about Whitmore’s composition, in an "interrupted moment" in the midst of intense lives.

A lesson from Jon Whitcomb’s How I Make a Picture Advanced correspondence course showing the reference and finished page as it later appeared in the Ladies Home Journal, probably 1948. The smaller figures represented scenes from the story, the traditional use of photos. The Cooper style’s innovation was the dominant close up uncontained by the frame of the page, without specific ties to the plot, thus changing completely the old interaction between text and picture. Here the model had vamped the pose in the photo session. Then she was transformed by idealization formulas Whitcomb and Parker, with others like Haddon Sundblom, made standard throughout the industry. Note the brilliant, mostly flat, straight-from-the-tube color, the hands positioned close to the face and the nonsensical attention grabber, a spray of flowers in her right hand, limning a story about a girl who wants to return to New Jersey from the West Coast because she finds the California climate too cold and damp. The Famous Artist Advanced courses were developed before the well known regular lessons but were too costly and time consuming to administer and take. They were quickly discontinued. Each of the 12 founding members made a personal book of techniques and picture-making philosophy, including Whitcomb, Parker, Robert Fawcett, Austin Briggs and more. (Norman Rockwell's advanced course was published as Rockwell on Rockwell in the 70s. Al Dorne's was never released.) The middle example below shows Whitcomb's reference photo and the sketch he submitted. He didn't like the finished illustration. The client (a face soap company) wanted the skin too creamy and flat for his taste. For more Cool School examples.

Above all, these illustrators placed an emphasis on the face, on expression and body language.

These exacting craftsmen relied on photographs to a degree not seen before to capture expression, seeing their use as a commercial and professional expedient. For reference, they may have pioneered spontaneous series--a model improvising for a rapidly shooting camera--a technique fashion and celebrity photographers like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and David Bailey later adopted in the 50s and 60s. These new American women needed sharp features, particularly well-defined dark eyebrows and full lips, with contoured cheekbones and thin faces. The pattern on clothes and hairstyles, the ornaments in the hair, what jewelry was or wasn’t worn, became just as important in revealing personality of the heroine as behavior or dialogue. Whitcomb called it a “character” approach or mood snapshot. Critics, mostly supporters of the old Howard Pyle/Saturday Evening Post school, which was staged, carefully analyzed action tied specifically to a scene from the text, derisively called this intimate, seemingly improvisational approach, “Big Head” illustration.

But it enormously popular. Readers were encouraged to project themselves into these accessible, young, smart, fresh, women who looked out at them from the large pages of the major mainstream magazines. While Parker liked the challenge these limitations imposed, he also warned in his “He and She” lesson about those limitations and the artist. According to Parker, “Readers demand pretty people in pretty settings forming a pretty picture. The larger your audience, the more limited its taste. It prefers subject matter to design and girls to men. It wants no message, other than girls are cute and men like cute girls.” He concluded, as much as justification for his own aesthetic as advising new illustrators about what lay ahead, “So long as your work has solid drawing, color and design and whatever you can get of elegance, dignity and depth, you’ll never be ashamed of your job. The long eyelashes are secondary.”

To call the times just the Cooper Era would only be partially true because it ignores the very large influence of Parker. The New York based studio was the most well known in the country, had one of the most popular stylists of feminine beauty, Whitcomb, as its founder and besides Whitmore had other well known names such as James Bama, Ward Brackett, Joe Bowler, Bernard D'Andrea, Freeman Elliot, Lorraine Fox, Joe De Mers, Al Moore, Robert Jones, Robert McCall, Casey Jones and Alex Ross on its roster at one time or another. In its heyday in the late 40s and throughout the 50s, over 60 busy artists worked there and entire magazines would eventually be done in the Cooper style by Cooper artists or by artists doing their best to imitate the Cooper pictures.

And some recognition should also be paid to the art directors of the time who sought such images in their magazines, like Otto Storch at McCall's, Frank Eltonhead Cosmopolitan, Bill Fink of Ladies Home Journal, and Budd Hemmick and later Suren Ermoyan for Good Housekeeping.

But it's also true most of design innovations were devised by Parker, and often in the few illustration histories we have the period bears his name and stamp. Parker, who had such early and astounding success that he never belonged to an established large studio and was able to limit the number of assignments he took on, came to New York in 1935 at the request of eager editors who wanted him close by and completely engaged for them. He first began working from photographs in 1939 on the suggestion of a fellow artist and said he was "suspicious, because I felt this was a crutch and I frowned upon any false approaches. However, I experimented . . .," and for the next three decades-- with a schedule for the year in place by the previous October--he never looked back nor deliberately made the same picture twice. As many have noted, most of the illustration community remained in Parker's wake his entire professional career, always one idea behind.

A Clean Perfection One editor marveled that "perhaps once in a art director's lifetime. . ." would an illustrator like Parker come around, with "a talent and viewpoint so individual, so strong and so right" for the times that he had an impact on everybody. Bob Peak said, "Seems like every time I saw something fresh and imaginative," it was signed by Parker. The man himself as pictured in a 1946 American Artist step by step profile that already proclaimed the industry followed the man from St Louis. A tireless, self-critical artist, Parker reveled in the raw creation of the picture and left no stone unturned in the composition phase, typically spending 8 days out of 10 on concept work, always interested in bold, persistent experimentation. He often would spend two weeks on roughs, going through his extensive clip files (reputedly the largest in the country) for visual "stoppers", making "hidden drawings" of "pleasing" shapes and analyzing reader eye movement across the page, exploring color studies in different media, investigating patterns and textures, rereading or marking up the author's text for the moment or mood to illustrate. Only when he had solved all the creative problems (compare his last rough with the finished illustration) to his satisfaction, then he would take copious photographs of models at different exposures and that could entail major new decisions as well. Parker preferred working at reproduction size and mostly drew freehand from the selected photograph but occasionally, if somehow he thought it would add something interesting, he would render from life (as in the first example) or put the reference away after several studies and draw from memory. He used the two samples above, the reference and the finished illustration called "A Thing of Beauty," to show how free he could be from the photo, making the face rounder to fit the story, altering the nose, hair and hands, removing a elaborate black veil, and adding the white sequined gloves. He believed in the power of suggestion and just the right touch of realism. For the girl clutching the bed sheet illustration, he distained to outline any part of the girl's body under the sheet, saying good taste and "imagination gives her the most beautiful body there is!" so why show more? For the "clinch," the bread and butter for the magazines he worked for and a "stopper," Parker followed intuition. For the kissing couple above he explained, "If a kiss looks real, I use it." The last double page spread--from 1948 no less!--a line drawing on sanded smooth gesso accented with daubs of white, shows what my friend Leif Peng asked rhetorically in an email, "who but . . . Parker had the creativity, the audacity" to imagine such an image? The quote from the story that curves above the dancer's arms and veil reads ". . .her simple movements had a clean perfection that was like light." For more Cool School examples.

City Girls, Who Lived Up the Stair Judith Lynne "Honey" Dorian (her rarely used given names taken from two Raymond daughters, her nickname from the third and youngest daughter) was quite a change from Dale Arden, embodying all the social changes women underwent after WWII, and with an independence eventually both Hefner's Playboy and even Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan in their own way would champion. Introduced on the fifth day of the strip, the same day as Rip's swanky apartment and shaky golf game, she is already established as having a teasing, unrequited relationship with the brainy yet brawny sleuth and eagerly jumps into the ongoing case at her first opportunity, the opening narrative making her the model she becomes for the rest of Raymond’s time on the title. The daily above, probably the most reproduced single strip of Raymond's entire run, Honey’s near miss with a bottle of acid, appeared just 3 weeks after the strip's start in March 1946 (note the sequence number instead of date) and is not representative of the strip as whole. Raymond’s early efforts are marked by medium shots and four panels, with Honey and the other females full-figure or nearly so. As the strip goes on, the POV comes in closer and closer, so within a few months, it is uncommon to get a panel of Honey from head to toe. Instead, she is shown with her face dominating the panel or a little more than waist up, with a 3 panel arrangement. (These early full figure strips are also remarkable for the amount of skin exposed. There's an obvious resemblance in the 6-20 daily with the La Gatta inflected strips from the previous page.) By fall, Honey is Rip’s steady girl, although her position and rivalry with other women, namely the alluring dark-haired Pagan Lee, always troubles her. In the strip Oct 31, 1959, while riding in Central Park, Honey warns Rip not to pursue the Mangler out west, Rip leaves, and Honey isn’t seen again until 1975. Thereafter, she remained a occasional character until the end of the strip in June of 1999 and appears in the very last panel with Rip and Desmond.

Not much has been written about Raymond and Rip Kirby, his tenure on the strip running from March 6, 1946 to September 29, 1956, and the commentary is pretty much alike. All recount how Raymond began the daily after leaving the service because the syndicate was satisfied with his less expensive replacement on Flash, Austin Briggs, and as a Marine Corps volunteer in 1944, Raymond was not guaranteed his old position when he mustered out.

Stephen Becker in his late 50s survey of the field called Comic Art in America said Raymond’s last effort was at that time “something modern and almost too intellectual.” Jerry Robinson, an early major Batman creative force, a longtime cartoonist at the time for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate and later President of National Cartoonist Society, proclaimed Rip was “a new kind of detective hero: not the typical hard-hitting private eye but a sophisticated intellectual, who even wears glasses!”

Honey begins in the strip as a frisky bobbysoxer, just out of college (in the second story of the strip in 1946, her sorority sisters treat her as if she had left the previous semester) and her fascination with Rip has the lightness of a schoolgirl crush. She often seems even younger still, eighteen or so, childish and petulant when things don't go her way. But, within a very short time, she becomes a worldly woman of New York and Rip’s frequent dinner and dancing companion, so she is rendered taller, sleeker, with bold print dresses and gowns, and her face becomes greyhound thin, especially noticeable in three quarters view. Her dresses were an opportunity for Raymond to showcase fearless, dazzling brushwork and pen lines that seemed both careless and brilliant. The original art panel from Raymond's last Honey sequence above comes from the collection of David Apatoff and the daily from Jack Gilbert. Below, from Jerry Robinson’s 1974 survey of Comic Art. The story was reprinted in Dragon Lady #12 in 1987.

Well-known critic and comics historian Robert C. Harvey, while admitting it was “another masterpiece of illustration,” says in 1994’s The Art of the Funnies urbane Rip was not “innovative” in its use of the comic medium and thus gives equal credit to staff writer Fred Dickenson, who along with King Features editor Ward Greene and Raymond, sculpted the plots in story conferences. And Ron Goulart in The Funnies observes Raymond’s work had “matured and moved much closer to realism. There was a sophistication to his work, and he was much more at home now in contemporary locations than he had ever been on Mongo.” But for all the maturity he sees, Goulart also can’t resist retelling what Greene said to another staffer about Raymond after a story meeting, “That so-and-so really thinks he writes this damn thing.”

Although the noir style in films and Rip Kirby grew up together, Rip is not a noir as it is often labeled. He did walk down some dark and mean streets, with murder, kidnapping, fraud, messy affairs, theft, and blackmail the usual crimes, but Rip’s glamorous escapism has more in common with the coming Secret Agent--James Bond genre, a genre Rip would greatly influence visually when the strip is exported to England. (See the discussion in Jim Holdaway and Modesty Blaise.) Rip is more easily defined by what he is not, a sure sign that the character was something different. He was not a tarnished knight like Chandler's Philip Marlowe or a foppish gentleman detective in the manner of Hammet's Nick Charles. He has far more personality and history than mysterious, dour Dexter, the all-action, all-the-time Secret Agent X-9, Raymond's first crime fighter. Rip was never a victim of fate nor is the mood of these strips bleak. In fact, even though there are some gruesome deaths in the first 18 months of the strip, Rip's foes usually pale in evil competence and danger with, say, Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon of similar vintage. Above, Ward Greene, Sylvan Byck, and Raymond create a Rip Kirby script during their regular 10AM Tuesday meeting, from a King Features promotion "The Story of a Story Strip." Note Raymond's ever present cigarette. The bottom daily comes from Raymond's second year on the title, with an unmistakable use of reference in the middle panel's tight close up, a minor character's lone appearance.

The longest and most positive previous look regarding Rip Kirby is Richard Marschall’s chapter on Raymond in America’s Great Comic Strip 6-1-56

Artists from 1989. Marschall as well calls Rip Raymond’s most “mature” work, and sees variety in point of view, innovation in panel composition, and consistency of style that Harvey doesn't.

According to Marschall, Raymond atones for his sins in Flash with Rip Kirby because Raymond aligns himself with comics rather than illustration. In Rip, Raymond used accepted comic strip technique, principally the use of speech balloons rather than the picture and running text operating separately, sometimes, as gleefully is pointed out in Flash, at cross purposes with each other, to move through the story. Then too, Raymond’s few known words on his art seem to repeat this realization:

“I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more 7-25-56

accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration—since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business—he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once.”

So, the consensus runs, Raymond created his first real comic because he abandoned the influence of illustrators, dropping the well known Clark, Booth, and La Gatta flourishes so easily seen in his earlier strips and instead looked to “fellow cartoonists.”

Soap Opera staging in comic strips did not originate with Raymond, Mary Worth begins in 1934 after all and was always the most widely distributed, but he set many of the conventions that would propel all realistic, contemporary dress genres through the 70s. The older soaps relied on a simpler outline style of rendering (which they still use) while Rip brought the detailed, close focus, densely inked “Big Head” approach. Honey was the perfect foil. Here she struggles with a persistent suitor while her affection really belongs to Kirby. ( Raymond's studio assistant Ray Burns was the male model on this 1949 sequence, explained more fully on the next page.) These strips have been reprinted in various forms and formats, see Sources, but rarely show the strips in their full crisp glory, as the panel below does from Jack's collection.

Despite the quote which comes from a 1949 King Features promotion booklet, “Famous Artists and Writers,” sent to prospective and current Syndicate buyers and has been mentioned in almost every piece about Raymond written ever since, including his obituary in the New York Times, the sentiment was probably no more than conventional publicity assuring clients that Raymond had no intention of walking away from his strip (or why he wasn't doing Flash) than a real explanation of his art. (And the full book is rife with known factual errors concerning other syndicate artists like Mac Raboy, E. Simms Campbell, and Walt Disney (?), and, in Raymond’s case, directly contradicted by another press released the year before.) Why would he say a comic artist is the sole "playwright" when he never wrote a strip by himself? Why would he dismiss "camera and models" when that's what he used (at least at times)? Why would he dismiss illustrators, his closest friends, and whose creative profession he had once flirted with joining fulltime and continued to freelance after the quote appeared?

In Rip Kirby, Raymond just changed the styles he was internalizing, as he had done throughout his career, and there was no single artist to point to as the direct antecedent. It was the spirit of contemporary illustration, the connection to modern life that Raymond sought to have his strip portray. Rip Kirby is Raymond’s nod to contemporary illustrators, men who were his neighbors, his peers, and by general consent in and out of the profession were making the most interesting and popular pictures around.

Read for yourself the profile of Raymond from King Features "Famous Artists and Writers," 1949. Each cartoonists' bio was accompanied by a representative illustration. Raymond usually chose these occasions, really halfway between publicity material for the strips and a behind-the-scenes peek, to provide eye-popping renditions of his female cast. Honey Dorian adorned the 1946 and '48 bios (see next page) and '49 features the sultry Pagan. One of the few real people to be mentioned by name in the strip was Raymond's friend and Cooper Studio artist Alex Ross. Tom Roberts, Raymond's biographer, told me Raymond envied Ross and his glamorous lifestyle, Ross being a nationally known illustrator who earned his considerable living concentrating on two staples of American magazines, glamour illustration and angelic children for Good Housekeeping and other magazines. Many believe the daily 1/9/47 contains a Raymond self portrait in profile. I submit 6/25/53 where Honey has a one panel conversation with a pin up artist named "Ray." Although Raymond's studio assistant was so named, Ray Burns was a strapping young man just returned from service in Korea, so a self-deprecating caricature of the 43 year old Raymond (who did have a receding hairline ) wouldn't be so farfetched (If Ray was shown unshaven and smoking, I would say the ID was 100%.) That kind of sly humor is evident in Raymond's last full story in 1956. The use of Raymond's middle name (Gillispie) and his un-credited writer (Fred Dickenson) for a critical location in the story meant half a dozen opportunities for Desmond and Rip to pore over maps and stand at the named intersection with street signs prominent in the background, musing on the hidden significance of the pairing. Raymond's famous gull wing Mercedes 350 SL Coupe was rendered in detail throughout this last stage, as shown here 7-7-56, the car accident that took his life only two months away.