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Morrill
Goddard
Godfather of
the “Comics”
Morrill Goddard
is not a name we readily associate with the comics. In fact, it is a name that
crops up only occasionally in histories of American newspapers and in
biographies of some of the press barons who built their fiefdoms on the work of
journalists like Goddard. And wherever his name appears, it never gets more
than a paragraph. Sometimes, only a sentence. Goddard is nearly unknown because
the man had a passion for anonymity. All that we know about him is divulged
herewith—in connection with what we have been calling “comics” for generations.
But
the “comics” are not necessarily comical, the obvious meaning of the word to
the contrary notwithstanding. Bugs Bunny, Batman, Dagwood, Mary Worth. Whether
in pulpy pamphlets or newspapers, comics are sometimes funny and sometimes
quite serious. So why call them “comics”? The reasons for the anomaly are
evident in the history of the medium, a history over which Goddard hovers
consequentially albeit largely unacknowledged.
Newspapers
had published cartoons before 1893, but it was in the spring of that year that
the New York World started publishing cartoons in a Sunday supplement
that became embroiled in a circulation war, which, taking place in the nation’s
largest city where the media set a pace for the rest of the country, had
ramifications beyond the city limits.
Goddard,
an intense man with exacting journalistic standards, was the editor of the
Sunday World. At the time of his death in July 1937, his assistant of 26
years, Abraham Merritt, wrote a elegiac obituary in Editor & Publisher (July),
confessing that soon after he started working for Goddard, he began to think his
boss was the greatest of editors. “There might have been some hero worship in
it then,” he admitted, “but now, after a quarter of a century, I no longer
think he was the greatest editor of his day. I know he was.”
Goddard
“abhorred all sham and pretense,” Merritt wrote. “He took a grim joy in
pricking the balloon of some inflated personality. He had a passion for
accuracy ... [He was] a constant challenger of what he considered ‘mischievous
fallacies’” masquerading as truths or facts. Goddard, Merritt went on,
“combined in one extraordinary synthesis creative and executive genius of the
highest order. He had the unique power of being able to project himself into
the minds of all classes of people, discover and be interested in what
interested them and reflect that interest in the pages of his paper.”
Devoted
single-mindedly to his profession, Goddard was essentially defined by his
dedication. His was a simple, unprepossessing personality. “I know of no man,”
Merritt said, “who, occupying the position he did, being what he was, had so
little egotism, who was so devoid of what he called ‘high hat bunk.’”
In
his personal conduct, demanding though he was of subordinates and reporters,
Goddard was deliberately self-effacing and was virtually unknown by the public
at large. He never had a photograph taken. “Once,” Merritt said, “when I
inadvertently snapped him while on one of his boats, he made me destroy the
film. ‘Nobody is interested in me,’ he’d say. ‘All they’re interested in is my
product.’”
His
product for most of his long life was the newspaper Sunday supplement that he
edited at William Randolph Hearst’s American Journal. “It was,” Merritt
asserted, “the main and almost the only interest in his life.” But Goddard had
a life before Hearst. Hearst had found him at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
World, where, on May 21, 1893, Goddard had produced the first Sunday comics
supplement in color.
The
idea of a color Sunday “magazine” had been under discussion at the World since
1891, according to Roy L. McCardell, who wrote about it in Everybody’s
Magazine for June 1905. But it wasn’t until a couple years later that a
press was devised that could print color accurately. At first, the paper’s
editors thought the color supplement should be devoted to women’s fashions,
“but just about that time, Goddard, city editor of the World, was made
Sunday editor.” And Goddard “was emphatically against the fashion supplement.”
Goddard
“went in for the weird and wonderful in everyday life,” said McCardell, “and if
things were not so weird and wonderful enough for him, he made them so.”
In
his Life of Pulitzer, Denis Brian retails several stories about
Goddard’s inventive circulation-building enterprise: “Dartmouth graduate
Goddard ... persuaded a leading Episcopal clergyman to live in a Hell’s Kitchen
tenement for six weeks and report his impressions, which started with a
sizzling: ‘I would rather live in hell than Hell’s Kitchen.’ ... Considered the
leading practitioner of the ‘crime, underwear and pseudo-science school of journalism,
Goddard illustrated a science feature on anatomy with the shapely legs of
actresses and showgirls.’” On another occasion, Goddard concocted “a hilarious
account of a raunchy stag party thrown by architect Stanford White, in which,
for dessert, a naked model ‘covered only by the ceiling,’ as the World put
it, stepped from a papier-mache pie. ... Goddard had spread an eye-catching
sketch of the shapely dessert across two pages.”
And
it was Goddard’s “professional opinion,” McCardell avowed, “that American
humor, not fashion, ought to have a colored pictorial outlet.”
Goddard’s
plan for the World’s color Sunday supplement was to make it in the image
of the weekly humor magazines of cartoons and humorous verse then enjoying
enthusiastic readership in New York and around the country. At first, Goddard
was forced to reprint cartoons from the humor magazines because many of the
most desirable cartoonists were under contract with them and obliged to give
them first refusal rights.
At
the time, McCardell was on the staff of one of them, Puck, and Goddard,
in quest of work that would be original with the World, approached him,
asking if he knew any artists who could do comic work who were not contracted
to any of the weeklies. McCardell directed Goddard to Richard F. Outcault, a
draftsman on the staff of the Electrical World and the Street Railway
Journal, who had been dabbling in comic pictures, too. Outcault would do
his first original work for the World with a comic strip published
September 16, 1894. He would eventually produce a half-page comical drawing
called “Hogan’s Alley” in which a bald-headed kid in a yellow nightshirt stood
out among the other street urchins and, as “the Yellow Kid,” would demonstrate
and establish the commercial value of comics to newspapers by boosting
circulation, thus assuring the subsequent maturation of the comic strip form.
Meanwhile, Outcault continued doing cartoons for Truth, one of several
humorous weeklies in the mold of Puck, Judge and Life, the three
most popular of the genre.
Offering
comical drawings and amusing short essays and droll verse, these magazines were
dubbed “comic weeklies” in common parlance—or, even, “comics.”
So when the World launched
its imitation “comic weekly” as a supplement to its Sunday edition, it was
lumped together in the popular mind as another of the “comics.” In short,
“comics” denoted the vehicle not the artform.
And
then, once the World had shown the way, papers in other cities began
publishing humorous Sunday supplements full of funny drawings in color and
risible essays and verse. In a relatively short time, obeying the dictates of
demand, newspapers eliminated the essays and verse and concentrated on comical
artwork, which was increasingly presented in the form of “strips” of pictures
portraying hilarities in narrative sequence. It was but a short step to the use
of comicsto designate the artform (cartoons and comic strips) as
distinct from the vehicle in which they appeared (the Sunday supplement
itself). Once that bridge was crossed, meaning deteriorated pretty rapidly.
Storytelling
(or “continuity”) strips arrived in the 1920s, and even when, in the 1930s, the
stories they told were serious, they were called “comics” because they looked
like the artform called comics and they appeared in
newspapers with all the others of that ilk. Finally, when comic strips began to
be reprinted in magazine form in the 1930s, the now-generic term was applied to
those magazines, too; in the new format, comic books quickly
emerged from comics (although the latter persisted as an
alternative name for the former).
Disputation
about where the first newspaper comics appeared and who drew the first ones has
fomented for years. Was it the New York World or, as it has lately be
asserted, the Inter Ocean in Chicago that published the first Sunday
color comics? Was Outcault the first with a regularly appearing comics feature?
Or was it Charles Saalburg with The Ting Lings in the Inter
Ocean? Wherever and whoever will eventually emerge undisputed with the
titles, the World seems both judicious and accurate in its editorial
published in 1928 when Outcault died:
“To
say that the late R.F. Outcault was the inventor of the comic supplement [a generous
but erroneous attribution of early comics history] is of course to ignore the
social factors that lead up to all inventions. ... But it is due Morrill
Goddard ... to say that he saw in the early nineties that the time was ripe for
‘comic art,’ and it is due Mr. Outcault to say that his talent made the most of
the opening” (quoted in A History of American Graphic Humor, Vol. 1:
1865-1938 [136] by William Murrell).
Whether
the evolution of the term followed the lines I’ve sketched precisely or only
generally (the Oxford English Dictionary is not explicit in its
etymology), it is certain that a confusing coinage was in wide circulation.
And it is also certain that we call the artform “comics” rather than the less
confusing “cartoon strips” or (for comic books) “paginated cartoon strips”
because of Goddard’s inspired deployment of the World’s Sunday
supplement as an imitation of weekly humor magazines.
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