Smilin' Zack Mosley's
Wilder Blue Yonder Captain
Joseph Patterson, publisher of the nation's first big tabloid newspaper,
the New York Daily News, had an instinct about
what newspaper readers doted on, and that celebrated insight guided
him in midwifing numerous highly successful comic strips. Beginning
with The Gumps, Paterson nurtured into fame
such stellar attractions as Gasoline
Alley, Little Orphan Annie, Moon Mullins, Smitty, Winnie Winkle, Dick
Tracy, and Terry and the Pirates.
Successful as he was at the game, the Captain occasi Patterson had been trying to learn
how to pilot an airplane. It was his way of combating his fear of flying.
It wasn't easy: he was past fifty, and he seemed to lack coordination
and the ability to judge distances. His first attempt at a solo (without
his instructor's permission) finished in a ground loop. He eventually
got his pilot's license, promptly wrecked his five-ton Sikorsky amphibian,
and swore off piloting himself. But in 1933, he was still struggling
to master the skills. At the time, Zack Mosley was working
at the John Dille Syndicate in Chicago, assisting Dick Calkins on the
first science-fiction comic strip, Buck
Rogers, and an aviation strip, Skyroads.
But Mosley was eager for better things, and he spent a good deal of
time hanging around the Chicago
Tribune offices with fellow Oklahoman Chester Gould, then in the
early years of Dick Tracy, and one of the Tribune's editorial cartoonists, Carey
Orr, from whom Mosley had taken art instruction. One day early in the
year, Gould told Mosley about Patterson's flying adventures. "He's cracked up a couple of planes,"
Gould explained, "and I think he's a bit afraid, but he's determined
to become a licensed pilot. Zack, you should take flying lessons and
do a strip about scared pilots. The Captain might just like it." That, it turned out, was just the right
thing to say to the up-by-his-own-bootstraps youth. Zack Terrell Mosley
was born December 12, 1906, in Hickory, Indian Territory the year before
it became the state of Oklahoma. His father, Zack Taylor Mosley, was
a rancher and one of the sons in Mosley and Sons General Merchandise
Store; his mother was Irah Corinna Aycock. The family moved to Shawnee
in 1922, and while in high school, Zack worked as a cotton picker, soda
jerk, cowboy, and lumberyard roustabout. After graduating, he clerked
in an Oklahoma City drugstore for a year to earn enough money to go
north and enroll in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in the fall of
1926. He took courses in the Chicago Art Institute 1927-1928 and private
lessons from Orr, earning his living as a cashier in a restaurant. In
early 1929, Zack and one of his roommates, Russell Keaton, were hired
to help Calkins. After three years of dating (and often becoming "somewhat"
engaged to) several beautiful girls (strategically located in widely
separated parts of the city "so there was," as Mosley explained,
"no danger of them meeting
one another"), Mosley married one of them, Marie Gale, a nurse,
in 1932. Gould's advice struck a chord—Mosley's
lifelong awe of airplanes. By the time he was eleven, young Zack had
seen two airplanes in action—both crash landed, but he had been bitten
by the aviation bug and started drawing airplanes and dreaming of flying
them. "My main career was planned," Mosley wrote in his autobiography,
Brave Coward Zack: "Someday, I would
fly aeroplanes and draw 'funny papers' about them." Now, in the
spring in 1933, Mosley saw his future looming suddenly larger, nearer,
than ever. He signed up for flying lessons, but he froze at the controls
his first time aloft, so alarming his instructor that he was forthwith
grounded. But he still wanted to draw a comic strip about flying, and
by that summer, he'd translated his meager flying experiences into a
strip about "scared pilots" that he called On
the Wing. He resolved to take it to New York and show it himself
to Patterson. When he arrived at the Daily
News building, he found that getting in to see the Captain wasn't
all that easy. While waiting for an appointment, he wandered in to Walter
Berndt's office, and after canoodling a little about Berndt's strip,
Smitty, Mosley heard some
startling news: Patterson was about to double the Sunday comic section
to sixteen pages. Before Mosley had time to rejoice at the timing of
his errand, Berndt went on to explain that the new strips would be selected
from 400 candidates already on exhibition awaiting the Captain's decision.
Mosley decided to enhance the odds in this 400-1 shot: he would go ahead
and see Patterson in order to show his strip personally. The Captain was not impressed. "You're
a lousy artist," he said when he saw Mosley's samples. "But
you seem to know a lot about aviation. How much pilot time have you
had?" Mosley
confessed he'd had only one lesson but rattled on about being fascinated
by aviation ever since he'd seen a plane crash when he was a kid. He
wanted to learn to fly, he said, but was scared of the prospect. Then
he mentioned that Gould had encouraged him to bring his strips to Patterson
personally. Patterson decided to give this brash
youth a chance. Pointing out that his aesthetic judgment of Mosley's
work stemmed in part from the fact that his samples were not completely
inked and finished, the Captain told Mosley to condense his daily strips
into a Sunday page and bring it in by nine o'clock the next morning
when Patterson would begin picking strips for the expanded comics section. Mosley panicked: he didn't have a pen,
ink, or drawingboard in New York. But he knew someone who did. He called
an old Chicago roommate, Frank Engli, and the two of them worked through
the night, cutting, pasting, and inking panels. The next day, Mosley
turned in his samples and then went to wait out the decision in Berndt's
office. Unbeknownst to him, Mosley had a powerful ally. Berndt, the
Captain's unofficial talent scout and one of those who would help Patterson
select the new strips, liked Mosley's samples. Although another contestant
drew airplanes better, Berndt thought Mosley had livelier ideas. Patterson
liked the beautiful airplanes, but Berndt wanted Mosley to get the nod,
so he rigged the selection by conspiring with editorial cartoonist C.D.
Batchelor. Accordingly, he called Batchelor in as an independent third
party arbitrator, and Batchelor, as instructed, picked the strip Berndt
held in his right hand. It was On the Wing, and Mosley was suddenly a bigtime cartoonist doing a
Sunday strip for the Tribune-News Syndicate. On
the Wing debuted with the other new strips on October 1, 1933. Five
weeks after the strip started, Mosley got a telegram in Chicago from
Patterson: "Change the name of On
the Wing to Smilin' Jack,"
it said. Mosley wired back: "The name of the main character is
Mack not Jack." But Patterson was not deterred by details: "Change
name to Smilin' Jack," he responded. "Naturally
I did," Mosley recalled, "but I wondered what the readers
would think when they saw that 'Mack' was suddenly 'Jack."' Readers
apparently thought nothing of it: not one complained when the new name
appeared on December 31. (Mosley never found out why Patterson changed
the name. Maybe the Captain was inspired by Mosley's own beaming countenance,
the autobiographical nature of the strip, and the profusion of sound-alike
names—Zack, Mack, and Jack.) Those who remember Smilin' Jack doubtless recall a strip with
lots of pictures of airplanes and a string of bizarre adventures. It's
true that Smilin' Jack always
had airplanes in it: Mosley was so fond of drawing them that he decorated
his panels with airplanes, putting in pictures of them even when the
story didn't require it. But it didn't begin as an adventure strip—a
fact of which Mosley had to be rudely reminded almost immediately. Shortly
after the strip began, Mosley insinuated some hair-brained adventuring
into it. Patterson's assistant, Mollie Slott, wired the Captain's displeasure,
saying the strip would probably be dropped soon. Mosley dashed to New
York, borrowing money for the trip from Carey Orr. Patterson relieved
him of any confusion he may have had about why the strip had been selected. "You started off about true-to-life
scared pilots," he explained. "But you are about to become
imaginative. Stick to real flying. No shooting tigers from a cockpit.
Keep up your flying lessons—and, so I can keep an eye on you, move to
New York immediately." Properly chastised, Mosley dutifully
packed himself and his wife off to the Big Apple and installed his drawing
board in Berndt's office in the News
building. And Smilin' Jack
continued for the next two-and-a-half years as a Sunday-only feature
about the high-spirited training field antics of a bunch of young pilots.
It was a humorous strip, the weekly gags occasionally strung together
on a slender plotline. Then in the spring of 1936, Mosley sent Smilin'
Jack into the South Seas in search of a famous missing aviator, Major
McCloud—a continuity that ran for several months. The strips still had
punchline endings rather than cliffhangers, but Mosley's execution of
the story apparently led Patterson to rescind his dictum against adventuring.
The Captain may have recognized in Mosley's unquenchable enthusiasm
for excitement that the cartoonist was uniquely equipped to do a slam-bang
adventure strip. (Besides, Patterson had earned his own pilot's license
by this time, and, having sworn off flying himself, he may have lost
interest in the strip's original focus.) Smilin'
Jack was converted to a seven-day strip, the daily beginning June
15, 1936, and Mosley's aviator was thrust into one harrowing scrape
after another for the next thirty-seven years. None of the other strips
introduced in Patterson's expanded comic section in 1933 lasted as long
as Smilin' Jack or attracted as faithful a following. Mosley proved himself adept at telling
an adventure story—in his own haphazard, eccentric, almost zany, fashion.
He subjected his hero (whose last name, for trivia collectors, is Martin)
to more hair-raising cliffhangers per week than any other strip around.
His off-handed plots were held together by a rapid-fire series of increasingly
desperate situations from which Smilin' Jack extricated himself by a
succession of maneuvers whose ascending ingenuity of contrivance gave
every story the breathless spontaneity of catch-as-catch-can invention.
Once into this thrill-packed maelstrom, we lose all sense of a plot
in the headlong progression of stratagems by which Mosley advanced his
stories day by day. Despite the artifice of these inventions, Mosley's
plots seldom clanked: they were so flaccid as to lack working parts.
But we never noticed because we were having such a marvelous time.
Smilin' Jack was the
only aviation strip in which the techniques and skills of flying functioned
actively in the stories. Mosley eventually became a licensed pilot,
and he used his flying experiences to create both technical dilemmas
and their solutions for his hero, scattering them liberally along every
storyline with a propwash of aviator's jargon. Once one of the more
unsavory of the strip's villains is decapitated before our eyes when
he gets too close to the propeller of Jack's low-flying plane. Ever
authentic and always ready to throw a complication into the story, Mosley
quickly passed from this grisly scene to the cockpit of the plane, where
Jack notices immediately that the impact on the prop has made it vibrate.
"It's ripping the motor loose," he exclaims and quickly adjusts
to meet the crisis: "I'll feather the prop so the blades won't
turn," he says, and a footnote explains that feathering turns the
prop control so the blades knife the air. By letting his zest for his
hobby spill so constantly into his work, Mosley cast a mantle of authenticity
over the strip thereby rescuing it from the realm of the fantastic to
which its often preposterous incidents would otherwise have resigned
it. Soon after the adventures started,
Smilin' Jack was battling a succession of Gouldish grotesques who equaled
in criminal caricature and unrelenting villainy the hoodlums in Dick Tracy: Mosley's monsters were champion
fiends, committing atrocity after atrocity for the sheer sadistic pleasure
of it. One of the more note-worthy evil-doers was the Great Toemain,
who was fond of feeding those who offended him to a pool of piranha
fish ("my man-eating minnows," he called them affectionately).
But there is justice in Smilin'
Jack: in fleeing the forces of law and order, Toemain stumbles into
the pool himself and suffers the natural consequences. A steady diet of this kind of grim
stuff could be depressing, but Mosley's imagination was too boisterously
exuberant to sustain a long run of unrelieved fiendishness. The strip
had been thoroughly infused with the horse-play sense of humor of its
training field days, and Mosley never resisted a frequently recurring
impulse to pull a prank for laughs, even in the midst of the most dire
circumstances. And many of Jack's adventures were far less bloodcurdling
(although just as harrowing). Mosley ornamented his strip profusely
with fuselages other than the purely aerodynamic: the runway was an
endless attraction for shamelessly zaftig pretty girls (which Mosley
christened "li'1 de-icers," maintaining the strip's aeronautical
ambiance in all things), and Jack was forever becoming entangled in
their coils. He seemed always to be either falling in love or grieving
over the (often falsely) reported death of one of numerous fiancees.
He even got married. Twice: first to Joy Beaverduck, who died. Then
to Sable Lottalotta. Mosley's skill at limning the curvaceous gender
had both benefits and hazards. He was frequently asked to judge bathing
beauty contests, which he dutifully did, saying he was doing "research"
for the strip. But sometimes the embonpoint of his de-icers strained
readers' sense of decorum, and they protested, writing letters that
eventually found their way to the syndicate office, which forwarded
them forthwith to the cartoonist. The girls' appearance was pretty tame
by the standards that emerged only a few years later, but in the 1940s,
the stream of protest correspondence was fairly steady. Whatever letters
from the syndicate arrived on Friday, Mosley put aside and didn't open
until Monday. This delaying tactic postponed for two days the emotional
turmoil of confronting nit-picking editors and carping would-be censors,
thereby preserving a carefree weekend. One of the most picturesque of Smilin'
Jacks adventures began in the summer of 1938 and continued for eight
months, introducing two of Mosley's unforgettable characters and giving
his hero a new appearance. Jack is recruited to infiltrate a spy ring
by assuming the identity of one of the ring's members, a man named Powder,
whom he resembles. To complete the masquerade, he dies his hair blonde
and grows a moustache; his hair eventually returns to its normal black,
but the moustache hangs on for the rest of the strip's run. The story
is one of Mosley's spiraling spectaculars. As soon as Jack arrives among
the spies, he meets Powder's wife and his infant son, about which his
briefing had been seriously deficient. His imposture is discovered and
he is imprisoned aboard the spy's ship. He escapes by hijacking a seaplane,
but when it runs out of fuel, Jack is stranded in the trackless ocean
vastness, doomed. A bunch of sharks swim up and Jack thinks he's their
dinner, but they turn out to be porpoise. Jack's heard that porpoise
will push a man to shore, "—maybe if I lie still ... ," he
thinks. And, sure enough, the big fishes push him onto the beach of
the nearest South Sea island. Jack's triumphant survival is cut short
by the native population which thinks he's Powder; they demand that
he marry the chief's daughter, as Powder had promised. Jack flees, swimming
out to a ship just off-shore. It's a prison ship, and he is again taken
for Powder, who, it turns out, escaped the prison, Death Rock, "the
Devil's Island of the South Seas." Jack is returned to the prison,
but he escapes three times—twice on foot through the jungle. In the
jungle, he's re-captured both times but tries yet again, ingeniously
constructing a glider by night and, eventually, flying off the Rock
with it. Before this success, he must endure the sadistic attentions
of the chief prison guard and the threats to life and limb of fellow
inmates, who, thinking he's Powder, want revenge for his treatment of
them during his first sojourn on the Rock. He also encounters the spy
ring leader again, a man with Peter Lorre eyeballs called the Head:
the Head and his lumbering henchman, a half-naked hulk with a murderous
claw for a hand, have been captured by the authorities and sent to the
Rock. Jack engages in a life-or-death fight with the Claw and wins.
When he finally glides to freedom, he lands in the ocean and is picked
up by a seaplane, whose skipper, a dutiful sort, says he must return
the escaped convict to the Rock. At that crucial moment, Jack is recognized
by another of the plane's officers, a man he'd flown with before named
Downwind Jaxon. (Mosley appropriated the name from his flying instructor,
Wally Jackson, who once defied his own dictum never to try to land downwind.)
Conveniently, Downwind vouches for Jack, who finally makes it back home.
The invention of Downwind Jaxon typifies,
perhaps, the creative eccentricity that guided Mosley's machinations
in the strip. When Mosley was winding up this sequence, he was rushing
to finish the last weekly batch
of strips so he could take a vacation in Cuba. He needed a handsome
skirt-chasing character, but since handsome men were difficult for him
to draw distinctively, he couldn't come up with a good face quickly.
Mosley decided to postpone the moment of creation until he returned
from Cuba, but he had to introduce the character before he left. He
faked it. When we first see Downwind, we see him almost from behind:
only the side of his forehead and rounded cheek and chin are visible
in a sort of profile. When Mosley returned two weeks later,
he still couldn't come up with a face for Downwind, so he continued
to draw him in profile as seen from behind one shoulder. Pretty soon,
the mysterious Downwind began to draw mail. Patterson complimented Mosley
on his perspicacity and suggested waiting about two months before showing
Downwind's face. "Well, if it's getting such a good response,"
Mosley said, "how about never showing his face?" The Captain
thought for a moment and then concurred. And so Downwind was condemned
to a faceless existence. Patterson's instinct converted Mosley's fumbling
and groping into a firm grip on his readers, and letters asking for
a glimpse of Downwind's permanently averted visage came in a steady
stream for the next three decades. Another of Mosley's inspired inventions
was one of those South Sea islanders Jack meets, a paunchy native whom
Jack casually names Fat Stuff and brings him back to the U.S. with him
in gratitude for having saved his life. Worthy of his nickname, Fat
Stuff was all belly—so much so, that his shirt, strained by the bulk,
was always popping its buttons. This aspect of the character Mosley
had borrowed from his experiences as a youth in Hickory. His family's
general store was a social center, and local characters convened there
to sit on benches in front, chewing tobacco, spitting, whittling, and
telling tall tales. "There was one really fat Indian," Mosley
recalled, "called Richmond Billy, who had two large families. He
would live with one family on Big Blue Creek for six months, and then
live six months with his other family on Polecat Creek. When Billy was
'in town,' he never said much—just stood around listening to the tall
tales, and occasionally his big, fat belly would pop a button off his
shirt." When it was subsequently decided that
Fat Stuff would have a pet, Mosley resurrected another youthful experience
that involved a cold front that arrived in Hickory so quickly that it
threatened the chicks in his mother's hen house. Mosley and his brothers
dashed out in the freezing temperatures to gather up the chicks and
brought them indoors, where his mother had devised a unique way of saving
them. She'd fired up the wood stove in the kitchen, Mosley recounted,
"and we would stick the chicks in a pan in the open oven for a
few seconds; the ones that chirped would be placed on a blanket in a
tub, and the ones that didn't chirp would be discarded." One of
the chicks lost his feathers during this process, and they never grew
back. "He was naked," Mosley said, "and we kept him as
a pet: he would follow us around like a little puppy. Maybe he thought
he was a dog." Mosley gave Fat Stuff a pet featherless chicken,
whose chief function in the strip—his only function—was to catch the
buttons popped off Fat Stuff's shirt. Presumably, he lived on a steady
diet of them. Unforgettable.
After the War, Mosley set up shop in Stuart, Florida, and continued
both Smilin' Jack and his
association with C.A.P., assisting in the national staff's public relations
efforts, producing promotional artwork, designing squadron insignia
on request, and making appearances around the country. He flew over
1.5 million miles in his aviation career (3,000 miles at the controls)
and was inducted into the C.A.P./U.S. Air Force Hall of Honor in 1976.
When he retired Smilin' Jack with the release for April
1, 1973, the strip was the longest-running and most authentic aviation
strip in the history of the medium. Mosley died in Stuart of a heart
attack on December 21, 1993. He'd had a great flight through life and
art. Bibliography. Mosley wrote an autobiography in 1976, Brave Coward Zack, and the standard references, The Encyclopedia of American Comics From 1897 to the Present, edited by Ron Goulart, and World Encyclopedia of Comics, edited by Maurice Horn, rely upon it. Mosley was a member of New York Society of Illustrators, Airplane Owners and Pilots Association, Sportsman Pilots Association, Banshees, Quiet Birdmen Fraternity, Pi Delta Kappa, Silver Wings Society, American Aviation Historical Society, National Cartoonists Society, and Aviation Writers Association. Throughout his career, Mosley was assisted by several cartoonists: Gordon "Boody" Rogers, Andy Sprague, Elliott Adcock, brother Bob Mosley, Alec Delich, Craig Zirkle, and Ward Albertson (who served the longest at 23 years). Smilin' Jack was reprinted in comic books during the 1940s and 1950s and collected in two saddle-stitched paperbacks Mosley published, Hot Rock Glide: August 1938-March 1939 (1979) and De-Icers Galore: April-August 1941 including some sample Sundays, 1934-40 (1980). Two other paperback collections from Classic Comic Strips, Volume 1 and 2 (n.d.), carry the continuity from the first daily strip, June 15, 1936, to March 20, 1938 (Volume 1 reprinting the first On the Wing), followed by a quarterly magazine that published about two dozen issues covering much of the period from March 20, 1939 to July 4, 1948. A movie serial, "The Adventures of Smilin' Jack," appeared in 1942 from Universal. The New York Times published Mosley's obituary on December 25, 1993. |
||||
