| Making the World Safe for Insanity
The cartoonist who
signs his work "Vip"—which is not his name; nor are they his
initials, as we might suppose—got into the funny pictures racket because
he wanted to make a living sitting down. Or so it is alleged. Nearly
six feet tall and weighing about 200 pounds, he could take a lot of
sitting down. He eventually made a living at it—a very good living from
time to time—but it was not without a high cost to his psyche. Almost
as soon as he started making the living he was hoping for, he started
worrying, too. Vip (the orthography I prefer) was a champion worrier.
His sense of foreboding was doubtless fostered by the many rejection
slips that he endured when he was first starting out. According to his
friend, newspaperman Phil Porter, "He got used to rejections because
there used to be so many magazines, but now that several have folded,
he worries even more. He even worries that the postal employees may
go on strike while he has some cartoons in the mail, ostensibly en route
to magazines." Vip told Porter: "I can't stop worrying. I invent worries.
Even after 30 years of making a living at this business, I feel my career
is precarious. I can always find dark clouds even though the sun is
shining. But I have a plan," he continued, "to consolidate
my worries. I'm going to try to find a shrink who can talk all my worries
from my head down to my arm, then to my hand, then finally down to one
long finger nail. Then—wham! —all I have to do is clip the finger nail,
and all my worries will be gone." The logic is, like most of Vip's logic, irrefutable. Nor
are any of the facts of his earliest form of life refutable. He was
born Virgil Franklin Partch II on October 17, 1916 on St. Paul Island,
one of the Pribilof Islands (as he was fond of saying, probably because
Pribilof is a word no one has ever heard of) near Alaska, the son of
Paul Chester Partch, an electrician in the U.S. Navy, and Anna Pavaloff,
housewife, who was one of 17 children, all born in the Russian community
on Woody Island just off the coast of Kodiak. When Anna was 14, a volcano
90 miles northwest of the island erupted and deposited 18 inches of
ash all over the Woody Russians, damaging the naval radio station and
creating the cosmic breech that permitted the Pavaloffs and the Partches
to coincide. Paul Partch was born in Ning Po, China, where his parents
(his father is Vip's namesake) were Presbyterian missionaries, part
of a 19th century American evangelical enthusiasm for making
good Christians of the Chinese. The Partches returned to the U.S. shortly
after the notorious Boxer Uprising in 1900, when Paul was about ten.
As he grew up, he traveled around the West, attempting, briefly, a career
as a prizefighter before enlisting in the Navy at the age of 19 and
pursuing an interest in the new technology of radio. In 1915, he and
the crew of the USS Prometheus put in at Woody Island to repair the radio station.
Paul met Anna, they married, moved to the navy base on St. Paul Island,
and had Virgil, named for his grandfather and denominated "the
second" in blatant disregard, typical of Vip, for the conventions
of dynastic succession, which usually did not skip generations but kept
to a strict numerical order. In accordance with petty office Partch's orders, the family
moved often to a succession of naval radio stations in Kodiak, Sitka,
Dutch Harbor, and Puget Sound. Anna contracted tuberculosis which worsened
with the severity of the northern climate, and as a result, Partch was
able to secure orders to warmer naval bases in San Francisco and San
Diego. The young Vip reportedly attended a number of one-room schools,
about which he said: "I was always the new boy who was a stranger,
ripe for getting beat up. I wasn't big enough to fight, so I began to
tell jokes to make the other kids laugh so they wouldn't slug me. By
the time my father put in his twenty years in the Navy and retired,
I was the fastest kid in school with a one-liner." He also drew
pictures and played football. When Partch pere retired from the Navy in 1929, the
family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Virgil enrolled in Roskruge Junior
High School and developed, entirely by accident, his famous nom de plume. He signed his drawings with his initials, but, as he
explained, "my writing wasn't so hot and the initials looked like
V-I-P to my classmates." Shyly, Virgil declined to correct their
misapprehension and was Vip ever after. Home life was rendered somewhat picturesque by Virgil's
father, who did the cooking. A bookish man, his dietary notions were
influenced by whatever he happened to be reading at the time. According
to Newsweek: "If it was Roman history,
the family dined on tough-fibered meats, rabbits, and a concoction made
of rabbits' eyes. Vip claims that chicken feed was a regular on the
breakfast menu." The family lived in an apartment for several years,
then the elder Partch, with Virgil's help, build an adobe house in Halcyon
Road. It had two bedrooms and wood floors throughout except in the bedroom
shared by Virgil and his younger brother James ("Bud"), where
the boys trod concrete. Attending Tucson High School, Virgil drew cartoons for the
school newspaper, the Cactus Chronicle,
and played football and basketball. He entered the University of Arizona
in the fall of 1936 as an art major and worked on the campus humor magazine,
the Kitty Kat, producing one
cartoon that achieved vast circulation: depicting a sailor and an admiral
in a somewhat off-color joke, the drawing was reprinted in other magazines
and eventually turned up as a comic postcard. Upon completing his freshman
year, Partch left Arizona for Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art
Institute, which, he knew, functioned as a training school for the Disney
Studios, his ultimate destination. While matriculating, he subsisted,
according to his own report, on ten cents a day for food (beans and
bananas) and $3.34 a month for rent. After six months and a total investment
of $38.04, he took the Disney qualifying test but failed; he was subsequently
hired in December 1937 as a messenger boy. "Traffic boys were called the flat-foot flyers,"
Partch later said; "they delivered anything from coffee and doughnuts
to pianos. Film cans usually served as carrying trays." He arrived
as the considerable popularity of Disney's first feature-length cartoon,
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," was cresting. When Mickey
Mouse debuted in 1928, the Studio staff numbered about 25; by late 1937,
the number was close to 800, and employees progressed in a somewhat
orderly fashion up a talent hierarchy as their skills developed. Partch
soon graduated from running errands to in-betweening, drawing the scores
of incremental pictures that traced the movement of a figure from one
key position to the next in an animated sequence. Then he became an
assistant animator, working with one of Disney's famed "Nine Old
Men," Ollie Johnston, on "Bambi." He also worked in the
story department for a time. Even by May 1938, however, Partch felt
secure enough as a breadwinner to marry an 18-year-old art student,
Helen Marie Aldridge, whom he had met at a party a month before. She
took up sculpture, and they had three children, two boys and a girl,
despite several intervals of separation that dotted their 46-year marriage.
Like all of his animation colleagues, Partch doodled comic
drawings in his spare time, caricaturing his fellow workers, lampooning
their efforts, and commemorating comically incidents that might have
transpired in their work cubicles or on the volley-ball court during
lunch hour. Animation is essentially factory work, and Partch may not
have felt entirely comfortable in the medium. As famed animator Chuck
Jones once said: "The basic difference between animation and still
cartoons is that the animated character is not basically funny to look
at. But Vip was so good at drawing funny characters he found animation
really inhibiting." What's more, in drawing funny pictures—gag
cartoons—the cartoonist flies solo, soaring or crashing as his talent
determines. His work is all his: it isn't a part of everyone else's.
Many of Partch's "classmates" at the Disney Academy doubtless
felt the same and left animation for success and fame in magazine cartooning—Sam
Cobean, Claude Smith, Hank Syverson, and Eldon Dedini, to name a few—and
some graduated to syndicated fame in newspapers—Walt Kelly (Pogo), Hank Ketcham (Dennis
the Menace), Dan Tobin (The
Little Woman), and George Baker (Sad
Sack). But Partch's career at Disney was cut short by external factors
rather than personal volition. Union organizers had been pressuring Disney for months to
unionize his shop, and matters came to a head on May 29, 1941, when
a picket line formed in front of the gate to the new studio in Burbank.
Many of Disney's employees crossed the picket line, but Partch did not.
And he never returned to the Mouse Factory. The strike lasted nine weeks;
government negotiators arranged a settlement, and by August, everyone
was back at work. But not Partch. Partch's version of his career at
Disney is cryptic. "I was a messenger boy longer than anyone else
there ever was," he once said. "Finally they sent me upstairs
to the art department, where I worked on 'Pinocchio,' 'Bambi,' 'Fantasia'
and others. I specialized in fawns, girls and little children. Then
one day in 1941, they didn't want any more of these, and I was out."
Newsweek asserts that Partch was fired in the aftermath of the strike,
but that, like much of Vip's autobiographical insight, isn't likely:
under the terms of the union settlement, Disney was required to take
back all strikers. More likely—Partch took the opportunity the strike
afforded him to leave animation and take up magazine cartooning. He had sold a few gags to The New Yorker before that fated year. It seemed, perhaps, that the
field of magazine cartooning was beckoning him. He was drawing an unemployment
check of $18 and felt hopeful. For many previous months, Partch and
two other Disney cartoonists, Hank Ketcham and Dick Shaw, had been meeting
regularly in their off hours to brainstorm gags for magazine cartoons.
They kept on meeting through the strike and afterwards. It was deadly
stuff, said Partch: "We would arrive with blank paper and get our
coffee set up, and this was very serious business. You'd hardly find
any laughing at all during a conference in which we were doping out
what we thought was hilarious." Ketcham, describing their sessions in his autobiography,
The Merchant of Dennis, said one of the
trio would come up with a concept, and then the other two would supply
a comic twist. Partch, said Ketcham, always topped them with the best
twist, but according to Ketcham, Partch entered the magazine cartooning
field almost against his will. Partch was terribly shy and usually threw
all his "masterful thumbnail sketches" into the wastebasket
at the end of the session. "Shaw and I couldn't stand it,"
Ketcham went on, "so we recovered the bits and pieces and Shaw's
wife Katie ironed them back into shape.
Dick then sent the batch to Gurney Williams, cartoon editor at
Collier's, and the rest is
history." Williams himself once recounted the history in the introduction
to a 1954 collection of Partch cartoons, The Dead Game Sportsmen. "In every quarter of the globe, I am
referred to as the Collier's editor
who 'discovered' Partch. Faugh! The boy who first knew that Partch was
needed in the magazine and book publishing business was cartoonist Dick
Shaw, bosom Partch pal. ... Back in 1942, he (Shaw) beat Virgil over
the head at increasingly frequent intervals until our subject mailed
four drawings to my office. Not being a moronic baboon at the time,
I bought all four. The following week, I received more Partch drawings,
... and I bought them all. This proves I'm a brilliant editor. It is
to laugh, son. ... I am partial to Partch because, despite the incomparable
quality of his pleasingly grotesque work, he has never consulted a psychiatrist.
Half a dozen harried psychiatrists, however, have dropped in on Partch
and have gone away in a more cheerful frame of mind." The first
published Vip cartoon appeared in Collier's for February 14, 1942; the celebrated
Vip signature, fashioned, as Joel Goldstein put it so admirably, "through
the alchemy of mistaken identity," didn't appear in Collier's until that year's July 4 issue. Partch's success with Collier's
was followed in short order with similar reception at the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, This Week, and numerous others, including,
eventually, True, a magazine
purporting to be for men. True
was admirably suited for hosting Vip's cartoons: its editors were
nearly as lunatic as the cartoonist, as we can tell from this description
of their first encounters with Vip's reputed genius. "Back in 1945,
we were looking around for a cartoonist with a style zany enough to
illustrate the 'Truly Yours' [letter] column. None seemed at liberty;
then an associate editor suffering from jug bite suggested Partch. A
letter was dispatched, after considerable digging to learn where he
lived, detailing at pontifical length just what was wanted. Partch was
then in the Army, attached in some vague manner to the Fort Ord Panorama, and his wife acted as
go-between. There is nothing to the rumor that his sketches had to be
smuggled past censors. Private Partch (later made corporal) seemingly
ignored the pontifical letter, said, 'Will do,' and turned out just
what we were vainly trying to outline in the first place. His first
'Truly Yours' work appeared in October 1945. After that we made timid
suggestions on ideas and size—most of them blithely ignored—and finally
just bundled up some of the best letters each month and sent them out
to California and said draw something. We don't consider this temperament;
it's a man who knows his job. Once or twice Vip sent in a cartoon that
gave us a few bad moments matching it up with a letter that made sense,
but otherwise he bats out his work fast (often with alternate cartoons
just to flatter the editor), makes little or no comment, meets all deadlines
unless you ask for something yesterday, and cooperates smoothly from
across the continent unless we forget to mail his check." True's cartoon
editors—a succession including Will Lieberson, Burtt Evans, and Clyde
Carley at least—were infected with a sense of humor almost as bizarre
as Partch's, inspiring issues' full of wonderfully zany cartoons. At
True, Partch became a fixture of the magazine, embellishing the letters
column and other miscellaneous departments with antic spot drawings
(a few of which we've included in the gallery at the end of this exegesis),
and he was often the subject of articles and was invariably referred
to, with vague menace, as "the Vipper." Ralph Stein was another
True regular and was described by the editors with the same carefree
disregard for the facts. Almost at once, wherever his cartoons appeared, Partch's
manic artwork inspired alarm because of his nonchalance about ordinary
anatomy. He may have been among the first to discard such niceties almost
entirely, striving instead for approximations of the human figure that
served his comedic purposes and no other. In his early cartoons, drawn
with a supple brush stroke, bodies are drawn in simple outline, lumpish
shapes without modeling or anatomical detail, and they stand rigidly,
feet braced far apart, arms dangling meaninglessly at their sides. Heads
are all nose and chin: noses, all of the large pointed variety, start
at the top of the skull without bothering about foreheads and are punctuated
on either side by tiny pop-eyes. Mouths bristle with bared horse teeth.
As repeated executions of this desecration of the human form took place,
the rough edges wore off: noses got larger, eyeballs bulged more, and
anatomy became more angular all over—heads rectangular, jaws ponderously
lantern. And Partch's line took a sharp turn to brittle whimsicality
by means of a pen instead of a brush. "Some people dislike my distortions," he once
said. "The strange part
is, I rather prided myself in my anatomical studies while in school. Such academicians as Rico LeBrun smiled on
me and patted my hair for my ability at putting the old muscles and
bones together. But why does
a gag drawing need muscles and bones?" A frequent objection was made to his unabashed disregard of the number of fingers that are customarily issued with each human hand. With the giddy abandon of footloose youth, Vip produced hands with fistfuls of fingers—five, six, seven, however many fell, uncounted, from his pen or brush. To those who carped about his anatomical irresponsibility, Partch reposited patiently: "I draw a stock hand when it is doing something, such as pointing, but when the hand is hanging by some guy's side, those old fingers go in by the dozens. And why not? At Disney's studio, I spent four years drawing three fingers and a thumb. I'm just making up for that anatomical crime."
The extravagance of his graphic inventions inspired similar
excess among those who attempted to describe what they saw going on
in front of them. In Newsweek:
"The line drawings of Partch's angular and rectangular characters
have something in common with the tragic figures of Picasso's Spanish
War 'Guernica' ... But Partch's men, with their bushy or bald heads,
pop eyes, bird-beak noses and cavernous mouths have their own particular
brand of frenzied insanity, which makes them funny in almost any situation."
Partch's cartoons, said Goldstein, "made a style of drawing and
thinking, with roots in cubism, surrealism and dada, part of America's
daily life." And Collier's movie scribe Kyle Crichton thought
Partch's work "revealed plain signs of a pathological condition."
The anonymous author of the Partch entry in Current Biography (1946) noted that "a
Vip character sometimes wears an expression of dazed or wondering imbecility,
but more often is glaring at some person or thing with fanatic intensity.
... One Partch admirer has said, 'the cartoons are funny if you enjoy
remembering your nightmares.'" But it is not recommended, according
to another critic, that Partch's cartoons "be probed and examined
for deep hidden meanings." Partch's sense of humor was as wildly distorted as his rendition
of human anatomy. "Vip's gags," Goldstein said, "while
seeming to take place in the mundane world, subvert all the trappings
of realism and the familiar, taking us to a place where the extreme
meets the literal." That first Collier's
cartoon depicts a cluster of surgeons around a patient on the operating
table, all seriously at work; the patient's arm extends out from under
the sheet, his hand being ministered to by an attending manicurist.
In another specimen, a man walking along is soaked to the skin because
it is raining only under the umbrella he's carrying. Here's a man exercising
on a rowing machine who is startled to see shark fins protruding from
the floor all around him. Two fliers have crashed in the desert, and
one is busily pumping up an inflatable rubber camel while the other
says, "What if we had cracked up at sea?" One of my favorites:
a couple is standing before a funhouse mirror, and she is smiling at
her distorted reflection that we, too, see in the mirror; we don't see
her companion whose hand she is holding while standing next to him,
but we see his reflection, and it is of an entirely normal human male.
In another mirror gag, a man looking at his reflection sees only the
back of his head. Many of Vip's cartoons give a literal interpretation to
a common expression. A man says of his pet, who is depicted with the
head and front paws of a dog and, at the other end, the legs and buttocks
of a human baby, "He's almost human."
During World War II, two soldiers are seated at a bar, and one
turns to another man, naked, on the next barstool and says, "We've
been wondering why you're not in uniform." A man walking along
looks back over his shoulder at a woman whom he and his male friend
have just passed, saying, "Boy! If looks could kill, eh, Steve?"
Steve does not react; he sprawls dead on the sidewalk beside the speaker.
A bartender is filling a glass and the whiskey pours in a zigzag pattern;
the thirsty patron watches angrily and says, "I ordered straight
whiskey." Gags of this breed offer a vivid demonstration of how
the verbal and the visual blend in the classic gag cartoon manner in
which neither the words nor the pictures achieve a comedic meaning alone
without the other. Partch was drafted shortly after becoming famous (or, perhaps,
while becoming famous). Inducted September
23, 1944, he found himself at Fort Ord, California, where he became
the unintended victim of military boondoggle on a grand scale. As Vip
later described it: "I was in the infantry and orders had been
cut to send me from Fort Ord to somewhere in the Pacific. But a guy
who saw my name on the shipping list called Mrs. Stilwell, wife of the
commanding general—Joseph W., known as Vinegar Joe, who later became
commander of the whole China-Burma-India shebang—and said, 'Do you think
the general would be interested in a cartoonist for the Fort Ord Panorama?' My orders were changed
and I was on the staff of Panorama,
as cartoonist, business manager, circulation director and art director.
It was a wonderful way to fight the war. I lived off the base and had
a beautiful blonde lady chauffeur. I had to put in at least an hour
a day. Never more than six hours a week." A series of Partch's military-themed cartoons called "Vip's
War" reportedly appeared in one of the magazines that regularly
bought his work (Collier's
perhaps; dunno—I couldn't find any under that heading, although, truth
to tell, my search was scarcely exhaustive). The first book collection
of his Collier's cartoons, It's Hot in Here, was published in 1944, to be followed by about sixteen
more. Meanwhile, Partch, while still in the service, continued to freelance
cartoons to magazines with sufficient time left over to increase his
income by illustrating ads for such products as Wheaties cereal, Smith
Brothers cough drops, Briggs pipe tobacco, and Squirt soda. He also
illustrated Morton Thompson's humorous novel,
Joe the Wounded Tennis Player (1945). After his discharge on July
1, 1946, Partch illustrated a strangely disproportionate number of tomes
having to do with adult beverages.
From the first of these, Bottle
Fatigue (1950), we derive the following insight into the man: "Flinging himself into the study of this challenging
matter, Vip left no glass unturned, no drink unbottled, no bottle undrunk,
etc. Leaving statistics to the
statisticians, analysis to the analysts, facts to the factories, data
to the dataist, Vip went straight to the sources.
Often he worked until the wee small hours of the night, crawling
home exhausted from his studies, numb with the impact of startling discoveries,
quivering and all but incoherent with surmise. ..." You get the
idea. Partch illustrated several bar guides and these, together
with six thematic volumes he produced for Duell, Sloan & Pearce,
established Vip as the comic expert on booze and babes, exactly the
cartoonist that Hugh Hefner chose to share the cover of the inaugural
issue of Playboy with Marilyn Monroe. Vip's drawing,
of a cavorting naked lady, appears very small, compared to Marilyn,
under the heading "Vip on Sex." About his Playboy work, Vip saith: "Mine is the only clean stuff because
I can't draw nipples." But, adds Phil Porter, "He's very good
at drawing cleavage. I can testify to that: some years ago, he sent
my wife and me a cartoon showing a woman with three breasts. The caption
said, 'It's that little something extra that counts.'" In 1950, Partch moved from North Hollywood to Balboa Island
where he took up boating and joined the Balboa Island Sculling and Punting
Club. "Inasmuch as half the members are very wealthy people and
the other half are bums," Partch wrote, "we call our first
boat the Number One Boat and the last boat the Bum Boat. I'm number
three sweep in the Bum Boat." (We have a self-caricature of the
Vipper in full bumboat regalia in our gallery.) Late in the decade,
the Partches moved again, this time to Corona Del Mar, where they built
a house overlooking the ocean. Partch began a typical day at 5 a.m., seated at a light
table, doodling and occasionally giggling. "That's one of the advantages
of working at home," he said. "You can giggle at your own
work. If you were in an office and did it, your colleagues would figure
you were ready for the funny farm." Usually, he'd finished his
day's work by noon, which was when his friends and drinking companions,
mostly night people, arose and started phoning him. Partch enjoyed bars
but not for the booze as much as the conversation. "You here a
lot of talk in bars," he explained, "—more than you'd hear
in a public library. A bar is a good idea place." In 1960, Partch started a syndicated
feature called Big George.
And in 1977, he launched another syndicated strip, The
Captain's Gig. Neither feature, according to Ketcham, was vintage
Vip. "The syndicate officials should have had the confidence to
give Partch his head and let him run, maybe even calling the feature
'Vip,' but they didn't. They chickened out and told him to design a
character, something they could merchandise, someone to whom the readers
could relate. Virgil then came up with Big
George and grudgingly produced it, with a bunch of pussyfooting
editors looking over his shoulder. They surely did not get their money's
worth, and the multitude of Partch fans felt cheated." The character of Big George was distinctly
not Vippish. Just a typical loud-mouthed irascible husband and father, a little heavyset with a pointy nose
and a moustache—in short, an entirely conventional newspaper comic character.
He appeared in panel cartoons during the week; in a strip on Sundays.
Here he is, buying a hot dog from street vendor's cart; the vendor holds
up a card for George to read, and George says,"No, I'm not interested
in seeing your wine list." We see George through the window of
his house, yelling, "Helen! The dog wants in." And the dog
is on its hind legs, pounding on the front door. George, his coat, tie
and shirt draped over his arm, is walking down the street with his doctor,
who says, "Blast it, George, you'll make an office appointment
like all my other patients, see?" Scarcely any evidence of the
maniacal muse that animated Vip's magazine cartoons for two decades.
Partch even eliminated the superfluous fingers that had always festooned
his people before. Vip's eyesight, always marginal, began
to fade but only, apparently, in the real world. He gave up driving, leaving that to his wife.
At the drawingboard, he could see well enough to continue producing
his cartoons albeit at a larger size than earlier in his career. He
was diagnosed with tuberculosis and cataracts at about the same time,
1971. Writing to a newspaper friend, Phil Porter, Partch said he discovered
the cataracts while in the TB ward, where he was trying to catch up
to his deadlines. "A couple papers ditched me because I was a hair
late," he wrote, and he resolved to get far enough ahead that he'd
never have to worry about an immediately looming deadline again. Then
came the alarm. "I discovered one morning that I couldn't see to
draw—couldn't even draw a margin," he exclaimed. "The eye
freaks gave me drops which dilated the pupil, thus allowing me to see
around the faulty spot in my lens. So with that stroke of luck, I immediately
set up a work schedule to get six weeks ahead of my deadlines in order
to have the eye operation. It was easy to do two days work every day
since in the hospital I couldn't spend long lunches in bars." Despite continuing eyesight problems (macular degeneration this time), Partch adhered to his regimen faithfully, eventually resorting to a vision-enhancing apparatus that engravers and watch repairmen use (pictured on his cranium in one of the self-portraits we've included above). He was two years ahead of his deadline on Big George when he and his wife, who, as usual, was driving, were killed in an auto accident shortly after noon on August 10, 1984. Their Chevy sedan smashed into the rear end of a slower moving pickup truck on Interstate Highway 5 just north of Los Angeles. The driver of the pickup told the highway police that he had been driving about 50 miles an hour when the Partches rear-ended his truck. At 68, Vip was too young to die, and so his death was untimely and tragic. But it was also, somehow, a fitting conclusion to a cartooning career distinguished by absurdity. Here's a too short gallery of his work, including a tiny smattering of the sport illos he produced for True's letter column as well as cartoons.
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