Storymania - A Picture's Wirth A Thousand Words by Frank Dunsmore

A Picture's Wirth A Thousand Words
Frank Dunsmore

A young boy in Bayonne, New Jersey discovered he could draw almost anything. In the 1930s young Cliff Wirth was on an adventure as he drew Tarzan of the Apes on his grandparents’ bedroom wall. Later he filled the blacktop streets of Bayonne with cartoon pictures.

Cliff Wirth has drawn a daily cartoon for the Chicago Sun-Times for many years bringing smiles and laughs to its readers. His daily pocket cartoon is 1½" by 2½" and is placed next to the story it complements.

I visited Cliff Wirth in his 4th floor studio-office at the Chicago Sun-Times. Adorning the walls were favorite cartoons, his water color paintings of jazz musicians, and one of his many awards for cartooning. His desk top is an array of pens, paper, and white, square cardboards.

Congenial and relaxed, Cliff is someone who truly enjoys what he does in life. Please join me as Mr. Wirth talks about his life as a cartoonist.

Q. You’re a wonderful artist and you bring a lot of joy to many people. The first thing I look for in the morning, after my cup of coffee, is the Wirth cartoon. It’s always a surprise because we, the reader, never know what story you’ll be drawing.

WIRTH: You’re too kind. I love what I do and I get paid for it. It’s the best job in Chicago.

Q. When did you start drawing cartoons?

WIRTH: I was about 12 years old. My grandfather made a little gallery down in the basement and when I drew a cartoon he would take it down to the gallery and hang it up.

Q. Did you draw pictures other than cartoons?

WIRTH: I was a big fan of Tarzan of the Apes. My grand parents’ house had a small bedroom and one day I went into that bedroom and painted a picture of Tarzan on the wall. I will always remember my grandmother going into the bedroom and being shocked because of the long hair that Tarzan had, she thought it was a girl running without a top on.

Q. Did you do any other drawings?

WIRTH: When I was growing up we had black asphalt streets, and my friend and I would get some of the red brick off of the buildings so we could draw. We’d fill up the whole street with pictures of airplanes fighting the Germans. We drew most anything but nothing nasty. In those days the cops could give you a cuff up the side of the head if you were out of line. We were just cartooning, there wasn’t any art in it.

Q. Did you have any lessons in painting or drawing?

WIRTH: When I was in the 8th grade, I was sent up to another school to an older nun who painted in oil. She gave lessons for a couple of bucks. She liked the stuff I was doing, maybe because it was different from what she was teaching. My drawing was more cartooning but it still had a source of light, perspective and anatomy and stuff like that.

Q. Did you have any other formal art lessons?

WIRTH: When I got out of the Service I went to the Meinzinger Art School in Detroit for two years. It was exceptional because we had live classes and professional artists were teaching. One teaching artist was Leon Makelski. When my wife and I were vacationing in Hilton Head we went to an art gallery. Low and behold, there was a Makelski painting. I talked to the curator of the gallery and he said they had a number of his paintings.

Q. Was Leon Makelski an important influence?

WIRTH: Makelski was very good and he helped everyone a lot. We were just young guys who were just out of the Service and had a talent for drawing. It was the exact time that the group in New York were painting, the avant-garde painters like de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. At that time they were practically giving away their paintings. Now they’re worth millions. de Kooning sold a couple of his paintings for millions of dollars.

Q. After art school when did you become a professional cartoonist?

WIRTH: Well, you kind of work into it. I learned about it originally in Bayonne from a young artist on Silver Street. He told me about magazines that were buying cartoons and I became impressed and started drawing. My grandparents supplied me with paper, pen, and ink. I submitted some stuff to the local newspaper and it was accepted.

I was paid a few dollars for my cartoons and my grandfather said I was never going to have to dig ditches, that cartooning is what I was gonna do. I took the old man at his word and I’ve been drawing ever since.

After the Service I submitted to magazines quite a bit. I can’t say that I was tremendously successful because I think at that time you had to be located in New York. That’s where all the magazines were and since I didn’t live there, most of my work was done by mail. But I sold a lot in the Detroit area. Ford Motor Company had magazines at that time, all automotive oriented, and I would supply them with cartoons to lighten up their articles.

Q. How did your style emerge to what it is today?

WIRTH: Style comes with practice and work. I was impressed with the cartoonist Hal Foster who drew Tarzan and later Prince Valiant. Talk about detail, 80 to 90 Vikings storming a fort. I was impressed by this but I got away from it because I started into the gag field. I became exposed to magazines like the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post and I started submitting there.

You were either an illustrator like Norman Rockwell or a cartoonist. I figured they had more cartoons in the magazines than illustrations so I started drawing and submitting cartoons. You had to be located in New York to get your face known. It was possible to submit by mail but most were rejection slips and I could paper a wall with them.

But what you must not accept is rejection. You must keep submitting. It’s like Winston Churchill said, "You must never, never, never, never give up!" That’s basically it. Style development is really in that little realm of work. You develop your own style.

Q. Your cartoon complements one of the stories of the day. How does your day begin at the Sun-Times from the moment you are assigned to a writer’s story to the approval of your final drawing?

WIRTH: We have a budget meeting every morning at 11:30 to budget out the space of the paper. This meeting is the first take of what, more or less, will be in the paper the following day. It’s designed to outline some of the stories and features or business which pretty much stays the same.

The 3:30 meeting is with the editors of each section of the paper and is run by the managing editor and the editor-in-chief. I’m in on that. We get a printout of what’s going in the next day’s paper. I’ll read through it, pick out a story that might be conducive to a cartoon, and find out from the make-up editor if there’s space in that story. If I do get space I’ll retreat to my office and start thinking funny. I try to come up with an idea the reader can identify with.

The recent story about the cats in Highland Park said they must be on a leash if they go outside because they’re killing birds. That was the only story that had space for my cartoon. All the other stories were tight and the paper was full. They didn’t even have room for photos and they come first if they’re selected. My cartoon is like a little cherry on the cake.

Q. What is your deadline?

WIRTH: I have a window of about two hours from the afternoon meeting. My cartoon must be ready by about 6:00 to make the 1st edition of the next day which comes out at 11:00 that night.

Q. Do you have a favorite type of story you like to draw?

WIRTH: No, I think the average person gets a kick out of something that happened to them and I’m able to bring back a memory to them.

Q. Is there a story that you wouldn’t draw?

WIRTH: I skirt anything that’s tasteless. I won’t draw death or anything about crippled people. The editor wouldn’t let me either.

Q. I notice that your phone rings a lot. Do you get any crank calls?

WIRTH: There was a story about the teachers in Niles School District and the high salaries they were paid and they were striking for more money. I drew a teacher with a picket sign, getting out of a chauffeur driven limousine. The caption was, "Now come back and pick me up at 3:00." I had telephone calls from many Niles teachers.

Q. What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a professional cartoonist?

WIRTH: The main thing is developing a sense of humor. You can appreciate humor but you must be able to create it. You have to be able to draw. Some of the cartoonists recently are getting a little lax.

Q. You mentioned that the cartoon drawing is not as important as the idea.

WIRTH: Right, in a social comment cartoon or gag cartoon the idea is 90%, the caption gets the idea across. The idea, the drawing, and caption all have to meld. In the back of my mind I have to remember that the cartoon doesn’t have a half hour to be understood. If someone looks at my cartoon and asks, "what did you mean by that?", I blew it.

Your cartoons bring immediate smiles and laughs and I’ve never had to ask for an interpretation.

It was almost time for Cliff’s budget meeting so I packed up my notes and left Cliff to his work, thinking about the lifetime of laughs and smiles that he had provided his readers. I’d look for his cartoon the next day as I sipped my morning coffee. As usual, Cliff would help me begin my day with a smile. Thank you Mr. Wirth!