If you turned your back on the business of cartooning as I did, for even so short a time as 3 years, you'd find changes. The biggest change would not be among the editors, but in the number of top name cartoonists missing from the freelance scene. Where are they now? Are they rich millionaires living off the fat of syndicated comic strips and juicy advertising accounts? Let's take a good look back 10 years ago when Cavalli, Mort Walker, Clyde Lamb, Ketchem, and George Smith dominated the pages of every magazine on the stands. All these great names, and perhaps a dozen more, are syndicated now. Was it luck, talent, business ability, or a combination of all three that put these people in the lead?
I remember George Smith, one of the finest artists in the cartoon business. George was a long, thin, sad-faced drink of water who looked as if he had the troubles of the world on his shoulders. While he wasn't exactly accident-prone, more awful things seemed to happen to him than to any other cartoonist. For instance, in making the rounds on Wednesday, George would get off the elevator, turn right toward the magazine office, change his mind, make an abrupt left, step kerplunk on the editor's foot in back of him, and at the same time manage to give the editor a good boot in the behind with his briefcase! Apologies on both sides didn't make for happy relations when George sat opposite that editor ten minutes later showing his cartoons!
Another time George was showing his cartoons to an editor of a top magazine who had a kind of facial quirk which George didn't know about. This editor's eyebrows would go sky-high and he'd gulp very deep at the same time, and he looked for all the world as if he were seeing the cartoon of a lifetime! When George saw this expression, he leaped out of his seat to stand in back of the editor's shoulder to see just what cartoon had so astonished him-only to have the editor look up coldly and say "yes?" George swore then and there that if anyone, anywhere would offer him $100 a week he would quit the freelance business forever! George Smith was a pet of us all because he was such a fervent family man. He had six girls on which he based most of his gags. So, the very popular comic strip "The Smith Family" was born. The George Matthew Adams Syndicate snapped it up the minute they saw it, and it is one of their top sellers. While George's syndicated family stays about the same, his personal tribe has increased to 10 girls and with George's luck one boy! We called to congratulate George on the boy only to find that he and his family had left for Fallbrook, California, an hour before. So, if you see a Mack truck with eleven little children sticking out of the top, that will be "The Smith Family."
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