Cullen Murphy grew up in the funny pages. Almost literally: His father, John Cullen Murphy, was an artist who drew numerous comic strips, the best-known and longest-running of which was Prince Valiant. He somehow managed to support a family of eight children. This improbable feat was made possible partly by the times—the postwar prosperity and optimism that saw hundreds of thousands of returning servicemen, like his father, moving to the suburbs and starting large families, if not quite as large. And Connecticut, where his father and a cadre of cartoonists (Murphy numbers them in the hundreds) eventually settled, had no state income tax. Still, ten people on one cartoonist’s salary is impressive in any era. Soon after the grown Murphy joined the staff of The Atlantic as managing editor, we published an excerpt from a 1988 biography of Pablo Picasso by Arianna Huffington called Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. Murphy, who had already made his father a familiar figure around the office through frequent and offhand references, reported that after seeing the galleys his father asked that any biography of himself be subtitled “Creator and Provider.”
Their unlikely profession kept the cartoonists in an unusually companionable group, united by the oddity of working at home and by the common task of making the fantastic and whimsical the stuff of daily life. As Murphy recounts in his new Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe, comic strips, so much a part of the fabric of the American scene in the last century, were in Fairfield County a family enterprise. Even today, when the number and ubiquity of strips is far lower than when Murphy was growing up, the children of family friends—including Mort Walker, the industrious and businesslike creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, and Dik Browne, the endearingly scraggly creator of Hägar the Horrible—carry on the family tradition by drawing and writing the strips their fathers created. If one cartoonist happened to be sidetracked by an accident or, in the case of Murphy’s father, pneumonia, another would take over the drawing of his strip—the “syndicate” that distributed the strips never the wiser. As Murphy points out, this is unimaginable in the case of, say, op-ed writers, though it is fun to imagine Thomas Friedman pinch-hitting for Maureen Dowd. (Even more fun, he adds, to imagine it the other way around.)