The New York Times is celebrating 175 years as a national news publication. Among the features prepared for this revue of highlights is one devoted to the evolution of Opinion Art. Twelve former art directors from the Op-Ed page were invited to select one example each of what was a consequential contribution to the legacy of art in the Times during their tenure.
Among the mandates of the job was to inject traditional illustrators and comics artists to the page. By way of example, I present (below) a few of the comics I commissioned in the mid 1970s.
In the summer of 1976 the Op-Ed page editors and I were hashing out ideas for art during the Republican and Democrat conventions. I asked: “Wouldn’t it be surprising to readers to see the biggest names in comic strip history do storyboards that repurposed their fictional creations as representing the current event?” Gerald Ford had assumed the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned. Everyone knew that Nixon’s ghost would be present at the Republican convention. Since I wanted this to be challenging for me, I decided to ask my comics heroes to participate. Who better to ask but the founder of the comic strip “The Spirit”—Will Eisner—to do the spirit of Nixon. Eisner came out of retirement for occasion.
Marvel Comics had not yet become a media conglomerate its is today, but Marvel superheroes were nonetheless the most famously popular amalgam of heroes and heroic misfits on the page. I asked Stan Lee, Marvel’s founder, if he would be interested in reimagining Captain America as Gerald Ford running for a full term as president. He was surprisingly excited about the idea and recruited his colleague John Romita, a master in his own right, to create “Candidate Man.” I vividly recall meeting the two of them marching into my office with a large stiff envelope that held the strip. They seemed genuinely proud to show the work.
Elsewhere, one of the very first artists/cartoonists I invited to The New York Times was Gahan Wilson. I was awed by his acute use of irony and wit in cartoons for Playboy and the National Lampoon. His humor was dry and nuanced, underpinned by sardonic horror. He was the perfect artist for the Halloween page.
I had known and worked with Art Spiegelman for many years prior to the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning Maus. I had wanted to get him to do strips for the Op-Ed page, but the editors were reluctant. As illustration for a story about re-inventing America, Spiegelman did a two-part panel wordless strip. We later referred to this strip as having opened a portal to all future narrative comics in the Times. (For a brief time this, , even edited a “comics” section in the Times’ Sunday magazine, as well.)
The editors allowed me to use comics artists, but not their comic strips. R. Crumb’s drawing was among my earliest attempts. Spiegelman granted us the rights to use the cover of Arcade, the post-underground comics revue that he co-edited with Bill Griffith’s, as an independent image for one of the holiday pages. I couldn’t have asked Santa for a better Christmas gift.
