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 OpEd page were invited to select one example each of what during their tenure was a consequential contribution to the legacy of art in the Times.
Among the mandates of this job was to inject traditional illustrators and comic artists to the page. By way of example, I present (below) a few of the comics I commissioned in the mid 1970s expressly for the page.
In Summer of 1976 the staff of the Op-ED page and I were hashing out ideas for art during the Summer Republican and Democrat conventions. I asked: “wouldn’t it be surprising to readers to see the biggest names in comic strip history do a storyboard 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, it was the first Presidential election since his resignation. 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 the comic “The Spirit” to do the spirit of Nixon. He came out of retirement to do this.
Marvel Comics had not yet become a media giant, but Marvel superheroes were nonetheless the most famously popular amalgam of heroes and misfits on the page. My choice 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 idea and recruited his colleague John Romita, a comics master in his own right, to create “Candidate Man”. I can vividly recall the two of them marching into my office with a stiff envelope that held the strip, twice the size its printed. They seemed genuinely proud to show the work.
One of the first artist / cartoonists I invited onto the Op-Ed page upon taking the job 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 Art Spiegelman for many years prior to the publication of Maus, and had wanted to get him to do strips for the Op-Ed but the editors were reluctant to make the this narartive art part of the Op-Ed visual language. As illustration for a story about re-inventing America, Spiegelman did a two-part wordless, panel strip, published on subsequent days. We referred to this strip as having opened a portal to all future narrative comics. (For a brief time he edited a “comics” section in the Times Magazine.
Before comics became a frequent and go-to storytelling genre at the New York Times, I was given license to use comic artists, but not their comic strips. R. Crumb’s drawing was among my earliest attempts. Art Spiegelman gave us the rights to use the cover of Arcade, the post-underground comics revue he co-edited, as an independent image for one of the holiday pages. I couldn’t have asked Santa for a better Christmas gift.
