Showing posts with label Paul Conrad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Conrad. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Conrad's last Nixon cartoon: "I forgot the line!"

 by Mike Rhode

I was in a bookstore on Capitol Hill (Capitol Hill Books in fact) this weekend, glancing through the comics and graphic novels section, and spotted this copy of The King and Us: Editorial Cartoons by Paul Conrad (Los Angeles: Clymer Publications, 1974; 3rd printing 1975) collecting his cartoons about the disgraced President Nixon. Conrad's one of the great editorial cartoonists of the 20th century, and had been on Nixon's enemies list so I picked it up to look at...
...$10 and it was a third edition, signed in August 1994 twenty years after it was published, and twenty-five years later, the Sharpie ink is already blurring and fading.... 




...but there were two photocopies laid in, one of Conrad's last cartoon about Nixon from April 25, 1994, showing Nixon's tombstone with a double entendre engraving, 
"Here Lies Richard M. Nixon, 1913-1994"


...on the back side of that first photocopy was a sketch of the idea of that cartoon, inscribed, 
"For Frank and Estelle, Lisa, David -- All the Best - Paul Conrad"...


...but it also had something the final cartoon was missing. 
A caption with a second double entendre - 

"The Final Coverup" 

- which made the cartoon just a bit more brutal, 
as befitting a man who was was audited  by the IRS as a result of the enemies list


Estelle apparently kept the sketch until Nixon died 
and sent a photocopy to Conrad to remind him of it. 
He wrote back, "Estelle! I forgot the line! 
Why didn't you call and remind me. Love Paul C."

Admittedly, there are some deductions here, and it's a very minor bit of comics history, 
but one never knows what one will stumble across in the pages of a book. 

I wonder where the original sketch is now...

Monday, September 20, 2010

Matt Wuerker on Paul Conrad

Among others, Matt's recollections of the great cartoonist are here - Conrad the mentor: An editorial is 90 percent idea and 10 percent drawing
By Kevin Cody
Easy Reader September 20th, 2010.

There's a tiny thumbnail of Matt's obituary cartoon - I don't know if it appeared in Politico or not.

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Today in The New York (Comics) Times

Pekar, Paul Conrad and Rutu Modan -

The Unfinished Tale of an Unlikely Hero
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Harvey Pekar, the obsessive chronicler of everyday lives, was collaborating at the end of his life on a Web project whose fate in print remains uncertain.

Paul Conrad, Cartoonist, Dies at 86
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Mr. Conrad’s editorial cartoons in The Los Angeles Times and other papers slashed presidents, skewered pomposity and exposed what he saw as injustice for six decades.

And Rutu Modan illustrated the review of Skippy Dies in the Book Review.