The Press: Escape Artist

In the wacky world of the comic strips, Crockett Johnson found, all things are possible but one. A man may jump out of his shoes, a cow—or a rocket—may jump over the moon, but an artist has a hard time jumping the reservation. Chained in daily and Sunday captivity by his brain children, he can escape them only by dying or (worse than death) by flopping.

Johnson’s brain children were the elves, gnomes, leprechauns and little men—and a talking dog—that peopled Barnaby, a fey and fanciful strip that began in Manhattan’s tabloid PM in April 1943. Johnson liked them all, from Gorgon the dog to Mr. O’Malley, Barnaby’s pink-winged fairy godfather whose long cigar was a magic wand. But keeping them on schedule was a grind. Hulking Crockett Johnson tired, began plotting his escape.

Two for One. Last week the Chicago Sun syndicate let a trade secret out of the bag: its ghost-ridden Barnaby strip (in 52 papers, circ. 5,590,000) had been ghostwritten as well since the first of the year. Next week the ghosts would materialize; in place of Johnson’s byline, quietly dropped several months ago, there would be two new ones: Ted Ferro and Jack Morley, Connecticut neighbors of Johnson. Ferro, at 41 an old hand at collaboration, had ground out radio serial Lorenzo Jones with his wife for nine years. Morley, a 38-year-old gag cartoonist, once did editorial cartoons for Hearst’s New York Journal-American.

Johnson schooled Neighbors Ferro & Morley for months before letting PM and the syndicate in on his plans. He still sits in on story conferences—and shares in profits from the strip—but Barnaby takes little of his time. By now, says Ferro, “it’s all done by telepathy.” Freed from his daily grind, Johnson is writing a book about Barnaby for publication in the fall. Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley, a play adapted by Johnson and Jerome Chodorov from the strip, will open in Wilmington next week, may get to Broadway in the fall.

So slick was the transition that few Barnaby fans suspected what was going on. The comic business has its share of retirements and deaths, but changes in authors and artists are seldom advertised. Thus Tarzan still carries Edgar Rice Burroughs’ bold byline, but has been written and drawn for years by a succession of ghosts. King of the Royal Mounted still bears the name of Zane Grey, whom it has survived by seven years. And although Clare Briggs died in 1930, the New York Herald Tribune could not bring itself to put a new by-line (Arthur Folwell and Ellison Hoover) on his Mr. and Mrs. strip until eight years ago.