Art: The Tokio Kid

Little Japs are infiltrating U.S. factories, beaming and slavering with wicked satisfaction but doing no good to Japan. They are all versions of one & the same little Jap, Douglas. Aircraft Co.’s gargoyle-like cartoon character, “The Tokio Kid.” Created as part of the company’s drive to reduce tool breakage and waste, the Kid appears on posters that show broken drills, cracked cogwheels, mixed-up rivets, piles of scrap. “Bust tool make soooo happy, thank you,” is the main theme of his left-handed sentiments.

Douglas workers were startled when the Tokio Kid first appeared, but soon adopted him. About a dozen posters since Pearl Harbor have shown him with teeth and claws growing progressively longer and sharper, a brow becoming more apelike, ears more pointed. A worm crawling out of a huge front tooth was eliminated, after one try, as a little too gruesome.

Company officials feel that the Kid is responsible for a reduced ratio of waste and for redoubled suggestions from employes. Two of the posters have been lithographed and distributed to 7,000 Douglas suppliers, also to some 450 other industries. Among the firms using Tokio Kid posters are Vultee Aircraft, Diamond Tool, Chrysler, Remington Rand, Westinghouse, Western Electric, Carnegie-Illinois Steel. No other wartime Industrial poster has caught on like the Kid. This week the Treasury began using him to sell war bonds.

The Tokio Kid was the brain changeling of two Douglas artists, Jack Campbell and Harry Bailey. At present, Campbell is the Kid’s sole portrait painter. Campbell was a member of the 40th Engineering Camouflage Division during World War I, is an alumnus of the Disney studio. He is slim, swarthy, long-toothed, usually smiling, wears glasses when he works, bears a certain resemblance to the Kid.