The Press: Sporting Cartoons

In his cartoonland, basketball centers are lean and heron-legged, fullbacks loom half a mile high, thoroughbreds trade wisecracks with their jockeys on the drive to the wire. More startling, his situations may be parodies of a Keats poem or a Steinbeck novel. A literate wit, plus a newsman’s flair for capsuling the essence of a story, is the mark of Sports Cartoonist Willard Harlan Mullin, 55, of the Scripps-Howard New York World-Telegram and Sun (circ. 473,732).

Mullin draws for a New York audience, but he has become a national institution. Besides the World-Telly, where he has appeared six times a week for the past 23 years (except for vacations and one missed deadline when a cartoon was lost), Mullin runs sporadically in the other 20 Scripps-Howard papers, regularly in the weekly Sporting News. His madcap figures have also illustrated dozens of magazine articles (LIFE. Saturday Evening Post), peddled Ramblers for American Motors Corp., and brightened Frank G. Menke’s Encyclopedia of Sports.

Ode on a Bum. Last week, back from his annual trip to West Point for some friendly golf, chess and fishing with the Army’s Football Coach Earl (“Red”) Blaik, Mullin was zestfully skewering a typical summer’s assortment of subjects. In for a joshing came Heavyweights Floyd Patterson and Roy Harris of Cut and Shoot, Texas. A potbellied, stein-hoisting Brave celebrated Milwaukee’s National League lead in German dialect, and days later Mullin’s cutlass-swinging Pittsburgh Pirate was walking the plank while a puzzled Brave looked on.

From time to time, Mullin will lovingly revive the best-known figure in his sports wonderland: a mournful Dodger Bum, with his tattered coat, scraggly beard, patched pants and woeful cigar. When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, Mullin briefly spruced up his Bum with a sports shirt and dark glasses—but quickly went back to the stogie. After the Dodgers lost the 1953 World Series to the Yankees, Mullin had his Bum futilely chasing a light-footed brunette in a parody of Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (“Thou still unravish’d bride . . .”).

He seldom crusades: “I don’t think I’m God—I’m not running the world.” But Mullin often strops a sharp edge on a drawing. One neatly sliced target: spitting Slugger Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox. Another: Dodger Owner Walter O’Malley, pictured as a Mullinesque carpetbagger while he prepared to move his team to Los Angeles (TIME, April 28) in search of the dollar. Says O’Malley, undaunted: “I am very high on Mr. Mullin.”

Deadline Agonizing. To keep up with the news, greying Willard Mullin works only one day ahead. Most of his quizzical heroes take shape in a knotty-pine-paneled den in his home in Plandome Manor, L.I., where Mullin spends hours poring over photos for such details as the shape of football helmets and the piping on baseball uniforms. An agonizer over ideas, he suffers most during the rowing season. “It’s just too hard,” he says, “to draw eight guys doing the same thing.”

Born of Quaker parents on an Ohio farm, Will Mullin grew up in Los Angeles, where he was enough of an athlete to run up an impressive blight of injuries, including ankles ruined at squash and softball. He decided by the seventh grade that he wanted to become a sports cartoonist, went directly from high school in 1920 to learn lettering in a sign shop (“Women’s Philippine Underwear, 79¢”), got his first newspaper job in 1923 doing illustrations for Hearst’s old Los Angeles Herald (now the Herald & Express).

Republican Mullin has often thought of switching to political cartoons, occasionally draws them for the WT. But with an annual .income ranging from $35,000 to $50,000 he prefers the profession he dominates. “I’m very lucky,” says Mullin. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do.”