[Left to Right: Arnold Roth, Gary Groth, and Al Jaffee]

Of course it takes a special occasion to get Art Spiegelman, Adriane Tomine, Evan Dorkin, Bob Fingerman, R. Sikoyak, and a handful of fellow New York comics luminaries to forgo the warmth of their respective burroughs, braving the mid-April drizzle to sit amongst The Strand bookstore’s folding chairs.

For his part, Fantagraphics head honcho Gary Groth flew in from the publisher’s home in the scenic northwest to emcee the event—a celebration of Humbug Magazine’s rerelease in the form of two hardbound volumes, the first time the short-lived humor magazine has seen the light of day since its original year-long run in the late-50s.

Groth was flanked by two of the medium’s all-time greats—Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth, who, along with Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Jack Davis formed formed the principle cast of Humbug, Kurtzman’s “adult” satire magazine formed in the wake of his exit from Mad and the subsequent immediate folding of the Hugh Hefner-back Trump.

It was the late-Elder, however, who took center stage at the top of the event, in the form of an as-of-yet unfinished documentary directed and screen by the artist’s son-in-law, Gary VandenBergh. The filmmaker thanked his family, seated directly in the front of the projector screen and fired up the short film, only to postpone it so after, thanks to DVD-related technical difficulties.

Roth, Groth, and Jaffee picked up where the film left off, seated behind a trio of mics and copies of the new book, recounting the brief ups and downs of Humbug. Groth happily took a backseat during the proceedings, seated between two natural born storytellers and consummate humorists. The duo talked Mad and Playboy and Stan Lee and the insane genius of their fellow cartoonist. The chat, sadly, was fairly short-lived, lasting around half-an-hour, audience questions included.

Things wrapped up shortly after, with the final scenes from the Elder documentary. The night was short, funny, and fascinating–in all a fairly fitting tribute to the magazine it was meant to honor.

[Full Audio of the Event]

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Interview with Al Jaffee Partts One, Two, and Three

Interview with Arnold Roth Parts One, Two, and Three

–Brian Heater

In this final part of our interview with legendary cartoonist Arnold Roth, we discuss the his work creating covers for jazz LPs for artists like Dave Brubeck, his relationship with novelist John Updike, his connection to PG Wodehouse, and why not working for Playboy means you don’t want to live.

[Part One]
[Part Two]

You’ve done a lot of LP covers, primarily for jazz groups.

And even for classical people, but they were funny covers. I did one for Glenn Gould, who was a great concert composer.

Do you listen to the record much before you create the cover?

Oh no. a lot of times they were recording or hadn’t quite recorded, and they wanted to set up the printing or save the time. No, I never heard any of the music, but of course they were successful musicians, so generally I knew what they did and how they did it. But a lot of times the idea would key more toward—like Glenn Gould, it was an album of stuff that he had conducted with the orchestra. I remember I did a drawing of the orchestra, with Glenn Gould in the front conducting and everybody playing in the orchestra was Glenn Gould. So I drew Glenn Gould about 80 times [laughs]. I don’t know if they ever saw that.

You did a few book covers for John Updike, as well.

I did three. The Bech books. I enjoyed that very much. It was a lot of fun to do. And he knew that I would have to do the ideas, and whatever I sent to him, he liked and it went right through.

Was that a situation where you had the text in front of you before you drew the cover?

Yes, yes, because what they were were actually collections of short stories, most of which had run in different publications. They were always about this one writer, Henry Bech. A lot of things that I’ve done as an illustrator, writing humor, whatever, the piece that is involved is accomplished already. But I would say that, 70-percent, over the years, maybe more, had not been writen yet, because I did a lot for Time, Fortune, and it goes on and on. But they knew what the subject was. Of course, I keep to the subject, I don’t illustrate anything in the story. So, whatever the editors could tell me. If they had a title or a subtitle, fine, but they would say, “this is about a guy who lived in Moscow for 10 years.” That’s enough to get started. And like I say, the way I think, the sort of ideas I do, I can just pull it out of the air. But it will relate to the piece, naturally, because the setting or whatever fits. If it’s about a guy 10 years in Moscow, you knew you would see Moscow and the sky. That would connect to something funny about Russia, or whatever.

Was the work that you did for Playboy primarily strip or illustration-based?

No, I did a lot of illustration for them, but I did do a history of sex for them. That was in the 70s, when things had really blown wide open [laughs]. And it was a lot of fun to do, because imagine you’re gonna sit down and make up a history of sex. Everything is possible, and it was in there [laughs]. So, yeah, I even started with the dinosaur age for chapter one. One thing that happened is, Michelle Urri, now, unfortunately the late-Michelle Urri who was great—she was their cartoon editor. When I got to the ancient Greeks, I got two chapters. They were usually three or four pages. She called me up and said, “how long is this history going to go on?” And I said, “as long as I’m paying tuition!” A year later I called her up and, “Michelle, I have great news for you—both of my sons dropped out” [laughs]. She started to worry that they weren’t going to be educated. And, of course, they’re both still working in the rock and roll world. They’re both terrific musicians.

Did you feel a certain sort of stigma, when you first started working for Playboy?

Oh no. Although I lived in England for one year. When I sold the feature to The Herald Tribune, and I was starting to get lots of magazine commissions, I paid off all my debts in a year, because I had borrowed money from people to put into Humbug. And they included the Fantasy Record guys, Paul Desmond—people who had money. And since I had this steady thing of doing the syndicated feature, my wife and I decided we could go live in England, which we had always wanted to do. I guess I had been to Canada once, but I had never really been out of the country.  So our boys were very young—they were two and four. We went and I thought we would be there for at least two years, but when they folded my feature, it turned out to be one year.

Now, that had to do with the question you had asked [laughs]. Of course, when I was there, I met tons of British cartoonists. You go to the cartoonist pubs and they’re there. They would say, “how can you work for Playboy?” Of course they had all seen it [laughs]. They felt it was not degenerate, but a low kind of thing to work for. I asked, “are you against anything Playboy stands for?” Because they print nude photos of women. “Oh no, no,” they didn’t want to be Puritanical. So, everything I asked them, I said “are you against this, are you against that?” So a lot of them became regular contributors. But I think it was just because everybody considered it to be low.

It’s like, I lived in Princeton for many years, and I would go to cocktail parties and someone would say, “I understand you do drawings for Playboy Magazine,” but they would say it in this derogatory way. And I would say, “yes,” and they would say, “well, isn’t that sort of…you know…” and I would say, “they were the first major American magazine to come out against open air nuclear testing.” And one guy, when I said it to him, he said, “well, sure, if anybody would want to live, it would be those guys” [laughs]. So that was one of my test questions on the list, “do you want to live?”  If somebody didn’t want to work for Playboy, my first question would be, “do you want to live?”

So Hefner was pretty good to the cartoonists he employed?

I thought he was great. See, my deal was that I would do the work, and that’s how it would have to run, if they wanted me to work for them.

No editorial input.

Yeah, but he was a nitpicker. He wanted to be a cartoonist when he was young. He loves cartooning. They always had the obvious burlesque joke, but I think Michelle was running far superior cartoons to the New Yorker, for a long time.

They had Jack Cole—

Jack Cole, they had Francis Smilby, Eldon Dedini, oh gee, just a ton of excellent cartoonists. [John] Dempsey—Dempsey could draw dirty minded middle-aged people better than anyone [laughs].

Looking back on all of these various publications you’ve worked for, is there one you can point to as a favorite?

Oh yeah. I had a really great and fortunate route. I say because of my “demands,” but I didn’t demand it, I just went in and said, “the way I work best is to not do sketches.” They all went along with me. But the real romance of my career was Punch. To begin with, I replaced PG Wodehouse—the novelist and movie writer. He was like 90-something. He would do the “American Report.” I was doing lot of full-page joke. On one of our visits—I think Kennedy was still alive, it was like ’63 or something. And they said, PG Wodehouse is the reporter on America, which we run two pages a month. They said, “he really doesn’t do any work. He cuts out oddities from The New York Daily News and pastes them up together. Would you do the report? “ I said, “yeah.” My head blew up.

When we came back to Princeton, I wrote two pages, which I was sure were the funniest pages about the American news ever written in the English language. And by return mail, I got my pages back and written in red at the top was, ‘you fool! I meant draw two pages!’ “Draw” was underlined. My wife brought me the mail and said, they’re really angry at you. Look, they call you a fool.” And I said, “listen, in England, if they don’t call you at least a swine, they’re not even serious.” So I drew two pages and I did it for another 20 years or more.

–Brian Heater

Since first launching his career six decades ago, Arnold Roth has become one of the best know and most beloved cartoonists of the 20th century. His work has appeared on the cover of Time and in the pages of virtual every well-known American publication, from The New Yorker to Sports Illustrated to Playboy to The New York Times.

Of course, the cartoonist had to pay his dues, just like the rest of us. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we dig into Roth’s early career, before The New Yorker, before Playboy—even before Humbug and Trump—to discover how he went from being expelled from a Philadelphia commercial arts college to becoming one of the most celebrated cartoonists working today.

[Part One]

What was the strangest job you had when you were attempting to establish yourself as an artist?

This take s a few words of background, but I was expelled from art school in 1948, to give you a time frame. I started freelancing in ’51. I’d been involved in some other failed ventures for television. They were good ideas, where I was the writer—we were producing a lot of ideas for General Baking’s Bond Bread, which I don’t even know if it exists now. But it was huge back then.

But nobody owned a television [laughs]. That was in 1948. Very few people had bought televisions yet. They were pretty primitive. So when I started freelancing, I shared a studio, which was a largish room right near where the Liberty Bell used to hand in Independence Hall. And there were 10 or 11 other guys, and we shared the $11 rent [laughs]. You’ll never see a rent check that low for anything anymore. So this guy came in and said he’d been sent in by this teacher who I knew hated me, at the art school. It turns out this guy was from a notable Philadelphia family, but it turned out that he owned two nudist colonies [laughs]. The nudists would buy anything about nudists. I did some gag cartoons about nudism for cocktail napkins, drinking glasses, etc. etc. of course I was very poorly paid.

They didn’t have pockets to keep their money in.

And for all I know, they still make them and sell them [laughs]. Then I had a silkscreen company. I did Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs. Somebody told me that they recently saw one. It was all color separation work. That was the sort of thing that I got. And then things were building. I’d get jobs like that, but more and more people would come to me as they’d see my work. Of course in Philadelphia there was TV Guide. They knew I had a reputation for being reliably on time and the work had quality, I guess. But it takes a while, and you have to do an awful lot of cheap jobs. But, on the other hand, it was earning while you’re learning—earning very little while you’re learning a lot. Mostly about not working for little.

Why were you expelled from art school?

Well, I went into art school along with all the GIs, after the second World War. The had the GI Bill, which was a great idea. I came directly from high school. I graduated high school in ’46. The war had ended the summer before. All of these ex-GIs in the art school I went to, they were frantically putting up buildings to have art classes. So I had a scholarship from the Philadelphia public schools’ board of education. But I also played saxophone—I still do. I was gigging so that I could make money. And I liked it, too. I had a tendency to be late to school, practically every day. You know at most art schools it’s when you show up and when you leave that they care about, but this was very much that you had be there at nine, and there was a lunch break. It was strict that way. The same school is now called The University of the Arts, and it’s huge in Philadelphia. So I tended to be late and casual.

I wasn’t angry that they kicked me out, and I sure wasn’t surprised. They put me on probation after the first year. I figured, it’s their school. But that particular regime was very strict, as I say, and the last they needed was a scholarship student, because the government was paying for everybody else, so it wasn’t a difficult decision. Although years later, a fellow who became my brother in law, a printmaker named Jerry Kaplan, had been at the faculty meeting where they had decided to expel me, and he said that this one woman teacher walked in and said, “before we talk about anything, I want to talk about this boy, Arnold Roth. When he came to this school, he was a genius, but he has not improved.” That’s a strict school [laughs].

So, anyway, we parted ways. But since then they’ve given me every honor. I’ve had two one-man shows, etc. they’ve been very nice to me [laughs]. Of course, they were very different regimes. Oh, by the way, the regime that expelled me, they expelled at least one person every year, for about ten years, and every one of the people that they expelled not only stayed in the art world, but they became very well know in their particular field. Irving Penn, the photographer is the only one I can remember, but I used to be able to rattle them off. In a way, I kind of felt bad for the faculty, but to hell with them [laughs].

Was cartoon something that was frowned up in art school in those days?

Nobody that I knew of—maybe School of Visual Arts, if they were going by that time—taught such a thing. My major in commercial art, they had advertising and commercial art. They went through all forms. It was basically a commercial art school, but you were given all of the same things you would learn in a fine art school, painting, drawing. You were given a traditional background. It was a very good school. They still turn out excellent students. But there was no course in cartooning.

Remember, this was in the late-40s—I never knew why anyone would go to school to learn cartooning, per se. Because here I was playing jazz and to me they still are very similar exercises. You learn to be a jazz player by listening to jazz. You didn’t learn to play your horn. That was the way things worked. If you went to art school and became a cartoonist, you learned to be an artist. But you would apply it to cartooning. Same thing with jazz. People would go to Julliard and end up in the jazz world.

Did that traditional fine arts education have an impact on your cartooning?

Oh yeah. I started going to art classes when I was about eight-years-old. It was the end of the depression before the start of the second World War. They had stuff available for little kids, and because of the depression, the best artists in the city were teaching eight-year-olds. And I would go to classes Sautrday mornings. I’d go to the Philadelphia Art Museum and took printmaking there. We actually did real lithographs on real limestones. We learned everything about it, and here were the finest printmakers in Philadelphia teaching the class. Everybody needed the bread. And then in the afternoon, there were two brothers name Fleischer who were interested in art. They had bought a Catholic monestary, right in the heart of Little Italy. They converted it into an art school. They maintained the cathedral as a museum. It was loaded with statues, etc. it was perfectly free. So I would go there in the afternoon and there we drew in pastel. It was academic training and it was very valuable, but it’s like when you buy a saxophone, you don’t have to have someone teach you to play it.

You mentioned earlier that cartooning and playing jazz are very similar exercises, and of course plenty of people have compared fine art to jazz, in terms of improvisation, et al. Do you feel as if those two disciplines greatly affected one another in your life?

Sure. One thing, you have the confidence knowing that you can handle your materials and realize the ideas that come to you. But then you have that freedom of what you think of to draw and play. But with the training, you notice that someone who can really play will usually be a better jazz player than someone who is fumbling along because they’re more restricted.

Do you often put on jazz in the background when you’re drawing?

Yeeah. But I listen a lot of classical, but of course there’s only one station now in New York. If I have to really write something, I don’t really play the music. I’ve worked with writers and they say, “oh, you’re so lucky, you can listen to music when you’re working.” But if I’m really writing, say a really important letter, I don’t listen to music. That’s the penalty of listening to music that you like. It starts getting interesting and takes your mind off of what you’re doing.

Will you listen to different genres of music, depending on what you’re drawing?

Oh no. depending on what sort of stuff they’re playing on the radio. It’s all good. It becomes recessive. My mind isn’t on the music. I’m hearing it and enjoying it, but my mind is on the work I’m doing.

Do you think the manner of music you’re listening to can subconsciously affect the work you’re doing?

I think at various times, if I was listening and they were playing a very bright tempo, I would cross hatch faster or something. But no, when I really got to the vital parts of the piece, then the music would receed.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

Fantagraphics’ new two book Humbug set marks the first time that the long-defunct magazine’s material has been pulled together into a single collection.  Forty years after its initial publication, the magazine has largely been forgotten by all but the most devout cartooning fans. Its founders Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee and Will Elder, however, should be familiar to all of those who have a passing knowledge of that perennial favorite humor magazine, Mad. Jaffee, Davis, and Elder all followed Kurtzman as the editor made the jump from Mad to Hugh Hefner’s newly launched humor magazine, Trump.

After two issues, however, Trump’s increasing expenses and Hefner’s own economic troubles resulted in the closure of that magazine. Along the way, however, the four Mad refugees added yet another creative cartooning force to the team—a young Philadelphian named Arnold Roth. It was with Roth, funds culled together by the five artists, and some residual Hefner office space that Humbug was born.

Humbug, too folded quickly, completing a paltry print run of 11 issues. Roth, however, would go on to a diverse and successful career illustrating for Playboy; creating his own syndicated strip, Poor Arnold’s Almanac; designing album art for Dave Brubeck; and drawing book covers for John Updike.

We sat down with the artist, a month after his 80th birthday, to discuss Humbug and his early forays into the world of cartooning.

The new Fantagraphics book is really the magazine’s first real collection.

Well, yeah. I don’t know how major of a publication it really was. You’d never think that from our sales. As the story goes, the figures that we go on sales were not reliable and never were going to be. But at any rate, yes. It’s all due to Gary Groth’s keen dedication and interest.

What’s the story behind the numbers?

They wanted us to do Cracked every other month, and of course we didn’t want to. That’s how we eventually decided that we had to fold. But the sales figures come from the distributors. Whatever they say they are, that’s what they are. You can’t argue. Since they wanted us to make that deal with them, we were never going to break even. Our sales came tantalizingly close to breaking even, but whatever number they wanted to give us, that’s what they were doing. We knew it. that’s the way business runs. So finally we had a showdown meeting and we just decided to go out of business.

What was the hesitation, as far as working on Cracked?

Well, we were owners of Humbug. There were five of us. But Cracked would be the product of the distributor and we would be doing it for free for them, every other month, just to stay in business—for all intents and purposes. We never actually talked about what the payment arrangement would be. I don’t think we would have been over payed in that situation [laughs]. So, we just decided to fold.

For lack of a more tactful way of putting it, Cracked always sort of struck me as something of a second-tier Mad. Was that the feeling at the time?

Yeah. That’s what it was. That’s very usual in magazines—well, in movies and everything. Somebody has a hit and everybody has an imitation. Hefner used to be very brilliant when discussing this, because his magazine had a lot of imitations, too. It’s like clothing lines. Somebody brings out a dress suit with short pants, so every suit company says, “well, people who liked that will buy from us, too.”

Kurtzman and Jaffee had come over from Mad. Was part of the driving force of Humbug a desire to do something different than what they had done on that magazine?

Well, not necessarily. Willie Elder and Jack Davis, of course—I was the only one who hadn’t, come to think of it. That was the appeal of the work, mining that particular vein in that particular way. But Harvey’s idea was to make it less high school and more college. And of course we all agreed that would be fine. But they couldn’t make too drastic a change, because that what the appeal was—these are the people that had been doing Mad. They had invented it, actually.

Were you a reader of Mad before you signed on with Humbug?

Yes. I didn’t know about it for a while. I had heard it mentioned. I knew the Dave Brubeck group. We had met by happenstance. Paul Desmond I think read everything that was being printed in every form [laughs]. They did a lot of traveling, so he had lots of time. He told me about it. I went to the newsstand, and of course it was there and selling like crazy by that point. I would say that it would have been about a year since it first came out. I thought it was great, of course—which it was. It was exactly what I wanted to do in my career, that sort of thing.

Was Humbug your first steady work as a cartoonist?

Well, no, I had been on retainer to Trump, which went out of business before it hit the stands. That’s when we said, since we’re altogether and since Hefner was giving us office space—he was very contrite and disappointed about what had happened. He heart was into Trump—as were ours [laughs]. Of course on Humbug I was spending money—we were all partners and putting money into it. I think the only other times I’ve gotten a regular check for doing work was when I had a syndicated feature with The Herald Tribune. And then a revival of that, 30 years later. That was Poor Arnold’s Almanac.

That was after Humbug?

It was after we folded. Al sold a feature. They had a very good comics editor. It was almost completely a writer’s syndicate. They had a few comics and the newer ones were BC by Johnny Hart and Mel Lazarus’s Miss Peach, which was very good also. It was sort of like Peanuts in a way, with bright little kids saying sophisticated things. But they had a few old time things that they kept alive. I think one was called Mr. And Mrs. I can’t rattle them off. So Al sold them Tall Tales and I sold them Poor Arnold’s Almanac, which ran two years. It was a Sunday only, which was why they canceled me. They wanted a daily. They said it makes the Sunday feature stronger. The Sunday feature was doing—not great, but well enough for me to make money.  At that time I was living in England and my magazine work and record album was was starting. I wasn’t in great haste to do a daily. But during one of my many moves, when I cam back, I found that I had penciled a stack of dailies, but I was never going to ink them. I didn’t want to get too locked up in the syndicate thing.

Because you had so much work on the side?

Yeah. And I really enjoyed the magazine work more. And I eventually ended up where most of my business was illustrating for magazines. I did a lot of comic stuff that I would write. I liked the humor and eventually I did “The American Report” for Punch for two pages, and that went on for about 25 years. I worked for them for 30 years. I started to do a lot for Sports Illustrated, and I would do features and spreads and Esquire and TV Guide. There were lots of magazines that I did lots of illustrating for. The way I illustrate is I try to have something humorous in the illustration. It’s not just a drawing of something in the story.

You must have considered doing a daily earlier on. That was sort of the dominant forum for cartoonists in those days.

Yeah. Well, it was one of the most lucrative fields for cartoonists, if you made a hit. It was the ultimate realization of capitalism. You only did it once and you were getting paid many times, depending on the number of newspapers. That was fine. That’s an industry, comics, and it’s a hell of a job. And doing the same thing every day—I don’t know how they don’t all become drunken hatchet murderers [laughs]. A lot become drunks, but they don’t become violent. Which is why they had to eventually get assistants, to keep the quality of the work up and make it good.

How did you get involved in Trump, initially?

I believe it was Ed Fischer, The New Yorker gag cartoonist who I was friends we. He mentioned it. I don’t know if I had already done drawings for Playboy. But Ed told me that they were starting this publication. And I hadn’t met any of the people involved. I lived in Philadelphia, so I would go to New York frequently to push my stuff. I’d go to magazines and show them my sample book, etc, etc. By that time I had already done fairly steady work for TV Guide and occasional work for Esquire. I was already selling to major markets. And of course album covers were a very good field for me. And I was even doing stuff for an animation place called Storyboard, which John Hubley owned. He was one of the three people who did Gerald McBoing-Boing.

With Gene Deitch.

That’s it. Gene Deitch was working inside at Storyboard. So they were using two freelancers that I knew of and they sort of added me on the fringe [laughs]. When they would add me when they got certain commissions to do ideas for them. But I never actually did the animation. I might have designed something for Old Gold Cigarettes.

Back when you could do cartoons for cigarettes.

Yes [laughs]. I still smoke. 80-years-old and I still smoke. That shows you how smart I am. That was a good account for me, at that time. By that time I was already rolling. By the mid-50s, I could see that that would be my career. I started freelancing in ’51. Of course, as usually happens, I was the only one who knew that’s what I was doing. I would do local work in Philly–$10 a drawing. Even in those days that was not a lot.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater