Mike Lynch Cartoons: From the Dick Buchanan Files: "Wiggly Gardner" A Gardner Rea Profile by Gurney Williams

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

From the Dick Buchanan Files: "Wiggly Gardner" A Gardner Rea Profile by Gurney Williams

An editor must really like your work if he wants to celebrate your life and work in a major magazine. That's what cartoon editor Gurney Williams did for Gardner Rea (1894 - 1966). Like a lot of cartoonists, Gardner was born in Ohio. His initial plan was to become an artist, but at the age of fifteen, he sold his first gag cartoon to the old Life Magazine and his path changed.

From the Post Morrow Foundation, which reprints the New York Times obituary of December 29, 1966, p. 31:

"When Harold Ross was gathering talent to start a magazine called The New Yorker in 1925, Mr. Rea was one of the original contributors. An old college friend, James Thurber, was in Paris at the time, but joined the magazine the following year.

"Rea’s contribution was considerably more than the drawings that appeared under his name. Some associates considered an equal talent was his short, sharp gags that formed the basis for cartoons by such noted colleagues as Charles Addams and the late Helen Hokinson. At one time he wrote about 40 gags a week, most of which he sold to editors.

"That somewhat serpentine line of his drawings, without detail, became his trademark, along with a trick of having in each picture a small shape, such as a necktie, inked in solid black. He explained the 'wiggle' of his line with another gag—'Nobody will catch on when I get senile.'

"But Mr. Rea distinguished between verbal humor and the art of drawing. He told an interviewer in 1946 that in common with most critics, he considered 'that line is the highest, most difficult form of art, and so long long as the fundamental design is there, I can’t see that it makes the slightest difference, technically speaking, if the subject matter is humorous.'"

Here's Dick Buchanan with the Collier's Profile and lots of cartoons. Thank you and take it away, Dick!

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WIGGLY GARDNER
Collier’s April 4, 1953

Whilst working at our desk, which looks suspiciously like a couch, we picked up an old issue of Collier’s magazine from the nearby coffee table, which looks suspiciously like a floor. Lo and behold, we discovered the magazine, dated April 4, 1953, contains a two-page spread celebrating Gardner Rea’s 20th year as a Collier’s cartoonist. Cartoon editor Gurney Williams’ profile of Rea claims Rea’s cartooning earned him a million dollars from 1908 up to 1953. During that time, he contributed 650 cartoons to Colliers. All the while his cartoons were also appearing nearly every week in The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post and many other magazines. We do not have enough fingers to add it all up, but that’s a sh**tload of cartoons. Gardner Rea may have been the 20th century’s most published magazine cartoonist. So, take a look at Gurney Williams’ profile of Gardner Rea, Wiggly Gardner . . .

Full Page. Collier’s April 4, 1953, page 66.