Al Gottlieb, Longtime Editor of Gag Recap, RIP

 

Al Gottlieb, former editor of Gag Recap, passed away last week. He was 94.

I received the below from Van Scott, current publisher of the magazine cartoon industry publication Gag Recap. (Gag Recap records all published gag cartoons by publication, date and cartoonist. It was. and still is, the go-to for information on what publications are buying gag cartoons, how to contact them, and what kind of cartoons they publish.)

"Jacqueline Rosenberg, the daughter of Al Gottlieb informed me that Al passed away last week of natural causes at the age of 94.

"Al had been the publisher of The Gag Recap (a newsletter for cartoonists and gagwriters).

"The Gag Recap started in 1954 by Earl Temple. Al bought the Recap from John Waterfield in August 1963, and it continued for 36 years until Al sold it to Publisher Bill Keough. Al's last issue was August 1999.

"Al wrote re: the Recap, 'I’m proud of the fact that we never missed an issue in all those years.'

"Jacqueline states Al was a truancy officer working for the city of New York and worked on the Recap at nights and on weekends. Al was a gagwriter, not a cartoonist.

"He wrote for Joan Rivers and Phillis Diller. He sold gags to Marmaduke, Family Circus, Blondie and to many magazines. (His favorite magazine was Saturday Evening Post.) He had a close friendship with illustrator/cartoonist Ed Arno.

"The Gag Recap was a family business for Al, his wife Jo, and daughter Jackie.

"Jackie reminisces: 

‘We were a family of three and everything was done manually in those days. So it was just us. Dad collected all the material to be included in each months' edition. My mom (who passed 3 years ago) and I would handle the processing of the actual magazine. Mom did all the translating/describing of the cartoons, typing and collating, while I stapled and stamped the manila envelopes they were mailed in. Remember those sloppy stamps? Yup, that was me. I was only a kid. And all those typos? That was mom. We all knew that she made so many typos but dad could only proofread so much! Then, Dad addressed, sorted by state, loaded up the car and schlepped the boxes of about 450 Gag Recap/Trade Journals to the P.O. each month. This was the routine in my household for as many years as he had the magazine. That was how I grew up...in a mini publication house.'

"In a final note, Jackie writes about her father ‘He loved the Recap!’"

 

 

Above: the cover of the last Gag Recap that Al Gottlieb edited. It's from Van Scott, who assured me he DID renew his subscription. 

Van added in another email:

"Al published The Gag Recap every month which covered all the 'major' magazine markets, and the Trade Journal Recap which had the smaller specialty magazines. 

"He also published a yearly Directory of Cartoonists/Gagwriters & Short Markets List, Comedy Calendar Guide (a guide for writing and submitting monthly and seasonal material-topically indexed), Self-Syndication (step-by-step methods to sell and syndicate your cartoon strip), Successful Cartoon Gagwriting (a MUST for beginning cartoonists and gagwriters), as well as Pleasing Editors For Fun and Profit. And finally, Al would send you cartoon clips to help you build a morgue of cartoon settings. 50 clips for $5.

"Al was into side hustling before it was a thing! 

"But, seriously, many cartoonists and writers owe Al and the Recap a lot for helping with their career."

 

Above: Bob Vojtko's cover to the February 200s issue of Gag Recap, poignantly acknowledging the loss of some of the markets then.

Agreed! Al Gottlieb quietly impacted a couple of generations of cartoonists and gag writers during his 36 years of running the Gag Recap and other publications. My condolences to his daughter. And thank you, Van, for continuing Gag Recap.

GAG RECAP Editor Bill Keough RIP

Veteran newsman William T. Keough passed away at the age of 74 on Friday, December 17, 2010. The cause was complications of melanoma. He lived in Chalfont, PA.

Bill was the most recent editor of the GAG RECAP trade journal, a professional insider prozine aimed exclusively at gag cartoonists. He edited a number of other journals, including CARTOON OPPORTUNITIES.

GAG RECAP, which has traded hands several times since its inception over 50 years ago, lists gag cartoon markets and is aimed at the working freelance gag cartoonist. The publication, which was anywhere from 8 to 12 pages a month, staple-bound, on letter-size paper, detailed the contact information for each market, along with text descriptions of cartoons published.

The Philadelphia Daily News has an obituary here by John F. Morrison. An excerpt follows:

Bill Keough was born in Boston and grew up in Milton, Mass., where he went to high school. He graduated from Michigan State University School of Journalism in 1958.

He started his newspaper career on a paper in Wapakopneta, Ohio, then worked for the Lima News in Lima, Ohio, before moving East and getting a job on the Long Island Press.

He went from there to United Press International in the Newark, N.J., office, where he covered the riots.

He worked part-time on the copy desk of the Daily News.

... Bill joined the Bulletin in 1970 as a rewriteman and later started a column, "Bill Keough's City Beat."

"He loved the neighborhoods," his wife said. "He had a strong affinity for neighborhood projects and places. He helped raise money for sick kids. He would put their stories in his column and readers would respond. He was given a lot of silver loving bowls by people he had helped. He tried to do good."

But when the editors refused to run a column he had written in the early '80s during a gasoline shortage, advising people to save on gas by letting their cars coast, he quit.

"He was trying to be funny," his wife said, "but the editors said they couldn't run something like that. The subject was too serious."

Bill became editor of the South Philly Review and the Welcomat, and then went to work for a legal newsletter, Andrews News Litigation Reports, covering the courts and getting other news of interest to lawyers.

After learning the business, Bill started his own "Keough Inc.," which he ran until his final illness.

Services are private.

Contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society, 700 Horizon Circle, Suite 201, Chalfont PA 18914.


Above: a June 2008 GAG RECAP cover by veteran gag cartoonist Roy Delgado.

Related: WHAT ARE YOU NUTS? a collection of his GAG RECAP columns at Google Books.

My thanks to my friends Dan Danglo and Cynthia Lance.


I have heard through the grapevine that GAG RECAP is for sale. I have no further information at this time.

Another Market for Gag Cartoons Is Going Going Gone

Above: Bob Vojtko's poignant 2003 cover to the gag cartoonist industry mag Gag ReCap. 



There isn't an funeral service or formal news article. This will have to do.

The new issue of Reader's Digest is on the stands. And there are three cartoons in it. Not bad. One was originally published by The New Yorker magazine some years back. The cartoon was then bought by RD this year from the New Yorker's Cartoonbank. There is a cartoon from Cartoonstock, an online site full of cartoons to buy. The last appears to have been an original buy. So, only one cartoon may be unique to the Digest.

The Digest used to have its own cartoons. There were maybe four or six an issue. And there were also some special issues with more. But the cartoons are going. At least it looks like cartoons that are unique to the Digest are on their way out.

Bob Vojtko drew a cover the old Gag ReCap magazine of a cartoonist (who looks very much like Bob.) standing at the "Cartoon Submission Cemetery," look at tombstones with names of magazines that had stopped running cartoons, lamenting, "Good by old friend."

Good Housekeeping. First for Women. Chronicle of Higher Education. National Enquirer. They stopped running cartoons some time ago. Recently, I have heard that Harvard Business Review will stop. Barron's is "rethinking its cartoon policy." Every year I hear rumors that The New Yorker will stop too.

Like I said, there's not a ceremony to mark the passing of these cartoon markets. They just quietly go. It's the loss of an art form. So, I thought I would mark it here.

American Cartoonist 1951

Above: the August volume V, issue 1, 1951 issue of American Cartoonist. The scan is unclear, but the man on the cover is holding a slip of paper: "Sorry does not fit our present needs. The Editors."

Ahh. Those were the days. Even a mediocre cartoonist could get by. There were a lot of magazine markets. American Cartoonist, edited by L.T. Benson, was a trade publication for and by cartoonists.


Let's see what is happening with the markets! Jack Markow and Gurney Williams need gags!


And this back when $60 was real money.

American Cartoonist published cartoons as well. Here's a cartoon from the Marketplace pages by Ed Morgan:


After cleansing our palate with the above panel, let's delve back into the markets. Click to supersize:


No more stenographer on the boss's lap cartoons? Darn! Those are classics!

What about the boss chasing the secretary around the desk cartoons?

Collier's cartoon editor Gurney Williams even had a newsletter for his cartoonist contributors. It's excerpted in American Cartoonist:


And below is a "letter" from Hank Ketcham. 1951 was the first year of his Dennis the Menace panel:

These are a few of the highlights from this 55 year old issue. I thank Bob Weber (not the Bob "Slylock Fox" Weber or the Bob "New Yorker cartoonist" Weber, but the Bob "Moose & Molly" Weber") for copying this little gem for me.




Related: Wednesday: Cartoon Look Day

Also related: Seminal Cartoons at Eli Stein Cartoons

Final note: It was a wonderful time to be a cartoonist. Not like magazine cartooning today, huh? Below is the one and only Bob Vojtko's take on the declining publication industry from a 2003 cover of The Gag Recap trade magazine.

Sam Gross' Funeral

A print of the above Sam Gross cartoon was framed over a couch in the cartoonists' waiting room back when The New Yorker was in Times Square.

It was funny. Profane and funny. I think Sam would have approved. 

On the sunny morning of May 11th, well over a hundred friends and family of Sam Gross gathered for a funeral service. I came down to NYC to pay respects to his wife, his daughter Misha, and mark the occasion of this one-of-a-kind cartoonist's passing. 

Beforehand, I saw Michael Maslin and Liza Donnelly, and chatted with them. They are well. I saw a few other cartoonists I hadn't seen in a while: Warren Miller, who was in fine form, as well as my Brooklyn neighbor Nick Downes. Felipe Galindo and his wife were there too. Everyone chatted for a couple of minutes. I saw Steve Brodner and Pat Byrnes from across the room, but didn't get a chance to say hi in person. 

 While there has been video posted, I thought I would recap a few things in writing. 

After an opening statement by the Rabbi, we watched a segment from Funny People, a documentary on New Yorker cartoonists. We watched, of course, the Sam Gross section and got to see his studio and his massive collection of the cartoons he drew, all neatly filed away in a series of ring binders. 

Isabelle Gross was introduced and took the dais. She told the story of Sam and Isabelle, which starts in the late 50s. She had been dating Sam's roommate, and then they broke up. Sam called her after. "Just because you broke up with him doesn't mean we can't be friends," he said. She agreed, and they stayed friends and would set one or the other of them with dates. And then, one evening, at a party, Isabelle was by herself. She was on one side of a large room and Sam was at the other end. Next to Isabelle, a friend was quizzing her, asking those questions that a young, single woman in the 1950s gets asked. "So," says this girlfriend. "When you gonna get married?" Isabelle said she didn't know. But the questions didn't stop. "So, when you gonna get engaged?" And, from the other end of the room, came Sam's voice, loud and clear, "January!"

She was, she told us, angry at Sam. 

"What? I was enraged. He saw how mad I was." 

When Sam took her home, he asked, "What are you so mad about?"

"You never even asked me. You just took me for granted," she replied.

"And this is Sammy's gift. Sam can get out of any trouble. He has a gift for it. So, he said, 'But I never realized I could lose you. And once I realized that I could lose you, I knew I never wanted to.'

"Now ... can you really say no to that?

"I didn't. And we got married in 1959."

 

Sam's cousin spoke next. She was a kid when his very first book, "Cartoons for the G.I.," was published. It was, as she put it, a "risque" book that Sam had mailed to her mother (Sam's aunt), and put in a discrete place where she and her little sisters could not see it. Of course, kids being kids, they all quickly figured out where it was hidden and took turns sneaking it to the upstairs bathroom for serious perusal. She described one "forbidden cartoon:" a G.I. has introduced his new bride to his parents. One of the parents has lifted her arm and said, "Hmm. I see you married a European girl." 

She paused, and looking out at us, added, "Well, this gag remained a mystery to me for a long time. Years later, when I hit puberty, I learned European women go 'natural;' and do not shave under their arms." 

She admitted that this was not her favorite cartoon of Sam's, but it had stayed with her for many decades. 

Other speakers were Michelle Kurlander, who was a dear friend of the family (She even called Sam late at night one time after reading new New Yorker, asking him what one of his cartoons was all about.), Rick Meyerowitz (He is best known for his National Lampoon work, and his Animal House movie poster.), friends and fellow New Yorker cartoonists Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin. Here's Liza's favorite of Sam's:

 For me, there was a "what you see is what you get" aspect with Sam and that's a great aspect. He was honest, forthright and treated everyone as an equal. He was a no bullshit guy, and he was one of the funniest cartoonists who ever lived. He treated me with kindness and helped me with contract questions when I asked. He was always there, and now that he isn't, my solace is in those great memories and his one-of-a-kind cartoons.