To support President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election campaign, Syd Hoff, Crockett Johnson, Lynd Ward, Hugo Gellert, William Gropper, and fourteen other artists illustrated this booklet. The text is FDR’s speech made before the Teamsters Union on September 23rd, 1944 – also known as the “Fala speech,” since it features his dog, Fala. Here is…
An update. Shortly after yesterday’s blog post, my editor said I could go ahead and send it all in. This means either that he (or someone else) will now seek places to cut or that it’s moving ahead to the copy-editing stage. Either way, it’s off my desk until [unknown date]! With a mixture of…
On Monday, I finished the eighth edit of The Purple Crayon and a Hole to Dig: The Lives of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, and sent it to my editor. I’m really happy with all of the edits I’ve made. I finally understand his advice, and have cut anything that feels purely “completist,” and focused…
The good news. I’m making progress, and – currently up to Chapter 20 (of 28) – have cut far more (already) than I did on the last round of revisions. I have a clearer sense of The Purple Crayon and a Hole to Dig: The Lives of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (UP Mississippi, June 2012)….
If the Drying-Paint Watchers’ Association has a website, they’re about to face some competition! I’m publishing more cuts from the biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (due out from UP Mississippi next year). Â Today, we’ll look at some of the notes I’ve omitted. Â I’ve also been making cuts to the body of the manuscript,…
A Crockett Johnson–Ruth Krauss biography update with good news, thanks, and apologies. Â Let’s do the apologies first. Apologies. Â It was unprofessional of me to air this disagreement publicly. Â It’s one thing to blog about the editing process, and another to air one’s editorial differences in a public forum. Â I’ve already apologized to my editor (who…
I haven’t blogged about the biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss for a while because I’ve been waiting. Â I sent in the latest version of the manuscript back on the first of the year; my editor finally read it in late March, and sent it out to a reader. Â I received the reader’s report…
69 years ago today, the first daily strip of Crockett Johnson‘s Barnaby ran in the newspaper PM. Â One year from today, Fantagraphics will begin reprinting Barnaby in full (co-edited by me and Eric Reynolds) – and the University Press of Mississippi will publish my biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. Â In anticipation of both…
As a follow-up to Saturday’s post (featuring Crockett Johnson’s Little Man with the Eyes strip), here are a few more of Johnson‘s Little Man comics, starting with one for April Fools Day, 1941. I was pleased to see Mark Newgarden share the original post on Facebook because — as I was writing the original post —…
He’s famous for Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) and the comic strip Barnaby (1942-1952), but Crockett Johnson wrote an earlier strip – one that was popular enough to feature in a series of Ford advertisements in the late 1940s.  Popularly known as The Little Man with the Eyes, Johnson’s strip ran in Collier’s from March…
