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Mugwump. Webster always wanted and meant to be a political cartoonist. He shifted to such relatively universal phenomena as a boy's fondness for a dog, or a wife's inability to be gracious when her husband wants a stag vacation, because they syndicated more easily, raised fewer quarrels (of a sort that involved furious letters-to-the-editor) and made more money than cartoons which took a strong stand on the tariff. As for taking a weak stand on the tariff, or on any other political issue, that was for Webster out of the question. Good political cartoons have to be simple, and the only sure way to be simple, without also being vapid, is to be very firm in your convictions. Webster calls himself a Mugwump, but the mug and wump usually lean over the conservative side of the fence, as is perhaps natural in a man who spent his most formative years, very happily, in much the sort of pre-industrial American background which had produced his gods, Lincoln and Mark Twain.
Now Webster dips his pen only rarely into politics. For Lincoln's Birthday 1940, Webster drew a forlorn, storm-whipped, benighted, wilderness cabin, a light in its window like the fever of birth. The caption: Ill-Fed—Ill-Clothed—Ill-Housed. During the war he drew a cartoon showing soldiers, under fire in the Pacific, listening to a radio's soapy-voiced report on the progress of a strike. But mostly he is content to give the U.S. newspaper public a much needed, and not too loaded, laugh for its three or five cents' worth.
Moldy Homiletics. Comedy is about as inconspicuous an item in so-called comic strips today as drugs in drugstores. Krazy Kat died with its creator, the late George Herrimann. The Gumps, which in the days of the late Sidney Smith had a modest resemblance to middle-class U.S. life, has little now. Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, never any too real or too funny, has sunk so deep into moldy homiletics that it is now trying to make Tory a nice word by proving that only rabble revolted in 1776. Fantasy, outside of Crockett Johnson's Barnaby and Al Capp's Li'l Abner, is so fouled up in gamma rays, cloaks of invisibility, space ships, and brutal omnipotence, that it has little time for fantasy's ancient, essential job of fusing the creatures of earth and heaven. The best of the rest, like Chester Gould's resourceful, bloodthirsty Dick Tracy, are like entertaining gangster movies that no one would confuse with truth or comedy, or—like Milton Caniff's extraordinarily proficient and accurate Terry and the Pirates—rattling good straight adventure strips.