BALTIMORE — Mike Ricigliano practices a nearly extinct newspaper art: he is a sports cartoonist, poking fun at sports figures with pen, paper and a gag writer’s shtick.
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Dying Art, Lost Occupation
How much longer he can earn a living doing what he loves — he barely gets by now — rests on finding new work to replace what he has lost. Last year was a brutal recession for him. The Los Angeles Times, The Buffalo News and USA Today Sports Weekly all dropped him for financial reasons.
He still draws a Sunday cartoon for The Baltimore Sun in a raw, busy style influenced by Sergio Aragonés, a Mad magazine artist, and Tom Toles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post. But he recently learned there was no money to keep him sketching the Orioles bird on The Sun’s front page in various poses after wins and losses.
“I haven’t lost confidence in myself,” he said in his small, cluttered house. “I’m just perplexed about which way to use my talents. I haven’t lost my voice in this town. It’s just not producing income.”
Ricigliano’s upstairs desk and basement drafting table are overwhelmed by the toys, dolls, pennants, hats, pens and Pez dispensers that have taken residence there. He has no filing system for his large archive and little space to work in, but there has not been much to do lately. He hopes that a Web site designed by one of his sons will attract business — even if he has to draw without pay for a while.
“I feel like I’m not doing my job if I don’t put cartoons out there,” said Ricigliano, 59, who was wearing an Orioles cap over his gray hair, a hoodie and faded jeans. “I’m out on a limb with no safety net.”
Drew Litton and Rob Tornoe — who are among the nation’s few remaining regularly published major daily newspaper sports cartoonists — are struggling less but still feel the pinch of an industry that no longer prizes them. There is more job security in being an editorial cartoonist and dipping into sports, as many do.
“Most editors, especially sports editors, are word people who don’t see the sports cartoon as a succinct form of journalism and a different way of covering sports,” said Tornoe, 34, whose sports cartoons appear in The Philadelphia Inquirer but who also draws editorial cartoons for various outlets.
Litton said: “It’s a part of America that’s dying away. I feel we’re losing a vital medium.”
It was easier for their predecessors, especially in the golden era from the 1930s to the 1960s.
They blended the skills of a caricaturist and the mind-set of a columnist. They were entertainers and ink-stained jokesters. They were newsroom denizens and deadline artists who churned out five or six cartoons a week that received prominent display. If they possessed power, it was that they drew players, owners and managers in ways that reporters could not with their words.
Sports cartoons were usually more amusing and informative than critical, which reflected the times when the sports section was the fun-and-games department.
Some cartoonists created indelible characters that engaged and comforted readers.
Who can forget the unshaven Brooklyn Bum, created in the 1930s by Willard Mullin of The New York World-Telegram, who connected with fans viscerally long after the Dodgers’ Bum days were over? Or Bill Gallo’s Basement Bertha, the Mets’ washerwoman fan, and his George Steinbrenner-like General von Steingrabber (with spiked helmet and exaggerated German accent) in The Daily News?
“They were kind of visual columnists,” said Larry Merchant, a former New York Post sports columnist who has an original Mullin cartoon of Casey Stengel hanging in his office in Santa Monica, Calif. “With the stroke of a pen, they animated the page, maybe in a way that even photographs could not.”
Mullin was the dean of newspaper sports cartoonists, a gifted draftsman and writer whose signature looked like blades of grass. He spent 33 years at The World-Telegram before it closed in 1966; his work also appeared in books; Life, Collier’s, and Time magazines; the covers of Mets yearbooks; and in advertisements.
His final cartoon for The World-Telegram (by then merged with The New York Sun) was a vivid illustration of the boxers Dick Tiger and Emile Griffith. He loved to draw boxers because “they’re completely basic; you don’t have to know what inning it is,” he told The New York Times in 1978.
Bob Staake, an artist whose Web site features a gallery of Mullin cartoons, said that Mullin had a “highly nuanced understanding of anatomy and sports, such as the way he drew a thigh guard on a running back in the ’50s.” He added, “He captured animation in a still image in an uncommon way.”
One of Mullin’s disciples, Charlie McGill, the former sports cartoonist for The Record in northern New Jersey, which is now based in Woodland Park, N.J., recalled a nugget of practical advice from Mullin: “Keep the Sears Roebuck catalog for research. Say you’re drawing a vacuum cleaner; it’s tough to make it up out of your head if you’re on deadline.”
There were others, of course: Leo O’Mealia, who preceded Gallo at The Daily News, and Bruce Stark, who was also at The News; Karl Hubenthal at The Los Angeles Examiner; John Pierotti of The New York Post and Thomas Paprocki of The New York Sun; Dick Dugan at The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Lou Darvas at The Cleveland Press; Jerry Dowling of The Cincinnati Enquirer; and Murray Olderman of the syndicated Newspaper Enterprise Association.
Long before the recent contraction in the newspaper industry, editors began to view sports cartoonists as vestiges of a bygone era and as budgetary luxuries.
“Sports cartooning is an antiquated form of commentary that hinged on tried-and-true tricks that are considered passé and corny,” Staake said.
McGill, who still draws The Record’s high school athlete of the week, remembered editors telling him to stop drawing his cartoons in 1974 because his work was old-fashioned and circulation was falling.
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