BRIAN M. KANE: I want to talk about your comics work for a bit. With Big Ben Bolt, you were approached by Elliott Caplin to do the art after he'd seen a Collier's prizefight illustration you'd done of Willie Pep fighting Sandy Saddler for the featherweight championship. What made you decide to do comics instead of strictly illustration work or portrait painting?

JOHN CULLEN MURPHY: I saw that most of the advertising dollars were being pulled from magazines and going into television. The strip work was steady income.

KANE: Bolt was an obvious response to Joe Palooka, but did Caplin ever say if he took Ben Bolt's name from the 1843 poem by Thomas Dunn English?

MURPHY: I never really thought about Joe Palooka before, but Al Capp was always fighting with Ham Fisher since the days he'd worked at Fisher's studio. I just thought he got the name from the song "Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt."

KANE: That's English's poem set to music.

MURPHY: Well, there you go; it comes full circle. Elliott liked it because it was alliterative.

KANE: Fanny Young Cory also did a single panel cartoon called Ben Bolt starting in 1916. Did you ever see any of those?

MURPHY: No, I never did.

KANE: Bolt was the next-to-the-last strip accepted by William Randolph Hearst for King Features. [Beetle Bailey was the last.] Did you ever discuss the strip with Hearst?

MURPHY: I never met him, but I did meet Junior [Hearst's son], though we never talked about the strip.

KANE: Did anyone model for Ben Bolt?

MURPHY: There was a model in the studio by the name of Mike Garrett who later went into the movies. I also used Willie Stribling -- he was a pro boxer at the time. Later on, I used Bob Mathias.

KANE: Mathias was the only man to win back-to-back Olympic decathlons. Great choice.

MURPHY: They all had a clean-cut look to them.

KANE: You mentioned a studio -- did you work for or with someone back then?

MURPHY: No. I always worked alone, in my own studio.

KANE: Did you follow any of the daily strips before working in the field?

MURPHY: I spent six years in the army so I naturally liked Caniff's work on Steve Canyon. I didn't follow that many strips though I liked Terry and the Pirates and Prince Valiant. I also used to like Little Orphan Annie. [Laughter.]

KANE: Did you ever talk about your work on Big Ben Bolt or Prince Valiant with Norman Rockwell?

MURPHY: No, I actually didn't talk with him much in those days.

KANE: Alex Raymond's brother George was your assistant on Bolt for a while. What did he do on the strip?

MURPHY: George did layouts, lettering and research for me for 15 years. When I was growing up in New Rochelle, the Raymonds lived only a block away. Their brother Jim, who eventually went on to draw Blondie for Chic Young, was a southpaw and was the pitcher on the high-school baseball team. I didn't make the cut.

KANE: Did anyone else help you with Bolt?

MURPHY: Al Williamson, Frank Giacoia, Gray Morrow and Angelo Torres all filled in for a strip or two. I never met him, but Al had Carlos Garzón help him with the dailies. Stan Drake, Al Scully and Tex Blaisdell did two weeks when I had pneumonia once, and Alex Kotzky, who drew Apartment 3G, helped me out when I was trying to get ahead a little to go on vacation.

KANE: When you do black-and-white illustration, do you have a favorite type of nib or ink?

MURPHY: I use a Gillott 303, which are hard to come by these days. My daughter Cait, who lives in New York, gets them for me. I like to use Dr. Martin's waterproof ink, which I thin down with water so it doesn't clog the pen.

KANE: How do you approach black-and-white illustration? What do you consider first when laying out a panel or a page?

MURPHY: I look for the drama in the panel. It's like being a stage director. You're competing for the reader's attention so you need to get in some good blacks -- some high contrast.

KANE: What would you say is your trademark? If someone looked at a John Cullen Murphy pen-and-ink piece, how would they know immediately that it's yours?

MURPHY: I would hope it to be that the drawing's all there -- the figures, the hands, the faces, the emotions. Characterization is very important. When I was doing Ben Bolt, it was important to make the word balloons unobtrusive. The lettering didn't interfere with the art. Today, I see balloons that are cutting off part of a head.

KANE: What's the hardest part of working on the strips?

MURPHY: Interruptions. Distractions. Phone calls. I'm inking as we're talking.

KANE: In 1964, you moved to Dublin, Ireland for two years. What prompted that move?

MURPHY: It was just for the fun of it. Joan and I wanted the kids to know what it was like living up in another country. We'd thought of Spain, but we stayed with one where the main language was English.

KANE: Plus you're Irish.

MURPHY: Yes.

KANE: Was it hard meeting deadlines and corresponding across the ocean in those days?

MURPHY: No, except for the time when the strips got lost in the mail. It was the only time I didn't have Photostats made. I called up Al Williamson and he redid them for me.

KANE: I'd like to ask you about what you thought of the artwork of some of the other artists who were working in the field back then. How about Milton Caniff?

MURPHY: I was a great admirer of his. His work was strong. He was a wonderful storyteller -- it was the perfect combination of story and art. I loved his Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. He was a nice person too -- always willing to help.

KANE: Noel Sickles?

MURPHY: I admired his art too -- he was a master at just drawing. He developed a style similar to Robert Fawcett.

KANE: Al Capp?

MURPHY: [Laughter.] I almost went to work for Al back in '67. I was supposed to go to Boston three days a week, but he hired Bob Lubbers instead. He was irascible, contentious, a genius with characterization.

KANE: Frank Godwin?

MURPHY: He was one of the old masters of pen and ink. His work on Rusty Riley was terrific. He was a fine illustrator.

KANE: John Prentice?

MURPHY: Finding someone to take over Rip Kirby after Alex's death was hard, but he did a beautiful job.

KANE: Al Williamson?

MURPHY: He was a true student of Alex Raymond. I liked his work very much.

KANE: Stan Drake?

MURPHY: He was one of the most facile, talented artists around. To think that he could work on something like The Heart of Juliet Jones and then turn around and do Blondie... wonderful stuff.

KANE: Alex Raymond?

MURPHY: He was a good friend. I think his best work was in the late '30s -- afterwards he tightened up a bit. He had it all -- impeccable drawing, great imagination, and all done in brush. He based his style on Matt Clark's Western art. There were two brothers, Matt and Benton Clark, who did some nice work. Benton was a painter and Matt did Westerns in mainly dry brush. He based his style on the works of Frank Hoffman. Matt Dillon, the actor, is Alex's grandnephew. He's the grandson of Alex's sister Beatrice.

KANE: OK, this may be a hard question but since you were so close to the Raymonds, how were you affected by Alex's death?

MURPHY: It was a shock. Mort Walker called me, and I had to convey the news to George [Raymond]. Very sad. Alex loved sports cars. He made the mistake of driving Stan's car when the roads were still wet. Stan was hurt pretty bad.

KANE: Did you ever talk to Drake about it?

MURPHY: I went to see him in the hospital. He was a mess. We talked about it then, but we never discussed it afterwards.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #253.]

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