Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King is the latest volume from The Library of American Comics and IDW and is available for pre-order now. The Library of American Comics’ Creative Director and the book’s editor Dean Mullaney and Ohio State University Professor and Contributing Editor Jared Gardner, who provides the book’s introduction, recently spoke about the book with Westfield’s Roger Ash.

Westfield: For those who aren’t familiar with him, who was Otto Soglow?

Jared Gardner: Whenever I tell folks I am working on Otto Soglow, nine times out of ten I get a blank look in response. But when I follow up by mentioning The Little King or the hundreds of drawings that continue to illustrate every Talk of the Town article in The New Yorker decades after his death, there is always that look of recognition — one that extends beyond the specifics even of the King himself or any one of those drawings to the unique style of cartooning that Soglow perfected and passed on to countless descendants within the world of comics and illustration.

I think Soglow would not be unhappy with being infinitely less recognizable than his most famous creation. Throughout his career, after The Little King became a sensation and eventually the official logo of the most powerful comics syndicate in the world, Soglow enjoyed dressing up as his cartoon monarch for press junkets, charity events, and even parties with his friends. Like the Little King, Soglow was short, plump, and always up for a good party or a good joke. But the most important similarity between character and creator lay in their shared sense of wonder (at times bordering on horror) as to how on earth they found themselves in their respective roles. Even as Soglow would spend the rest of his life making the Little King perhaps the most immediately recognizable comic strip in America, he would retain the ambivalence about his remarkable career — an ambivalence that lay at the heart of his work’s power.

The Little King shows his flair for decorating.

Westfield: From the subtitle of the book, Otto Soglow and The Little King, it sounds like Cartoon Monarch is part biography and part comic strip collection. Is that correct?

Dean Mullaney: The book is primarily a strip collection because The Little King is undoubtedly Soglow’s main life’s work and we want to show as many examples as possible by such a master cartoonist. In order for us to fully appreciate the strip’s overall motif and the specific sub-themes Soglow keeps coming back to, however, it’s useful to understand his social, political, and artistic background. His earliest work was in the radical and socialist magazines that were published in the years following the Russian Revolution. What’s interesting is that a decade after being on the artistic barricades, as it were, he was drawing for the biggest capitalist of them all — William Randolph Hearst, who owned King Features, and drawing ads for Standard Oil. But it’s not as if he sold out…

Gardner: Not at all. Like his most famous creation, Soglow was a man whose origins and political sensibilities were always with the working man on the street — and even the angry mob. He began his career as a young, idealistic student of John Sloan at the Arts Student League in New York City. As Dean said, much of his art was for magazines like the Liberator and New Masses, committed, like Sloan himself, to the idea that art should always be put in the service of political change. Over time, internal fights within the Marxist community at the New Masses would lead Soglow to The New Yorker, which became a somewhat surprising refuge for many exiles from New Masses. And it was here the Little King — that reluctant monarch who, like Soglow himself, would rather be partying or rioting with the people than sitting stiffly upon his throne — first appeared.

The Little King is born out of the tension between Soglow’s political idealism and his professional ambitions.

It's the Law ran in The American Magazine.

Mullaney: And those ambitions served him well — The Little King ran for forty-plus years. But Soglow’s place in the cartoonist firmament runs deeper than a Sunday strip, no matter how popular it was. He was also instrumental in defining the “New Yorker-style” of modern, streamlined cartooning. He became one of the magazine’s regular cartoonists during in its formative years, and may be the only cartoonist still being published weekly more than thirty-five years after his death. His influence can also be seen among such avant garde cartoonists as Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Ivan Brunetti, and others.

A King Features model sheet used for licensing.

Westfield: What can you tell us about the comic strip, The Little King? Are there other recurring characters aside from the King?

Gardner: There are very few recurring characters in The Little King, aside from our cartoon monarch himself. The queen appears fairly often, and there are some recurring rivals from neighboring states alternately looking to invade or to play poker. But aside from one regular, Ookle the Dictator, in the early 1940s, this is a strip without a defined supporting cast. Everyone here is interchangeable (Ookle himself will show up later in minor roles as far from Dictator as can be imagined). And even the King himself seems to have stumbled into his post somewhat by accident, as we discover at the end of The Ambassador.

Westfield: Cartoon Monarch also collects all of Soglow’s The Ambassador comic. What can you tell us about that?

Gardner: When Hearst swiped The Little King from The New Yorker, there were still some months left on Soglow’s contract to produce the strip for the magazine. So while waiting for the King’s release, Soglow created another strip for Hearst called The Ambassador. With the exception of a couple of minor details (title, clothes), the Ambassador was in every way identical to the King, and on the last day of The Ambassador before beginning The Little King in the papers Soglow had a giant windstorm blow up during a public event that resulted in the King’s crown finding its way onto the Ambassador’s head. Since we had already seen the Ambassador mooning over the Queen, is there any reason why we might not believe that he simply kept the crown in place and moved into the palace (and the Queen’s bed)? If so, no one seems to have noticed or cared — after all, he is a king even Americans could embrace: fat, feckless, and big-hearted beyond measure. Long may he reign!

The Little King keeps up appearances.

Westfield: If this book does well, would you like to do more Little King books?

Mullaney: In researching Cartoon Monarch, we read around 2,000 Sunday pages. Let’s be honest, over forty years there’s going to be a certain amount of repetition, so we chose what we felt are the best strips from all periods of his career, and that cover each of his major themes. I’m particularly partial to his ’50s and ’60s Sundays. You’d think that by then he would have been bored and perhaps phoned it in, but his gags are fantastic, and he had so perfected that confident, simple linework… I like them better than his earlier pages!

Cartoon Monarch is designed to be a definitive, single volume compendium of Soglow’s best work. By devoting 432 pages to Soglow’s career, I believe readers will get a well-rounded, extensive look at his cartoons and will learn a great deal from Jared’s biographical introduction.

Westfield: Any closing comments?

Mullaney: I’m convinced that when younger cartoonists see the hundreds of examples of Soglow’s brilliant cartooning in this book, we’re going to see an entirely new round of Soglow influence. I’m looking forward to it!

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Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King