The art in Cartoon County is as lovingly reproduced as the anecdotes, showcasing the strips as well as the artists’ preliminary drawings, war sketches, and other pieces. The senior Murphy’s loose, expressive watercolors are particularly striking and a surprising contrast to the realistic renderings of his strips ... Murphy acknowledges that the Connecticut School was something of a bubble — nearly all-male, all-white, and largely insulated from the anti-war and civil rights movements that were challenging the country’s status quo. But he appreciates the artists’ bonds, bonds that extended to filling in for each other when illness or accident kept one of them from the drawing board. Most of all he relishes the father-son connection as they collaborated on Prince Valiant...The book is a testament to the strength of that partnership.
...[a] stylishly written and illustrated field guide to the American Cartoonist and his mid-century habitat ... Cullen Murphy has had other notable successes as an editor, essayist and author, all presumably head-clearing pursuits that give him a valuable perspective lacking in those of us who rarely come up for air. I was especially moved by his modest appraisal of the ultimate significance of our profession: 'Was it anything more noteworthy than bringing laughter (and adventure) to other human beings, while keeping the show on the road? What any civilization mostly needs is not the world-altering legacy of a few but the numberless people of talent who play a role … sustaining their contemporaries in the brief moment we have together.' In Murphy’s reckoning, cartoonists are no more or less indispensable to society than the dentists and adjusters they evidently resemble. They simply play their part. Still, Murphy obviously knows how lucky he’s been: There are worse places to work than Camelot.
This special community of midcentury print cartoonists, their lives and their contributions to American culture, get a witty, instructive and ultimately touching treatment in Cartoon County ... A particular joy is Cullen Murphy’s eye for detail. His elegant, immersive writing welcomes the reader into his father’s Cos Cob studio, a cluttered room like so many of his fellow cartoonists’ ... Fascinating, too, are the lessons in storytelling that the younger Murphy received directly from Hal Foster: how to build a narrative arc, the relationship between the pictures and words on the page, the power of the space between panels, the importance of character.
Cullen Murphy’s excellent Cartoon County is a history of a group of those artists, the ones established in the 1950s and 1960s, whose work didn’t so much break rules as make them familiar to the tens of millions of us who started our Sundays with a look at the four-color comics ...seriously charming, in the sense that it made me want to travel to the enchanted time and place that Murphy presents ...delivers deft insights into the cultural anthropology of this vanished society, from the microscopic...to the ritualistic...to the global ...a skilled observer, and his prose is supplemented by a jaw-dropping array of cartoons, sketches and photographs ... Largely left out are the affairs and the insurmountable family conflicts... He really makes you wish you were there. And with this book, just for a little bit, you are.
[Cullen Murphy’s] memoir provides sharp but loving observations of the tight-knit clan that shared a strong commitment to family, a love of golf, and ‘that early-’50s Clark Kent-ish look’ ... Nearly all the Connecticut School members are gone now, and newspaper comics, like newspapers themselves, are on the wane. Murphy’s paean to this bygone era and endangered art form make the reader keenly feel what’s been lost.”
The destination was Fairfield County, Connecticut, the main location of Cullen Murphy’s fantastic new book Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe ... In the pages of this book, and in its generous bounty of illustrations, the world of cartooning in the 1950s and ’60s is brought energetically to life, and its men and women laugh and sweat and hustle and goof off ...richly dramatized pictures of this strangely concentrated community...in its own way every bit as gripping an adventure as any of the cartoon adventures created by its many subjects. It recounts in lively detail the great heyday of the American cartooning industry and peoples.
As Murphy recounts in his new Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe, comic strips, so much a part of the fabric of the American scene in the last century, were in Fairfield County a family enterprise ...a loving, precise, and delightful portrait of a world Murphy was 'powerfully drawn to' as a child, though he knew 'even then that its days were numbered and that before long it would disappear.'
Part memoir, part cultural history, part treasure trove of drawings and photographs, many previously unpublished—and all thoroughly delightful as a celebration of the golden age of newspaper comics ... The book is also an elegy for the era before comics went online or morphed into graphic novels, when a popular strip seemed to capture the entire nation’s eyeballs. Fun to flip through; engrossing to read.
We learn a lot from Cullen Murphy about how cartoonists worked, plotted their stories, sharpened their pencils and polished their gags ... Murphy’s book is a visual record of a particular time and place. The world was done in by newspaper strikes, by changing technology, politics, and culture. But if you grew up, like I did, caught up in the stories of Sunday comics, you’ve passed hours in 'Cartoon Country.'
Cullen crafts an immensely evocative look at an art colony many don’t know existed. He writes with a personable mix of affection and realism that offers a vivid sense of what it was like to be in that crowd, and to be a working cartoonist in the decades following WWII. Particularly fascinating are the parts of the book on Cullen’s father’s experiences in the Army and on his father’s relationship with his mentor, Norman Rockwell.
