School Days: Richard Sala, Cartoonist

An excerpt from the Richard Sala interview with Darcy Sullivan in The Comics Journal #208, November 1998.

Sullivan: Were you doing illustrations during this period?

Sala: Yeah. When I was at ASU, a friend of mine was president of the Cultural Affairs Board. One good thing about small scenes like Tempe is when you go to the weird little art shows, movies, or parties, you keep running into the same handful of people and eventually get to know each other. This is right before the years that punk really hit, in the late ’70s, and it was certainly before it hit Arizona. We were sort of proto-punks, and we founded this thing called Art Brut Graphics — we didn’t really found it, we just named it that. We did all the posters and movie schedules and stuff for the Cultural Affairs Board. Mostly my stuff would appear in the State Press, which was the newspaper for ASU. I started doing work for some of the local weeklies as well. The people at The New Times in Phoenix are my heroes. The New Times gets a bad rap these days because they’re a chain alternative newspaper. But I was there when those guys were starting, and to be an alternative newspaper in Phoenix in the ’70s was like putting a target on your back.

The president of the Cultural Affairs Board (CAB) was Charles Emerson. The CAB was a student-run organization located on campus in the Memorial Union (MU). Also at the MU was a graphic design studio run by Ron Clark. For a couple of years, 1976 and 1977, I worked at there and met Emerson who was looking for someone to design posters for the film series at Neeb Hall.

I moved to New York in October 1977 and was still involved doing posters for Emerson. I did this with assistance from my friends at ASU. I mailed layouts with directions to Tom Chung. Rusty Falk, Peter Fasolino, Sonja Zelen and many others did the illustrations. It was Chung who introduced Sala to me when I visited friends in Tempe and at ASU in early 1978. Chung and Sala were classmates in the illustration class.

In the summer of 1978, Emersion sent the list of films, for August 25 to October 1, to me and Chung. Films were assigned to various people including Sala and his girlfriend, Debby Spector. Below is Sala’s July 15, 1978 letter to me.

I wrote back and mentioned masks. Very quickly the eighteen illustrations were finished, photostatted, and pasted down. Type was set and arranged accordingly. I contributed the logo. Below are both sides of the poster.

Art and design credits were at the bottom of the poster. Most of the artists used pseudonyms. Hilario Placenta was Emerson. Richard “Black Death” Sala did the art for the August 25 and 26 films Suspiria, Captive Wild Women, Night of the Living Dead and Island of Dr. Moreau. The art for The Goodbye Girl, August 31 to September 1, was by Debby “Art Rap” Spector.

 

 Below are both sides of the poster with numbers identifying the artists. Sala and Spector’s credits were switched.

The next poster, October–November, was produced by Emerson, Spector, Sala and a few others. Art Brut Graphics made its first appearance.

Below is the November–December 1978 poster.

I don’t know how many film posters Sala did.

In December 1979 I received a postcard announcing Sala and Spector’s “Viewmasters” exhibition at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, December 5–31, 1979. Unfortunately I missed it.

But I was fortunate to have glimpsed the emerging talent of Richard Sala.

Further Reading and Viewing

The Comics Journal #161, August 1993, Sala’s sketchbook

The Comics Journal, Richard Sala 1955–2020

eBay, set of three Neeb Hall film posters from Sala’s estate

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Rich Chidlaw, Cartoonist

(Next post on Monday: Ho, Ho, Ho!)

School Days: Rich Chidlaw, Cartoonist

I was an early 1970s fine arts major at Arizona State University and met other students interested in comics. Rich Chidlaw lived on the first floor of Best Hall B dormitory; I was on the second floor. Best Hall consisted of three buildings (A, B and C) on the ASU campus and located across the street from the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Gammage Auditorium. Rich contributed cartoons to the student paper, State Press. After ASU, he did comics and animation; he is in a group photo here. Below is his sketch of Barbarella. Chidlaw passed away October 3, 2023. Camelback High School, In Memory

 

Rocket’s Blast Comicollector #74, 1970; advertisement for Ryle Smith and Chidlaw’s Bedlam Magazine

 

(Next post on Monday: Richard Sala, Cartoonist)

Comics: Ed McLean, Letterer, Freelance Writer and Copywriter

Edward Leroy “Ed” McLean was born on December 5, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois according to his post-World War II draft card which had his full name. His parents were James H. McLean and Beatrice E. Davis who married on June 24, 1920 in Chicago.

The 1930 United States Census counted McLean (line 17), his parents and three older siblings, Margaret, Beatrice and Thomas, in Chicago at 5121 Justine Street. His father was chauffeur at a furniture storage company.

In the 1940 census, McLean (line 38) had two younger siblings, Douglas and Ursula. The family of eight were Chicago residents at 5724 South Racine Avenue.

The same address was on McLean’s draft card which he signed on May 20, 1946. His veteran’s file said he had enlisted in the Navy on November 20, 1945 and honorably discharged on May 15, 1946. McLean was described as five feet seven inches, 130 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair.

McLean was not counted at Chicago with his parents in the 1950 census. There was a newspaper cartoonist with the same name (line 20) in New York City at 463 West 19th Street.

Although his birth year, 1925, and birth state, New York, differ, I believe it was McLean because of Jules Feiffer’s 2010 autobiography, Backing Into Forward: A Memoir. Feiffer devoted a chapter titled, Ed, on McLean who was lettering at Wally Wood’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The book included a 1948 photograph of McLean.

... Woody introduced me to one of his studio mates, a lettering man named Ed McLean ...

... We met on my first visit to Woody’s studio, a long room that deepened and darkened as your eyes failed to get used to it. Artists and writers sat like galley slaves at desks and drawing tables jammed close enough together to constitute a single piece of furniture, an intimidating world of cluttered comic pages and pounding typewriters, dingy and roach-rich. The no-frills ferocity of the place was intoxicating. ...

... Ed was short and stocky, a big head with thin red hair, built like an Irish workingman, not a writer. ...

... Ed was from the South Side of Chicago, Studs Lonigan territory, and like Farrell’s hero and Farrell himself, he stemmed from Irish Catholic working-class roots. When we met in Woody’s studio, he had been in New York for six months, on the lam from faith and family. Ed was an itinerant. ...

There are no entries for McLean at the Grand Comics Database and Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928–1999. Information about his art training has not been found. McLean may have met Wood at Burne Hogarth’s Cartoonists and Illustrators School. A class photograph is here.

In 1957, McLean and Ylavaune Wiley obtained, in Manhattan, marriage license number 9447. Their May 16 wedding was reported in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, May 20, 1957. Feiffer was one of the attendants. Ylavaune was the research librarian for the Radio Advertising Bureau, Inc. McLean was a freelance writer.

Soon, McLean found work as a copywriter. His acclaimed talents and skills were described in obituaries and remembrances at Chief Marketer, September 7, 2005 Direct Marketing News, September 7, 2005 and Target Marketing, December 1, 2005. A photograph of McLean is at Denny Hatch’s Free Direct Marketing Blog.

McLean passed away on August 13, 2005 in Ghent, New York. Six months later, his wife died on February 23, 2006.

 

Further Reading
Potrzebie

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(Next post on Monday: Rich Chidlaw, Cartoonist)