Lowell Hoppes
High Hopes, Lowell Hoppes
Babes galore! Laffs. Funzapoppin! So barked many a mid-century cover headline that featured a Lowell Hoppes cartoon within. Stacked secretaries, unscrupulous businessmen, horny neighbors, and money hungry entertainers populated a world of urban office environments and bachelor pads. Hoppes portrayed the sexism of the 1950s in a wildly appealing manner that stands above par. His work is mysterious in that while it appears to be that of a lifelong career cartoonist, the material has never been collected in book form or written about, at least not in his lifetime. Those who appeared in the same periodicals that he did would go on to author children’s picture books or become famous comic book artists or strip creators. Hoppes, for better or for worse, stuck with the black and white single panel format. The heroes of his youth gave him high aspirations for the profession. But were his hopes high enough? As a collector, these are all the obscure remaining pieces I’ve been able to string together.
Who were the influences of a young Lowell Hoppes, born in a small town south of Cleveland in 1913? If you were born in 1910 you probably grew up reading newspaper strips like E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre following the adventures of a macho crumbum hero named Popeye. Most likely you were also attuned to household magazines like Life, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. These oversized editions were entertainment fixtures in pre-television America that published cartoons alongside lavishly painted illustrations and some of the best writers of the day. These slicks of the 1920s brought about the rise of cartoonist celebrities that included the likes of John Held Jr., Rube Goldberg and other screwballs like Milt Gross.
Not long after, it became the world in which a young Walt Disney was just beginning to stake his claim. It was also a time, on the brink of the Great Depression, where yet another ink slinger, Ralph Barton, committed suicide shortly before his 40th birthday. The former’s star rose in the burgeoning field of animation. The latter, a star of print, was vanquished of all celebrity. In between the gloss of commercial entertainment and the obscurity of the eloquently refined line—new marks in-between were forming.
Hoppes’ contemporaries included Syd Hoff, the creator of Danny and the Dinosaur as well as Ted Key, creator of Hazel. Hoff was from the Bronx, and Key form Fresno, California. Hoppes knew neither, although a passion for cartooning makes him inadvertently part of a group originally set out to leave their own creatively drawn lines in the printed world of humor. For an ambitious young man, the artist who specialized in magazine cartooning appeared to have the most freedom. At a time when the country was at its wits end, having something unique to sell was foremost.
The gag cartoon was a classic spec product because it’s idiosyncratic. When it appeared in a publication, it did not illustrate copy or merely decorate a page. Instead, its intention was as a small self-contained feature that marked the signature of the artist. In the 1930’s, the burgeoning field was on the rise, embracing a variety of adult-themed topics in magazines such as The New Yorker and Esquire, even before the invention of the comic book. Other magazines, specifically dedicated to gag cartoons also, for a brief period, gained prominence on the newsstand including Cartoon Humor and Judge. If you were one of the lucky ones, your cartoon took up the real estate of an entire page, in washes – or even color– making a huge impact (and even larger paycheck).
The way it worked was that cartoonists typically submitted around 8 to 15 sketches of rough cartoons on typing paper. These were mailed in a manila envelope to said publication. Once accepted by an editor via mail, they would then further develop the style of those top guffaw grabbers. Often this would entail a process of redrawing on a light table. In the 1950’s, finished artwork was often large: on a 10” X 13” thick Bristol paper in black and white ink brushwork. The back of the board was often rubberstamped and dated with his name and personal address. The editor would then in-turn stamp the artwork PAID once it was complete. Cartoonists were paid in the $10 - $100 range. Captions below the images were handwritten or pasted on via a typewriter as they’d later be converted into a font by a typesetter.
Lowell Hoppes enlisted in the army at age 30, in 1940. On his draft card, he lists himself as a magazine cartoonist, place of employment: home. At this point, Hoppes still resided in his birth town of Alliance, Ohio and was married to Lucille, who remained his wife for the next 50 years or so. It’s unclear where Hoppes’ work was appearing prior to 1940 but most likely it was limited to newspapers within Ohio. However, it was at this time, that numerous digest-sized publications, mostly aimed at soldiers serving in World War II, sprung up with titles like Army & Navy Fun Parade. Printed cheaply on pulp paper, these magazines, made specifically for men, often featured ribald humor and risqué situations told in a humorous fashion. Al Ross was the most prolific in this particular arena. Later, Bill Wenzel would take up that throne. Certainly Hoppes was submitting to these periodicals as the “battle of the sexes” provided welcome distraction to him from the actual war. His work began appearing in Hello Buddies magazine, an early publication of Harvey comics prior to their licensing Sad Sack and other kid-friendly characters. Unlike most of the other contributors, his work never proved popular enough to grace the cover and therefore it is rare to find examples of his work in color.
After the war, Hoppes lived for a time in Pennsylvania. The 1950s saw his work developing as he continued to employ a varied brush line and style that combined sexiness and humor. The female forms he delivers become exaggerated in the bust. All the while, they maintain a coyness and often sport a peek-a-boo hairstyle à la Veronica Lake. While these sex-symbols are the victims of his lecherous male characters, they are also poised, self-aware and ready to exploit the males to their advantage. In fact, Hoppes’ draws most of his male characters in a Popeye-influenced manner: rubbery, big-nosed and ugly. In opposition, his women always seem to have an air of sophistication, taking the ball from Ernie Bushmiller’s Fritzi Ritz character and infusing it with a sex drive. Roy Crane’s Sultry from his comic strip Buz Sawyer most likely also made an impression on Lowell. Button nosed and tiny-wasted, with hair rendered like no other, it’s obvious Hoppes was an artist who loved women.
While the majority of his output has been lost to time, the salvageable pieces published herein originally appeared in the Humorama line of digest magazines. Humorama was a division of Martin Goodman’s publishing firm, which was associated with Marvel Comics. It was a family business and the Humorama line was mostly run by Abe Goodman. (Martin would later appoint his wife’s cousin, Stan Lee to become an editor –and the rest is well-documented history). With titles like Breezy, Joker and Fun House, the Humorama books were a winning-combination. The cheaply printed publications had duotone newsprint covers. They featured voluptuous photos of pin-up queens such as Eve Meyer, June Wilkinson and Julie Newmar alongside cartoons by Bill Ward, Vic Martin, or Lou Magila, who combined the two in a collage technique. The one picture a page format was distinctively different than a comic book and the separation was intentional. This was material strictly for an adult audience meant to compete with Playboy magazine.
Hoppes’ early 1960s work was his pinnacle. It is therein that the situations are distinctively representational of mid-century America. Mod furniture adorns his interiors of strip clubs, swank flats, and executive suites. Men are more focused on groping than the work at hand. Women are all too aware of their beauty and their power to manipulate. It’s a world full of abandon and absurdity.
By the late 1960’s men’s magazines no longer faced censorship restrictions and became pornography. The Humorama line transitioned into mostly reprints, garishly laid out in a larger format. In this manner they were distributed to an alternative market of adults-only magazines that was overflowing with hippy era material. Eventually these died out while most mainstream magazines, besides The New Yorker and Playboy, no longer contained cartoons. Many of the artists who profited from Humorama would lend their talents to parody magazines such as Mad and Cracked. Two others, Dan DeCarlo and Stan Goldberg would define the style of Betty and Veronica at Archie Comics. Don Orehek would divide his time between making cartoons for both kids’ joke books and the XXX rags. Post 1965, the market was already dwindling and it was more common that sketches were used as the finished products. Gag artists drew smaller, and on cheaper paper in a more minimal style, to cut down costs, as the cartooning business became less profitable. Sex to Sexty, a Texas based humor magazine, became a last vestige for smutty humor in cartoon form. It ran from 1964 to 1983 and Humorama artists like Charles Dennis, Pete Wyma and Earl Engleman continued to collect paychecks. Hoppes also contributed, but the material seemed less inspired and more slapstick than his work of the prior decade, often drawn on scraps of paper dashed off in pen, rather than brush.
Hoppes would eventually move away from the adult material. He was getting older. He had grandchildren. By the late 1950’s he had moved to Sarasota, Florida. His younger sister died in 1965. His mother passed in 1972. Hoppes was restless, in need of a change. He contributed gentler material that was published in Parade Magazine, Saturday Review and–believe it or not–an early feminist publication: New Woman. To top it off, he also made some kid-friendly gags for Highlights for Children, and Three-Four, a church publication. The material, focused on family life, was not too far off from Bil Keane’s Family Circus...even though just a few years prior his work mostly consisted of people screwing.
Lowell died on November 20, 2002 in South Carolina. He was 89 years old.