Match to Flame 229

The Process

I made the quip at a lunch with King Features executives in the Palm restaurant in New York City. I meant it as a joke, never realizing until sometime later how honest an answer it actually was, and that, as it turned out, I apparently wasn’t joking at all. Maybe it was the fact that I said it in the Palm that brought it so powerfully to life. Please permit me a brief digression to underline that last point.

Walking into the Palm restaurant was akin to entering a time machine. Almost every square inch of its walls was festooned with smoke-tinted cartoon sketches and characters drawn by popular and renowned cartoonists dating back to the 1920s. The comic strip characters on those hallowed halls ranged from the biggest to the lesser stars in the cartoon firmament. Modesty, almost but not quite, keeps me from mentioning that even yours truly had a sketch of Funky tucked in a small corner of one of those sacred partitions, a sketch in which I had anointed the restaurant as “The Funkiest Palm in New York.” It’s a little difficult to see the awkwardly fixed error in the photo presented here, but, true to form, I managed to misspell the word “new” when I was writing it (I can almost picture the knowing smile of recognition on my longsuffering editor’s face as she reads this). The ideas and drawings portrayed on those walls were bawdy, gaudy, sophomoric, and utterly fascinating. You can have your Bayeux Tapestries and Book of Kells, and even the venerated stores of the Met thirty blocks uptown; I’ll take the walls of the Palm any and every day of the week. The Palm’s origin from a speakeasy to a cartoonist hangout was due in no small measure to the presence of the King Features offices a few blocks away, which was how I initially made its acquaintance. The first time I walked into the Palm with my wife Cathy, we were introduced to the legendary Milt Caniff and his wife as they were having lunch. Something like that tends to make an impression. But while the Palm was special, there was a particularly endearing spot inside that was the most special of all. Within that venerable cartoonist clubhouse, there were, at the end of the bar on a wide dark-brown wooden door frame next to the kitchen, some drawings that few paid any notice to. A sacred site where two artists had made tiny sketches of their characters in black ink. Comprising a remarkable club within a club, Milt Caniff had sketched Steve Canyon, and Hal Foster had drawn his masterful Prince Valiant. Cartoon voodoo on another plane.

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 15