Stan Lynde’s CARTOONS & NOVELS
By Sue Hart |
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One of Stan Lynde's comic strips that ran Nationwide
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Stan Lynde enjoyed national prominence as a cartoonist from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. His “Rick O’Shay” strip garnered a huge fan base—and many of those early fans are now devoted readers of Lynde’s Merlin Fanshaw novels.
Lynde gives much of the credit for his success to his Montana upbringing and the principles and ideals that he learned as a child. “If ‘Rick O’Shay’ was successful in connecting with the hearts and minds of its readers”—and it was—“it was because I was able to be a spokesman for those principles and ideals. I had the soapbox and thanks to the power of syndication, reached some 15 million readers every day.”
If any of those readers were to see Lynde today in his high-crowned white cowboy hat and western-cut clothing, they might think he had just stepped out from one of his “Rick O’Shay” cartoon strips or off the pages of a Merlin Fanshaw novel. And that observation would not be far off the mark.
“I suppose I am a lot like my creations—or they’re a lot like me,” he says. “ I think even when a writer/cartoonist doesn’t deliberately do work that is overtly autobiographical, it turns out to be so anyway. The values and attitudes I grew up with, and those I later acquired, were bound to show up in my work.”
Referring to his best-known cartoon characters, he adds, “Rick was a boyish idealist and a warm-hearted extrovert who liked people and was liked by them in return. Hipshot, on the other hand, was a loner and an introvert who cultivated a cold, cynical demeanor designed to keep people at arm’s length. I’ve been told by people who know me well that, in their opinion, I am both Hipshot and Rick…depending on time, place, and circumstance.”
A Montana Boyhood
Lynde’s background includes a boyhood on a ranch near Lodge Grass, where he not only developed the skills and stamina needed for the often grueling work ranching requires, but was encouraged to explore his artistic abilities and love of literature by his mother, Ellie, whose memoir, Daylight in the Canyon, was published in 1993.
From an early age he loved both the books and the Denver Post cartoons his mother read to him. However, “I had no understanding of where those cartoons came from,” he says. Then, while still a preschooler, he learned that “people called ‘cartoonists’ were paid to do them,” and his first career path was determined. “I wanted to tell stories through cartoons.”
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Black and white cartoon
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“I’ve been a storyteller from my earliest years,” he says. “ My parents told me stories, and so did the cowboys I knew, so it was natural that I’d tell my own.”
There were ample opportunities for him to polish his skills as a ranch house raconteur. “I was the oldest of my siblings and my cousins,” he recalls, “and when the family gathered, I was the designated babysitter. To entertain the younger kids, I’d tell them stories.”
He found a wider audience during his school years when he drew cartoon strips in spiral notebooks—“when I should have been studying,” he jokes—and entertained his classmates by passing his work from hand to hand.
His fellow students appreciated his efforts to entertain them, but some of the teachers were not amused. “One of my male teachers confiscated a notebook that was making the rounds and tore it up and threw it away,” he says. “That night I drew a special installment for the story I’d been telling: my western hero beat up the teacher. The class loved it, and the teacher kind of gave up on making me see the error of my ways.”
Turning “Pro”
His first professional stint as a cartoonist came while he was serving with the U.S. Navy in Guam. “Our newspaper, The Marianas Mariner, lost its cartoonist,” he remembers, “and I was able to step in and supply a cartoon called “Ty Foon” for the next two years. It was a great place to learn my trade.”
When his Navy hitch was over in 1956, he returned to Montana and spent a summer on the family ranch helping his father, but the siren song of storytelling in one form or another lured him to Colorado Springs, where a weekly newspaper was expanding its offerings.
“I was a general reporter and illustrator for the paper, doing fashion drawings and the like,” he says—but no cartooning.
When he had saved what he thought was enough money—$300—he packed up his courage and his clothes and took a Greyhound bus to New York City. A Navy buddy, whose family was “a big friendly Irish clan” took him in—a lucky break, because he soon discovered that his meager stake wouldn’t last long in the big city.
He found a job as a typist at the Wall Street Journal and eventually worked his way up to reporter. And, using the GI Bill, he enrolled in night courses at the School of Visual Arts. “I was lucky,” he says. “All the instructors there were working artists, so they could give us ‘real world’ information and advice.”
By 1957, ready to take “Rick O’Shay” public, Lynde began offering the strip to various syndication groups. “It was rejected by 13 before the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News group accepted it.”
“Rick O’Shay” was introduced to readers of 30 or 40 papers on Sunday, April 27, 1958. By the time Lynde left the Tribune-News syndicate nearly 20 years later after a contract
dispute, “Rick O’Shay” was appearing in almost 100 newspapers around the country.
It was not an easy break-up for Lynde. “’Rick O’Shay’ was a highly personal creation,” he says, and in those days, the character and the strip belonged to the syndicate, not the cartoonist, a situation since remedied. When he and the Tribune-News group (which has evolved into Tribune Media Services, a division of Time-Warner) parted company, Rick stayed put.
“They hired two different artists and a writer who claimed to be an expert on the West to continue the strip,” Lynde remembers, adding wryly, “claiming to be an expert doesn’t make you one.”
Starting Over
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Cowboys are a focus of Stan's work
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The Field Newspaper Syndicate liked what they’d seen in “Rick O’Shay” and invited Lynde to create a new western-themed strip for them. For the next four years, he drew “Latigo.” In 1984, leaving the “storyline” type of cartoon strips he’d
been crafting for a quarter of a century, he introduced a new “stand-alone” series of single panel cartoons, “Grass Roots,” which appeared in many weekly papers.
“With the advent of so many television channels and other electronic diversions, newspaper readers weren’t following continuing storylines in cartoons the way they had for decades earlier,” he notes. “Instead, they were watching serial-type stories on TV.”
Perhaps in an effort to move some of those TV watchers out into the fresh air for a while, in 1989 Lynde helped launch the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive, which involved the trailing of many head of cattle from Roundup to Billings by volunteer riders and wagon masters who came from all over the state, the country, and the world to take part in the event. “The Drive was quite a draw,” he observes.
A New Way of Telling Stories
It was tragedy that moved Lynde from the world of cartooning to a different form of story telling. On December 23, 1990, Stan and Lynda Lynde’s home in Billings burned to the ground, destroying a lifetime of Stan’s artwork. For many people, such a devastating blow could also destroy the incentive to move ahead; instead, it challenged Lynde to tackle a different form of preserving stories and scenes of the West. Instead of drawing his popular comic strips or painting landscapes, he would tell his stories as novels.
After the fire, Stan and Lynda moved to the Flathead area, taking with them copies of their first foray into book publishing, Rick O’Shay, Hipshot, and Me. Those books, which Stan calls “part memoir, and ten complete stories from ‘Rick,’” survived the fire because they were stored in a detached garage. Fans of the cartoon characters Lynde had developed were delighted to have the opportunity to revisit their friends in the fictional community of Conniption, and several reprint volumes of the strips from first to last would follow.
After the success of his memoir, Lynda encouraged Stan to try his hand at a novel. In addition, Lynde’s “mentor, drill sergeant, and friend,” Whitefish novelist Larry Delaney, author of Blood Red Wine and The Triton Ultimatum, helped him get started as a novelist. And he was influenced by another friend, sculptor Malcolm Alexander, who told him “Most of us live too long to only do one thing for life.”
Stan Lynde, Novelist
His first novel, The Bodacious Kid, introduced readers to his title character, Merlin Fanshaw, in 1996 and created a new fan base for Lynde’s deft story-telling abilities. Careless Creek and other titles continued Fanshaw’s adventures. Summer Snow, the fifth of the Fanshaw stories, came out in October 2006.
He enjoys the “challenge of writing,” he says, and the rewards that come from having told a good story for “my readers, who have supported me because of the Montana values they’ve found in my work.”
Critics have found much to praise in those stories, too. Lynde has received an Independent Publishers’ “Best Fiction Award,” and was recognized as a Spur Finalist by the Western Writers of America in June of 2006.
“I have a good life,” he says.
And considering the amount of pleasure he has provided for his many fans through the years, that seems only fair.
Stan Lynde Publications
Cartoon Reprint & Graphic Novels
(Published by Cottonwood Publishing)
Rick O’Shay, Hipshot, and Me —a Memoir (Introduction by Charlton Heston)
Rick O’Shay and Hipshot, The Price of Fame, Books One and Two
A Month of Sundays–the Best of Rick O’Shay
(Introduction by Dorothy M. Johnson, o.p.)
Rick O’Shay, The Dailies: 1958
Rick O’Shay, The Dailies: 1959-60
Rick O’Shay, The Dailies: 1961-1962
Rick O’Shay, The Dailies: 1963-1964
Latigo, Book One: 1979-1980
Latigo, Book Two: 1980-1981
Latigo, Book Three: 1981-1983
Pardners: Books One and Two
Grassroots (1985 – Reprinted 1993)
Grassroots (2000)
Novels
The Bodacious Kid
Careless Creek
Vigilante Moon
Saving Miss Julie
Marshal of Medicine Lodge
Summer Snow
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