Johnny Hart on meeting Brant Parker

HART: I met Brant when I was in high school. Brant was another working of God, as you know how these things work; I've got to tell you this? Like you didn't know? Brant was from California and he was in the Navy and he met his wife, who was from Endicott. He met her out there... they met, fell in love and when he got out of the Navy he came back here to live with her. That brought Brant to town.
He went to work for the Binghamton Press up here as an artist, cartoonist, photo retoucher, you know, all those things. And somebody asked him to judge a high-school art contest. So he went to judge the art contest and saw my work. There were no cartoons or anything. You didn't do cartoons in those days, that wasn't considered art. There was no such thing as cartooning in high school!
MARSCHALL: Still life or something like that?
HART: Well, I did a drawing of the cemetery at night in charcoal -ー a couple of charcoal things; I used to love to work in it. Anyway he saw my work and was impressed. I don't think he should have been, but he was. That's the way God worked: he called me up and he said I just thought I’d like to meet you, I really like your artwork. I told him about a place in town, a spaghetti place, a place where a lot of other people hung out. Well, Brant came over there and we had a pizza and beer. And we had this wonderful night, talking art, and Brant came home with me... And that night he asked me who my favorite cartoonist was and all. And I said Virgil Partch [VIP], of course. At that time Virgil Partch was the newest thing in the cartoon world. I just loved Partch's work and he started on me about Partch. That was his wedge -ー he got his foot in the door there!
MARSCHALL: He admired his stuff?
HART: Yeah, he said, "Y’know, I used to work with him out at Disney," because Brant had worked at the Studio. And I said, "Really? — they were out there at the same time but I don't think they ever met 一 I said, "You knew him?" So he starts telling me Virgil Partch stories, Then he says, "You notice the line he has..." and he starts getting out some paper, and he's drawing things and he's just pulling me in, drawing me in and he's talking about the genius of VIP's art and he says, "You notice when you draw a right angle line like a guy's elbow, on the inside of the arm there's a curved line, to complement the right-angle line" and so on. Yeah! That's Right! Wow! And then we're going through all this stuff and he's taking Partch's work apart, line by line, and showing me the genius in every line. Then he gets into the humor part of it and I am totally hooked.
When Brant went home that night, I was going to be a cartoonist. And he knew it, that's all he was trying to do. So he sucked me in, he's the guy, he's the culprit, the one who's responsible for all this. But I got even with him. I pulled him in, I created a comic strip just to make him work on it every day of his life.
Now I believe Brant left the paper and I guess he worked for Tommy, and that must have been when I saw him there. I believe he was getting ready to go back into the Navy because he was having difficulty landing anything and he figured he'd go back into the Navy and serve another hitch. And every time he came home on leave, we'd get together. Eventually, I'd gone to Korea, gotten married and come back. I was selling to the magazines by then and when he came back and I kept prodding him, because he was lazy [laughs], trying to get him to sell to the magazines, Because I said, "You got me into this, and if I can sell you should be selling, too." And he said, "I can't do gags." And I said, "Of course you can do gags! Anybody can do gags." And he said, "I can't. I hate doing gags." So I said, "OK, you're right, you can't do gags, If you won't do gags, you can't do gags." I said, "I'll do the gags for you and you draw them." And he said, "Would ya?" And I said "Sure, and you send them in." So he did and he would send all this stuff in. Marion Nichols of the Saturday Evening Post loved his work. I wrote a letter to Marion and sent some of Brant's stuff: "This is my mentor, my cohort." She said she'd love to see some of his work. We sent some of his work -ー and she bought two of them the first time! I said, "Hey!" She sends him money and sends all my cartoons back [laughs]. So I went down to New York. I only went [to the cartoon-buying magazines] two or three times because it usually was all through the mail; also [agent] Don Uish would take them around for me. This one time I went down and went in to see Marion and she says "Hi, Johnny! How are you doing? How's Brant? She says, "I love his work! I just love it! I've got one of his originals. I've got it framed and it's hanging on my living room wall." I said, "Good!"
MARSCHALL: Oh, man!
HART: I kept saying to Brant, "See, I knew you could do it. Send her a hundred of these!
MARSCHALL: It was probably your gag?
HART: That's right! no wonder she loved his work.