Howard Cruse on Crockett Johnson and Barnaby

RINGGENBERG: When you were an adolescent in the '50s, what were some of your other influences, besides Al Capp?
CRUSE: Crockett Johnson's Barnaby. Actually, this was more in the early '60s. A teacher at Indian Springs was a Barnaby freak from way back, and he introduced me to an old hardback collection. It was just a wonderful strip, and I was deeply under Crockett Johnson's influence for a while. I even tried word balloons that used type instead of hand lettering, I didn't know he had a typesetting machine to do it, so I tried doing it with Artype and my X-Acto knife! I wore my fingers off cutting all the little letters and trying to get the right effect, so I gave up and went back to hand lettering.
RINGGENBERG: That was a real distinctive-looking strip. Nothing else really looked like it.
CRUSE: Exactly. And it had sophistication, funny characters. It's being reprinted now, and think everyone should explore it.
RINGGENBERG: The little snippets of it I've seen are utterly charming. Well-written, funny.
CRUSE: Mr. O'Malley, the fairy godfather, is hilarious!
RINGGENBERG: I love the fact that he uses a cigar as his magic wand.
CRUSE: I don't know if he ever succeeded in working magic with it. He always talked big, but somehow he could never make his magic come off. If there was magic, he wasn't able to make it do what he wanted. He tried to make somebody else disappear, and he disappeared!