Virgil f partch biography of michael

Even by May , however—just six months on the payroll—Partch felt secure enough as a breadwinner to marry an year-old art student, Helen Marie Aldridge, whom he had met at a party a month before. She took up sculpture, and they had three children, two boys and a girl, despite several intervals of separation that dotted their year marriage. Like all of his animation colleagues, Partch doodled comic drawings in his spare time, caricaturing his fellow workers, lampooning their efforts, and commemorating comically incidents that might have transpired in their work cubicles or on the volley-ball court during lunch hour.

Animation is essentially factory work, and Partch may not have felt entirely comfortable in the medium. As famed animator Chuck Jones once said: "The basic difference between animation and still cartoons is that the animated character is not basically funny to look at. But Vip was so good at drawing funny characters he found animation really inhibiting.

What's more, in drawing funny pictures—gag cartoons—the cartoonist flies solo, soaring or crashing as his talent determines. His work is all his: it isn't a part of everyone else's. But Partch's career at Disney was cut short by external factors rather than personal volition. Union organizers had been pressuring Disney for months to unionize his shop, and matters came to a head on May 29, , when a picket line formed in front of the gate to the new studio in Burbank.

Many of Disney's employees crossed the picket line, but Partch did not. And he never returned to the Mouse Factory. The strike lasted nine weeks; government negotiators arranged a settlement, and by August, everyone was back at work. But not Partch. Partch's version of his career at Disney is cryptic. I specialized in fawns, girls and little children.

Then one day in , they didn't want any more of these, and I was out. Newsweek asserts that Partch was fired in the aftermath of the strike, but that, like much of Vip's autobiographical insight, isn't likely: under the terms of the union settlement, Disney was required to take back all strikers. More likely—Partch took the opportunity the strike afforded him to leave animation and take up magazine cartooning.

He had sold a few gags to The New Yorker before that fated year. It seemed, perhaps, that the field of magazine cartooning was beckoning him. For many previous months, Partch and two other Disney cartoonists, Hank Ketcham and Dick Shaw, had been meeting regularly in their off hours to brainstorm gags for magazine cartoons. They kept on meeting through the strike and afterwards.

It was deadly stuff, said Partch: "We would arrive with blank paper and get our coffee set up, and this was very serious business. You'd hardly find any laughing at all during a conference in which we were doping out what we thought was hilarious. Ketcham, describing their sessions in his autobiography, The Merchant of Dennis , said one of the trio would come up with a concept, and then the other two would supply a comic twist.

Partch, said Ketcham, always topped them with the best twist, but according to Ketcham, Partch entered the magazine cartooning field almost against his will. Partch was terribly shy and usually threw all his "masterful thumbnail sketches" into the wastebasket at the end of the session. Dick then sent the batch to Gurney Williams, cartoon editor at Collier's , and the rest is history.

Williams himself once recounted the history in the introduction to a collection of Partch cartoons, The Dead Game Sportsmen:. In every quarter of the globe, I am referred to as the Collier's editor who 'discovered' Partch. The boy who first knew that Partch was needed in the magazine and book publishing business was cartoonist Dick Shaw, bosom Partch pal.

Back in , he Shaw beat Virgil over the head at increasingly frequent intervals until our subject mailed four drawings to my office. Not being a moronic baboon at the time, I bought all four. The following week, I received more Partch drawings This proves I'm a brilliant editor. It is to laugh, son. I am partial to Partch because, despite the incomparable quality of his pleasingly grotesque work, he has never consulted a psychiatrist.

Half a dozen harried psychiatrists, however, have dropped in on Partch and have gone away in a more cheerful frame of mind. The first published Vip cartoon appeared in Collier's for February 14, ; the celebrated Vip signature, fashioned, as his biographer Joel Goldstein put it so admirably, "through the alchemy of mistaken identity," didn't appear in Collier's until that year's July 4 issue.

Partch's success with Collier's was followed in short order with similar reception at the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, This Week, and numerous others, including, eventually, True , a magazine purporting to be for men. True was admirably suited for hosting Vip's cartoons: its editors were nearly as lunatic as the cartoonist, as we can tell from this description of their first encounters with Vip's reputed genius:.

Back in , we were looking around for a cartoonist with a style zany enough to illustrate the 'Truly Yours' [letter] column. None seemed at liberty; then an associate editor suffering from jug bite suggested Partch. A letter was dispatched, after considerable digging to learn where he lived, detailing at pontifical length just what was wanted. Partch was then in the Army, attached in some vague manner to the Fort Ord Panorama , and his wife acted as go-between.

There is nothing to the rumor that his sketches had to be smuggled past censors. Private Partch later made corporal seemingly ignored the pontifical letter, said, 'Will do,' and turned out just what we were vainly trying to outline in the first place. His first 'Truly Yours' work appeared in October Retrieved June 5, David R. ISBN Further reading [ edit ].

External links [ edit ]. Inkpot Award s.

Virgil f partch biography of michael

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