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Smoking club contraption maker11/17/2023 ![]() ![]() When MacNelly, 47, wants to look worldly and gruff, he tends to favor Ashton Churchills. "The cigar suggests to me a kind of worldly gruffness," says MacNelly, "so that's why I installed one in Shoe's beak." ![]() The cartoon cigar conveys confidence and cockiness mischief and majesty. "There is a warmness and affinity for comic-strip characters that you don't see in any other medium," says Lee Salem, vice president and editorial director of the Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes "Doonesbury," among other strips.Īs an especially potent symbol frequently employed by comic-strip artists, the cigar has served as an emblem of the plutocrat, politician or boss, all ripe for ridicule, and as the comfort of the common man. "Jeep," "goon," "boloney," "bam," "zowie," "plop," "wow," "wham," "heebie-jeebies," "horse feathers," "hotsy-totsy," "23-skidoo," "drugstore cowboy," "cat's meow," "security blanket," even "hot dog"-all are words or expressions that originated in the comics.Ĭartoon characters have become stars of Broadway musicals, motion pictures, radio programs and television shows they've been featured on every imaginable kind of merchandise. "Their influence upon the general American vocabulary must be very potent," wrote the Baltimore Sage, perhaps while puffing on an Uncle Willie. Comic-strip artists have been unsurpassed as "diligent coiners of neologisms," opined H.L. Comics have even shaped the way we speak. The characters in them have chronicled our society in times of peace and served as morale-boosters and mascots in times of war. Many of the founding fathers of this uniquely American art form smoked cigars - as did their cartoon characters.Ī mirror of American culture and a profound influence upon it, comic strips have always reflected and affected the way we see ourselves. By savoring cigars, both Shoe and MacNelly carry on a tradition as old as comic strips themselves, which are celebrating their centennial this year. "Shoe," published in more than 800 papers nationwide, represents more than just the cigar-smoking philosophy of the artist who created it, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly. "There are two basic categories of cigar," he advises his readers. "To fully appreciate fine cigars, it's important to recognize the various types of cigars," writes Shoe, who edits the Treetops Tattler. Martin Shoemaker, a bird of indeterminate species but impeccable taste, puffs on his cigar while typing his newspaper column, "The Cigar Corner Sewer." ![]()
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