Dick Brooks '39 Scores With His Mew Comic Strip
FROM the gigantic ice figure that straddled the campus in 1939 to a comic strip about two cute girls—thus runs the artistic career of Dick Brooks '39. With his new project, The Jackson Twins, he has high hopes of climbing on up to share the top rung with such fellow-alumni cartoonists as Doctor Seuss '25 and Abner Dean '31.
Brooks' brain children are an identical pair of nifties who are now being distributed seven days a week by the McNaught Syndicate to over 40 of the country's leading newspapers, including the Boston Herald, Philadelphia Bulletin, Washington Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
What Brooks calls his "recipe" runs some- what as follows: Take a lively pair o£ identical teen-agers whose personalities and abilities are opposite; add "homeyness" and depth to the strip by placing these girls in a typical American family; then, instead of relying on gags for appeal, combine comedy with story.
Five and a half years in the Navy—an experience which included being torpedoed from a submarine off Africa and undergoing harrowing experiences before rescue by South Africans—resulted in Brooks' creation of Elmer Squee, a sea-going character in a narrative poem. Elmer later became an undersized bellboy in a cartoon for King Features. On the air Brooks was "Luke Tatum," a rugged character from the Maine woods. A secret of Brooks' success would seem to be his ability to visualize convincing characters, to draw them, and to tell a story.
A comic strip like The Jackson Twins is one of the most difficult and time-consuming jobs there is. Brooks does all the writing and drawing for six daily strips and the Sunday color page. He does twins' heads about fifty times a week. As for material, he combines his own imaginings with observations of the high school bunch around his hometown, Westport, Conn. In February he hopes to send the twins to Winter Carnival. What if either Jan or Jill or both were chosen queen? Could make quite a situation!
