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PRESS

after Sunday without ever bothering to explain them. But last week in New York, the 58-year-old Holman, newly elected president of the National Cartoonists Society, finally unburdened himself to an interviewer, Colman's explanations:

FOO: "I was in a curio store in San Francisco's Chinatown about fifteen years ago, and I saw a little jade statue with 'FOO' written on it. The clerk said it meant 'Good luck' in Chinese. Whether it does or not, I don't know [it does]. But somehow that amused me, and I decided it would be nice to start putting it in the papers."

Notary Sojac: "That's my phonetic spelling of the Gaelic for Merry Christmas [the actual Gaelic words are "Nodlaig Soghach"]. It occurred to me, why not wish my readers season's greetings all through the year? I've been using the sign almost every Sunday for a dozen years or more, and now people seem attached to it."

1506-Nix Nix: "I had a good friend at The New York Daily News, the late Al Posen, who did a comic strip called "Sweeney and Son." Al was a bachelor and his hotel room was No. 1506. I began using the sign as a private joke between the two of us - it was a warning to girls to stay away from Al's room."

Holman, a good-humored practical joker, whose "Smokey Stover" strip is now distributed to some 50 major newspapers by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, Inc., delights in off-beat gags and gimmicks. His daffy firemen - Smokey Stover and fire chief Cash U. Mutt - ride to fires in a red, two-wheeled buggy, and smoke oddly shaped pipes that Holman has designed, including a double-bowled pipe ("for two-fisted smokers") and one with a zigzag stem ("for people who smoke like lightning"). Spooky, a jowly cat with a perpetually bandaged tail, pops up in all kinds of unlikely places, from the grocery-store pickle barrel to a perch on top of the fire chief's head. And adding to the helter-skelter appearance of the strip (critics claim it's cluttered), Holman fills the background of his panels with punny pictures which he calls "wall-nuts." In a recent strip, for example, a typical Holman wall-nut showed a man sitting in a barrel of oil to have his portrait painted. The gag line: "Sitting for his portrait in oil." An older wall-nut, which the cartoonist considers his personal favorite, showed two pairs of ladies' panties hanging on a clothesline, over the title line: "Rose's are red and Violet's are blue."

Sirens: Holman, who has been doing "Smokey Stover" strips for the last 26 years, first began specializing in firehouse gags as a free-lance magazine cartoonist in the early 1930s because, as he puts it: "I think firemen are funny - running around in a red wagon with sirens and bells." But while Holman sometimes puts on a fireman's hat to clown around for his friends, he says: "I've never been in a firehouse in my life."

Despite his free-flowing humor, Holman takes his cartooning seriously. To turn out "Smokey Stover" (and a daily cartoon panel titled "Nuts and Jolts" which runs in some 35 papers), he puts in a full work week at his studio in New York's Jackson Heights, working in a clutter of old newspapers and souvenirs. ("My files are in piles," he says.) The studio has no telephone, and Holman devotes himself to his drawings so intensively that he rarely goes out to lunch, preferring to nibble on candy, peanuts, and crackers.

Away from the studio, however, Holman likes to try out gags on his friends and his attractive red-haired wife, Dolores. On one occasion, when a friend complained that someone kept stealing the overshoes from his back porch, Holman surreptitiously nailed his friend's newly purchased overshoes to the porch floor. Another time, he talked to a waitress in a New York lunchroom into knitting him a pair of five-toed socks by telling her with dead-pan earnestness that the latest thing in knitting was to make socks like gloves. "He's just like the people he draws" his wife says. "But you can't get annoyed at him. He just has an unusual kind of mind."

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Newsweek - Vytas Valaitas
Holman, 'For people who smoke like lightning'

without trying to disguise it," he added. "I haven't made it go through an apparent disaster. So much work today has a disaster quality.

"My work," said Noguchi, "is a kind of nude and frank art, even if it's not always optimistic."

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