Comic Belief : Retired Illustrator Amasses a Prize Collection of Personalized Artwork by Mail

Flash Gordon, Brenda Starr and Dick Tracy are lurking in Murray Harris’ back bedroom.

Krazy Kat, Prince Valiant and Mandrake the Magician are hiding there too, sketched onto penny postcards and mailed to Harris at his request.

When he started collecting comic strip art by mail in 1927, Harris never planned to go so far.

But at 84, the retired illustrator has amassed a vast collection of original drawings that traces the history of the American comic strip from the Depression-era Gasoline Alley to the Doonesbury of today.

“They’re special, because they were drawn especially for me,” said Harris, lingering over a sharp, glowering portrait of Dragon Lady, inked for him in 1940 by Terry and the Pirates creator Milton Caniff.

“People said, ‘Well, you knew it was going to be valuable when you started,’ ” he said. “As a matter of fact, I had no idea of value. It was the drawing I was interested in. If I was interested in somebody’s work, I’d write them a letter and ask for a sample.”

Obsession bloomed in about 1916, when 5-year-old Murray hunkered over the Sunday funnies in his parents’ Boston parlor and began copying the beloved Mutt and Jeff onto scraps of paper.

Harris later studied fine-art techniques of painting and illustration at the Massachusetts School of Art and later at the Boston Museum of Fine Art and Harvard University.

He visited the art departments of Boston’s daily newspapers, peering over artists’ shoulders and snatching discarded sketches from their wastebaskets for later study.

And he jumped into the field as a professional, drawing newspaper illustrations, whiskey labels and drugstore ads.

But classical schooling and the workaday world failed to drum the love for the funnies out of Harris.

At 16, he mailed a blank, prepaid penny postcard to comic artist L.C. Segar, asking if he would be so kind as to scribble a little something on it and mail it back.

To Harris’ delight, the card returned a few weeks later--animated with Castor Oyl and Nana Oyl. These were the brothers of a character whom Segar had not even invented yet--Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl.

“I knew I’d get a personal response,” Harris said. “But I didn’t expect they’d put the time and effort into it the way they have.”

Harris sent out more requests. And in flowed personalized drawings from the comic field’s most favorite artists: Blondie’s Chic Young, Joe Palooka’s Ham Fisher and the Toonerville Trolley’s Fontaine Fox.

He hit up artists he admired: Rube Goldberg, Uncle Sam creator James Montgomery Flagg and a famous illustrator, who sketched a dog, inscribed, “Your faithful friend, Norman Rockwell.”

Harris even branched into collecting the work of editorial cartoonists.

Here is a glowering Hitler, a bloodied globe on his shoulders, captioned, “ATLAS--New World Order.”

There is Richard Nixon, dedicated to Harris and hobbled by a ball and chain supplied by Chicago Daily News artist Fischetti.

Together, the hated visages of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Tojo leer out from one card inscribed by its long-gone artist, “My Dear Murray Harris--You Can HAVE ‘Em!”

Sometimes, they just said no.

Political cartooning giant Bill Mauldin politely nixed Harris’ request for a sketch, informing him that original cartoons were growing too valuable to give away.

Prince Valiant artist Hal Foster also said no, but in a much more sarcastic way.

Foster rebuked the young fan for presuming to take away precious time from the artist’s all-important duck-hunting schedule--but he tossed into the mail a sketch already drawn of Prince Valiant standing atop the head of a dead dragon.

In 1948, Harris and wife Beatrice moved to Los Angeles to ease the burden of emphysema on her lungs--which later would require them to move out of the San Fernando Valley and into Simi Valley.

The collection grew, and grew more modern: Charles M. Schulz’s Snoopy joined the gang, as did Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id, Garry Trudeau’s Tiparillo-puffing Duke. And Hagar the Horrible took his place between a rough sketch of Sergio Aragones’ Groo the Wanderer and a razor-sharp ink drawing of Lil’ Abner and Daisy Mae Yokum.

Does Harris have a favorite?

“It’s kind of like asking me if I have a favorite composer--I like many composers,” Harris chuckled. “Some have brilliant ways of drawing, they do very fine artwork. Others have good thoughts behind their artwork. Some are serious, some are humorous.”

Sometimes, Harris wrote letters to the cartoonists. Sometimes his first wife, Beatrice, wrote for him, when she had spare time at her insurance company job and he was too busy drawing drugstore ads.

After Beatrice died in 1990, Harris remarried.

Now, his greatest regret is that he gave into his second wife’s demands two years ago to pare down his collection.

She was not interested in the art, or the clutter it created, he said.

So, Harris sold off priceless original panels of Flash Gordon and Krazy Kat and liquidated an amazing array of antique comic-strip toys--including a Buck Rogers ray gun and a wind-up Dick Tracy patrol car--for probably a third of what they were worth, to a Burbank art dealer.

For a while there, he just let the dealers come and go while he was out, taking whatever they pleased and cataloguing it for the bottom line.

Six months later, with the collection decimated, Harris recalled sadly, “She abandoned me.”

“It was a crazy way to do things, a stupid way, really,” he said.

But Harris clung to the personal sketches, because they were drawn especially for him.

He hopes that someone somewhere will see the value in his collection and put it on display, the way the Smithsonian Institution did many years ago for a traveling show on comic strips.

“Actually, it’s disposable art,” Harris said. “Comic strips were wrapped [around] fish and garbage and thrown out. But not now. The comic strips are worth something.”