Walter Berndt - Fishing For Ideas

Fishing For Ideas

Ed Black wrote about the method E. C. Segar and Berndt used to generate cartoon ideas:

Segar did another strip in the 1920s, but not on his own volition. One of his friends at the New York Journal was Walter Berndt who would in 1922 create the daily and Sunday Smitty strip for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate (under the aegis of the legendary Capt. Joseph Patterson), a feature destined to run for years. Both liked fishing. Berndt was doing a two-column strip called Then the Fun Began, inherited from Milt Gross. Both Segar and Berndt would finish their work by noon then steal away to an old pier on the Jersey side and spend the afternoon fishing and thinking up ideas. "We'd finish the day with a bunch of fish and about 15 or 20 ideas each," Berndt once said.

Then the Fun Began was appearing as early as March 3, 1919. When Berndt left that strip on October 13, 1921, it was taken over by Fred Faber, who continued it until 1928.

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Famous quotes containing the words fishing for, fishing and/or ideas:

    “I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “A rat crept softly through the vegetation
    Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
    While I was fishing in the dull canal
    On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
    Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
    And on the king my father’s death before him.”
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    “My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.”
    —James Thurber (1894–1961)