Newspaper syndicator brought the funnies
Comic strips part of lasting legacy
John P. Mcmeel, a newspaper syndicator who enlivened the funny pages with the distribution of comic strips such as Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes and Cathy and delivered the writings of columnists including Abigail Van Buren and Garry Wills to millions of readers, died July 7 at his home in Kansas City, Mo. He was 85.
His company, founded as Universal Press Syndicate and now called Andrews Mcmeel Universal, announced his death but did not cite a cause.
Mcmeel, a law school dropout once dubbed “Deals Mcmeel” for his gift for salesmanship, started his syndicate with friend Jim Andrews in 1970. With an early coup — the first cartoonist they signed was Garry Trudeau, then a student cartoonist for the Yale Daily News and later of Doonesbury fame — their operation grew into the world’s largest independent newspaper syndicate.
“Our goal was to differentiate ourselves and go for features more-established syndicates wouldn’t be interested in,” he continued. “We rolled the dice more. It was ‘survive or die’ from the beginning, and it paid off.”
Andrews was credited with recruiting Trudeau when he was penning a college newspaper strip called Bull Tales, with characters including a right-leaning football player called B.D.
Later renamed Doonesbury, Trudeau’s creation became a landmark of cartooning as one of the first newspaper comic strips to plunge headlong into politics. While other fixtures of the funny pages trafficked in tame, even childlike humour, Doonesbury addressed matters such as drugs, divorce and the AIDS epidemic.
In 1975, five years after Mcmeel and Andrews introduced Trudeau to U.S. newspaper readers, he received the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning. Doonesbury was carried by nearly 2,000 newspapers at its peak, at least partly as a result of Mcmeel’s promotion.
“His blarney was legendary,” Trudeau said, according to the syndicate’s announcement of Mcmeel’s death, “but behind it was a deep regard and respect for the artists he championed. That loyalty was mutual; many of us fondly called him ‘boss’ for decades.”