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196 21 Lorca Variations and Harold’s ABC Harold had to think of some other way to speed his trip. I is for Idea. He went to work on the next letter with his purple crayon. —Crockett Johnson, Harold’s ABC (1963) Ruth Krauss was so invested in her new career as a poet that at age fiftynine , she decided to learn French. Having read Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Arthur Rimbaud in Kenneth Koch’s class, she felt that she should learn the language in which they had written. She and Dave planned a summer 1960 vacation “for a week or so only—maybe Quebec so I can practice reciting French poetry.”1 Before leaving for Canada, Crockett Johnson sent a dramatic adaptation of Barnaby to E.Y. Harburg. But Harburg was too busy to take on the project, and although he thought Barnaby “one of the classics of our day,” he did not have enough “time and energy” for the project.“I am both flattered and sad,” he wrote.2 The Hall Syndicate, however, was interested in a revival of the Barnaby comic strip. Enlisting Warren Sattler to do the artwork, Johnson updated the original plots for the 1960s—the Hot Coffee Ring became the Counterfeit Credit Card Ring, and the Victory Garden sequence became a story about Barnaby’s attempts to start a garden. He also added some new story lines that focused on contemporary topics such as marketing and questionnaires. Looking back at his old comic strips as he prepared them for the new series, Johnson was “amazed and stand in awe as I see how the characters solved their problems, seemingly without any aid from me.” Privately, however, he complained about breaking in a new assistant and because “the size of newspaper strips has shrunk so that I am having to rewrite and redraw everything.” Still, initial sales to newspapers were promising, and on 12 September 1960, the new Barnaby appeared in papers. Johnson created some inspired new episodes , but he was much less emotionally invested in the strip. Despite the 197 Lorca Variations and Harold’s ABC year’s close-fought presidential election, the updated strip largely remained a passive observer of the political scene.3 His energies may have been too divided to give the strip the attention it needed. After the anticipated theatrical release of David Piel’s film version of Harold and the Purple Crayon, which still lacked a distributor, Johnson was planning to film five other Harold stories. He also had plans to adapt Barnaby strip material for a full-length feature film and for a series of 130 five-minute animated films to be shown on television. His collaborator on both projects would again be Lou Bunin. For a recent paper industry trade show, the two men had created an ad: Johnson drew the backgrounds, and Bunin used puppets to demonstrate why American Cyanamid’s new“wet strength”paper processes made stronger napkins and paper towels.4 The new Barnaby may also have lacked the earlier incarnation’s political focus because Johnson’s political views had become more complex. By the early 1960s, he was skeptical of those on the left as well as those on the right and believed that all politics was corrupt.Although he had supported Democratic candidates since the early 1950s and probably voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, at a party soon after the election, Johnson remarked,“Kennedy’s just a thug.”When the crowd of liberals reacted in surprise, he continued,“Oh, well, his father was a bootlegger.” Johnson’s impulse to puncture his liberal friends’ optimism may have stemmed from his political disillusionment or from his distrust of Joseph Kennedy Sr., who supported British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and remained a friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy into the 1950s.5 Johnson rarely talked politics, and he had friends across the political spectrum because he was reluctant to impose his convictions on others.As Shelley Trubowitz put it, “You could be the most reactionary bastard and be at his house. It didn’t make any difference to him. Whatever you thought, go ahead and talk. He didn’t have anything against you unless you were a Hitlerite or something like that.” Though Johnson had long since grown suspicious of the Communist Party, he continued to believe that the best solution to the world’s problems would be to start over with international socialism. But he...

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