Saturday Morning Book Report

"If It Isn't the Corn Borer, It's Something Else" by Frank Miller in Des Moines Register, May 23, 1975

Last month, I mentioned having bought a book of cartoons by Des Moines Register editorial cartoonist Frank Miller in a resale store. (I should clarify that if you came here by googling for the Frank Miller who drew Batman, Sin City, and Daredevil cartoons, that's someone else entirely. But you're welcome to read on.)

I first encountered Miller's cartoons in the Milwaukee Journal, which used to run three portrait-oriented, syndicated editorial cartoons side by side on its Saturday editorial page. The newspaper racks in library where I went to college had the Des Moines Register, which was one of the last U.S. newspapers running its editorial cartoonist on the front page, so I got to see his work much more often in those years.

"A Low Opinion" by Frank Miller in Des Moines Register, June 28, 1956

Over the course of the book, you watch Miller develop his curious pen-and-ink style with copious shading that appeared hastily scribbled. But not haphazard; the earliest drawings in the book are drawn in charcoal, and this shading appears to be Miller's way of emulating charcoal with pen and ink. Sometimes, as in the cartoon at the top of this post, characters' faces would be entirely in shadow — not something you see in most cartoons.

The editorial cartoons section of the book opens with Miller's first cartoon for the Des Moines Register in 1954, and ends with the cartoon he had not quite finished drawing when he died in 1983.

Since it was Miller's editors at the Register who chose the cartoons for the book, they may not have been the ones Miller would have chosen himself. They tend to be on the gentler side, particularly where individual Iowa politicians are involved. (An exception is a cartoon showing Senator Roger Jepsen, who had switched his vote on a military sale to Saudi Arabia, carrying his own head under his arm.)

By way of illustration, this cartoon by Miller, a Korean War veteran, probably didn't raise a lot of Iowans' hackles in 1965:

"Some of Us Are, Fella" by Frank Miller in Des Moines Register, Nov. 30 1965

Ten years later, as the South Vietnamese military collapsed, this cartoon might have been a little more controversial. It's not in the book; nor is any other cartoon about Saigon's defeat.

"American Monument in Southeast Asia" by Frank Miller in Des Moines Register, ca. March 29, 1975

The writers of the book describe Miller as "unassuming but not humble, aware of his talent but not crowing about it," so perhaps fire and brimstone cartooning was simply not his style. He might not even have seen any point in collecting his cartoons in a book in the first place; to clear out his basement, he once sold several of his original drawings in a garage sale for only 25¢ apiece.

The book allows that at least two of Miller's cartoons provoked such a response that he was forced to apologize for them. In one, a calendar of September hath 31 days. The other, commenting on Sandra Day O'Connor's ground-breaking nomination to the Supreme Court, hangs on a mildly sexist, even trite, joke. If  Miller stuck by any of his cartoons in the face of reader complaints, there's no mention of that in this book.

What you will find are every president from Truman to Reagan, a couple of Iowa governors, lots of lovingly rendered Iowa scenery, and one famous visitor to the state.

No caption, by Frank Miller in Des Moines Register, Oct. 4, 1979