Do you enjoy surprises? Would you like to find in one book 

• (1) a short history of cartoons and comic strips, 
• (2)  how the words and drawings of a particular strip were created during the Great Depression and 
• (3) a model for writing your own life story? 

If you read the book in different ways you will find three surprises in the 290 pages of Tom De Haven’s 1996 novel, “DERBY DUGAN’S DEPRESSION FUNNIES.”

The backdrop of De Haven’s novel is the Manhattan world of American comic strips. On display are the real men who turned into stories or “continuity strips” Buck Rogers, Little Orphan Annie, Joe Palooka, Li’l Abner and the Katzenjammer Kids. The conquest of America by the funnies began in 1895 when Joseph Pulitzer launched the New York WORLD’s “Funny Side” supplement (p. 97). The novel zeros in on the Depression years of the 1930s. It was the era of Wheaties packages with aviator pins inside and of Big-Little Books (whose every page of print faced a page of cartoons). De Haven sketches Americans running for the funnies away from the downside of the Great Depression.

The dominant relationship of the novel is between the narrator, detached Irish-American, moderately Catholic cartoon story writer Al Bready, and legendary cartoonist Walter Geebus (pronounced with a hard “G”). From 1931 to 1936 Al wrote the stories behind, while Walter took total credit for, the vastly popular cartoon series, “Derby Dugan.” Before 1931 “Derby Dugan” “had been a slapstick funny, Sunday only, and hadn’t changed one single jot since the days of goldbugs and Bill McKinley” (p. 3). Then the strip’s new owner, King Features, insisted Derby Dugan go daily and provide ”some drama, some danger.” So 60-something Geebus invited successful young fiction writer Al Bready to ghost the narratives. Walter did all the drawings and suggested half the plots about a 14 year old boy, Derby, and his talking yellow mutt, Fuzzy.  Walter made Al script many a nasty crack about labor unions and fanatic New Dealers. Early on Derby finds a magic wallet. Henceforward, whenever he wishes, Derby  “starts peeling off ten-spots like they’re loaves and fishes” (p.40). The final 187 pages of the novel portray the normally prolific Bready striving in vain to write a cartoon sequence demanded by Geebus in which Derby Dugan and Fuzzy are in a rowboat on the night of the full moon, drifting through the cattails when Fuzzy says, “A girl just floated by.” A dead girl.

Among the sub-plots Bready hires Jewel Rodgers as his typist. He falls hopelessly and platonically in love with her. Al’s love is apparent even to Jewel’s brain-damaged husband, Jimmie Rodgers. The aging, arthritic Walter Geebus declines mysteriously into ill health and to death’s door after reluctantly taking on as his drawing assistant Frank Sweeney. For Sweeney slipped arsenic into Walter’s coffee in order to take over the Derby Dugan strip.

Thirty-four years after these core events Al Bready concludes his narrative with a review of his plodding service in World War II and of the decline of comics in the 1950s and later. “Come the Eisenhower years, newspaper comics turned dull, they turned into boring little soap operas about doctors and lawyers, Air Force colonels, men in suits and uniforms...--and that just wasn’t for me” (p. 286).  His book is “the first true thing that I’ve ever written in my career, in my whole stupid life and now I’m finished. ...what it finally comes down to is that Sunday page of Walter’s, that dream that was never drawn. That story I never could tell, Derby’s in a rowboat. And so, I guess is Al Bready. It’s night.” (p. 290). 

The novel also tells in an indirect, non-chronological way the life story of its narrator. The novel is not a memoir. The book concentrates on five years of Al Bready’s intense but controlled relationships with Walter Geebus (who paid him "only thirty bucks a week") and Jewel Rodgers. Bready writes to understand what those two people meant to him and he to them and why. All he grasps is that those were the most important years of his life, those Depression years with Derby Dugan and Fuzzy, with Walter and Jewel.

Narrator Bready started walking toward those relationships at age 20 when he shifted to fiction writer from “selling classified ads over the phone for the New York GRAPHIC” (p. 20). Thereafter, Al Bready speaks of himself no more than he must to introduce other persons, such as his emotionally distraught sister, Jeannie. We also see the boy Al when he found his father with his lady love, both shot in the stomach. Had Al’s mother done the deed? Bready’s basic decency slowly emerges as he quietly supports distressed friends and relatives.

I read this novel for fun. I did not expect to learn lessons about writing memoirs. But I had recently enrolled in a “right brain” writing course designed to release our submerged creative juices. Another student was taking the course to figure out how to compress for children and grandchildren more than 10,000 pages of hand-written, strictly chronological narrative thus far produced. For me something suddenly fell into place. Our teacher, prolific Black Mountain novelist Yvonne Lehman, would argue that I experienced a “trial-web shift.” For, while looking in another direction, I understood how a short, readable, honest version of my classmate’s mammoth memoirs could emerge through imitation of “DERBY DUGAN’S DEPRESSION FUNNIES.” The technique is to write mainly about something other than yourself. Write directly about your times, your profession or craft. Let your inner self be displayed only obliquely, as you interact with others.

“DERBY DUGAN’S DEPRESSION FUNNIES” is a yarn to remember. Author Tom De Haven has written more than a novel. His "historian within" also provides memorable facts about the Depression years and funny papers and stages a creative way to do autobiography.

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11-27-98 for the ASHEVILLE TRIBUNE