Note: A longer version of this essay appears in Barnaby Vol. 5
Stories end.
But comics typically exist in a perpetual present. True, there are exceptions: characters grow older in Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean, and Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. However, comic-strip characters usually move through time without succumbing to its effects. Days pass. Seasons change. But the characters remain as they have always been.
That was true of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby until its final month. From April 20, 1942 to Jan. 2, 1952, Barnaby was always 5 years old. Yet on Jan. 3, 1952, Mr. Baxter tells his son that Mr. O’Malley “is going away” because “You’ll be six soon. You’re going to start school” and “big boys don’t have imaginary Fairy Godfathers, do they?” At that moment, the strip’s readers must have wondered: How will O’Malley prevail this time? Most adults in the strip dismiss Barnaby’s loquacious, con-artist of a fairy godfather as imaginary, but the children in the strip and we readers know that he is real. And O’Malley has foiled Mr. Baxter’s previous attempts to expel him from the household. However, within the next month (or a few days, within the internal timeline of the strip itself), O’Malley will learn that he cannot defeat time. And readers will discover that Johnson has made the highly unusual choice of writing a narrative conclusion to Barnaby.
Why did Johnson end the strip? In a February 1952 letter to Johnson, journalist Charles Fisher lamented Barnaby’s conclusion: “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with a world where Barnaby had to go down the spout.” He continued, “What Barnaby is going to do without Mr. O’Malley, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him either, the old bum. I felt sad as a son of a bitch to see him fly away.”
Offering his most complete answer to the question of why he concluded Barnaby, Johnson responded immediately and candidly, citing three reasons for why he “had to let the strip go.” First, he noted that “I think the last year or so hit a peak for quality but sales continued to slough off steadily.” At the height of its popularity, Barnaby was syndicated in 52 newspapers — which, to put that in context, was then but 1/17th of the circulation of a massively popular strip like Blondie. I don’t know its precise circulation in December 1951, when Johnson announced his decision to end Barnaby. But when he saw its circulation declining from small to smaller, Johnson likely realized that if he did not end the strip soon, then he might not be able to do so on his own terms.
Second, Johnson explained, “I decided that while I continued writing it I would never be able to start anything else.” Then 45 years old, he was doubtless more conscious of the tension between his many interests and the diminishing time left to explore them. He was already considering three other professions, one of which was creating books for children — the career for which he is best-known today. His most enduring creation, Harold and the Purple Crayon, published in the fall of 1955, inspired six more Harold books (1956-1963), an animated cartoon (1959), a TV series (2001-2002), a board game (2001), two stage adaptations (1990, 2009), a feature film (2024), and many artists.
But in 1951 and 1952, Johnson was also inventing a four-way adjustable mattress. Inspired by his wife Ruth Krauss’ intermittent back trouble and his own poor nights’ sleep on soft mattresses (especially when traveling), Johnson designed a mattress with adjustable firmness. He submitted a patent application in 1952, received a patent in 1955, and in 1956 met with hotel magnate Conrad Hilton to see if he might want to purchase it for his chain of hotels. Though Johnson’s attempts to market this idea would fail, it was a live option in 1951.
His other possible future was a return to advertising work. In the 1940s, Johnson used his earlier strip “The Little Man with the Eyes” as the basis of a well-regarded campaign for Ford. He also created political ads supporting unions, President Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election campaign, and national health insurance. Johnson may allude to the possibility of designing ads when — referring to the fact that Fisher has left journalism for advertising — he says “the press seems to have come full circle from the days when Thomas Jefferson said the only believable items in newspapers were their advertisements. A grown-up Barnaby is better off in an agency than in a city room at the moment.”
Yet another possible vocation, and a third reason for ending the strip is (paradoxically?) ongoing interest in Barnaby itself. Johnson proposed putting “the basic story and some of the better sequences in text form in a book” — a project that he would work on and ultimately abandon later in the decade. He also mentioned interest in Barnaby “as a television series” via a “west coast producing organization.” That would result in the most successful adaptation of his comic strip to date.
Five days before Christmas 1959, CBS’ General Electric Theater aired the full-color pilot episode of Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley “as a special Christmas presentation.” Introduced by actor (and future politician) Ronald Reagan as “a magical story based on the cartoons and books by Crockett Johnson,” the half-hour show starred Bert Lahr (aka the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz) as Mr. O’Malley, 5-year-old Ronny Howard as Barnaby, and Mel Blanc as the voice of McSnoyd the leprechaun. The broadcast received excellent reviews, with Variety predicting that Howard’s agent would find his phone ringing “with enough offers to keep him busy until next Yule time.” Variety was right. In 1960, Howard won the role that launched his career: Opie Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show. But no other episodes of this Barnaby TV program were made.
One possible cause for Barnaby’s conclusion not mentioned by Johnson is his rising profile as a suspected Communist. In April 1950, the FBI identified Johnson as a “concealed Communist” and opened a file on him. That August, when one agent knocked on his front door, Johnson opened it and chatted, while a second agent covertly took his photograph. In April 1951, the second House on Un-American Activities Committee report to name Johnson cited him a half-dozen times — a fact picked up by local newspapers. In the early 1950s, it was even rumored that, if Johnson and Krauss held a party, the FBI would be outside writing down the license plate numbers of those attending.
Though these allegations against him were public, Crockett Johnson was not on any official blacklist that I know of. (He is not named in Red Channels, for example.) As Julia Mickenberg has documented, many on the political left found work as children’s authors or illustrators because anti-Communist zealots deemed children’s books — most of which were written by women — less important, and so did not monitor the field closely.
But, as Johnson well knew, blacklisting can also operate more stealthily. He and Krauss lived in Rowayton, the section of Norwalk Connecticut adjacent to Village Creek, a planned, fully integrated community. They had many friends there, and — had it been established a few years earlier — may well have moved there themselves. Suspicious Norwalk residents called it “Commie Creek,” claiming that the houses’ modern roofs, viewed from above, were designed to lead Soviet bombers directly to New York City. Norma Simon — a friend of both Johnson and Krauss — established Village Creek’s Community Cooperative Nursery School, which local conservatives dubbed “the Little Red Schoolhouse.” Simon, whose first children’s book was published in 1954, soon discovered that her association with the Little Red Schoolhouse led to an unofficial blacklist: a PTA would invite her to speak, discover that she was director of the school, and, instead of accusing her directly, would then phone up to say, sorry, but the meeting had been cancelled, no need to come.
Since blacklisting does not require an actual list of names, it is impossible to prove or to disprove that blacklisting prompted newspapers to drop Barnaby. That said, Johnson likely wondered whether he would become a target. He was a former art editor for the weekly Communist magazine New Masses. It didn’t matter that he left the publication over a decade earlier. Nor that he was not a member of the Communist Party. In the 1940s, he had publicly advocated for racial justice, championed workers’ rights, and campaigned for Progressive Party candidates — all causes that made him suspect in the eyes of Red-hunters.
Whether wary of persecution, weary of writing the strip, or simply eager to pursue other ventures, Johnson in 1951 announced the end of Barnaby. Rather than merely stop, he devised a final episode which offers an unequivocal conclusion to the story of Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley.
When ending a mainstream newspaper strip, its creator (or his heirs) typically offers at least one of these four concluding gestures: (1) delivering meta-commentary on the medium of comics (Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes), (2) launching a new strip from the old one (Milt Gross’ Hitz and Mrs. launches Banana Oil, Berkely Breathed’s Bloom County launches Outland), (3) suggesting that the characters’ adventures continue unchronicled (Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, also Calvin & Hobbes), or (4) announcing the death or retirement of the creator (Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon and Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, also For Better or For Worse). Having already pursued the meta-commentary route when the Sunday Barnaby concluded in 1948, Crockett Johnson pursues a fifth approach for the Monday-to-Saturday Barnaby in 1952. There’s no announcement. Johnson doesn’t launch a new strip. Instead, Johnson’s final episode offers a definitive “THE END.”
For Barnaby to grow up, his Fairy Godfather must leave. He does and, in the final Barnaby strip, O’Malley lands in a different 5-year-old boy’s bedroom. Though the adventures of O’Malley will continue unchronicled in another household, the adventures of Barnaby — the strip’s title character — will not.
Yet I don’t think Johnson is suggesting that growing up requires that we relinquish the richly imaginative life of childhood. Instead, he reminds us that only extraordinary people age without abandoning a child’s flexibility of mind — people like Mr. Dormant, the unusual adult who chats with Mr. O’Malley in the Barnaby strips of March 2 through 6, 1945. Or Mr. O’Malley, who, in the strip of Jan. 7, 1952, reminds Barnaby that “lots of people never grow up. Makes things difficult on occasion, I daresay.” And Crockett Johnson, an artist who never wrote down to children because he remembered his own childhood so well.
To put this another way, the comic strip Barnaby ends because O’Malley leaves. Without our irascible Fairy Godfather, there’s no satire, no whimsy, and no story. Though named for Barnaby, Mr. O’Malley is the strip’s imaginative force. Barnaby is always more of a realist. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter think their son’s tales of O’Malley and friends are fanciful, the products of a little boy’s vivid imagination. However, Barnaby is merely providing factual reports of events the grown-ups have not seen — or, in some cases, have chosen not to notice.
Johnson’s conclusion to Barnaby is an invitation for us to notice. Like all elements of fiction, endings are contrivances that we accept. In providing the form that life lacks, they grant us perspective — a vantage point from which we can view the entire structure, interpret, and understand. As Kierkegaard observed, though it “must be lived forward,” life “must be understood backwards.”
So, too, must comic strips.
Looking back on Barnaby’s ten-year run, I marvel at Johnson’s capacity to balance O’Malley’s exuberant con-artistry and Barnaby’s sincerity, adult cynicism and a youthful sense of wonder, sophisticated satire and sheer ridiculousness. These days, awash as we are in a relentless stream of falsehoods and facts, the humor of Barnaby provides welcome perspective, and the hope that laughter may guide us through chaos and danger. Reading Barnaby in 2025, it’s a real comfort to arrive in an alternate reality whose leading grifter is genial, not malevolent, and whose misbegotten plans injure only his pride. As comics artist and scholar Coulton Waugh wrote of Barnaby during the strip’s original run, “It is a patch of cheerful, sunny green in the scorched-dust color of our times.”
Though Barnaby ended nearly 75 years ago, its cheer lingers on in Fantagraphics’ reprints. And, after a visit to the strip’s safer, sunnier haven, we can emerge, buoyed by Crockett Johnson’s moral imagination, delighted by the strip’s mix of whimsy and irony, and ready to face whatever we must face.
The post Boredom, blacklisting or new beginnings? Why Crockett Johnson ended <i>Barnaby</i> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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