Best Magazine Reads: Beetle Bailey and Connecticut's "Cartoon County"

I've visited Fairfield, Connecticut before because some of my wife’s cousins live there. What I didn’t know about the outer New York City suburb is that it had been home to an inordinate number of famous daily-newspaper cartoonists.

Mort Walker (pictured to the right) is perhaps the most famous of the crew detailed in a fantastic article in the September issue of Vanity Fair. I rank his Beetle Bailey as one of my favorite dailies, up there with Archie, Garfield, Peanuts, and, actually, several other strips emanating from Cartoon County, including Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Popeye, The Family Circus, and Hi and Lois. The place also has ties to Superman, Tarzan, Prince Valiant, and many others. It’s really pretty phenomenal.

The cartoonists lived different lives than the working men (and the cartoonists seem to have been all men) who headed into the city each day. They sat at home in their offices that smelled of sharpened pencils, tobacco, and whiskey, were pretty domesticated by their families, and only went into the city on Wednesdays to show off their latest works to various publishers and editors. Then sometimes they would go to gatherings with the other cartoonists to drink lots of Manhattans. And they played quite a bit of golf and took lots of naps. Pretty nice work if you can get it. Maybe that’s why “cartoonist” was always on my short list of potential professions!

The author, son of the Prince Valiant cartoon, notes that Cartoon County was a quirk in time. Cartoonists were rock stars, creating the most-read portions of the newspapers, up until the early 60s, when Hearst killed what the group considered its Mount Olympus, the New York Journal-American. Then later Wall Street further killed Fairfield County as an affordable place where cartoonists could live comfortably.

Even I remember a time when the newspaper would clunk down near the front door. I would run out to get it and grab the funny pages, and maybe sometimes the sports section, and throw the rest of it down wherever. At that point, I was a remnant of an earlier age, when just about every kid (and adult) couldn’t miss the cartoons each and every day, with the special, fuller, mostly-color Sunday editions being the highlight of each week.

Best Magazine Reads: Kate Moss May Not Be What You Think

I don't follow fashion closely. I've never thought much about Kate Moss before. She's always seemed to simply hang around and look all drugged out and anorexic with flamboyant rock stars.

Perhaps that why Vanity Fair's November 2012 cover story was such an eye-opener for me. The article is one the best of many magazine articles I read last year. It showed that Moss is actually not much of a druggie, is someone everyone wants to hang out with because she's so much fun, has boundless endurance and enthusiasm, has no qualms about taking nude photos (as this article's accompanying shoot can attest), doesn't suffer any fallout from taking said nude photos like most Playboy centerfolds do, and doesn't care much for fashion either. She simply lucked into it, has a natural talent for it, and keeps getting asked (decade after decade) to come back for more photo shoots.

The interviewer flies in very ritzy style all over the world with Moss. The piece reads a bit like a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous episode. And perhaps he, James Fox, makes her look way better than she really is, but he convincingly won me over to her.

I guess it speaks to my own style in that I go for the "unfashion" fashion model. Regardless, this is as good as magazine writing gets.

Best Magazine Reads: Vanity Fair Features 5-Year-Old Boy Lost From His Family in India

I love magazines, so I love the app I'm subscribed to on my iPad called Next Issue. It allows me to keep up with about a dozen of some of the best glossies out there.

Last night, I was glued to an article in the November 2012 issue of Vanity Fair called A Home at the End of Google Earth. The accompanying video is also very compelling.

A 5-year-old Indian boy is riding a train with his older brother. He falls asleep and realizes his brother is gone. He can't find him but assumes he'll be back. He falls asleep again and wakes up many hours later. His brother is still gone.

The train has ended up in Calcutta and the boy hadn't really known much of anything about where he was from. He wanders around the city and escapes at least one risky situation before heading back to sleep at the train station.

Soon he lands in government custody and is adopted by a loving couple from Tasmania. He lives there for many years, adjusting to life thousands of miles southeast of India. But finally, one day in his 20s, he has an inspiration to see if he can retrace the steps of his journey away from his birth family. He starts using Google Maps.

It is four years later when, after many sleepless nights scanning the web site in the dark, he thinks he might have found his home. He flies to India and is reunited with his mother, younger sister, and lots of other relatives. He discovers that his brother had died on some train tracks not long after being separated from his little brother. His mother had searched for the boys, but a fortune teller told her she would be reunited with the boy someday, so she ended her search and hoped for the best.

A truly inspiring and amazing story, and one that is not surprisingly being turned into a movie.

***** out of ***** stars