Heads and Tales

By Jim Stovall

Have you ever looked at a good caricature -- one that captures an essential characteristic of a person and still poked a bit of fun at him or her -- and wondered, "How did they do that?"

Jim Stovall has been asking that question all his life.

Stovall has also been writing all his life, and he has been fascinat

• Language: English
• Publisher: First Inning Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087941417

Jim Stovall

James Glen Stovall (Jim) is a retired professor of journalism who lives in East Tennessee. During his teaching career, he taught at the University of Alabama (1978-2003), Emory and Henry College (2003-2006) and the University of Tennessee (2006-2016). He is now working on a second career writing young adult fiction and mysteries. Jim is the author of the a selling writing textbook, Writing for the Mass Media, as well as other journalism texts such as Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How and Web Journalism. Other books include:  • Seeing Suffrage:The 1913 Washington Suffrage Parade, Its Pictures, and Its Effects on the American Political Landscape • Battlelines: Gettysburg: Civil War Sketch Artists and the First Draft of War In addition to writing, Jim likes to paint (watercolor), draw (pen and ink), play music (dulcimer and banjo), garden and piddle around in his woodworking shop. Jim grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and that is his favorite setting for his novels.

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Forward

By Ed Caudill

I found this volume informative and engaging.  In other words, the journalist in the author draws us in to the subject and overwhelms the professorial impulse to obfuscation and citation.  It is written not for the literary critic, who is welcome to read it, I’m sure, but for those of us who read for fun, and for whom learning is a decidedly pleasurable by-product.  This volume triumphs in both respects.

Jim Stovall writes in the introduction that he is trying to caricature people.  He succeeds, perhaps ironically in light of the fact that writers themselves are inevitably – sometimes tragically, sometimes commendably, usually unintentionally – caricaturing culture.  This collection careens along the gamut from rich and famous to downtrodden and obscure.  Some of them, the readers will know.  Others, I would take long odds, are unheard of among the perusers of this volume.  There any number of lesser knowns whose names are fleeting but whose work is durable, whether in politics, letters, sciences, or elsewhere. Some are masters of other media, such radio or cinema or illustration.

The mix itself invites a critical, What is that person doing here.  But then as I eyed the illustration and read the accompanying essay, my presumed pomposity withered and was answered, by me: Of course.  A good inclusion.  Among the various revelations and affirmations:

● Arthur Ashe was not just a great athlete, but a pretty good writer.

● Edward Bulwar-Lytton is remembered for his dark and stormy night and memorialized with an annual contest for bad writing.  He deserves better.  He came up with some pretty good stuff, and was himself an interesting and accomplished character.

● Agatha Christie’s fictional detective, Hercule Poirot, was given an obituary in the New York Times upon his literary demise.

● U.S. Grant was a better writer than politician.

● Marguerite Higgins, one of the most accomplished war correspondents of WW II and Korea, was told such work was no place for a woman.

● And speaking of that gender, it was Emma Lazarus who immortalized the American ideal with the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, inviting the world’s huddled masses.  She donated the poem as part of an effort to raise funds for that base.

● One of the nation’s greatest playwrights, Arthur Miller, studied journalism at the University of Michigan.  I speak with prejudice.

● An American foreign correspondent was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of Hitler and Nazism.  Eventually, Dorothy Thompson, to her credit, was told she had 24 hours to get out of Germany.

● Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist was stolen and twisted into Oliver Twiss by a book counterfeiter.

The list goes on.  You might find out which famous writer the author had lunch with, what not-so-famous writer probably was the first auto fatality, and who built a successful career on detective novels about maids and butlers.  You’ll have to read it for the details, visual and textual. 

Introduction

Wherein I try to justify the unjustifiable

I have always loved caricatures.

When I was a boy growing up in Nashville and our family subscribed to two newspapers, The Tennessean and the Banner – at my insistence – I sat fascinated in front of the work of editorial cartoonists such as Jack Knox and wondered, How did they do that?

I didn’t know then. I don’t know now.

But at some point in my life, I gave it a try.

I had always enjoyed drawing but had never looked upon it as a way to make a living. Drawing faded from my list of activities when I was a teenager and a college student, and briefly  reappeared when I was in the Navy. But mostly in those years I concentrated on the standard activities of life such as figuring out how I would make a living and finding someone willing to share whatever life we could build together.

By the middle of the 1980s, most of those issues had been settled. I had a wonderful wife, Sally; a cute and precocious red-headed son, Jeff; and a career path, teaching journalism at the University of Alabama. I had tons of good friends. I had lots of activities to take up my time. What else did I need?

I needed to draw.

Believing whole-heartedly in education, I decided to educate myself. In addition to some pens and paper, I bought some books. (This may sound quaint, dear reader, but you must remember that this was the brief period of mankind’s existence before the invention of the World Wide Web and the now source-of-all-knowledge, YouTube.)

One of those books was Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. It was filled with drawings that I happily copied, mangled, emulated, expanded upon. Again and again, night after night, I drew, copied, created, and imagined that maybe one day, I could actually do this. At some point, it dawned on me that the day I had dreamed up had arrived and passed, and I was actually doing it. Drawing, that is.

How do you go from drawing to caricatures? I don’t know. One of the many things I got from Jack’s book was that there is no journey. If you’re drawing, you can do caricatures. The book has a very small section on caricaturing, but it seemed to me – in one sense or another – that the whole thing was really about caricaturing.

So, I started deliberately trying to draw caricatures.

Since that time, I have continued trying. I have drawn hundreds of caricatures. Most of them aren’t any good. The not-so-good ones – those that aren’t in a landfill somewhere – have been withheld from this book. I have decided to include only those that rise to the level of mediocre or slightly better. Expect nothing more than that.

And the stories in this volume that go along with the cartoons? How do you justify those, I hear you sneering.

Those are simply a bald-faced attempt to avoid having this book declared by the U.S. Supreme Court as being without redeeming social value, or whatever it is that they say now when they want to ban a book and are annoyed by the existence of the First Amendment.

I am not convinced this clever ploy will work, but we shall see. (I am also not convinced that certain Supreme Court justices can read, but I probably should not say that given that I am trying to curry their favor. The assumption here is that they think, as I do, that reading is important. But, I digress.)

The stories themselves are products of a life-long interest (obsession?) with writing. Unlike with my drawing, I started writing when I was young and never quit. I have been fortunate throughout my life to have had many opportunities, not only to write but also to publish that writing.

When I was in high school, I gave up marching band to write for the school newspaper. In college, I wrote for the campus newspaper and got to work as a newspaper reporter for a time. In the Navy – through pure dumb luck – I was assigned to the staff of All Hands magazine, the Navy’s personnel publication that was distributed globally (600,000 copies a month) to all of the Navy’s far-flung fleets and bases.

When I became a journalism professor, I had many opportunities to write and be published, including a textbook titled Writing for the Mass Media, which was first published in 1985 and lasted through nine print editions. There were other books and other writing, and I have tried to apply the principles of good writing that I taught to my own work.

Now that I have retired, I have continued writing, mostly for my blog, JPROF.com, and my newsletter, which is where many of the articles in