MICHAEL H. PRICE: Moe Lester – Román Noir, or Roamin’ Nose?
The ungainly fellow pictured alongside is a concoction of my grammar-school days, modeled originally after an authoritarian physical-education teacher who took immense delight in reminding us younger kids that soon we would matriculate to the intermediate grades where he held sway. Talk about your incentives for under-achievement!
Because one must ridicule that which one cannot combat outright, I proceeded to reduce this intimidating presence to a cartoon character – exaggerating his pronounced nose and chin, as well as his intense Texas-redneck dialect – and set about subjecting him to sundry humiliations within the pages of a Big Chief composition tablet. These pages in turn were duly, if guardedly, circulated for the amusement of sympathetic classmates. The confiscation of these prototypical Underground Comics (ca. 1955) was long in coming but inevitable: I was having too much fun in plain view of a cheerless society.
The agent of my character’s simultaneous popular discovery and christening was one Mrs. M.E. Jenkins, third-grade home-room teacher and Tireless Champion of the Status Quo. Inquiring as to the contents of my sketch-pad, Mrs. Jenkins noticed its star player straightaway – and invited me to explain his raison d’etre to the assembled class. I improvised: “Aw, he’s just this goofy ol’ guy who gets in trouble a lot.” Then she asked: “And what is his name, Michael?”
Gulp! Well, now, no way was I going to identify my dreaded life-model – and so I made up an alias on the spot: “His name is Moe Lester, Miz Jenkins.” (Pre-emptive crisis-control tip: Never speak in puns to people who neither Get It nor want to do so.)
“A molester!?!” bellowed Mrs. Jenkins, grabbing me by one ear and leaving the classroom to its own snickering devices as she hupped me down the cavernous hallway to the Principal’s Office.
Not quite nine years of age, and already the author of a Banned Book. Over Mrs. Jenkins’ shrieks of outrage, Principal Howard Amick prevailed with somewhat a saner voice: He found the pages worth a chuckle but, even so, pronounced them a Waste of Talent. Damnation by faint praise, in other words, within a public-school system whose elementary art curriculum consisted of finger-painting and construction-paper cut-outs.
The menacing teacher who had served as an unwitting life-model for Moe Lester found himself transferred before I could reach fourth grade. So whew, already. But others like him have cropped ever since and all along, in the form of schoolyard bullies, college deans, petty bureaucrats, dim-witted newspaper editors, police officers of a maverick bent, and so forth. Abuse of authority is rampant, as if you didn’t know, and those who can’t bring themselves to buy in are well advised to find what humor they can in its ridiculous essence.
A recurrent, if not entirely current, incarnation of Moe Lester dates from 1969-70, when as a college undergraduate I based a revamped version upon such influences as (1) a uniformly lunkheaded and malicious campus-cop department at West Texas Suitcase University, (2) Lyndon “Beans” Johnson, and (3) a big-shot rancher-turned-political agitator named J. Evetts Haley, who at the time was holding forth as the Phantom President of W.T.S.U., my alma mater, such as it was and is – in hopes of marginalizing the on-campus outcroppings (yes, even in the provinces) of such influences as the Panthers and S.D.S. A primary aestheticable influence would involve the likes of Basil Wolverton, Walt Kelly, Gene Ahern, Al Capp, and Boody Rogers – masters of convoluted wordplay and cartoonish exaggeration. Many of the more recent Moe Lester pages, including a 1993 appearance in Heavy Metal and a couple of stories-in-progress with fellow Texas-bred cartoonist Frank Stack, date from times more recent. But the template was struck long beforehand.
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