Festivals Extra: Bob Cunningham, Middletown’s Cartooning Mayor



James Moore pointed out this article about an exhibit of Robert Cunningham's art and archival material, including many cartoons, at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Cunningham was Muncie's mayor in the late 1970s: the race to replace him between Big Jim Carey and Alan Wilson was the subject of one of the episdoes of the PBS series of documentaries on Muncie, called Middletown.

Cunningham was an avid cartoonist, and frequently had material in the newspaper -- or it seemed like he did. I remember my older brother Whit writing one of those article about the new comic books for the local paper, things like Cerebus and American Flagg!, and Mr. Cunningham telling him he'd checked out the new comics and they weren't for him. That Cunningham was a cartoonist didn't seem like a strange thing to be doing back in that town in the late '70s and early '80s; Muncie had Jim Davis and a character called "Benny Beans" who "frowned on" things like unkempt yards on the front page of the local newspaper. TK Ryan still had a presence in the region. Stan Mack visited to do a series of cartoons about Muncie that ran in conjunction with the aforementioned documentary series.

I've liked what I've seen of Bob's work since leaving home, although there's never been any indication that the field of cartooning was ill-served by Cunningham's choice of grocer and politician as primary careers. Unless the industry grows to meet the growing number of cartoonists we seem to be developing these days, the 2040s will be another era of people showing a cartooning hidden side.
 
posted 11:55 pm PST | Permalink
 

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