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The late Morrie Turner photographed in 2009 at
the San Francisco Main Library where his comic strip Wee Pals was the subject
of a retrospective. Photo by Brant Ward, The Chronicle.
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Kevin Melrose for Comic Book
Resources
Published
January 27, 2014
Wee Pals creator Morrie Turner, the first nationally
syndicated African-American cartoonist, passed away Saturday, January 25, 2014 in a Sacramento,
California, hospital. He was 90 years old.
Raised in
Oakland, Turner was a self-taught artist who drew cartoons for Army newspapers
while serving during World War II with the 477th Bomber group. Following his
discharge, he worked as a police clerk while also creating strips for a number
of publications.
In 1959,
the black daily newspaper the Chicago Defender began publishing his all-black
strip Dinky Fellas, created with the
encouragement of his friend Charles Schulz after Turner expressed a desire for
a comic that reflected his childhood experiences. But it wasn’t until Turner
diversified the cast, introducing kids from different ethnic backgrounds, that
Wee Pals was born.
“All the
kids were different,” the cartoonist recalled in a 2009 interview with the San
Francisco Chronicle. “White, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, black. It was a
rainbow. I didn’t know that wasn’t the way it was other places. Oakland was
that way before the war. We were all equal. Nobody had any money.”
Introduced
for national syndication in 1965, Wee Pals initially appeared in just five
major newspapers; integration of the comics page wasn’t easy. But within three
months of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, that number grew to 100.
Wee Pals was adapted in 1972 as a short-lived animated
television series called Kid Power.
Honored in
2003 with the National Cartoonists Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement
Award, Turner was also the subject of the 30-minute documentary “Keeping the Faith
With Morrie”.
Turner
spent much of his free time visiting schools until age and failing kidneys made
those appearances difficult. He updated his Facebook page on Thursday, January 23, 2014 writing,
“Have been having some medical issues that require surgery — and I’ll be
recuperating for a bit.” He also invited fans to keep him company during his
dialysis treatments, saying, “No need to call first; simply sign in, don a
paper gown and visit!”
He’s survived
by his son Morrie Jr., grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and his companion
Karol Trachtenburg, with whom he lived in West Oakland.
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