Background
He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the son of Edward John Fisher, a businessman, and Sadie Breakstone Fisher.
He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the son of Edward John Fisher, a businessman, and Sadie Breakstone Fisher.
After graduating from high school in Wilkes-Barre in 1918, he went to work for a local newspaper, much against the wishes of his father who, Fisher said, "had complete contempt for my aesthetic ambitions. "
He was, however, encouraged by his mother, who did some writing and, as he once mused, could "draw a lemon that almost looked like one. " The stimulus for Fisher's comic strip, "Joe Palooka, " came in 1919 when Fisher, who was working as a one-man staff for the Wilkes-Barre Herald, met a boxer. When the boxer asked the artist, "Would youse do a round of golf with me?" Fisher was inspired by the man's grammar, personality, and profession and began developing the "Palooka" strip.
In 1926 Fisher went to New York, where he was employed as an advertising salesman by the New York Daily News until 1929. Fisher then met Charles McAdam, president of the McNaught Syndicate, who gave him a job as a salesman. Fisher extracted a promise from McAdam that the as-yet-unpublished "Joe Palooka" might be tried out later.
In the highly competitive comic strip market of the Depression, Fisher proved himself to be a born salesman. He helped secure forty newspaper clients for an ailing McNaught strip, "Dixie Dugan, " the story of a modern career girl, then, buoyed by this success, went on the road, and found twenty newspaper clients for "Joe Palooka" while McAdam was on vacation. The strip, sent to newspapers for publication on Apr. 19, 1930, was an immediate success.
By 1955, nearly 1, 000 daily newspapers and a score of business and military publications carried Fisher's renderings of the gentle boxer.
By 1939 the strip was such a hit that readers of newsprint-poor London papers would not allow it to be dropped. In the United States, Newsweek declared, "Ham Fisher's straight-living and soft-hearted but naive and ungrammatical fighter has won the hearts of a good percentage of America's 130, 000, 000. Bishops, university presidents, Congressmen, governors, industrialists, and even Supreme Court justices follow the pen-and-ink champion's adventures and sorrows. "
An element of realism was added by the inclusion of such living persons as Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who made cameo appearances. Although some critics characterized Fisher as "complex and clever, " the strip itself glorified the simple, virtuous, and moral.
Becker called Palooka himself "the personification of the ideals of an American majority. " Each of Palooka's attributes "has two sides; he may be called a boob, which is bad, or unsophisticated, which is good; a sucker (bad) or an idealist (good); a sentimentalist or a saint. But in every panel of the strip there is such an effusion of traditional virtue, of bonhomie, of democracy, that Palooka has come to personify the glories of the simple life. "
Fisher's keen sense of public opinion was reflected in his use of Palooka as a propagandist for the war effort during World War II. And he was precise in fashioning his image of the fighter who enlisted in the service as a private because he said he did not know enough to be an officer.
During the war Fisher used the strip for recruitment, promotion of hygiene, instruction in languages, and custom guides. The German propaganda minister Joseph P. Goebbels was said to have called the comic strip "the most vicious of anti-Nazi propaganda. "
Palooka was the first comic strip hero to get into uniform, enlisting in 1940, even before the draft. Americans reading the "Palooka" strip followed GI Joe into every major action of the war, from Africa to Okinawa. At the end of World War II, the army used Joe Palooka in an educational comic book designed to help soldiers readjust to civilian life. Fisher drew these strips for the government without payment.
Although the draftsmanship in "Palooka" was unimaginative, the strip was widely discussed and written about. The boxer, fictitious in spite of the original inspiration, seemed to take on life as newspapers and magazines wrote about his upcoming fights and his courtship of Ann Howe, whom he eventually married.
Miss Howe, a not-so-prototypical blonde, was a bright woman of wealth and social station.
By the late 1940's Fisher was making $200, 000 a year from his daily strips and $50, 000 from comic books. His earnings from motion pictures and radio series are not known. As much as anything else, Fisher was a promoter with a good marketing sense and a keen ability to please the public.
But in spite of outward manifestations of success, his life was far from perfect. In an illustrated autobiography for Collier's in October 1948, he described his life in fifteen panels, beginning with himself as a newborn baby at the hospital screaming to his father, who urged him to take over the family business. In a sad final panel, the artist, besieged by ringing phones and people offering movie and book contracts, admits to a young aspiring cartoonist that he is quite lonely.
Some of the cartoonist's unhappiness may have been fueled by a feud with fellow cartoonist Al Capp, creator of "Li'l Abner. " Fisher had given Capp his first job when he hired him in 1933 to finish a Sunday page for $10. Later Fisher hired Capp as a full-time assistant. A bitter conflict between the two broke into print in Time on February 14, 1955.
The magazine reported that Fisher had accused Capp of putting pornographic material into his strip. The accusation came as Capp and some associates were trying to buy a Boston television station. Capp responded to his former boss's charges by calling Fisher a "certain treasure trove of lousiness who, in the normal course of each day of his life, managed to be, in dazzling succession, every conceivable kind of heel. " Two weeks after the Time article, the 325-member National Cartoonists Society suspended Fisher for "conduct unbecoming a member. "
The Society's ethics committee accused Fisher of using "altered, tampered-with and not a true reproduction" of Capp's cartoons in an effort to prove Capp had slipped pornography into his drawings.
A few months later Fisher died from an overdose of sleeping pills, an apparent suicide. After his death "Joe Palooka" was continued by his friend and assistant, Moe Leff.
Two weeks after the Time article, the 325-member National Cartoonists Society suspended Fisher for "conduct unbecoming a member. "
But in every panel of the strip there is such an effusion of traditional virtue, of bonhomie, of democracy, that Palooka has come to personify the glories of the simple life. "
Each of Palooka's attributes "has two sides; he may be called a boob, which is bad, or unsophisticated, which is good; a sucker (bad) or an idealist (good); a sentimentalist or a saint.
Quotes from others about the person
"Palooka" was "the most sentimental strip in America, " according to Stephen Becker, who wrote: "Here are all of the paraphernalia and appurtenances of the fight racket: fighters, managers, seconds, gamblers, horse-playing hangers-on. Yet look at its hero: tall, good looking in a snub-nosed way, mild-mannered, even affectionate, totally virtuous (though capable of anger at real injustice) and a Juggernaut in the ring. "
In an illustrated autobiography for Collier's in October 1948, he described his life in fifteen panels, beginning with himself as a newborn baby at the hospital screaming to his father, who urged him to take over the family business.
The boxer, fictitious in spite of the original inspiration, seemed to take on life as newspapers and magazines wrote about his upcoming fights and his courtship of Ann Howe, whom he eventually married.
After his death "Joe Palooka" was continued by his friend and assistant, Moe Leff.
