Morrie Turner at SFPL - Exhibition Review by Kim Munson (10/09)

Morrie Turner, Creator of Wee Pals Cartoon: a 45 Year Retrospective, an exhibition

produced by the AfroSolo Theatre Company at the San Francisco Public Library

(August 15 - October 15, 2009), showed an impressive range of work by this award

winning cartoonist. Large display cases clustered in three locations within the library

explored not only his best-known work, the Wee Pals comic strip, but also Turner’s Soul

Corner panels and the social/political cartoons he created in the 1960’s & 70’s for

publications like Black World and Ebony.

“Soul Corner” panel by Morrie Turner. Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library.

Turner, a life-long resident of Oakland, California, was

born in 1923. He was a self-taught artist, and some of

his first publications were strips he drew for military

magazines while serving in WWII. After his service was

completed, he continued drawing, supplementing his

income with a job as a police clerk.

Turner, a life-long resident of Oakland, California, was

born in 1923. He was a self-taught artist, and some of his first publications were strips

he drew for military magazines while serving in WWII. After his service was completed,

he continued drawing, supplementing his income with a job as a police clerk.

With the encouragement of Charles Schulz, Turner became a full-time cartoonist in

1964. In 1965, he developed a racially-integrated comic strip called Dinky Fellas that

ran in five newspapers, which was renamed Wee Pals. By 1966, Wee Pals could be

seen in over 70 newspapers in the US and abroad. The strip gained true nationwide

acceptance after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when it’s

publication expanded to over 100 newspapers nationwide, making it the first nationally

syndicated racially-integrated comic strip.

The library exhibition, curated by Kheven Legrone, devotes several display cases to

Wee Pals. Outside the Children’s Center, on the library’s second floor, two cases

featured Wee Pals books and memorabilia, and paintings that were used as

background slides for a children’s concert series, A Journey Into Jazz, performed by the

Oakland Symphony at the Paramount Theatre. These slides featured portraits of

famous jazz musicians, and child characters demonstrating dance moves in different

styles. Turner would attend these concerts, sketching the children that attended and

giving them the drawings.

The heart of the exhibition, upstairs in the African American Center, focuses on the

development of the Wee Pals characters (some based on Turner, his son,

grandchildren and friends), his production methods on the Wee Pals strip, and his

political cartoons. Many of these single panel “civil rights cartoons” (as Turner called

them), drawn with pen, ink and watercolor, found humor in irony. For example, one

drawing depicts a White panhandler saying “Thanks, Boy” to a wealthy Black gentleman

that had just deposited a dollar in his cup (Turner says this really happened to him).

Also featured in this part of the exhibition was a series of cartoons Turner created in

1969, when he was invited with five other cartoonists by the National Cartoonist Society

to travel to Vietnam to entertain the troops. He spent twenty-seven days on the front

lines and in hospitals sketching more than 3,000 caricatures of service people.

Turner’s drawings for the Sunday Soul Corner panels were prominently displayed in the

third floor main lobby. These drawings, originally meant to fill up the "drop out panel" in

Turner's Sunday strips, illustrate the accomplishments of famous persons of color.

Morrie Turner with Belva

Davis at the SFPL, 11/15/09.

Photo courtesy of the SFPL.

Turner (shown in conversation with Belva Davis at the

SFPL 11/15/09) still lives in Oakland in the house his

father bought in 1941, and continues to reach out to

children through small cartooning classes and guest

lectures at schools. Turner’s life was the subject of the

2001 documentary, Keeping the Faith with Morrie,

produced by Angel Harper for Heaven Sent

Productions Inc.

This review will be published in the Spring 2010 edition of the International Journal of

Comic Art. See more reviews and news about comics and museums on my blog at

http://kmunson-mac.blogspot.com/