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When Prague Post cartoonist Stewart K. Moore asked for a raise in 1997 to produce his weekly “Morris Mule” comic strip, the paper’s managing editor, Barry Henderson, a salty, no-nonsense newspaperman, offered him a deal: "Make me laugh for six weeks in a row, and the raise is yours."
“Morris Mule,” the saga of a bumbling, unlikable expat, was a high-concept strip that didn’t always resonate as intended with the paper’s readers. Moore recalls coaxing enough chuckles out of Henderson to merit the raise, but the increase never came. Today, he jokes that “Morris Mule” may go down as the least-appreciated comic strip ever to run in an expat publication.
Moore’s tough crowd was part of an ongoing theme. For the comic artists and illustrators drawing for Prague’s English-language press, the ever-present challenge was finding common ground -- images that spoke to newcomers from several different countries about the one thing they all shared: the delights and strangeness of living in Prague.
And there was no shortage of places to try. The rapidly growing number of English-language newspapers, magazines, literary journals and small presses all needed artwork, and the artists stepped up to supply them. Their work made us laugh, sometimes made us think, and often captured that odd, exhilarating sensation of being a foreigner in Prague better than the articles themselves did.
In this second part of my series on Prague’s expat art scene in the 1990s, I look at the cartoonists, illustrators, comic artists and designers behind those pages. Part 1 -- last week -- covered how art was simply everywhere back then. Next week, in Part 3, I’ll turn to the many foreign painters, their exhibitions and their ties to the Czech art world.
