Bill Holman and Smokey Stover

Take one look at Bill Holman's "Smokey Stover" comic strip and you can immediately see his strong influence on underground comix icon Robert Crumb and on the formative years of MAD Magazine. Early MAD editor and prime mover Harvey Kurtzman even acknowledged Bill Holman's influence in his introduction to a 1985 Smokey Stover compilation.

Bill Holman

William "Bill" Holman was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana. His cartoonist career began with a short-lived stint as an office boy at The Chicago Tribune, where he soon proved his skills and moved up to become a staff cartoonist.

Smokey Stover

In 1935, Holman's Smokey Stover comic strip was launched into syndication by the Chicago Tribune/New York Daily News Syndicate. The strip had its own world of made-up words like "Foo", "Notary Sojac", and "1506 Nix Nix." And almost every panel was crammed with verbal and visual puns. For example, "bathtub gin" would show a cartoon depiction of a couple sitting in a bathtub playing gin rummy. "Hog wash" would show a hog hanging out his wash on a clothesline. Of course, these were all throwaway gags, but they made a hilarious impact as tiny part of a strip's storyline.

Smokey Stover was a fireman who drove a two-wheeled fire truck known as "the Foo Mobile." As a boy in Indiana, Holman wanted to be a fireman. Cash U Nutt was Smokey's fire chief boss. And Smokey's wife, Cookie, was modeled after Holman's red-headed wife.

Holman claimed that his made-up word "Foo" that appeared in most of his strips was derived from a word that he had found on the bottom of a Chinese jade statue from San Francisco's Chinatown. He also claimed that "Notary Sojac" was the Gaelic word for Merry Christmas.

During World War II, the image of Smokey Stover was painted on U.S. bomber planes.

The Smokey Stover comic strip ran for forty years, until 1973.

Other Bill Holman Strips

Spooky, a black cat with a bandaged tail, started as a Smokey Stover strip character. His popularity soon launched his own strip. "Nuts and Jolts" was a single-box series that made good use of any overflow Holman visual puns.

Other Bill Holman Achievements

Holman was one of the founding fathers of the National Cartoonists Society. William "Bill" Holman died in 1987 at age 84. Smokey Stover lives on at a tribute website courtesy of his nephew. In Harvey Kurtzman's introduction to the collected Smokey Stover book, he admitted that Smokey Stover's "foo" and "notary sojac" inspired him to stick "potrzebie" and "furshlugginer" in MAD, and that Holman's visual puns influenced the early MAD artists like Will Elder and Wally Wood to cram each comic panel with visual puns.