Funny Pages: The Disneyfied Cartoons of Etta Hulme

During the WWII era, Hulme filled the shoes of many a male cartoonist, even working for Disney, a skill she brought to Texas.

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A rediscovery of Etta Parks Hulme (1923-2014), one of the last of the old-school pen-and-ink (pre-digital) editorial cartoonists, requires a leap way further back than her lengthy stretch as a provocative opinionizer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The artist seldom spoke of her Disney-studio years, even less often of her post-WWII stretch as a star-player comic-book artist — except when reminded. Whereupon the floodgates of happy memory would swing open and stay swung.

Walt Disney Productions had shown Etta Parks the exit after the war’s end had brought the studio’s masculine talents home from uniformed duty. (Women in motion-picture animation were scarce-to-none until the draft had caused a shortage of male cartoonists — Walt Disney’s preferred personnel.)

Then, upon retrenching in comics-pamphlet production, Etta found Disney’s affiliated funny-book factory barricaded with trademark-wrangling red tape — and so she invented her own troupe of kid-stuff characters for an independent publisher in Chicago. Her rambunctious “Red” Rabbit series (1947-1951) ran for 22 issues, only to run afoul of a gradual comic-book purge that put many small publishers out of business for lack of distribution.

That industrywide implosion had left Somerville-born Etta Parks without a mass-media outlet, but her marriage to Vernon Hulme, a coal company honcho, and their devotion to family life filled any such gaps. Etta’s interest in politics led her to a cartooning niche with The Texas Observer. The Hulmes settled in Fort Worth during the waning 1950s.

Flash-forward to 1992-1993: My newspaper-of-record, the Star-Telegram, hooked up with a traveling exhibition tracing the centuried history of editorial-opinion cartooning in Texas. The curators, Maury Forman and Bob Calvert, enlisted me to whip their program notes into an accompanying book. The finished result, Cartooning Texas (Texas A&M University Press; 1993), boasts a cover design by a cohort (and Pulitzer medalist), Ben Sargent.

Our expo-opening ceremonies involved in-person appearances by such working cartoonists as Sargent himself, of the Austin American-Statesman, and Etta Parks Hulme, of the Star-Telegram. Etta and I had offices within shouting distance of one another at the Telegram, and I had been urging the “powers that did be” to devote a Telegram-spinoff book to her cartoons. The resulting booklet, UnforgETTAbly Etta, was issued as a subscription premium, priming the pump for a more substantial collection. That one surfaced in 1998 as The Ettatorials: The Best of Etta Hulme (Pelican Press).

Around the time of the Cartooning Texas show, I had been visiting with an artist and feminist historian, Trina Robbins, in San Francisco, in connection with her research for A Century of Women Cartoonists (Kitchen Sink Press; 1993). I suggested that Trina should consider Etta Hulme as a subject. Trina’s interest lay less with editorial cartooning than with comic-book/comic-strip artistry. I asked Etta about a comic-book background.

“Oh, yeah — you bet!” she said. “Reckon you ever heard tell of ‘Red’ Rabbit?”

“You did ‘Red’ Rabbit?” I asked. The title, from Chicago’s Dearfield Publishing, had been a childhood favorite of mine — a funny-animals comic with an unusual ring of cowhand authenticity.

“Oh, yeah,” Etta said. “One of my more ambitious youthful efforts. Had a pretty good run with it. I was Etta Parks in those days. Sometimes signed myself as just-plain ‘Etta,’ sometimes just ‘E. Parks.’ I had struck out in tryin’ to land some assignments for Mr. Disney’s official Donald Duck funny books, and so I just hauled off and made up some characters of my own. Just as well — I would’ve been forced to sign ‘Walt Disney’ on anything I might’ve done for that company, anyhow.

“And ol’ ‘Red’ Rabbit, now, those funny books gave me good excuse to take off from my Disney-studio experience and combine it with an interest in wild-and-woolly Western adventures.”

Since 1972, Etta Parks Hulme had been a widely distributed opinion-page mainstay, based at the Star-Telegram.

 Degreed in fine arts at the University of Texas at Austin, Etta spent two years in the Disney animation shop during WWII, after military conscription had caused the studio to ease off on Walt Disney’s insistence upon keeping women out of the more creative roles. Here, Etta worked as an in-betweener (figure movements between character poses) on Disney’s war-effort propaganda films and such theatrical features as “Song of the South” and “Make Mine Music!” (both from 1946). Etta returned to Texas as a commercial artist and art teacher, meanwhile pitching comic-book ideas. “Red” Rabbit proved a success — until its publisher became collateral damage in a nationwide scare campaign that targeted comic books in general as a purported cause of juvenile delinquency.

“Mr. Vernon Hulme and I made a good, counterbalanced team,” Etta would say, “what with my left-of-center political-cartooning career and his corporate-industrial career — coal-mining exploration, at that, during a time [the 1970s] when Texas was just starting to develop an environmental conscience.

“But Mr. Hulme also was ahead of his time in that regard,” she added. “He had a policy of taking great care to minimize the damages of any mining operation, and when his company [Texas Industries] located one huge vein of coal in 1977 at Thurber, Texas, he even took pains to protect the migratory route of a rare breed of bird in that area.” (Vernon Hulme died in 1983.)

The lapse from the old-guard liberalism of The Texas Observer to the provincial Star-Telegram might have found Etta’s readers expecting a softening of her social-critic voice. But, no, the Hulme cartoons retained their bite throughout her involvement with the mainstream daily.

“Good old-fashioned ridicule — that’s the ticket,” Etta said. “And a lot of absurdity, too. Let the readers know you’re having fun, poking fun at the politicians and taking a stand on the issues, and they’re likely as not to get a kick out of a cartoon even if they disagree with it. All except for those miserable souls who can’t take a joke.

“I love gettin’ disagreeable letters,” she adds. “I just love stirrin’ the pot until it boils over. Objections from the readers, disagreements with whatever stance I might take — nothin’ to ’em. Just give me some real-world abuses of power or political absurdities to work with, and I’ll find the humor necessary to point up the seriousness of a situation. The only obstacles I’ve ever encountered have been the occasional editors who’d be leery of my gettin’ ‘too opinionated,’ as they’d say, and want to slam on the brakes for me.

“Well, y’know, there’s a reason we call these things ‘editorial opinion cartoons,’” says Etta Hulme. “I’m in this business to dispense opinions, and — if the job gets done right — to get people stirred up while keepin’ things on the funny side.”