Stan Lynde, creator of the newspaper strips Rick O'Shay and Latigo died August 6 in a hospital in Helena, Montana. The cause was cancer and he was 82. This video will introduce you to him…
Lynde created Rick O'Shay in 1958. It was a wonderful comic that underwent several changes of style over its run, ranging from broad humor to what might be considered serious philosophy, at least by comic strip standards. It also changed eras. The little town of Conniption, presided over by Deputy Sheriff O'Shay, was originally depicted in the present day. In 1969, Lynde suddenly announced that henceforth, the strip would be set in the year 1869…and from then on, it was, though many readers may not have noticed.
Readers who were aware of that change and the ones in tone probably assumed the transitions were simply a matter of the artist evolving…and that was probably some of it. It was a good strip no matter when it was set or how broad Lynde got with it. But he also spent most of the strip's run groping for a way to make it sell better. Rick O'Shay was an unusual feature in that it appeared in very few newspapers…but the ones it was in were the big papers that paid the most, like the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. It wasn't in very many small newspapers.
Usually, a comic strip has the opposite problem. Cartoonists who are in a lot of small papers dream of getting into the big ones. The big ones that carried Rick O'Shay paid enough to make it worth his time to do…but he needed the extra income from a bunch of smaller clients and — as he told me the one time we met and spoke — they were maddeningly uninterested in his strip. The switch to 1869 was in part an attempt to grab them and it did not succeed in that regard.
Lynde worked very hard on Rick O'Shay, sometimes putting in (he said) 80-hour weeks. As he got older, this became more difficult to do and he increasingly employed assistants…though it never showed in the strip. That time I met him, someone asked him why he'd quit his own creation in 1977. His answer went something like this: "I couldn't do those long weeks anymore so I brought in others to help me…but I was so fussy about how the strip read and looked that I was still putting in impossible hours on it. One day, I realized that my assistants were making more per hour off my strip than I was. That was when I realized I had to go do something else." Rick O'Shay was continued for a while by the team of Marian Dern and Alfredo Alcala, then later by Mel Keefer but it was discontinued in 1981.
Lynde did indeed do something else. He wrote novels (graphic and otherwise) and short stories and did drawings. In 1979, another syndicate offered him a potentially more lucrative arrangement to create a new western strip and he came up with Latigo, much of which was expertly drawn by Russ Heath. It was a good feature but it was no Rick O'Shay and it failed to find an audience, ending in 1983. Lynde returned to his novels and other projects, many of them issued by his own publishing imprint, Cottonwood Press. Soon after, he acquired full ownership from his old syndicate of Rick O'Shay and he republished the classic strips himself and did some new stories in graphic novel format that were quite splendid. I recommend any of them. He was a very talented man and the world of comic art is much poorer for this loss.
Tom Spurgeon has more details on his life. Buzz Dixon has a nice appreciation.