The Press: The End of a Fairy Tale

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At its best, no comic strip was more whimsically humorous than Crockett Johnson's Barnaby. The world of five-year-old Barnaby was peopled by such characters as McSnoyd, an invisible leprechaun who talked with a Bronx accent, Gorgon, a talking dog, Gus, a friendly ghost, and a rotund, urbane fairy godfather named J. J. O'Malley. O'Malley's cigar doubled as a magic wand and usually kept him and Barnaby at odds with the slow-witted real world around them.

The strip's gentle satire on mortal failings was never a big crowd-pleaser; at its peak in 1946, only 76 papers carried

Barnaby. Shortly after, Cartoonist Johnson himself tired of drawing the strip and turned it over to Collaborators Ted Ferro and Jack Morley, though he kept his hand in on & off, began writing the dialogue again in 1948. Somehow much of Barnaby's appeal disappeared, and the number of papers fell off by almost half. Last week Johnson announced that next month he will end Barnaby altogether. Although Barnaby readers always assumed that the child was ageless, Johnson said not so. Barnaby is finally growing up. He will soon reach his sixth birthday, and six-year-olds need no fairy godfathers.