The Press: He'll Do It Every Time

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Cartoonist Jimmy Hatlo, a jovial, bigdomed man who explodes into mock-temper tantrums, makes more than $250,000 a year by illustrating his simple theory that things always happen at the worst possible moment. Last week Hatlo, whose syndicated cartoon "They'll Do It Every

Time" runs in 637 dailies around the world, had real-life facts to back up his fiction. On its front page, the Denver Post reached the peak of a campaign to prove that dogs are "man's best friend." The Post was all out to block an anti-dog ordinance in the city council that would virtually force dog owners to keep their pets on a leash or shut up in yards of homes. On its back page the same day, the Post ran a Hatlo cartoon showing a saber-toothed dog tearing the pants off "Mailman McMucilage." As dogs do every time, the man-eater struck a "cute 1'il WoozyOzzums" pose when the postal inspector arrived to investigate McMucilage's complaint. Nevertheless, the harm was done. Hatlo had sabotaged the paper's campaign.

He quickly made amends to the Post with a special Hatlo cartoon (a Post editor tearing his hair and screaming "Kill the Hatlo cartoon!! No, better still, kill Hatlo!") and Ratio's "abject apologies to every dog ... in Denver." Said his apology: "This sort of thing is always happening to me. If I draw a cold-weather cartoon showing my characters shivering in their red underwear . . . the temperature will rise to about 102°F. the day it appears."

Bigdome & Tremblechin. Because his comic, faintly tragic drawings show situations that are always happening to his readers, Hatlo at 55 has become one of the best-known cartoonists in the U.S. His two-panel cartoons are populated with such characters as "J. Pluvius Bigdome," stuffed-shirt, penny-pinching president of Bilgewater Beverage Co.; Henry Tremble-chin, Bigdome's browbeaten employee; Phootkiss, the office climber; Lushwell, a well-meaning but unpopular drunk who drags reluctant friends off to the El Clippo nightclub; and Gliblip, the unctuous sales manager. Typical Hatlo situation: browbeaten Mr. Tremblechin, nervously on his way to his first dinner at Bigdome's house, dropping his false teeth and smashing them on the pavement.

Most of Hatlo's crowded scenes are in an office or living room, but he is equally at home in the kitchen, ballpark or local hospital, where the best-looking nurses are always taking care of the patient with the bandage over his eyes. Hatlo has no trouble getting ideas; his readers send him 200 suggestions a week.

Snobs & Iodine. Hatlo quit school in Los Angeles at 14, became a printer's devil, and in his spare time was a publicity man for Mack Sennett. He worked his way into cartooning on the sports page of Hearst's San Francisco Bulletin. William R. Hearst himself spotted his drawings of an improbable community Hatlo called "Swineskin Gulch," and ordered Bulletin editors to use more Hatlo cartoons. In 1928 he tried his first "They'll Do It Every Time," was so flooded with letters from readers suggesting ideas that he has drawn it ever since. By 1943, Trem-blechin's dreadful little daughter Iodine had become so gruesomely popular that Hatlo put her into a Sunday strip all her own.