Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe

A poignant history of the cartoonists and illustrators from the Connecticut School

For a period of about fifty years, right in the middle of the American Century, many of the the nation’s top comic-strip cartoonists, gag cartoonists, and magazine illustrators lived within a stone’s throw of one another in the southwestern corner of Connecticut—a bit of bohemia in the middle of those men in their gray flannel suits.

Cullen Murphy’s father, John Cullen Murphy, drew the wildly popular comic str...