If I could meet one living person, I'd choose Cullen Murphy. Who he? He's an essayist who writes for Vanity Fair and used to edit The Atlantic, but what particularly interests me is that he's an authority on old comic strips. His father, John Cullen Murphy, was a comic strip artist who drew Big Ben Bolt, about a white boxing champion, back when the idea wasn't laughable. Later he took over Prince Valiant from Hal Foster and drew it for a good thirty years, with Cullen doing the writing.
Cullen recently published Cartoon County, a biography of his father which talked a lot about his and others' cartoon work. (A whole lot of comic-strip artists lived in the same county in Connecticut!) I read it recently and greatly enjoyed it. You could say that his family reversed the cliche--it's supposed to be the father who's the highbrow magazine editor and the son who becomes a popular cartoonist!
If I met Cullen Murphy, we could certainly talk a lot about comic strips. (When I was eleven or twelve, comic-strip detective Rip Kirby seemed the coolest guy in the world to me!) But I'd also mention the sketches and letters his father sent home while serving in the Pacific in World War II, a few of which were reproduced in Cartoon County. I'd encourage him to turn them into a whole book in themselves!
There's an episode of Prince Valiant where Val was making a rocking horse for his son Galan, but being a busy knight he never got around to finishing it, and now Galan's old enough for a real horse! (Did something like this actually happen in his family? Knowing how time-consuming drawing a comic strip is, I could believe it.)
And I'd also mention a dream of mine: that the three American daily newspapers distributed nationwide--The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today--will someday start carrying comic strips! Not the regular syndicated ones but original strips of their own. I can dream, can't I?
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