When a Dog Was Art: Clifford McBride and the Immortal NapoleonBack in those dear, dead days of yesteryear, cartoonists drew comic strips; they didn't rule them with a straight-edge. And one of the best examples of the truth of this freshly brewed axiom is Clifford McBride's dog strip, Napoleon. McBride drew with great verve and an exuberant pen, producing such a ferociously kinetic line that even when depicted in repose, his subjects seemed vitally energetic. And the style suited the subject (in fact, given the low-key humor of the strip, the style may have been the subject).The strip focused on a stout bachelor and his giant pet-Uncle Elby and Napoleon-achieving, as art critic Dennis Wepman once wrote in Ron Goulart's Encyclopedia of American Comics, a "beautifully balanced team-the fat man, all stasis and order, and the lean dog, all motion and chaos." It is Elby's fate (and the flywheel of the strip's punchline, daily and Sunday) to be forever dogged (pun intended) by misfortune of a minor dimension: if his own bumbling doesn't frustrate his plans that day, then the clumsy albeit good-hearted meddling of his affectionate, over-sized hound does.Elby was patterned visually after McBride's uncle, Henry Elba Eastman, a Wisconsin lumberman. McBride was likewise an upper midwesterner, born January 25 (or 26),1901 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of a purchasing agent for a threshing machine company (who identified himself on his son's birth certificate by writing "They just call me 'Mr. McBride'") and Lillian Eastman McBride, housewife. The family moved to Pasadena, California, when Clifford was nine. He drew throughout his school years, and he was twice expelled (then reinstated) from Pasadena High School for his cartoons in the school newspaper. When he was sixteen, he sold an editorial cartoon to the Los Angeles Times. He graduated from Occidental College in 1923 and joined the art department at the Times, producing a series of pantomime comic strips. In 1924, he left for the Chicago Tribune, where he illustrated humorous fiction for the paper and its magazine, Liberty. The next year, he accepted an offer from McNaught Syndicate to distribute nationally a full-page weekly pantomime comic strip, and McBride returned to Pasadena.Offered in black-and-white for release on either Saturday or Sunday, the McNaught feature was a miscellany page: instead of a continuing title, it carried a descriptive headline that changed every week to suit that week's subject. The comic reprints from are reproduced from actual classic comics, and sometimes reflect the imperfection of books that are decades old