THE BORN LOSER AT 45

The Born Loser celebrated its 45^th year on May 15 even though it was May 10 that the strip debuted in 1965. Art Sansom, the originator of the feature, had been producing artwork and sometimes realistically rendered comic strips for NEA since joining the syndicate staff as an illustrator in 1945. Among the early strips he collaborated on were Peggy, Chris Welkin - Planeteer, and Vic Flint - Private Investigator. After twenty years drawing others’ creations, he concocted his own strip about hapless Brutus Thornapple, the loser who was apparently born to arrive missing whenever the train left the station. Art died July 4, 1991, and the strip has been continued since then by his son, Chip, who was merely 14 when his father invented Brutus and his wife Gladys, his Scrooge-like boss Rancid Veeblefester, the wonderfully named panhandler Wastrel P. Gravesite, and numerous others, all of whom fare better than Brutus on a day-to-day basis.

Chip had been helping his father for years. He first tried the business world after graduating from Case Western Reserve University with an applicable degree in about 1973, but after four or five years, he said, “I discovered I couldn’t stand it. At the time, my father was looking for an assistant.”

Father and son shared drawing and gag-writing chores. They started each week with a Monday morning gag-writing session. As Art remembered it for an article about the strip’s 25^th anniversary: “We’ll sit down and toss around the best 15-20 gags we can come up with, back and forth, then narrow that down to the best seven.”

But gag-writing goes on all the time, day after day, no matter where the cartoonists might be. Said Art: “Inspiration can strike at the most inopportune times. I’ve discovered that a good way to clear out an elevator is to start chuckling to yourself.”

In 1981, Art and Chip teamed up on a humorous strip about life on a Texas dude ranch with the title character, Dusty Chaps, a country western singer patterned somewhat after the Urban Cowboy fad. But this effort, more realistically (albeit still simply) drawn than the Loser, didn’t last long. These days, Brutus and his ensemble cast circulate to more than 1,300 newspapers in 35 countries, and Chip signs the strip with both his name and his father’s.

“I am very happy that The Born Loser is still as appealing to readers, new and old, as it was when it first appeared 45 years ago,” Chip said in the syndicate press release. “It is a tribute to the great characters my dad created and his universal and timeless premise that Brutus Thornapple is an everyman, taking the fall for the rest of us in the trials and tribulations we face everyday.”

The strip continues to be a family affair with Chip’s wife, Brooke, assisting him in much the same way as when he started working for his father. Daughters Jacqueline and Isabel are a constant source of material for the strip. Appropriately, Chip now works in his father’s old studio in the Sansom family home in Lakewood, Ohio.

Here’s the anniversary strip (in color) with samples of the strip for 1969, when Art Sansom was still doing it solo, the drawings rendered in a rather more languid manner than later on.