'No Comment' (The Ottawa Citizen, 22 December 1979).
Vahan Shirvanian was an American magazine gag cartoonist, who contributed to The New Yorker, Reader's Digest, Harvard Business Review, Playboy, and many other publications. Between 1979 and 1982, he created the relatively obscure and largely pantomime newspaper comic strip 'No Comment' for King Features Syndicate. 'No Comment' evolved from wordless comedy with many different characters to a balloon comic starring an orange cat named Brimstone.
Early life
Vahan Shirvanian was born in 1925 in Hackensack, New Jersey, and mostly grew up in Newark. His parents were from Armenian descent. During World War II, he served two years in the Army Air Force and was trained as a fighter plane bombardier, before eventually becoming an artillery instructor. After the war, Shirvanian majored in English literature from Seton Hall University, where he also served as comic artist and editor for the yearbook. Graduated in 1950, he sold his first cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post.
From: 1000 Jokes Magazine (December-February 1965).
Cartooning career
Shirvanian quickly began contributing to other magazines, working from his house studio in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. His witty cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, Hugh Hefner's Playboy, The Harvard Business Review, Prevention and Reader's Digest. Notable were his contributions to Highlights for Children, where he, according to his obituary in the Star-Ledger, "used his great love and connection to children to create memorable commentary on everyday mishaps."
Cartoon from the Saturday Evening Post, 24 February 1962.
No Comment
Between 9 April 1979 and 25 April 1982, King Features Syndicate distributed Shirvanian's daily and Sunday comic strip 'No Comment' to hundreds of newspapers throughout the nation. The strip had a revolving cast of characters, and initially featured absurd pantomime gags with a quarreling husband and wife. Gradually more colorful personalities turned up, including a fakir, a magician with a rabbit, a huge dog and an everyday guy with a checkered cap. Out of all these odd individuals, an elephant eventually became the series' new protagonist. Shirvanian soon dropped the pantomime comedy in favor of dialogue.
'No Comment'.
In 1980, Shirvanian scrapped all of his previous characters in favor of a lazy and womanizing orange cat called 'Brimstone'. Now having a permanent main character, 'No Comment' was easier to pigeonhole by readers, while the comedy became more straightforward. However, already being the third orange cat protagonist in a newspaper comic after George Gately's 'Heathcliff' and Jim Davis' 'Garfield', didn't do Brimstone any favors in originality. After two years, Brimstone was finally adopted by a young woman and the series concluded.
A total of four book collections were published by Tor: 'No Comment' (1981), 'Brimstone at Work and Play' (1983), 'Brimstone' (1988) and 'Brimstone #2' (1988). On his Strippers Guide blog, researcher Allan Holtz expressed bewilderment that so many reprint books of 'No Comment' were released, with so many years in between them, while the series was never all that popular. He suggested that the books were either released as part of a contractual clause, or to cash in on the ongoing success of 'Heathcliff' and 'Garfield'.
Graphic contributions and recognition
In 1959, Shirvanian received the National Cartoonist Society's award for "Best Gag Cartoonist of the Year." He illustrated Georgie Starbuck Galbraith's book 'Have One On Me' (J.B. Lippincott, Company, 1963).
Final years and death
In 2011, Vanan Shirvanian suffered a severe spinal injury. He recovered and even took up the pencil again, but in 2013 he passed away in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, at the age of 87.
'No Comment' (28 March 1982).