Sports Cartoons Return: Ricig to PressBox

If the local newspaper seems less animated than in the past few months, you are not mistaken. A one panel sports cartoon on the second page of the Sunday Baltimore Sun Sports section that had been there for more than 20 years was another casualty in budget woes affecting nearly every newspaper publication across the country, thanks mostly to the internet explosion of the last decade.

Yet in the years before that there was a cartoon Oriole bird on the front of our Baltimore newspaper. About an inch tall, a “quick hit” as Michael Ricigliano puts it; the cartoon bird would reveal how the team had performed the day or night before. The man who first created the cartoon Oriole bird in 1954, Jim Hartzell, would use the bird on the front page of The Sun starting in June of 1966. Every baseball season from then until his retirement in 1979, the cartoon bird would greet Baltimoreans in their morning paper.

It wasn’t until the public started to complain about its absence that the paper brought back the bird sometime in the 1980 season. A handful of writers and cartoonists would take over periodically until 1992 when the cartoon started to fade away. Unfortunately it was a fairly tumultuous time just as the Orioles were getting their new home when then owner Eli Jacobs was forced to hand over majority ownership to Peter Angelos in bankruptcy court in 1993.

There a few good years in there with playoff runs, Cal Jr’s 2131, and an All Star game but the cartoon Oriole bird had vanished completely from the front page. By the time the team entered their 14 year losing skid a whole new generation of O’s fans were being turned off by bad teams, bad deals, and complacent ownership. The thought of there ever being an Orioles bird cartoon to look forward to every morning seemed ludicrous. Who wants to look at a sad Oriole bird almost every day?

It was sometime after the 2008 season that Mike Ricigliano, known as Ricig, got a phone call. “It was this editor who, he didn’t like cartoons, but he thought it would be a good idea” to have the cartoon Oriole back on the front page of The Sun. The bird would finally be back after 17 years of being ignored or shunned or just plain forgotten.

Sound familiar?

“Always for me, (it was) a lot of fun to do. Like, I was always honored to do those and I, you know, as just a fan of that cartoon in the paper, I was ticked when they took it out.”

Ricig had a bird ready for every single game starting in the 2009 season and continued to give the Baltimore public their nostalgic taste of the Orioles with his cartoon until the end of the 2011 season, the last cartoon marking the occasion of “Game 162” where The Curse of the Andino knocked the Red Sox out of the playoffs.

The cartoon Oriole then returned to the caps and uniforms of the players on the field but was unceremoniously missing from the front of The Sun when the now historic “BUCKle Up” year began in 2012. It seemed that this time people noticed a little more. Or maybe it was just me. I was used to seeing it every day for 3 years and then it was gone. I missed it. It was part of my baseball season mornings and it was just disappeared.

“Yeah, they stopped it that year, the year before the turning point,” Ricig lamented. He did however still have the bigger, one-panel cartoon in the Sunday Sports section but not having the bird every morning was a bit hard to swallow for some fans such as myself.

“Like I said, I was honored to do it during that time. I had a lot of fun doing it.”

The other shoe dropped in November of 2014: the bigger cartoon, “Mike Ricigliano’s View”, would be cut from the paper.

“That drove me crazy. Just the way of not doing any cartoons about Deflate Gate or Dan Duquette or anything like that. I got to do no cartoons.” Ricig said he reached out to Stan “The Fan” Charles, founder of Pressbox, to see if they could use him but they were dealing with budget issues as well.

Ricig said he kept running into Charles at events during the past few months and Charles kept telling him that the editors were trying to work on something.

“Then later that week he called me up and said ‘this is how this is gonna go.’” Charles had reached out to comic magnate and publisher Steve Jeppi. “He was a friend of ours and was interested in the idea, he liked the idea that the original cartoon could be used for charity, or something like that. The way Stan pitched it to him, it worked for Steve.”

Ricig enthusiastically accepted.

“The cartoon is going to have to be issue related because it’s so far in advance. I have a 15 day lead time so whatever I do, has to stick for a while,” he said. When I asked what he would prefer he was emphatic about his inclination to do things “on the spot”, like the front page Oriole bird.

“I can do maybe something on a really bad team, if I know they’re going to be bad for a while, or something that’s far away like the All-Star game.

“I’m excited. It’ll be in color. It’s online too, which is great exposure. Diamond Comics is sponsoring the cartoon. The layout is going to be similar to The Sun”, meaning it’ll be a single box with some cartoons having multiple panels while others will have a single, giant tableau.

Ricig asked if there were any “taboo” subjects with his cartoon, “how much of an envelope can I push here, basically.” Ricig had previously played with the idea of doing “little Peter Angeloses” in the same context as the Oriole bird.

“I just love the idea; I wish I could use them somewhere. I don’t think Pressbox would use them.” Ricig was told in an early meeting that he “could do some Angelos stuff, but not too much Angelos stuff”, the editor citing the desire to keep amicable relations with the Orioles’ front office.

“It’s good to do cartoons in this town and I’m just like you, I’m a big fan… so it makes it easy for me to do cartoons about our team. You want to have fun with it, you want to react like a fan, but you don’t want to undercut an individual player. I think I do a pretty good job of that. And your dad will be a part of the drawings, as usual.”

My father has been given accidental celebrity in Ricig’s comics over the last 20 years. Look for a guy with a black handlebar moustache. If there’s a woman in the frame with him, that would be my mother. Sometimes my dog appears, too.

When asked what his favorite Baltimore sports moment to cover he simply said “Irsay.”

Ricig and his wife moved to Baltimore the year before former Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay took the team to Indianapolis.

“There was the Elway stuff when I was here and the Colts were terrible that season and all the time building up to Irsay moving the team. So the goofy interview in Phoenix and at the airport with Schaefer, all that. I had plenty of material.” He also made a paper Mache dummy of Irsay to carry around Memorial Stadium during those empty NFL years.

“Albert Bell was great material too. Peter Angelos obviously, and I’ve met Angelos and I thought he was a charming guy. He’s easy to draw, too. Him aside though, I had (former Ravens coach Brian) Billick down pretty good. (John) Harbaugh is a little tougher though because he just is more typical. I liked drawing Bud Selig too. The new guy is kind of plain though. And Buck. Buck’s always fun.”

Starting this month be on the lookout for Ricig’s new cartoon in Pressbox. I asked about the possibility of doing a cover for them: “A cover would be great. I did a cover for The B one time. I like to do very busy scenes where there’s lots to look at.” It is one of Ricig’s specialties, something he was known for when he cartooned for Cracked magazine.

If the opportunity arises, don’t be surprised to find a Where’s Waldo at Camden Yards scene, packed with fans and vendors and all sorts of whacky things happening in the stands and on Eutaw Street. How about a division Championship cover?

“That would be great.”

Collector’s item is more like it.

There may not be a bird on the front of our paper any more or any sports editorial cartoons in the Sports section, but thankfully the Baltimore Sports gods have smiled down upon our city and given back to the public the wonderful works of Mike Ricigliano.

You can visit his incredibly fun Toon Trivia site at http://www.gocomics.com/ricigs-toon-trivia or visit his Facebook page. You can find his work in Orioles Kids Magazine. I also implore you to search for the cartoon bird if you don’t remember it.

As always you can follow me on Twitter @Andropoulos7.

I’ll be looking for my cartoon likeness in the next coming months, Mike.