I said I might talk more about figure-drawing this morning, but I ran across a piece of trivia yesterday that is too good not to share. Bob Dunn was a cartoonist who worked in the King Features Syndicate “bullpen” before and after World War II. In the Golden Age of newspaper comics, a bullpen was an in-house staff of syndicate artists who performed quotidian tasks such as lettering and corrections. Along with these lesser duties, Dunn for decades did much of the drawing on They’ll Do It Every Time, the popular single-panel feature created by Jimmy Hatlo. Apparently, Dunn was a colorful character who had a long career simultaneously working in the King bullpen and for Hatlo. It wasn’t until three years after the 1963 death of Hatlo that Dunn received a byline on They’ll Do It Every Time, but Dunn made another contribution to American culture. He invented the “knock-knock” joke in 1936 and, during the Great Depression, sold over two million copies of a book of knock-knock jokes. I read this in “Cartoon County,” a book by Cullen Murphy. Cullen grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, after WWII, the son of illustrator John Cullen Murphy, who collaborated with creator Hal Foster on Prince Valiant, taking over the strip from the aging Foster in the 1970’s. Murphy’s book recounts living among an unconventional colony of writers and artists who made their homes in suburban Connecticut because of its proximity to New York City, at that time the center of the publishing world. (A tip of the Hatlo hat to Ken Carson.)