For months Bakken had no idea that his mentor was a precocious teenager who'd made his first sale to a national magazine at age 15. I just graduated from high school. Personal relationships with other caption writers are uncommon too. Recap, founded 40 years ago and published by Al and Jo Gottlieb since 1961, lists hundreds of cartoons that appeared in major outlets during the previous month. Descriptions are terse, with as many as 50 cartoons summarized on a single page.
Anonymity precludes public acclaim for gag writers.
What passes for applause is the heady experience of finding their creation tacked to an office bulletin board or supermarket cash register. When Harald Bakken took a fiction-writing course in which everyone showed Examples of their work, he passed around some cartoons. But there are very few of those. No one else who professionally tries to make people laugh is expected to do it quite so quickly. It all starts with a premise.