Weather as a Graphic Novel

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows …”

                        Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

            There’s a storm blowing in from the southwest, drawing moisture all the way from the remnants of a hurricane near Hawaii.  It will arrive in my neighborhood in about three hours.  Winds will be blustery, and I can expect at least a half inch of rain this evening.

            I know all of this because I have access, whether on broadcast TV or my computer, to the most sophisticated, high-tech meteorological equipment on the face of the earth.  I have multiple radar stations lighting up my screen with shades of green, yellow, orange and, occasionally and worryingly, red; I have satellite images of cloud patterns far out into the Pacific; I have live weather cameras scattered around the state; I have graphs and charts from Federal agencies and the University of Washington; I have an app from the Weather Channel that tells me, minute by minute, what’s happening and what will ensue in the immediate future.  I have video and GoPro pseudo-experiences of tornadoes, hurricanes and blizzards.  Weather is a certifiable obsession, not just for me, but for many of us who live in the Northwest.  I used to do content analyses of local television news broadcasts for my Mass Media class.  In every broadcast, around 11% of the time was devoted to weather (25% was commercials, another 11% was sports—that doesn’t leave much time for actual “news”).

            It’s colorful, scientific, entertaining—such weathercasters as Jeff Renner and Steve Pool are local icons—but it’s not fun.

            It used to be.  I grew up with weather presented as a graphic novel.

            Early television news was, quite frankly, pretty boring.  A reconstructed radio or newspaper reporter read copy from a paper script, often with a backdrop of analog clocks set to different time zones.  “Video” was really film clips (usually days out of date) from movie newsreels. The tone was straight-laced and somber, and the coverage (local broadcasts lasted fifteen minutes) superficial.  But television, as early producers were discovering, is fundamentally more than “radio with pictures”—it’s a visual medium.  You have to see things, not hear about them.

            But just how, in a pre-satellite, pre-weather radar, pre-remote video world, was one to show a low-pressure area?

            For KING TV in Seattle, the answer was cartoons.  In 1951, when they were still the only station in the Northwest, they hired a local commercial cartoonist, Bob Hale, and commissioned him to illustrate the weather.  Although his was hardly an effervescent personality, Bob Hale quickly became a star.  He had little scientific or meteorological expertise, but that wasn’t necessary; the U.S. Weather Bureau supplied the forecasts.  Hale’s task was to make them comprehensible to the rest of us, and he did so admirably, with a happy sun (“Old Saul”), grim, glowering clouds and puffy wind gusts.  It was like a high-school magic show every night—a bespectacled, balding, geeky guy (reportedly not infrequently fortified by liquids from the nearby Doghouse bar) with an easel and grease pens.  His segment often drew more viewers than the news itself, and his cheery, simple style inspired some of us to try our hands at cartooning. 

Bob Hale

           

  I was one of them.  At the height of his popularity, Bob Hale offered a correspondence course in cartooning, and I prevailed upon my parents to pay for my tuition.  Each week I’d receive a lesson and send my “homework” back to be evaluated.  Unfortunately, my evaluations revealed that I had little talent and nothing in particular to say in graphic art, and a future career in cartooning weathercasting was dashed. 

            Hale’s wasn’t.  He attained national notice and, in the early ‘60s, was lured away to San Diego, to be replaced by another cartoonist, Bob Cram.   Cram was actually funnier and had a more complex style, and he created a cast of recurring characters like Onshore Flo and Milli Bar to dramatize upcoming events.  For nearly another decade he carried on the cartooning tradition on KING, even after Hale came back for a brief comeback attempt.

            But it was a new age, a Space Age, and new technologies left little room for folksy guys with grease pens.  Sexy weathergirls in front of green screens, yes.  But cartooning weathermen…not so much.  By the early ‘70s, even KING became serious and scientific, and the weathermap became increasingly colorful and graphic in a far different way. Weathercasters increasingly possessed advanced degrees and scientific credentials and actually prepared their own forecasts from an increasing array of tools and data.  And weather became a serious, sober subject.

            Is it just coincidence that in this new age we have a flourishing culture of Know-Nothing climate change deniers?  Maybe they’d benefit from a cartoonist to explain it all to them.