B. “Hap” Kliban ~~ 1935-1990 ~~ Ex Ungue Leonem

Portrait of B. Kliban (tap or click to view larger)

You probably know who B. Kliban is even if you don’t know you know. His famous “grey stripers,” or Kliban Cats, have been a staple of the coffee cup/t-shirt market for many decades. He would be very unhappy indeed to know that the cats he doodled in-between his real work were what he was remembered for. Kliban’s best drawings; bizarre, hilarious and sophisticated, are little-known, even to fans of his cats. In one drawing some cucumbers and asparagus are juxtaposed with a cumbersome apparatus with the title (written in Kliban’s iconic shaded bubble font) “More Than A Coincidence?”  In another, a Turk in a striped suit and tassel-less fez goes on many unexplained adventures. Tiny people buy inch-long hot dogs. Men in a diner wolf down burgers over the caption “What Did The City Of New York Do With King Kong?” The skill of a lifetime of drawing and painting shines through, as does a razor sharp wit, intelligence and sense of fun. Not everyone is able to laugh along with Kliban, but those who do laugh hard. Equally absurd and silly, his work is also full of keen insight.

Kliban had an unhappy childhood in Norwalk, Connecticut, which he disliked talking about. He was born on New Year’s Eve, hence the nickname “Hap,” which he preferred to Bernard. In adulthood, being called “Hap” became ironic for the misanthropic, sometimes depressed Kliban. He described his family as “cold” and said he spent his time feeling sullen and resentful. He was a malcontent who preferred drawing to school. He learned to draw by tracing the sexy women in “Planet Comics” and once he had traced them, enjoyed erasing their scanty attire. He continued this habit in later years by erasing women’s clothes from newspaper photos and doodling in his own ideas of their anatomy. He fell asleep in classes because he stayed up until four a.m. listening to Long John Nebel’s radio show. He enjoyed Nebel’s interviews with the “lunatic fringe” and even once sent some of his comics to the DJ, who never wrote back. Kliban had a younger brother Ken (now an actor in New York) whom he beat up regularly. Ken Kliban described their father as a “granite ogre who worked all day and watched TV at night.” Their father was a Russian Jew who escaped persecution, came to America knowing no English and went from factory worker to factory owner. Clearly hard work was valued, maybe above all else. In high school, Kliban was voted “best in art,” a title he perceived as an insult. The insult still stung twenty-five years later. He was a self-described “grudge holder” and said he even sometimes had a grudge against his parents for giving him birth. He never healed the rift with his family and seldom spoke of his early years in the few interviews he gave. In fact, he disliked speaking about his personal life in general and avoided all forms of publicity. This is perhaps part of the reason he is virtually unknown today.

After high school, Kliban dabbled with college, but it didn’t agree with him. He loved to draw and paint and had persuaded his parents to let him study art, but he found college lacking. He went to Pratt in Brooklyn and briefly to Coopers Union. He felt the non-painting classes pointless and thought that college smoothed out the rough edges that make artists unique. He went to Pratt long enough to be voted “most likely to be a buffalo.” After dropping out, he did several odd jobs (one painting piggy banks) and bummed around Europe soaking in the classics. Every day he drew and painted abstract faces in his journal and he learned about art in his own way. Eventually, he returned to the US and drove across country on a motorcycle, ending up in California. He applied to and was turned down for a job at Disney Studios. Back home in Connecticut, he painted a portrait of a friend’s mother who wanted to appear younger and thinner. This was just the kind of observation about vanity, humanity and truth that Kliban would soon be serving up in his drawings. But the money from the portrait probably came in handy when eventually he decided to make a permanent move West.

He ended up in San Francisco at the height of the art and underground comix boom of the late 60’s. Kliban preferred warm weather, and the lack of strong family ties left him free to follow his desires. To make ends meet he worked at a post office. He was painting and making woodcut prints, getting “no where” when a friend mentioned a Canadian magazine that was advertising for cartoon submissions. Kliban had always liked cartoons, but had never considered them very important or as possible income. Now he worked up a batch. At the last minute, feeling ambitious, he sent them to Playboy instead. Playboy’s cartoon editor Michelle Urry accepted three of the cartoons. Kliban was euphoric and immediately quit the post office job. This was a bit premature, it turns out. Kliban had married cartoonist Mary K. Brown and they had a daughter, Kalia (Kliban also had another daughter, Sarah, from a different relationship). After his initial burst of success, there were many years where Kliban could only sell a few cartoons a year. He sent out dozens to many publications, but his humor and sensibility were not sellable enough. There were many rejections. To make enough money, Kliban did freelance advertising, commercial art and even drew nude dancers at a club. They were difficult times for Kliban, but he worked hard and persevered. Those traits were very important to him, and he emphasized them in interviews and with those who sought advice. He believed that "overnight success" was a myth.

The best customer for his work remained Playboy and eventually the sales became more regular. On a visit to Kliban’s studio, editor (and now good friend) Urry saw that in-between making cartoons to sell, he had been doodling and drawing the four cats he and Brown owned. The doodles helped him clear his mind and think of ideas. Urry liked the cats and helped Kliban get an agent, Toni Mendez, who began shopping the idea of a cat book around. Again, his work met with rejection. Eventually, however, a new, small press called Workman Publishing accepted the book, and called it “Cat.” The book quickly became a best-seller. “Cat” is certainly not a book that Kliban needed to be ashamed of: it is full of his insight, humor and sense of the absurd. However, in later years he would come to see the cats as an albatross around his neck.

As Kliban’s professional life ascended, his personal life became troubled. His wife, M.K. Brown, had been more successful during most of their marriage. Kliban told fellow artist Melinda Gebbie that he had sometimes felt like he was “M.K. Brown’s husband” and not an artist in his own right. The marriage ended. One of the cats had been lost, one died of feline leukemia and the other two went with Brown. In an interview Kliban mentioned the irony that the cats who had brought him fame were all lost to him in the end. He told another interviewer that he wouldn’t own cats again because the loss (especially of the cat who had died from leukemia) was too painful.

Kliban was very conflicted by his success. He had struggled for over a decade and was happy to finally be making money, but on the other hand, he felt ambivalent about the cats being what he was famous for. He had great doubts about his ability as a painter, but he still painted watercolor landscapes which by many accounts were beautiful. He also valued his ability as a cartoonist, if not particularly for the Playboy and cat cartoons. According to Bill Griffith, a fellow absurdist and creator of Zippy The Pinhead, all along Kliban had been making hundreds of very funny, original and surreal drawings which he kept tucked away in filing cabinets. “Haps gags hit you on two or more levels,” Griffith wrote in an email, “first, the absurdity of the situation, next the underlying observations about human nature and/or society. There were three or more levels after that, but I was already bent over laughing.” Chicago artist Heather McAdams was also inspired by Kliban. She told me, “His comics seemed to have no rules or boundaries to hold back his vivid imagination. Looking through his books freed up my brain to try things out artistically. It was a big day when I put a voice balloon on a glass of water, amazed people would believe that it could talk!”  Kliban said, “I consider myself a surrealist who happens to like the area of humor.” One series of drawings entitled “The Turk” came to him unbidden and stopped days later, unable to be recreated. “I’d love to work like that all the time. Just do mysteries. They were a pleasure to do. It’s a whole different process  when you sit and have to manufacture fifty goddamn cartoons…” He said the good, the real stuff came from a spot in the back of the brain; the really off-the-wall cartoons that he loved best. To Kliban, that was the work that made being a cartoonist worthwhile. He did end up producing many books full of hundreds of those strange, brilliant, non-cat cartoons (seven in all), some of which were even bestsellers. People did, after all, like his stranger, less “cute” work. Would those books have been published were it not for “Cat”? It’s hard to say. At a comic convention around 1980, Melinda Gebbie gently mentioned to Kliban that maybe his cats were a bit too cute, he responded with,  "Next to your stuff, Auschwitz would look cute!” 

Artwork created by B Knilb for Bill Griffith's first Zippy anthology

Kliban was a modest, down-to-earth guy. He loved to mingle with the many underground cartoonists of San Francisco; besides Gebbie and Griffith, he was friends with comic icons Victor Moscoso and Dan O’Neill.  Even after the success of “Cat,” Kliban would sometimes attend comic book conventions and happily sign autographs and draw his fat, striped cats for fans. He admitted he had a streak of the airline stewardess in him at such events. That may have been because he didn’t go to many, and indeed shunned almost all publicity. He gave few interviews and to this day it is difficult to track down much biographical information about him. Kliban’s current obscurity could be due to his avoidance of self-advertising, added to the uncommercial quality of his work. But he did often connect with fans, and there are wonderful, long and thoughtful letters he wrote to fledgeling cartoonists and drawings he sent to fans online. One gets the sense that he never took his success for granted and remembered what it felt like to be obscure and unknown.

A rather odd chapter in Kliban’s life involved the controversial group Synanon. The group began in the late 50’s as a drug treatment program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, but for hard drugs. Later on Synanon allowed non-addicts to join the group (calling them “squares”). Kliban was drawn to the group in an attempt to save his marriage with Brown, and ended up remaining involved with them for three years, sometimes even leading sessions. The group therapy, called “The Game,” was something the troubled Kliban found helpful. The sessions consisted of verbally aggressive attacks on member’s by others in the group. Kliban found it frightening, and sometimes funny. Members (even women) shaved their heads (although to my knowledge Kliban did not). By this time, Synanon was widely considered a cult and made headlines when members put a rattle snake in the mailbox of a lawyer representing a former member. It’s hard to imagine Kliban, who was an expert satirist, being involved with a cult, but his sad childhood, unhappy family life, and failed marriage led him to seek out succor where he could find it. Around this time he met his second wife, Judith Kamman.

With Juddith in his life, Kliban once again owned cats. To him it seemed like all he did was paint and draw cats. From the start, Kliban’s publisher had made merchandising deals to put the Kliban cats on mugs, sheets, shower curtains, music boxes, stationary—anything that could be printed on. Money rolled in. Kliban produced calendars, painting detailed and, to him, tedious color portraits of the famous cats. Kliban told one interviewer “Cats are wonderful, it’s drawing cats I get tired of.” He called the work “agonizing” and Judith admitted that he hated doing them. She once even salvaged several that he had thrown in the garbage, disgusted. In addition to the tedium, the cats took time away from doing the work he loved—painting landscapes and the strange, absurdist cartoon work he preferred. Kliban loved Paul Klee, Max Beckmann and Matisse. He was inspired by James Thurber, Saul Steinberg and loved R. Crumb’s “fat, juicy” drawings. He liked artists who worked from the heart and did what they wanted to do. Talking about his art, he told journalist Marilyn Chase in 1980 “I haven’t done anything I wanted in a couple of years.” Kliban admitted in interviews that he feared his prosperity would dry up; he didn't know how long the fickle public would keep buying his books and cat merchandise. He once told Bill Griffith that he took a civil service exam (and aced it), which Griffith believed was for more than a laugh. He thought perhaps Kliban was making sure he could still find a regular job if the art sales dried up.

Kliban said he made better work during his first, unsuccessful marriage. The more relaxed, prosperous and content he was, the more the strange, interesting work eluded him. His last, posthumous book “Advanced Cartooning” is the least inspired of his work. Drawing the cats and handling the complexities of success ate up all his time and energy. Kliban’s brother Ken said, “He always had the strength to be different, to follow his own vision. Maybe that’s where his bitterness came from; he had to do it alone.” In his mid forties, Kliban had started to feel a little more mellow. But he said, “I know that’s when it’s going to catch me in the back of the head. That’s when the pie hits. As soon as you think your dues are paid up, you hear a knock on the door.” He and Kamman had been planning a move to Hawaii, which they had both fallen in love with, but Kliban never made it. In 1990, after undergoing bypass surgery for artery disease in his legs, Kliban died of a pulmonary embolism. Ten years earlier he had told Marilyn Chase, “I’ve changed from being a full time artist into a half-baked business man. If I outlive the cats, I’ll eventually get back to art.”

Kliban thought art should be like an iris—the viewer should see a glimpse of something beyond the picture, a hint of another place. Kliban’s drawings let you look through his iris into a weird and wonderful world. It is a fully formed place; strange, funny, thought provoking, and interesting. I think he’s in that world still, maybe spending time in Istanbul with the Turk.

Thank you for reading my B. Kliban biography! If you like Kliban, you might be interested in my graphic novel about having OCD - this is a link to a short stop-motion video about it. 

©2016 Alice DuBois


There is a listing of Kliban's published works under "books" on his wikipedia page.

Thank you to Bill Griffith, Melinda Gebbie, Heather McAdams and Arnie Fenner for patiently answering my questions and passing on details about Kliban's life and work. I was informed by M.K. Brown that this biography contains inaccuracies, however she declined to indicate what part was inaccurate. Every effort at accuracy was made by myself and nothing was written without backup from my sources.

For More Information See:

• "Jumping Up And Down On The Roof, Throwing Water Bags On People" By Mark Jacobs and Sam Gross. This book contains by far the longest, most informative interview with Kliban. 
• "Something About The Author" By Gale Research, Volume 35
• "Artist Kliban Finds That Wealth Comes On Little Cat Feet" By Marilyn Chase, The Wall Street Journal, July 9, 1980
• "Terrors Of The Universe And Other Cartoons" By Charles M. Young, Rolling Stone, September 21, 1978
• "Cat Dreams" Pomegranate, 1997. The forward by Zoe Burke, which whitewashes Kliban's life a bit, does contain some interesting biographical information.
•   A 1978 interview with Kliban, which is a delight to listen to, is posted on youtube. It's a shame the interviewer, Stephen Banker, insisted on harping on about the cats—however, you still get an insight into Kliban and get to hear his voice!
• "Kat Guy" By Mark Evanier, May 11, 2016. An interesting essay which offers a view into Kliban's philosophy, plus insight into the insane world of TV.