Lakewood Lore

Born Loser proves to be a winner for local cartoonist

Lakewood is the home of a hapless soul whom each of us may identify with, one day or another.

He is Brutus Thornapple, hard-luck guy of “The Born Loser,” popular comic strip created by Art Sansom.

Art, who has lived in Lakewood since 1962, produces the antics of his doleful cartoon character from a modest studio-- formerly a bedroom--on the second floor of the Sansom residence on Erie Cliff Drive.

Every Thursday, from this wellspring of gags and punch lines, Art express-mails a whole week’s work to United Media Enterprises, a feature syndicate in New York City from whence it ultimately reaches 1,400 newspapers.

The strip is translated in nine languages for publication in 26 countries, and is now one of the first American comics to penetrate the crumbling Iron Curtain as fun fare for Hungary and Yugoslavia.

Art, who is of English-German descent, was born Arthur B. Sansom II in East Cleveland 70 years ago. He attended Shaw High School and was graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University where he majored in art.

“I always enjoyed drawing and became interested in cartooning in the early ’40s,” Art recalled.

“I tried to sell a comic strip named 'Kip Gaynor,' whom I modeled after author Leslie Charteris’ famous detective 'The Saint.' It never got off the ground, but it got me a job as a staff artist for Newspaper Enterprise Association at W. 3rd and Lakeside.”

“The Born Loser” today is a team effort, in which Art’s 38-year-old son Chip (Arthur B. Sansom III), a graduate of Lakewood High and Case Western Reserve, collaborates, sharing responsibilites for both gags and drawings.

As a Lakewoodite, Art first lived on Kirtland Lane for three years. He moved to Erie Cliff in 1965, the year he started his successful strip. His home there, which overlooks Lake Erie, was built by restaurateur Vernon Stouffer.

“I think Lakewood is the ideal city--a nice, beautiful, easy-going place with lots of community spirit” Art commented.

Although he also has a summer home on Cape Cod, which he visits in the spring and fall, Art complained that he hasn’t had a vacation in the quarter century he has been drawing “The Born Loser.”

“I work at the Cape the same as I do here” he lamented. “Cartooning is an eight-day-a-week, 400-day-a-year job.”

By the same token, however, Art professes to be the kind of guy who “absolutely refuses to punch a time clock.”

“Chip is a night person and I am a day person, and we kind of set our own hours," he explained, adding that that’s not to say the deadlines don’t keep coming up with frightening regularity.

Art’s ideas come from many sources, including newspapers and television. While working, he prefers TV reruns because they are less likely to interfere with his concentration. He loves every episode of “Mash.”

Because ideas are fleeting, Art keeps a pad and pencil on his bedside stand.

“Sometimes it’s difficult to get a punch line. If I think of one in the middle of the night, I have to put it down immediately, or I’ll forget it,” he said.

Whenever Art gets the chance, he’ll slip a local name into his strip.

“Once I used Lakewood Mayor Sinagra, and some of his relatives in Italy saw it,” Art remembered.

In 1988 his brainchild won him the Reuben Award--Oscar of the comics industry--for the best humor strip of that year. Credited for its success, beyond the gags, is its easy-to-read text, sheer simplicity of art, and the fact that it pops out at you.

Last year, Art was named to the Lakewood Centennial Hall of Fame. This summer he came out with his fourth book, “The Born Loser’s Guide to Life,” a compilation of his latest offerings.

Three years ago Art married Angelyn Mancuso of Lakewood, one-time executive secretary at NEA. His first wife, Isabel Henry of Youngstown, whom he wed in 1943, died in ’84.

Chip Sansom is married to the former Brooke Ballantine, daughter of a newspaperman. The couple have a daughter, Jackie, 9, and live in Rocky River.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post September 27, 1990. Reprinted with permission.

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