In high school he was an indifferent student but continued drawing; somewhat to his surprise his sketches took a satirical turn. One summer he wrote away to a correspondence school whose advertisement he had seen on the inside cover of a matchbook. He followed three lessons before giving it up with an inner shrug, but the sense of something to be learned, of rules to be mastered and broken, stayed with him. In his senior year his father told him that he was being sent to a Commercial Academy in Cincinnati, nearly two hours by buckboard and train from Plains Farms, in order to prepare for a career in business. Franklin agreed to go without protest, as he agreed to most things, while inwardly withdrawing to a quiet corner of his mind. In the tall-windowed rooms of the Commercial Academy, with the sound of automobile engines and voices coming from the street below, he took notes faithfully and did his best to pay attention. But he preferred to wander about the exciting city on the river, with its German shopkeepers and crowded sidewalks, its horse-drawn cabs and handsome automobiles, its sudden glimpses of the river, of the suspension bridge with its soaring towers, of the green hills of Kentucky. At the entrance to the suspension bridge stood the sheds of apple and peanut vendors, and Franklin liked to walk across the river with his pockets full of peanuts and sit on a bench in Kentucky and look at the city of Cincinnati rising up at the river’s edge. On the broad city streets he liked to look in the plate-glass windows at displays of cameras with black leather bellows and automatic shutters; stem-winding pocket watches with silver-plated cases engraved with train engines or antlered stags; mustached mannequins in striped suits and Panama hats, with walking sticks tucked under their arms; phonographs with shiny brass horns or the new cabinet models in oak and mahogany that concealed the horn and had room for one hundred records; stylish women’s boots with glossy patent-leather vamps and creamy calf tops; gleaming white-enameled sinks and bathtubs. He liked the big-city drugstores with their window displays of dental creams, hair pomades, self-stropping safety razors in plush-lined cases, and bottles of perfume with exotic scents: fleur d’orange, new-mown hay, night-blooming cereus, ylang-ylang, opoponax, patchouly. His favorite haunt was Vine Street, which ran down to the river at one end and up into the hills at the other and was crowded with shops, hotels, and every variety of saloon, from shabby riverfront grogshops to the palatial cafés in the business district, with their wrought-iron doorways flanked by marble columns, and their interiors of carved mahogany and onyx and great mirrors that reflected bronze statues — and farther away from the river, the comfortable saloons of the German neighborhood, with their sitting rooms and shady outdoor gardens.
It was on Vine Street that Franklin discovered one day a five-story building called Klein’s Wonder Palace, an old dime museum that had flourished in the nineties and now, in 1910, housed a movie theater, Madama Zola’s palmist parlor, and an array of faded exhibits and aging curiosities, such as a sickly two-headed chicken, a tired-looking counting pig, and a tattooed man so ancient that he continually fell asleep with his head hanging down. Franklin wandered the old halls with delight. He made his way through a dusty mirror maze and followed arrows to a dim-lit room with roped-off alcoves in which he saw Jenny Scott the Armless Wonder, Dee-Dee the Dog-Faced Boy, and the Missing Link. There was an old wax museum showing tableaux of famous murders, an historical collection that included the bloody neckerchief of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington’s childhood ax, and a stage for performers where you could see John Blake the Contortionist, who could squeeze through a crack no wider than a finger, or Little Ellie Trinker, who played popular tunes by cracking her bones. In a corner of the surprisingly crowded second floor, not far from the Bearded Lady, Franklin saw a young man with very pale skin who stood at an easel and made startlingly swift and accurate charcoal portraits for twenty-five cents apiece. Franklin fell into conversation with the quick-sketch artist, who said he made a dime for each sketch but was planning to quit at the end of the month to join his brother in a printing plant in Ypsilanti. He showed Franklin, who was amused by quickness but didn’t much admire it, a few tricks of the trade. Ten days later Franklin was hired to work three afternoons a week and all day Saturday in Klein’s Wonder Palace. He divided his time between the Commercial Academy and the Wonder Palace until, one day a few months later, the manager offered him a full-time job making advertising posters; and Franklin, after thinking it over for a week, withdrew from the Commercial Academy and moved into a small studio at the back of the upper floor of the Wonder Palace.
His advertising posters, in flamboyant colors, at first showed simple portraits of the Bearded Lady, or Jenny Scott the Armless Wonder, or Dee-Dee the Dog-Faced Boy, but soon they began to include perspective backgrounds and small secondary figures, real and fanciful, arranged artfully within the total design. Backgrounds became filled with meticulous detail, the decorative titles began to include minute fantastic creatures with tails and wings; and before six months had passed, Franklin received a raise.
One day after he had been living for nearly a year in the Wonder Palace, Franklin was sketching in his room when there was a knock at the door. “Just a,” he said, and looked up from his drawing to see a man in a white linen suit with a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and a diamond stickpin in his cravat. The stranger introduced himself as Montgomery Nash, glanced negligently at Franklin’s sketches, and offered him a job in the art department of the Cincinnati Daily Crier. Franklin’s hand paused in midstroke before continuing along the curve of a handsome handlebar mustache. He had heard of Montgomery Nash, the dandyish business manager of the Daily Crier; the offer was so tempting, so exactly in line with his secret ambition, that he felt an odd, melancholy desire to refuse it. Instead he began to ask precise questions and to insist clearly on his lack of training, his lack of suitability for the job. Nash gave him a shrewd look, pulled at the brim of his fawn fedora, and told him to report to work the following Monday.
In his office on the sixth floor of the Daily Crier, Franklin’s favorite piece of furniture was the high-backed oak swivel chair, which allowed him to tilt back and, with a slight pressure of one foot, swing away from his desk to the sunny window with its raised Venetian blind. He liked to look across at the commercial building with its arched windows in the upper stories and its ground-floor row of small shops and restaurants, all with fringed awnings and plate-glass windows, before pushing with his foot and swinging back to his drawing board.
At first Franklin drew decorative borders, elaborate titles, and miscellaneous illustrations, while using his spare hours to learn the art of the editorial cartoon; and as his editorial cartoons began to appear regularly, showing France and Germany glaring at each other across a table while a Japanese waiter looked on with a smile, or Civilization, crowned with vine leaves, walking away with bowed head from the bench of Judicial Vice, he tried his hand at occasional gag cartoons, which he drew slowly and in loving detail. The success of these single-panel cartoons, as well as his ability to summon up a wealth of images from his childhood in Plains Farms, from his long walks in Cincinnati, and from his year in the Wonder Palace, led him to try his hand at a comic strip, which he set in a phantasmagoric dime museum on Vine Street. “Dime Museum Dreams,” a six-panel black-and-white strip that appeared weekly, was an immediate success. The format was invariable: in the first panel, an unnamed boy was seen holding his mother’s hand — nothing was shown of the mother except her hand and forearm — and staring at an exhibit in the dime museum: a bearded lady, or a two-headed chicken, or a man shaped like a pretzel. In the next three panels the freakish creature became more and more frightening — the pretzel man began to wrap himself around the boy’s legs, the bearded lady became entirely covered with thick long hair — until in the fifth, climactic panel the height of horror was reached and the boy shrieked out in terror. In the last panel the exhibit had returned to its original shape, while the boy sobbed against his mother’s leg and listened to her words of comfort. The success of the strip led Franklin to attempt another; and by the end of his second year at the Daily Crier, in the summer of 1913, he was drawing three daily strips and a color strip for the Sunday supplement, in addition to editorial cartoons and spot illustrations.