Cartoons in Chile

Jorge ("Coke") Delano is a peppery, jovial, chunky Latin of 47, whose chief claim to distinction is not that he is a distant cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt* but that he is founder-owner-publisher-editor and No. 1 caricaturist of one of South America's most engrossing magazines.

His Topaze, a splashy red-&-black-ink 5-c- weekly, printed in Delano's native Santiago, Chile, is small (7 1/4 in. by 10 1/4 in.) and devoted largely to political cartoons. As a true barometer of Chile's political trends and moods, it invariably finds its way each week to the U.S. State Department, to the other chancelleries of the Western Hemisphere.

Satire, Ridicule. When Senor Delano, Chile's pioneer motion-picture producer, launched Topaze in 1931, his friends predicted it would flop. It clicked from the start. Last week, twelve years old, it was prospering (45,000 subscribers, in a country of only 5,000,000 inhabitants, 55% illiterate).

For his success, Publisher Delano could thank his own publishing formula: the satirical laugh gets more results than the solemn warning, the prank is more effective than the preachment. Topaze is never really nice to anybody. But neither is it ever very nasty. Sticking almost strictly to politics, it gigs Chilean politicos with biting irony or refined ridicule, has deftly wrecked many a political career. Two examples:

>In 1932 Topaze labeled President Juan Esteban Montero "One-Step" (roughly the way Juan Esteban sounds in Spanish when correctly pronounced). The nickname stuck, the Montero dignity was ruined. He was ultimately ousted. The idea was much the same as if President Roosevelt became known as "Frankly Dull."

> In 1937, during the last Presidency of Arturo Alessandri, known as "The Lion," Topaze printed a cartoon showing a decrepit, mangy old lion being tamed by Alessandri's most despised political rival. Said Delano: "Who ever heard of referring to a President as a lion?" Alessandri, like Montero, became a laughingstock.

Buffoonery. Once, before he had assistants (Topaze now is put out by a staff of four writers, four cartoonists, who work one day a week, are highly paid), Delano was busy with a motion picture and had no time for publishing. He might have skipped an issue. Instead he whipped off a cartoon for the cover, printed half the inside pages solid black, left half blank, at the bottom of each printed the caption: "Hold up to the sunlight for five minutes and you will see figures of political significance." Half of Topaze's readers that week claimed to see something. The rest held Topaze to the sun until their arms ached.

Most of Topaze's effectiveness is due to the wisecracky sayings of two simply drawn cartoon characters who appear in the magazine regularly and through whom Publisher Delano voices his own opinions. One is a bearded, elongated intellectual known as "Professor Topaze." The other is a shoeless, runty, ragged but usually grinning oaf called "Juan Verdejo." He represents Chile's lower classes, is so well known that all over Chile his name has come to be used much as "John Q. Public" is used in the U.S.

Delano's hope is that some day living standards will so improve in Chile that he can give Verdejo shoes.

* Paul Delano, a swashbuckling, sea-roving Yankee of War of 1812 days, Jorge Delano's great-grandfather, is their common ancestor.

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