A Page from Fate – A lost comic book completes the story of a father and son’s relationship

 Howard Weistling’s career as an engineer and navigator in the Army’s Air Corps could be described as ill-fated at best.
The 19-year-old set aside his comic book artist aspirations to join the war effort, enlisting a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Weistling was one of an eight-man bomber crew shot down, all fortunately unharmed, during his first mission.
However, through his son Morgan, 51, a Santa Clarita Valley artist and resident, Howard’s art and creative passion have found an outlet that’s lasted for generations and continues today.
After Howard Weistling’s crew was captured, the resourceful captive found a way to raise the spirits of the survivors at the German-occupied Stalag Luft I camp in which he and his fellow POWs were housed in Northern Germany.
“He’d tell me about how he kept the guys’ morale up because, back in those days, you’d get a daily newspaper, and you could get a comic strip,” Morgan explained. “And every day, there would be an advancement of that story.
“So, he created his own little comic strip,” Morgan said.
Howard flattened out two tin cans, bound by a scrapped nail and, using the paper insides of empty cigarette packets for the canvas of his cartoon book, which ended up being hundreds of pages long.  It gave the men something to look forward to each day, he said.
“(The German soldiers) just practically starved them to death,” said Morgan, whose father died 10 years ago.  “They would very rarely get any food – they ate the scraps that German soldiers left on the floor, like potato skins, that kept them alive.”
After returning from the war, both Howard and his wife attended art school, but soon after the war, both put their artistic career goals on hold in order to support their new family.  Howard took a job in landscaping, and his wife taught piano and organ.
Morgan, who was born 16 years after his older brother, grew up sharing a special bond with his father through art, which was strongly encouraged by both his parents, he said.  He discovered his passion for art at a young age, which his mom fostered by taking him to numerous art schools and classes.  He assumed he’d take the logical route as an illustrator, after he found the several hundred drawings necessary for a 30-second animation project he made as a ninth-grader a laborious endeavor.
He knew little of his father’s homemade comic book or its makeshift craftsmanship growing up, other than it existed, described to him only as a collection of drawings on scrap paper.  It was something he had always sought, but Morgan was sure fate had left it crushed by liberating Soviet tank tracks or otherwise abandoned by troops eager to return home.
“I grew up always thinking that was a bummer,” he said, regarding the fate of the POW camp comic book.
But the father and son shared so much else, he said, including countless hours watching Western films, which were the two’s favorite genre, and a theme prevalent in Morgan’s work today.  Morgan said Clint Eastwood was his dad’s favorite, and his dad could become misty-eyed discussing “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”  The two would spend hours drawing alongside each other in the family’s study, Morgan receiving an education that would prepare him for his classes and his successful career as an artist.
Later on in Morgan’s career, his dad would act as a figure model for him as a subject in some of his Western-themed paintings.  Morgan and his father shared so much through art, Morgan said he still gets emotional when he discusses the incredible feeling he experienced in receiving email five years ago alerting him that someone had found his father’s comic book from the camp.
“I was like, ‘What? That’s crazy,’” Morgan recalls when he read the subject line in his inbox.  “My brother was staying with us at the time, and he also wanted to know everything about my dad.  He and I just stood there and cried.”
It turns out that somehow – due to reasons that still defy Morgan, despite his attempts to track down the hundreds of names his father recorded in both books – the comic strip survived the camp.  In fact, it wound up in a collection of Nazi artifacts purchased with money embezzled from two New York businessmen, which was recovered by the partners who had been victimized by the embezzlement as an effort to recoup their losses.
While most of the goods were sent to various Holocaust museums, one of the business’ partners, who was Jewish, explained to Morgan that he saved some of the memorabilia from the looted goods, as a way to show his family and remind future generations of what happened.  Howard’s art just happened to be squirreled away in one of the boxes the businessman kept in his attic, largely forgotten until the man was moving.  While clearing out the space, he noticed a name and title, “A Western, by H. Weistling,” that had been hammered into the tin cover.
Eventually, the businessman contacted Morgan, letting him know he believed he had his father’s works.  Much to Morgan’s chagrin, the hardy comic book had sat among dusty memorabilia from Germany’s darkest era, including watercolors painted by Hitler.
Able to look Morgan Weistling up online – the artist in his own right has enjoyed a career that created blockbuster movie posters syndicated in newspapers by the time he was 19, and now success in oil painting artistry – through the story on Morgan’s website that mentions his father and the lost comic book.
Morgan is exceedingly grateful the book eventually made its way to him, describing it as the one thing he’d always wanted, before he even realized it would further connect their past, because of the Western subject matter: The story line focuses on a cowboy hero who rescues his damsel in distress.
“It was the experience,” Morgan said, of looking through the pages from his dad’s past, “because I’d already lost my dad.  His writings and his drawings come to life again for me, and I got a piece of him I’d never had before.  It was like having a piece of him come back to me.”
For more information about Morgan Weistling, please visit www.morganweistling.com. 

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