The Captain Who
Drew Mosquitoes.

He drew a mosquito named Ann. She likes to party at night, she isn't fussy about who she bites, and she's in a pamphlet called This is Ann, with words by Munro Leaf, the man who wrote The Story of Ferdinand. The name is a joke: Anopheles is the mosquito that carries malaria.

The captain was Theodor Seuss Geisel. You know him by the name on the books. This manual is about everything else he made: the ads, the war cartoons, the Army films, the paintings he hid, and the stuff his own estate stopped printing.

One rule, because his characters and his books still belong to his estate: no Seuss characters appear in this manual. Everything you see is either his public-domain work for the US government, a 1928 cartoon that's now public domain, or a photo of the man himself.

1. Easter weekend, 1925, during Prohibition. Dartmouth senior Ted Geisel gets caught with friends and a pint of bootleg gin. The dean takes away his job as editor-in-chief of the college humour magazine, the Jack-O-Lantern.
2. He keeps drawing for it anyway, under fake names. One of them is his middle name, and his mother's maiden name: Seuss. The pen name was born as a way around a punishment.
3. The family said it the German way, rhyming with "voice". Americans said "Soose". He let them, and one telling says he liked that it rhymed with Mother Goose.
4. The "Dr." was a joke too. He never finished a doctorate. Dartmouth gave him an honorary one decades later, which made the joke official.

EXHIBIT B. A 1928 Flit cartoon by "Dr. Seuss". Anything published before 1931 is now public domain in the US, which is why we can show this one.

1. In 1928 he drew a cartoon for Judge, a humour weekly, in which a knight mentions Flit, a bug spray. The story goes that the wife of a Standard Oil executive saw it in a hair salon and told her husband to hire the guy.
2. He did. Geisel drew Flit ads for about 17 years, starting in 1928, and invented the slogan "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" It went into everyday American speech the way catchphrases do now.
3. The ad money paid the bills through the Depression. It also let him practise drawing strange creatures for a living, years before any book.

1. In 1941 he became the main editorial cartoonist for PM, a left-leaning New York daily. In about two years he drew more than 400 political cartoons.
2. He went after the America First isolationists, Charles Lindbergh, Hitler and Mussolini, and racism at home against Black and Jewish Americans. Some of those cartoons still land like a punch.
3. He also drew Japanese Americans as a traitorous, buck-toothed mob, and backed the government's plan to imprison them in camps. Same pen, same years.

EXHIBIT D. Capt. Theodor S. Geisel, US Army. Public domain.

1. In 1943 he joined the Army and ended up in Frank Capra's film unit, making movies meant to train and inform soldiers.
2. He wrote for Private SNAFU, a series of short cartoons made with Warner Bros. animators for soldiers only. SNAFU is the dumbest soldier in the Army, and every episode shows what happens when you do it his way: you die, usually. It was voiced by Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny.
3. He drew This is Ann and other malaria warnings. Laughs, the Army had worked out, got read.
4. He wrote Your Job in Germany (1945), a film for occupying troops. It was later recut and released as Hitler Lives, which won an Academy Award. Geisel wasn't credited on it.

EXHIBIT E. Private SNAFU title card, 1943. US government work, public domain.

EXHIBIT F. "Starve the Squander Bug", a war-bond poster from his Treasury work. Public domain.

1. For decades, late at night, he painted for himself: serious, strange paintings he never meant to publish. They weren't shown to the public until 1995, four years after he died. People call them the Midnight Paintings.
2. He also built what he called a Collection of Unorthodox Taxidermy: impossible animal heads for the wall, made with real beaks, antlers and horns.
3. Both are still under copyright, so you won't see them here. Go and look them up. Picture the guy from the bug spray ads alone at 2 a.m. with a canvas nobody would ever see. Different artist entirely.