AFTER DECADES of living in Gus and Frances Arriola’s home on the outskirts of Carmel, Gordo has finally moved out.

The couple’s vast collection of “Gordo” — the award-winning comic strip Gus Arriola drew daily for more than four decades — now belongs to the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.

Arriola’s strip, for decades the most widely distributed comic depicting Mexican life, was not only expertly drawn and cleverly written, but helped inform Americans about life south of the border. Some credit Gordo with helping to curb racism, and many fellow cartoonists praised Arriola’s skills as an artist and story teller.

The transfer of thousands of original daily drawings, notes, correspondence from readers, magazines, framed Sunday strips and other memorabilia from Arriola’s cartooning career marked the end of a process that began more than a decade ago when the library’s director, Charles Faulhaber, asked Arriola if he would hand over custody of Gordo.

“I met the director at an exhibit at the Carmel Art Association, and he said they’d like to have Gordo reside at the library,” recalled Arriola, a CAA member.

In a December 1995 letter following that meeting, Faulhaber told Arriola, “Your work has given a great deal of pleasure to many, many people, myself very much included. Gordo is too important to be lost from sight.”

A midwestern university also wanted the archive, but as the years went by, Arriola decided Berkeley was the place.

In an August 2006 letter to Faulhaber and Anthony Bliss, curator of rare books and literary manuscripts at the Bancroft Library, Arriola wrote, “Although my old friend, famed cartoon collector Lucy Caswell, has offered Ohio State as home for the collection, I agree with you that ‘Gordo’ more aptly fits in your ‘two centuries’ worth of documentation of the Mexican presence in California.’

Just short of a year later, Arriola spent weeks packing up the thousands of daily strips, which were wrapped in brown paper and labeled with the dates they ran, hundreds of full-color Sunday strips that each took a day-and-a-half to draw, letters he received from readers, the notice he ran when he was planning to retire, some old family photos and personal notes.

“They wanted everything,” Arriola said. “They said, ‘Throw nothing away.’”

A life of art

Arriola was born on July 23, 1917, in Arizona, and moved to Los Angeles when he was 8. After high school — and a two-month stint in an orange juice processing plant that would end up being his only non-drawing job — he went to work for Mintz Studio on the classic cartoon strip, “Krazy Kat.” In the summer of 1937, he joined MGM’s new animation unit as a “story sketcher.” He met Mary Frances Sevier, who worked in the ink and paint department, at the studio Christmas party in 1939. (They married in 1943.)

Working on his own, he also created a strip based on a Mexican bean farmer he called “Gordo.” United Features Syndicate purchased it in 1941.

The strip debuted in a dozen newspapers two weeks before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In October 1942, Arriola was inducted into the Army and went to work animating training films for the military. In the meantime, he continued drawing his comic strip for publication on Sundays.

When he was discharged, he went back to work on the daily comic, which was eventually carried in about 270 papers. Converting his protagonist from a farmer to a tour guide in the 1960s, “Arriola was able to regale American readers with many aspects of Mexican folklore, history and art in an entertaining (but informative) fashion, winning awards and accolades for his efforts,” according to Robert C. Harvey, author of “Accidental Ambassador Gordo.” The National Cartoonists Society named “Gordo” the best humor comic strip in 1957 and again in 1965.

In 1985, Arriola drew his final strip and retired.

No vacations

Preparing for the Bancroft handover led Arriola and his wife of 64 years to reflect on his career.

“Both of us have been really going through everything and looking back on our life,” Gus Arriola said. “I can’t believe I wrote so much stuff and commented so much on things. It almost feels like somebody else did it.”

But he said it explains why he rarely, if ever, took vacations.

“I was chained to the drawing board!” he said.

Combing through his work, the Arriolas selected a few strips they wanted to save or give to friends. The rest of the collection was retrieved by Bancroft Library representatives who made three trips from Berkeley to collect Gordo from the couple’s Carmel Meadows home.

One of the women who came to retrieve the collection, archivist Lauren Lassleben, said Gordo is “a wonderful fit, because our special areas of interest are Spanish and Mexican California, and these will be so cherished and so well used.”

After the items are cataloged, they will be placed in acid-free storage. Because the library is undergoing a seismic retrofit, none of the material will be publicly displayed until at least fall 2008.

Museum curator Anthony Bliss recalled reading Gordo over the years.

“Here I am, looking at Gus’ drawings and saying, ‘Oh, wow, I remember that,’” he said. “The fact that it’s still in the back of my mind is what I call the persistence of good work — it stays with us.”

Bliss said the library’s goal is to ensure people will always have access to Arriola’s legacy.

“We plan to keep it for all time to make sure future generations know about Gordo and all the goodwill that’s in it,” he said.