The Obsessive American: Fixations, Tics and Mania in Early Comicdom

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Superstitious Sam

Early newspaper cartoonists had a fixation on fixations. From the relentless politeness of Alphonse and Gaston to the ravenous Hungry Henrietta to Mr. Jack’s apparent sex addiction, the comedy of dysfunction was central to the first decade of the medium. Rooted in caricature, and visual shorthand, cartooning has always been dominated by social typing of one kind or another. Racial stereotyping was rife, of course, in the first decade of strips especially. But they joined prankish kids, hapless husbands, befuddled cops, prissy socialites, country hayseeds, and wacky inventors in a kind of repertory cast of the comics pages in these years. But sometime after 1900, many cartoonists zoomed into specific characteristics, obsessions, and idiosyncratic tics to define a strip.

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McDougall’s Trolley Launches the Sunday Comics

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This Walt McDougall comic should be more famous than it seems to be. On March 21, 1893, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World published the first true color comics supplement of the modern era.1 It was a landmark effort that soon placed cartooning at the center of newspaper circulation wars and sparked a new mass medium. It is beyond me why this inaugural comic supplement cover is not more widely studied.  McDougall’s “Broadway Cable Car Possibilities” was more than an historical marker.  It carries within it, much of what made newspaper comics so appealing so quickly.

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Thimble Theatre Before Popeye: E.C. Segar, American Humorist

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Popeye’s impact on E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre in 1929 was so enormous that the previous decade of the strip’s life soon became a footnote to comics history. But, of course, Segar’s legendary storytelling skills in sagas like Plunder Island and the Popeye’s Ark/Spinachova cycle did not spring spontaneously from any newfound talent. He spent the previous decade developing a unique comic voice. Until now, the only deep dive into Pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre came from the beautiful, oversized, pricey collection from Sunday Press that collected select color Sundays across the1920s. But two new reprints of extended daily runs now let us zoom into the maturation of this singular American humorist through extended runs of the dailies. Thimble Theatre, The Complete Dailies, 1919-1920 (Boring Comics) initiates a multi-volume reprint project of all pre-Popeye strips from Library of American Comics veteran Kurtis Findlay.  And Thimble Theatre: “The Saga of Cylinda Oyl” Vol. 1, which covers April 22, 1926-Jan. 19, 1927) starts three-volume coverage of a major story, which comes to us from filmmaker Frank Tovar.

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The United States of Snark: Tad Dorgan’s Indoor Sports

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Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan (1877-1929) was a master of the miniscule moment. His wildly popular Indoor Sports single panel strip (1913-1929) captured, and mercilessly chided, the small stuff: judging the new boyfriend, or the new suit, or the new office boy; impressing the boss by laughing (too hard) at his jokes; saving face when the least experienced poker player wins the big pot; evaluating the new stenographer; a barroom braggart. This was a kind of cartoon social realism that would become familiar in comics pages across the next decades, because Tad pioneered the format. These indoor landscapes typically foregrounded minor pretention with a surrounding “peanut gallery” of onlooking family, office workers, bar customers offering snide asides on the situation.

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Deep Cuts: Quick Takes on Our Golden Age of Comic Strip Curiosities

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About 10,000 different comic strip series emerged in American newspapers during the medium’s first 75 years, Jerry Robinson estimated in his 1974 history. I guess it all depends on what you count. Holtz’s magisterial 2012 “Encyclopedia” included just over 7,000 entries covering more than a century of strips. Whatever math you use, however, it is clear that a signature feature of the comics medium has been the sheer volume of creative variety. In fact, I would argue that among the competing commercialized mass media of the last century, the comic strip enjoyed a unique range of idiosyncratic, highly personal artistic visions.

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The Bungles Are Us

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Misanthropic and petty, scheming and nagging, reviled by their neighbors and barely tolerable to themselves, The Bungle Family was the quintessential domestic comic strip of the 1920s. Critical historians like Bill Blackbeard, Rick Marshall and Art Spiegelman have singled out Harry J. Tuthill’s masterpiece as an especially dark and pointed critique of the modern petit bourgeoisie. But George, Jo and their daughter Peg were really the penultimate satirical family of 20s strips. Many of the qualities that characterized 1920s domestic strips were here, too. Like Mutt, Jeff, Barney Google and Andy Gump, George was a lower-middle-class man on the make, relentlessly attracted to get-rich-quick inventions or financial schemes. Jo was as much a nag, a scold and social climber as Jiggs’ Maggie. And the Bungle family dysfunction, bickering and resentments were at least as sharp as those at Moon Mullin’s boardinghouse or the suburban enclave of Mr. and Mrs.

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Roy Crane, Wash Tubbs and the Art of Cartoony Realism

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Roy Crane always seemed to me underappreciated in the pantheon of comic artists. True aficionados of the medium recognize his talent, of course. But in that larger gallery of cartoon notables, we tend to mention him more than study him. Too often, Crane is recognized off-handedly for originating the continuous story adventure strip with Wash Tubbs (1924), a genre that then reached its height in Alex Raymond’s detailed illustrative style, Milton Caniff’s chiaroscuro and cinematic effects or Chester Gould’s primitive Grand Guignol.

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