The Bungles Are Us

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.

Continue reading

Roy Crane, Wash Tubbs and the Art of Cartoony Realism

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.

Continue reading

Paging Dr. Perfect: Rex Morgan Wants a Word

This just in from 1948… . Let’s give it up for doctors, expertise, institutional authority and the principles of science they represent. Nothing speaks to the post-WWII shift in American culture and comics as starkly as this Christmas 1948 message from Rex Morgan, M.D. The rise of the institutional hero was clear.

Continue reading

“Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet…And Lands on Policeman’s Head”

In the first decade of newspaper comics, the line between familiar illustrated journalism and the emerging styles of cartooning sometimes blurred. My favorite example of those two worlds commingling is this news drawing from The San Francisco Call (Jan. 30, 1901), “Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet From Hotel Fire Escape and Lands on Policeman’s Head.”

Continue reading

“Stop Biting!”: Cairo Jones’ Hard-Boiled Cheesecake

The home front during World War II was a wonderful arena for gender reassignment. As we explored via E. Simms Campbell’s quick-witted and curvaceous “Cuties,” women adopted new roles with so many American men overseas, and this helped shake up, if for a while, a number of longstanding stereotypes across popular culture. Just as women were ready, willing and able to fill vacant jobs from the assembly line to management, they were just as ready to become adventure heroes.

Continue reading

Campbell’s Cuties: Wartime Women Had Their Moment

The role of WWII in the history of women, equality and feminism in America is widely known and usually mythologized in Rosie the Riveter tales. With many men abroad, women filled roles in industry and management that they traditionally had been denied. According to the thumbnail version, newly empowered women then suffered a kind of cultural whiplash with the post-war return of men to the States. Industry, government and pop culture generally openly discouraged women from enjoying their newfound role outside of the home in a range of unseemly ways.

Continue reading

Badly MAD: Snafu and Misreading Kurtzman

Harvey Kurtzman and Hugh Hefner were the two towering figures of 1950s culture who showed how idiosyncratic personal vision innovate even in an era of corporatized modern mass media. The best evidence of this is the abject failure of other publishers to imitate their success, at least in their first decade. Kurtzman’s MAD and Hef’s Playboy were singular efforts that made the many knock-offs seem like crude and exploitive misunderstandings of what these geniuses had wrought.

Continue reading