U.S. readers never got to experience one of the most visually arresting and subtle narrative comic strips of the 1950s and 60s, David Wright’s (1912-1967) Carol Day. Syndicate editors on this side of the pond deemed the popular UK newspaper soap opera too “sophisticated” for their audiences. They may not have been entirely wrong. To American eyes, this peerlessly drawn tale of an orphaned young model’s adventures in the stylish upper echelons of post-WWII London is more emotionally restrained and understated than its Yankee counterparts. But we will get to that.
Caricature, when done well, is the art of clarification through exaggeration. Which is not the same thing as simplification. The best caricaturists exaggerate, enhance, underscore and highlight some physical or character attributes that express a deeper insight about its subject. Thomas Nast’s iconic Boss Tweed was not just obese with graft. He was gelatinous, overwhelmed and almost inert from his own power and greed. It was a portentous portrait. It argued visually the seeds of Tweed’s own destruction, an appetite for power that was overcoming his own control and better judgment. It did what caricature does best by attaching ideas and arguments to figures in ways that reach beyond simple journalistic proof or language. And because political and social caricature almost always personifies issues, it tends to explain social problems as aspects of human imperfection.
Paper dolls and cut-out toy models are centuries-old, but the format was a natural fit for the modern newspaper comic from its beginnings. We tend to identify the comic strip paper doll with “women’s strips” from the great fashionistas, Jackie “Torchy” Ormes or Gladys “Mopsy” Parker. But in 1934, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon got into the act with a series that ran in every Sunday from August 18 to December 16. While Raymond focused mainly on Dale Arden as well as the various princesses and other female characters the still-young strip had amassed by then, he covers most of the cast, from Zarkov in a tuxedo to Ming the Merciless’ collection of flamboyant collars.
Before becoming the anodyne logo of Disney’s saccharine-soaked family image during the post-WWII era, Disney’s Mickey Mouse had some heroic chops. Make no mistake, Mickey was never even remotely “edgy” let alone hard-boiled in the style of some other 30s pulp protagonists. But he was imagined by Disney in the original animated shorts and then by Floyd Gottfredson in the daily comic strips, as a spunky, resourceful adventurer. In the 1930s, Mickey was thrust into a number of roles and across all of the pop culture genres: sky jockey, detective, western outlaw hunter, ghost-hunter, even sci-fi adventurer. As tame as Mickey’s 30s adventures may seem, the Disney corporation in its most controlling moments in the past has tried to disappear come of the earliest imagery of their corporate logo packing a gun or interacting with some cringe-worth but commonplace racial stereotyping of the era.
With the sad passing of Al Jaffee this week, cartooning lost its oldest and longest-working artist. In fact, the man behind 55 years of MAD magazine Fold-Ins held the Guinness Book of World Record for having the longest career in the field. But his 1964 invention of that classic foldable end-page gag was not his first stab at rethinking form. His inspiration for the fold-in was an inversions of the then-trendy magazine fold-out. But it turns out that zigging when others zagged was a bit of a thing with Jaffee. Back in the mid-1950s he broke into the syndicated newspaper comic strip market by literally turning convention on its side. He called them Tall Tales.
The underground sex comics of the Great Depression were not just an interesting sidebar to comics strip history. More than 700 of these 8-12 page titles were widely distributed in the 1930s through a clandestine, ramshackle shadow syndicate. The art was often at least as crude as the situations and banter. But their connection to mainstream comics were unmistakeable, mainly because they started by supplying Popeye, Moon Mullins, Blondie and Dagwood, Major Hoople, Betty Boop, and most major strip heroes with the raging libidos their real world creators left out. In their early years, the TBs depicted essentially the imagined sex lives of cartoon superstars. [FAIR WARNING: WHILE THE IMAGES TO FOLLOW HAVE BEEN CENSORED TO ABIDE BY WORDPRESS TERMS OF SERVICE, THE SITUATIONS AND LANGUAGE EVEN IN THESE CENSORED COMICS ARE VULGAR, MISOGYNIST, RACIST AND OFFENSIVE TO ALMOST EVERY CONTEMPORARY SENSIBILITY, AND MOST OF THOSE OF THAT TIME. IT WAS INTENTIONAL. TRANSGRESSION WAS THE POINT]
E.C. Segar seemed to love the screwball monarchy set piece that captivated 1930s comedy. He used the premise of the madcap cartoon kingdom at least three times: once in the early 30s defending Nazilia, later in the 30s when he installed Swee’Pea as a king, and most notably in the sailor man’s founding of his own kingdom of Spinachova in 1935. Starting on April 22, 1935 with Popeye’s decision to build an ark and ending with him abandoning the utopian venture in defeat and disgust on March 19, 1936, Popeye’s act of radical escape from Depression-Era America was among the longest continuities in the history of Thimble Theatre. But the Spinachova epic was important in a number of ways. It was the closest Segar came to political satire. The tension between “dictipator” Popeye and his “sheep” (the people) is basically a political one that turns the trendy populism and folk romanticism of the day on its head. It was also a saga of defeat for Segar’s hero, an extended example of our otherwise heroic, even super-powered folk moralist showing all manner of very human weaknesses. And finally, most importantly perhaps, the episode was Segar at his absurdist peak, a tour de force of relentless zany side trips, inane situations and surreal resolutions that were the cartoonist’s hallmark. While Thimble Theatre’s Plunder Island storyline was likely Segar’s most successful continuity in developing character, plot and comic suspense, he was using the roomier canvas of Sunday pages for deeper, more immersive sequences. The Spinachova saga was executed across nearly a year of dailies, which may give us the fullest picture of this artist’s range within the truncated cadences of this format.
Panels & Prose 