Monthly Archives: June 2020

McDougall’s City Vision

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The city was among the pressing new realities facing Americans at the turn of the 20th Century, and the comics medium was uniquely equipped to express sensations around a novel environment. Walt McDougall (1858-1938) was among the pioneers of American cartooning who took special interest in this historic shift. His “Familiar Sights of a Great City – No. 1 The Cop Is Coming” (New York Journal, Sunday, Jan. 9, 1898) is among my favorite one-offs of the era.

Much like R.F Outcault’s visions of urban chaotic action in The Yellow Kid that I commented about earlier, McDougall signifies city life with images of antic physical energy but a highly individuate view of that crowd. Visually, this frantic flight of street vendors (presumably unlicensed) from a strolling cop is a delicious explosion. The mere presence of a virtually inert cop in the far background produces this lurch into the foreground of scurrying limbs and panicked visages.

McDougall’s cartoon stylings are so much more sophisticated than many of his peers here. The cantilevered limbs of all his fleeing vendors are all frozen perfectly at the apogee of their panic. He has a sharp sense of each character’s weight and stance, momentum and facial expression. All of these qualities foreshadow in my mind post-WWII master Jack Davis in particular. There is some wonderful detail in here as well, like the shadows cast by wagon wheels and fruit. The one newspaper reader in the right foreground is an oblivious counterpoint to the onrush, which only enhances the sense of movement and fear in the rest of the crowd.

McDougall’s reading of the city here is much like Outcault’s in that he never lets the crowd be a “crowd.” He personalizes the cityscape. It is a collection of highly distinct individuals rather than the crowd as faceless horde. The emerging medium of film, however, would soon reinterpret the crowd more as a mass.

That said, McDougall exercises ethnic stereotyping as broadly as his comrades often did in newspaper comics of the day. I presume that the handlebar mustaches, beards, fruit, figs and statuettes signify an early Italian-American neighborhood. The great migration of Italians to the US spanned 1880 to 1924 and settled principally in Manhattan, where they often occupied street vendor and dayworker jobs.

I like this image because it is a great example of the uniqueness of comic art in America. Of course many formal critics wrote extensively about the city, pro and con. Their skyscraping buildings, mass transport and increasingly organized city governments were considered icons of progress, the triumph of industry, the genius of science. At the same time angst over crime, disease, xenophobic responses to emigrees, dislocation from nature all proliferated. But illustration, especially comics that took the crowd and the skyscraper as its subject, could express and interpret the sensations of urban life. The cultural role of modern visual media like comics and film often were to help make sense of these feelings with nuance that eludes written prose.

Terry and the Psychologists

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We revere Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates quite rightfully as the apex of the adventure strips. His evocative use of frame, staging, rhythms, ink and line (or blobs), setting, landscape, story arc – all set new and high standards for comic art in the 1930s and 40s that define the form. But as I read through the strip from its beginning I am struck by the pop psychological dimension of the strip. So much time is spent on characters musing on one another’s motives, gaming one another’s psychology, and especially mapping the contours of ideal manhood and the war of the sexes.

Terry the amateur psychologist – decoding adult relationships and the male ego in the first adventure with eternal Pat Ryan love interest Normandie Drake.

The basic psychological dynamic of Terry and the Pirates is father and son. In most places we are taking the perspective of teen Terry Lee who follows and tries to decipher ersatz dad vagabond Pat Ryan as his model male. In the very first story arch of the daily strip society gal Normandie Drake draws Pat’s eye. Here we get the first of many male/female cat and mouse games between Pat and a love interest. At one point Pat leaves Normandie because he doesn’t feel he could fit into her high society. She tries to retrieve him by falsely charging Pat with forgery. And the game is on.

Terry Lee is in the role of son actively trying to decipher the male role that stand-in father Pat is modeling. Connie is his sounding board, which lets Terry voice his readings of Pat without breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to us. And for all of the terrible stereotyping Connie himself endures at Caniff’s hand, he too engages in the pop psychologizing of men and women that quickly becomes one of the sub-themes of the strip.

For his part, Pat is less often an interpreter of human emotional signals than the classic American stoic, the isolato who spends more time silently staring out windows and having his actions and unspoken gestures read by others.

And Caniff’s world of men and women is one of deception, scheming and misdirection. As Terry understands above, a man or woman’s words or actions often run opposite their real meaning. Pat and romantic interests like Normandie, Burma and the Dragon Lady snub and reject one another regularly as ploys to intrigue and attract the other. Per below, Burma rages at Pat labeling him a coward to successfully challenge their stoic to declare his passion for her.

In a rare moment of vocalized reflection, Pat ponders the motives of Burma and his own worthiness as a suitor.

Pat often takes the paternal role to Terry, filling in the blanks on this great mystery that seems to be woman. Heart-to-hearts abound in this strip. Above Caniff invokes the familiar father/son exchange over “Dad” shaving. Caniff portrays the scheming and counter-scheming between men and women with the pointed curiosity of a boy’s view. The interpersonal plots in TATP take up at least as much panel time as the unfolding adventures as the two conceits of the strip run in parallel. And character introspection plays a large role in the day to day content of the strip. Typically the pulp adventure genre is about action, heroic characters who are fully externalized and use violence to express usually male emotion. In TATP, almost every character is capable of being at turns self-deprecating, introspective, analytical.

For and adventure genre usually focused on externalization, Terry and the Pirates uses character introspection to a remarkable degree. Here, Burma reflects own her own motives.
Pat on the glories of women who take “a man’s point of view.”
Connie too is one of Terry and the Pirates’ many armchair psychologists, following Caniff’s rules of interpersonal relations. Outward behaviors often run opposite real intentions.

In putting Caniff’s masterpiece in its context of the 30s and 40s, we would do well to understand this dimension to the strip’s appeal. As pure adventure and graphic storytelling, the strip is unmatched. But Caniff clearly is also exploring with his readers human behavior, psychology, the layers of motive and delusion in human interaction. The basic insight of modern psychology, that humans are not always fully aware of their own motives and that actions are not always clear reflections of thought and feeling, are remarkably featured in this strip. It may be Caniff’s unique blend of external physical action with internal introspection that made the strip so rich and appealing during its very popular run.