I don’t know who this Ferd. C Long was, nor how long the engaging “How You Felt” strip ran. But it captured me instantly as a great example of early cartoon experiments that explored some of the unique qualities of the new medium. The great team at Barnacle Press, who nobly harvest every scrap of early comic strips they can, gathered these. Like many strips of the day, it took up a simple single conceit – in this case using visual exaggeration to capture a feeling. The result is a fantastic surrealism that communicates in a singular way a range of small and common responses to the world.
Continue readingMonthly Archives: April 2022
McManus’s One Joke, Deftly Told
Comic disharmony between Jiggs and Maggie over their social climb was the central joke of George McManus’s Bringing Up Father for over four decades. For all of McManus’s fine sense of humor, he banged that one note across four panels six days a week and a full page every Sunday. To be sure, he layered in nuances of class and generational conflict. Jiggs was a hod carrier who struck it rich, never adjusted to his own ascent, and clashed with wife Maggie and daughter’s ambitions to join the social elite. The dynamic was rich with potential and embodied the experience of millions of American emigrees moving into the modern middle class. But many of the daily strips tediously replayed Jiggs’s sneaking out to his former watering hole Dinty Moore’s, embarrassing his family with etiquette transgressions or ducking Maggie’s thrown dishes. These were conventions that American newspaper readers enjoyed hearing for a handful of panels and 30 seconds a day over its 87-year run. McManus, however, was especially adept at maintaining reader interest in the familiar with his mastery of visual style, panel sequencing and timing.
Continue readingNapoleon: The Gentle Art of Everyday-ness
Clifford McBride’s portrait of the affable, accident-prone and corpulent Uncle Elby and his puckish oversized dog Napoleon is one of those great American comic strips that are about nothing. There is no adventure or much of an ongoing storyline to the Napoleon and Uncle Elby strip. Nor are there gags, verbal or physical, really. It is more a strip about everyday mishaps. Uncle Elby is proud of his new white suit, which an affectionate Napoleon meets at the the front door with muddy paws. Constructing a simple tent results in a tangled mess. Napoleon chases a fleeing rabbit, chicken, cat or whatnot (it’s a frequent theme), only to be chased by his prey in the end. Elby mows over one of his dog’s hidden bones, which conks him on the bean. Elby gets out of his car to open the garage door only to have it slam shut before he can drive through.
No, really, the action in the Napoleon strip is that banal and trifling…relentlessly…and apparently by design.
The Timid Soul Toys With Fascism
This 1937 vision of fascism’s psychological appeal to feelings of personal disempowerment is eerily relevant to the current ethos. H.T. Webster’s Casper Milquetoast (The Timid Soul) responds to newspaper images of Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolph Hitler with his own fantasy of assertiveness. Webster is perceptive enough to understand in this strip how the personal and political entwine around identity. And through Casper he renders it as a will to power that is at once frightening but also silly and sad.
But more than the prescience and enduring relevance of Webster’s 1937 strip, this sequence is a great example of the special powers of the cartoon arts. They can show, not just tell, bring greater depth and impact to an insight through sequential illustration than we would get from the description of language alone. He shows us panel by panel the process of Casper responding to imagery and internalizing it into self-reflection – literally, in front of a mirror – mimicking the despot’s power. And then he twists it into satire: the fantasy of power congratulating itself by terrorizing an unsuspecting cat. Psychologists and political scientists no doubt have filled reams of analysis about how fascism appeals to popular feelings of alienation and disempowerment. But somehow Webster brings it to life in a unique and impactful way here.
The beloved H.T. Webster (1885-1952) drew a range of political and slice of life cartoons across the 20s and 30s. Generally he was known for gentle satires of middle class life and nostalgic takes on bygone boyhood. His most famous contribution to the daily funnies (and American language) was The Timid Soul, which focused on the beleaguered and unassertive Casper Milquetoast who struggled with his own timidity in the face of an increasingly brash, intrusive America. In fact, Casper’s name entered into the language as the familiar descriptor of bland and weak. Casper’s attempts to break out of his own wimpy response to the world is the source of The Timid Soul’s light comedy.
Panels & Prose 