The great Clare Briggs (1875-1930) continues to impress me as perhaps the most under-appreciated figure in American comics history. He was by no means a distinctive stylist or draftsman of the sort that helps us better remember fellow greats like McCay, McManus, Herriman, Sterrett, King or Gould. But in the staggering range of cartoon series he conceived (When a Feller Needs a Friend, The Days of Real Sport, Mr. and Mrs., Real Folks at Home, Movie of a Man, Wonder What _____ Thinks About, among others) he demonstrated a range of human empathy, attention to emotional detail, and a social/class sensitivity that seems to me unmatched by any other American comic artist. Briggs was among the highest paid cartoonists of the 1920s, and widely known and beloved by audiences who were shocked at his premature death at aged 55 in 1930. His loss to the field was so deeply felt that his publisher issued a multi-volume memorial retrospective of his greatest work shortly after his death.

Briggs’ subsequent reputation is likely constrained by his association with simple, heartwarming but unfunny nostalgia. He recalls his own childhood in rural Wisconsin and Illinois in single panels of unbridled sentiment in The Days of Real Sport (below) and a number of other similar series.

As many of his contemporary admirers observed, Briggs’ talent in these pieces is for evoking that mild grin of recognition, a warm memory or nostalgic longing, that never breaks into real wit or humor. He captures the memory of a feeling from childhood. Visually, the large single panel allows him to deepen that moment with perspectives from multiple characters and minor details. That is Briggs’ special skill across all of his work. He was a genius of small moments and feelings unfolded with greater detail. In “The Best Place to See the Ball Game,” the joke of course is that the kids can barely see the distant field, but being atop the roof is still the “best” place to view it. Children dickering over who should do a minor task, the perennial hunt for snacks, the call to an off stage fellow to join the fun – are all minor keys of childhood honestly played in a Briggs’ cartoon. The ongoing call to the forever absent – “Hey Skin-nay” – became one of many catchphrases Briggs contributed to the culture. It was an effective frame on the scene that beckoned the observer to join Skinny as well.

Briggs was adept at communicating those small emotions with simple facial expressions and postures. The grieved look on William’s face at being mocked by his pals as he tries to act out adult etiquette speaks volumes about that boy-to-manhood chasm. Even in these saccharine tableaux for which Briggs was beloved, there is a delicacy and depth to his understanding of human feeling. While unimaginable to our sensibilities, “The Lickin'” is masterful. The circumspection of these friends overhearing their pal’s spanking is told entirely through looks and postures: heads down in mourning, slumped bodies, hands in pockets, empathetic humiliation on the smaller kids’ faces, a kind of wordless exchange of horror as the two eldest exchange glances. The nostalgic sentiment may seem simple, but the execution is not. Again, Brigg’s genius was for unfolding the small and simple into a moment with varied aspects and even depth of feeling.

And the divide between public spaces and personae and the private world at home was central to Briggs’ imagination. I have already written about the two greatest examples of this, Mr. and Mrs. and Real Folks at Home. In the former, one of many popular domestic sitcom strips that defined 20s trends, the marital bickering seems to me especially pointed, resentful, sometimes dark. With easy talk of suicide and poisoning, routine jumps into ad hominem attacks, Joe and Vi often have a genuinely bad relationship that is rarely redeemed by sentimental resolutions. Not surprisingly, it turns out Briggs was crafting this very popular strip as his own marriage was disintegrating, ending in divorce in 1929. But typically, Mr. and Mrs. was the quintessential domestic strip that characterized the in-home world brutal candor and plain speaking.

We’ve argued elsewhere in these pages that the modern sitcom of radio and TV originated as a genre in the comic strip of the 1910s in Herriman’s Dingbats, Sterret’s Polly and Her Pals, McManus’ Bringing Up Father, and even Tuthill’s darkly sophisticated The Bungle Family. But the cultural underpinnings of the sitcom ran deeper, in an idealization of the domestic sphere that emerged in Victorian America. As the American economy industrialized, middle class work became more managerial and hierarchical in service to ever-larger corporate masters. Victorian home life was constructed as a counterpoint. The domestic sphere served as a retreat and respite from that external world of ambition, ruthless competition, the humiliations of bosses, the artifice of social and workplace performance. This so-called “haven in a heartless world” was defined by relaxation, feminine accoutrements but male authority, plain speaking among family members as well as compensation for routinized toil – crafts, hobbies, consumption. This context is important to understanding the comic strip sitcom, because much of the comedy in this genre relied on disrupting those domestic myths, even if temporarily for a laugh.

Of all comic strip auteurs, Briggs may have been our best and most insightful cartographer of the growing gulf between public and private spheres in modern America. Many of his strips take that divide as their very subject.

The selection above from his series It Happens in the Best Regulated Families, dramatizes the gulf between work and home. The timid employee is anxious about having a tenuous hold on his job. but within the domestic space, a world of different stories that spouses tell one another and themselves, he is an indispensable worker with all of the leverage. Briggs was adept at showing couples building these private realities within the domestic sphere. That is the entire subject of what may be his most culturally sophisticated strip, Real Folks at Home. We have discussed this remarkable series elsewhere, but it is worth revisiting. After all, what other strip of the 1920s not only took the American manual and menial laborers as its subject, but treated the working class with such sensitivity and depth?

The domestic space is defined self-consciously as the frame for Real Folks at home. The formulaic first panel of each installment is the husband entering the front door of his home, and the next five panels explore the many ways that spouses co-author their own version of themselves in relation to that outside world of work. In this realm, the most menial hod carrier or street sweeper is an artisan, with deeply held expertise on the nuances of his trade and strident opinions on his company, co-workers and customers. The street sweeper and his wife gush over the heft and coverage of his new broom as if it were a new family car. The garbagemen delivers gossip about the the neighbors’ dietary habits and extravagance based on their trash. The shoe shine extolls the superiority of his homemade polish and the special snap of his polishing rag. Briggs makes so much more of this than a shallow bromide about man as “king of his own castle.” It is people demonstrating a sense of craft, professionalism, pride in what others might regard as minor, unskilled labor.

Consider the “A Locomotive Engineer” episode below and the delicate way Briggs bridges work and home world with the oil can device. He is calling attention to this worker’s intimate and emotional attachment to the small world he has mastered on the job, the minutiae of mileage among new and old engines, the little ways that work and private realms are distinct and overlapping. And throughout, Briggs usually depicts spouses as knowledgable of their husband’s work outside of the home, collaborators in building this working man’s proud self-view. The marital conversations in these strips feel like slices from a history of sharing life’s little details. The Real Folks at Home series seems like the inverse of Brigg’s more popular success, the Mr. and Mrs. domestic strip. There, Briggs sees the middle class Joe and Vi as endlessly contentious and unsupportive. And while not all of the Real Folks are laborers (some include opera stars and aviators), Briggs’ idealizes all workers as similar noble artisans whose identity is tied to their work. The strips illustrate the many ways in which Americans create their own dignity, manage the public/domestic spheres with creativity and nuance. On one level, Briggs is a sociological poet. He is keyed into an historical reality of changes in work and social class in an industrializing America. But there is nothing didactic or dryly sociological about his treatment. It is humane, sympathetic and individualized.

Which is to say that Briggs embodied what was singular and special about the American comic strip. At its best this was a form that explored aspects of American everyday existence that were beyond the scope or the care of other media. It was a poetry of small sentiments and recognizable moments, the near at hand – the meaningful aspects of modern existence that newspapers, movies, literary fiction had the interest or even the language to talk about in such a human, specific way.

Briggs was especially good at this in part because he seemed to be a man of great imaginative sympathy. He put himself and us into so many different heads and made individual their takes on every kind of small moment or feeling. In fact, this creative range embraced the minds of people and inanimate objects in another of his series Wonder What a ___Thinks About” in which he projects soliloquies into the minds of everything from window shoppers and traffic cops, movie star wives and babies, to angleworms, drinking fountains, flagpoles and a flirtatious Statue of Liberty (see above).

It seems to me that Briggs deserves to be in the pantheon of the comic strip greats, but perhaps for different reasons than McCay, Outcault, Herriman, Caniff, or whoever else we might name among the revered, heavily reprinted scions of strips. In most cases we attach the greats to specific characters and strips, innovations or technical wizardry. Briggs genius was in his unparalleled use of the medium to explore an unmatched range of modern American experiences with keen insight and sympathy. From embittered marrieds to grin-inducing nostalgia, tiny rites of boyhood passage to the inner lives of hod carriers, his was an open democratic sensibility. History has judged him as primarily sentimental, but I suggest he is better seen as radically sympathetic. He showed an eagerness to surface the humanity from an enormous gallery of American souls, and never seemed to rely on easy stereotyping. Equally important he had a keen sense for the changes Americans were experiencing in the first decades of this century – especially in those moving divides among public/private, work/home lives as America industrialized, corporatized, suburbanized. Much of his genius was for exploring these historical shifts in very individual, humanized ways. Which is to say that he epitomized the uniqueness of the comic strip as an American art of the everyday, not only an exploration of manners and morals but of gestures, familiar moments, fleeting sentiments and fantasies – the scope of human experience that was appropriate to a handful of illustrated panels every day.