Hank Hannigan was no Captain Easy or Jungle Jim or even Dickie Dare. In fact, he was designed by his creator, Coulton Waugh, as a deliberate antidote to the comic strip adventurer. He was a WWII veteran and amputee who didn’t want to journey (let alone, save) the world. Hank was proud to be a “plain guy,” a grease monkey who craved returning to the garage, marrying his sweetheart, and maybe making sense of the sacrifices he and his fellow soldiers just made. He was the unlikely hero of a short-lived 1945 comic strip that artist Coulton Waugh conceived as a populist corrective to the fantastic escapades of typical comic strip heroes. “To get a new character I go into the subways and actually draw them,” he told trade newspaper Editor and Publisher before Hank’s April launch. “I want the people of America to stream into the strip.”

Waugh knew well the familiar notes of adventure strips.  Since 1934, he had written and drawn Dickie Dare, succeeding Milton Caniff, who left to launch Terry and the Pirates. Hank was “a deliberate attempt to work in the field of social usefulness,” he said, but also to incorporate an expressive design sense that he admired in the late George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. The strip’s host and syndicator was New York City’s populist/progressive PM newspaper (1940-1948). In the run-up to the novel strip’s launch, editors promised that “The new strip works out interpretive techniques that are as new and different in comic strips as some of those developed by Crockett Johnson in Barnaby,” which PM had started two years before. For only eight months, Waugh succeeded in giving readers something that looked and sounded unmistakably different from the norm. Hank was packed with firsts. No comic had ever featured a character with a major physical disability. The strip included a regular Black character and did so without a whiff of mainstream cartoon minstrelsy. Waugh’s unvarnished view of combat veterans returning to civilian life also took an unabashed pluralist, progressive stand on what those soldiers fought to preserve. Yet, despite these innovations, Hank remains a forgotten strip that seems to get mentioned by historians more than actually seen or explored. Still, the time seems right to resuscitate a lost anti-fascist warrior.

Hank has never been reprinted, and only stray panels and strips appear online. An unevenly scanned PDF of one of Waugh’s scrapbooks does include a patchwork of clippings and syndication proofs including most of the full run. Here are the first 8 days of the strip.

Starting in the Pacific theater late in the war, we meet Corporal Hank Hannigan in battle. In the course of things, he rescues a fallen flyer (the legendary Capt. “Link” Kollwitz), shows his native genius by outsmarting a Japanese sniper and then gets blown up saving his squad. The strip pulls few punches. At the army hospital, Hank loses the lower half of his leg and Kollwitz dies. Depressed at the prospect of life with a prosthetic leg, Hank finds inspiration in a peg legged entertainer who turned his disability into a successful act.¹

Hank was at its most didactic during the inaugural months when Waugh eagerly signaled the strip’s left/populist alignment. y early 1945, both European and Pacific war fronts were careening towards an Allied victory, and Waugh frames the effort as a war for pluralist democracy. Despite casual hatred for “Jap” and “Nip” foes, Hank’s heterogeneous squad is a roll-call of ethnic names and regional roots. Their rescuer is the “well-trained Negro” grunt Jerry Green, who becomes the first recurring Black character in a mainstream newspaper comic to avoid ethnic stereotyping. Even the late Capt. Killowitz was a German emigree who embraced Allied ideals.  In sum, Waugh frames American democracy and identity as grounded in shared ideas and ideals, not ethnic or blood origins. And Hank himself emerges as a natural democrat. The aw-shucks grease monkey humbly insists he lets “others do the thinking.” But he is clever enough to jerry-rigs a grenade throwing slingshot and neutralize a sniper. “That wuzn’t thinkin’. That was just my reg’ler stuff like fixin’ cars back home,” a knack for “doping things out,” he tells Kollwitz.

Hank will need that native genius for “doping things out” soon enough. The departed Killwitz left behind a diary with thoughts about how “everyone should dope things out, that fascism could even happen at home,” Hank recalls. Soon enough, a “Veterans Forward” league of nationalists tries to co-opt Hank into being their spokesman. Ultimately, Hank and a journalist pal infiltrate and expose the conspiracy as well as its racist nativism. In one of Waugh’s most chilling dailies, one rally speaker barks out from the panel, “One day, we’ll take the Negroes and Jews and Communists and RUN ‘EM OUT!” Waugh was fictionalizing a storyline that PM’s own journalists investigated throughout the war, about secret collusion between European fascism and American political and industrial factions.

The strip took on racism a bit more obliquely. The heroic savior of Hank’s squad, Jerry Green, returns with college ambitions. A rich landowner offers him a job as handyman for his estate. When Jerry politely declines, the cigar-chomping white man grumbles, “Well, well, think of that. A perfectly good Negro wanting to ‘go to school.’ I’m afraid this war has put a lot of ideas into people’s heads.”

While Waugh lathers on the populist didacticism pretty thick in Hank’s first months, he leavens it with genuine intrigue and action. Woven into the anti-fascist conspiracy is a wonderfully drawn femme fatale who falls for Hank as well as a flurry of romantic missteps with girlfriend Rosalie. More impressive was the artist’s graphic experimentation. Waugh had a clean thick-lined style and use of deep shadows that seemed to channel the WPA poster art of the 1930s. He used dabs of shadow to define face and clothing. His cityscapes were minimalist but precisely outlined, again, more by shadows than detail. Individual panels often carried a poster-like punch. His characters might speak directly to the reader with fist-pounding certainty and Soviet poster-art vibes. And Waugh loved playing with patterns – stripes, mottling, polka dots – with some eye-popping spotting around his panels. He even played with typography and speech balloons. His sculpted lower-case lettering often went white against a black balloon. Overall, he achieved an adventure strip style that stood apart from Roy Crane’s cartoony approach in Buz Sawyer, Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby photo-realism and blotchy chiaroscuro of Caniff’s Steve Canyon.

About halfway through Hank’s short run, both Waugh’s ideological flexes and design flourishes settle down along with the storyline. A series of familiar miscommunications, missed communications and misinterpretations send Hank and Rosalie on a twisty journey towards the marriage that ends the strip at the close of December 1945. Believing mistakenly that Rosalie has fallen for a rich rival, Hank takes to sea as a tug boat mate. Waugh takes the opportunity to craft some of his most striking art and compositions. The ship gets swamped; Hank jumps overboard to save his unconscious Captain; then he himself gets saved from the storm, leading to a romantic reunion and Hank and Rosalie’s hometown marriage in Trueburg, N.J. (Yes, Trueburg). The sequence allows Waugh to exercise an uncharacteristic but beautiful naturalism in rendering the storm. It was a talent he came by naturally. Waugh’s father was a noted marine artist.

Waugh closed the strip at the end of 1945 with Hanks’s marriage and settling into a new home. For a strip that began so self-consciously contrary to comic convention, the ending was remarkably prescient of the domestication about to overwhelm adventure comics after the war. Waugh withdrew Hank, reportedly because of eyestrain, and he seems to have intended to wrap his story neatly in a bow. But for all of its novelty, the Hank strip did not have a clear path forward. Waugh was not a the strongest storyteller, and his characterizations were shallow and indistinct. The dialogue also tended to look better than it sounded. The strip as a whole, however, was unique in purpose and visual atyle.

Hank was an interesting experiment both in design and messaging that recalls a moment of “Popular Front” coalition that may be relevant today. Its politics, and even its aesthetics, extended a partnership among the radical left and liberalism against the common enemy of fascism in the late 1930s. While often intellectual in leadership and tone, the Popular Front tried to appeal to working class Americans in its support of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Stylistically, it is often embodied by the art of WPA posters and regionalist painting that celebrated labor, the wisdom of the common man, ethnic diversity and abstract appeals to a collective democratic identity.

The PM newspaper, founded by TIME editor Robert Ingersoll in 1940, worked in that spirit until closing in 1948. It rejected the advertising model to remain independent of corporate interests, although its beneficiaries included Marshall Fields III and others. PM took a strong anti-fascist line, opposed Jim Crow measures like Poll Taxes, and was often accused by the right of being a “Communist front.” PM called itself a “picture magazine” and featured hundreds of editorial cartoons by Dr. Seuss as well as photography by Weegee and Margaret Bourke White. Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammet and Dorothy Parker were among many contributors. And, of course, it was also the original home of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby. Coulton Waugh’s Hank fit right in. The strip embodied an enduring left/liberal idealism about finding in the American common man a native democratic impulse that can be married to more highbrow social justice ideologies. At the same time, Waugh and others in this Popular Front were looking for artistic styles that infused those ideals in everyday popular culture.  

1. As the panel suggests, the amputee entertainer was based on a Broadway headliner, Peg Leg Bates. The son of a sharecropper, Bates lost his leg in his adolescence from a cotton gin accident. He turned the handicap into feature act. Waugh’s panels depict the reported climax of Bates’ routine – a flying leap that lands and then spins upon his reinforced peg leg. ↩︎