Alert the gender police! Recruit the culture warriors. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip was bending gender norms more than 70 years ago. In fact, this 1953 story arc weirdly foreshadowed current skirmishes over cross-dressing, drag performance, legal gender reassignment and even “men” playing in women’s sports.
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As we found with Coulton Waugh’s lost gem Hank, the radical comic hero Little Lefty is often mentioned in comics history but rarely read. This mainstay of the Daily Worker through much of the 1930s deserves more than a footnote. Like Waugh’s Hank, and the later Pinky Rankin by Dick Briefer, Little Lefty was a genuine and sustained attempt to leverage the conventions of the comics genre towards specific political ends. And it was part of a legacy of leftist cartooning that was already decades old.
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Along with chaos, mayhem and violence, obsessive behavior was a core theme of early newspaper cartooning. Consider the many titular anti-heroes of these years, like Hungry Henrietta, Superstitious Sam, Jingling Johnson, Sammy Sneeze. Or the irrepressible raging “Outbursts of Everett True,” the sex addiction of Mr. Jack, the insufferable politeness of Alfonse and Gaston, or the numerous strips about absent-minded codgers or irrepressible pranksters. Seen through the lens of early 20th Century comics, the new American cityscape was characterized by obsessive behaviors, idiosyncratic personalities, uncontrollable ticks – compulsions of every sort. The annoying monomaniacs in our midst formed the heart of early comics. It was an art well-suited to the daily newspaper: a comedy of everyday frustrations and observations.
Here is your Weekly Weird. Call it comfort food for robots. When Lee Falk and Phil Davis sent their Mandrake the Magician into “Dimension X” in 1937 they found early stage AI. Metal Men were made of conscious “living metal” that dined on coal and oil and enslaved humans. This was a remarkable episode with loads of compellng art and wildly imaged alternative physics. We went into it in depth here.
John Held Jr.’s highly stylized, fine line cartoons are identified with “The Jazz Age” of Fitzgerald’s 1920s for good reason. His imagery on the covers of Fitzgerald books, in his Oh, Margy and Merely Margy comic strips and especially in his work for the early New Yorker and other humor magazines pretty much defined that decade visually. He found a way toi make privileged youth look even more air-headed and frivolous than they prbably were. It made him enormously wealthy, for a time, and in constant demand. Yet, for all of his identification with modernity, Held was deeply nostalgic. Many of his other illustrated works departed radically from his signature flapper stylings and used instead a pre-modern linocut technique that gouged an image into a linoleum surface to effect a primitive woodcut-like effect. Rob Stolzer recently posted the full run of Held’s Civilization’s Progress series from Liberty magazine (1931-32), where Held contrasted the Gay Nineties with contemporary life by juxtaposin his flapper and linocut styles.
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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.”
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Panels & Prose 