One of the longest-lived and popular Western series of the last century, Red Ryder (1938-1965) is barely remembered today…mostly for good reason. Unlike richer, historically-informed efforts like Warren Tufts’ masterful Casey Ruggles and Lance, Red Ryder was closer to Western genre boilerplate, The titular hero is a red-headed journeyman cowpoke who finds and resolves trouble wherever he roams. His woefully typecast sidekick “Little Beaver” was an orphaned Native American boy who provided identification for kid readers, a sounding board for the solitary and stoic Red, and comic relief of a distinctly stereotyped sort. In truth the strip made little effort to delve into character let alone suspense or high adventure.
By the end of his career in 1977, Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould was notoriously reactionary. His disdain for the counter-cultural forces at play in the 1960s and 70s, for liberal explanations of criminal behavior, were clear in the strip itself. In fact, his resistance to leniency in America’s legal system, and progressivism in general, had been baked into his epic since its roots n the gangster era of 1931. From the start, Dick Tray was an exploration of individual valor and evil rather than institutional or social forces. Gould’s take on the 50s moral panic around “juvenile delinquency” via Flattop Jr. is an excellent example. And the moral universe of Dick Tracy hinged on the personal evil of villains(usually embodied in physical abnormalities) and the poetic symmetry of their deaths via some kind of retributive justice.
Slipping a bit of light erotica into the back pages of the buttoned-down newspaper medium was something of a sport among many comic strip artists throughout the last century. From the ubiquitous Gibson Girls of the the 00s to the curvy and well-delineated flapper daughters and office gals of 20s strips to the imperiled damsels and femmes fatale of 30s adventure, cartoonists understood they were wedging adult cheesecake into a “kids’ medium. Milton Caniff understood the better than anyone the potential here for serving the needs of a daily adventure strip while also pushing the boundaries of the conservative editorial propriety of national syndication.
One of the pleasures of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner across the decades was that the strip never took itself or any other pop culture phenomenon very seriously. In fact, Capp may have been at his best in his absurdist parodies of pop culture fads, rising celebrities, and politics. Satirical proxies for Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando showed up in the strip at the height of their popularity. Larger issues like the Cold War, student unrest, Third World politics all found their way to Dogpatch, or Dogpatchers somehow found their way to them. Ironically, what started as a comedy about a backwards and alienated community of big-hearted naives, was really illustrating in its own light way how interdependent and mass mediated the world had become by the 1930s. In Capp’s hands, Dogpatch is anything but disconnected from the rest of the world. The wide world rushes through the hillbilly berg.
Like its eponymous heroine, Dale Messick’s Brenda Starr strip had to conquer the systemic sexism of the newsroom to make her mark. It launched in 1940 in constricted, Sunday-only syndication under the skeptical stewardship of New York Daily News legend Captain Joseph Patterson, after he had rejected Messick’s multiple submission for female-led adventure strips. According to lore, Patterson was unabashed in dismissing women in cartooning, claiming to have tried and failed with them in the past, “and wanted no more of them.” Messick’s samples were salvaged from the discard pile by Patterson’s more open minded assistant Mollie Slott, who helped the artist rework her ideas to feature an ambitious and dauntless female reporter. The artist was acutely aware of the gender deck stacked against her. Born “Dalia” Messick, she deliberately adopted the androgynous “Dale” to help get her strips considered more seriously. Slott convinced thge reluctant Patterson to give this red-headed firebrand and Rita Hayworth lookalike a try. History was made.
Dick Moores’ Jim Hardy (1936-42) crime adventure strip was more of an interesting curiosity than it was a success. Moores had done backgrounds and lettering for Chester Gould on Dick Tracy, and he achieved enduring fame later when he took over Gasoline Alley in 1959, a run that lasted until his passing in 1986. But Jim Hardy is an interesting freshman effort because of its attempt to move crime comics beyond his mentor’s wildly popular but narrow world view. In Jim Hardy, Moores was looking for a more rounded, richer crime fighter than Tracy.
The Dingbat Family, July 26, 1910 introduces “The Family Upstairs” and Kat and mouse.
The shrunken American male was always at the center of the modern family sitcom, and at the head of that long line of hapless hubbies is George Herriman’s pint-sized E. Pluribus Dingbat. The Dingbat Family premiered in June 1910, but was soon retitled The Family Upstairs when by the next month E. Pluribus had found his persistent nemesis, the noisy upstairs neighbors. When the strip is studied at all, it as the birthplace of Herriman’s more famous Krazy and Ignatz. Kat and mouse started as a secondary pantomime comedy at the bottom of the Dingbats, first seen on the same day the Dingbats discovered the irksome “family upstairs,” July 16, 1910 (see above). According to Herriman biogrpaher Michael Tisserand, the artist quickly fell in love with the Krazy and Ignatz dynamic, was able to spin the duo off into their own strip and make history. Herriman himself was unsure of the appeal of the Dingbats, even though his bosses at Hearst seemed to compel him to continue the series for six years. His heart belonged to Krazy. Still, in E Plurubus Dingbat Herriman was laying down some of the early tropes of the family sitcom. The diminished and dimuntive father figure had comic precedents, namely Jeff of Mutt and Jeff, Gus Mager’d Henpecko, and to a lesser extent the lesser half of George McManus’ The Newlyweds. But it is in The Dingbats that we start seeing the sitcom dad adopt his fuller cultural role. Haplessly raging against a modernizing world, bemoaning his own diminished authority, battling stylish children, neighbors, politicians, plumbers and garbagemen, half-baking schemes that always fail, much of sitcom fatherhood take shape in Pa Dingbat.
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