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.
With a striking visual energy, speech and violence that was unlike anything else on the page, Will Gould ‘s (1911-1984) short-lived Red Barry (1934-38) jumped out of the Depression-era comics page. It was intended to mimic the success of crime comic powerhouse Dick Tracy. But the two unrelated Goulds, Tracy’s Chester and Barry’s Will, couldn’t have been more unalike in temperament and values. And so their visions of gangesterism, crime and heroism took wildly different paths. Red Barry was uniquely exciting among rival crime comics of the day, and even to the contemporary eye, it feels fresh. Everything vibrated with action and intrigue in the strip – from the modernist, machine age sharp edges to every person and thing in the panel to bolded words in speech balloons, to the massive, stylized shadows its characters cast on nearby walls. The strip blended cartoonish visual abstraction with realistic violence and plot lines that deliberately mimicked current news stories. In comparing it to Dick Tracy, Red Barry exemplifies how deeply and varied the personal visions and personalities of artists could inform a range of perspectives on society despite the institutional constrains of this mass medium.
U.S. readers never got to experience one of the most visually arresting and subtle narrative comic strips of the 1950s and 60s, David Wright’s (1912-1967) Carol Day. Syndicate editors on this side of the pond deemed the popular UK newspaper soap opera too “sophisticated” for their audiences. They may not have been entirely wrong. To American eyes, this peerlessly drawn tale of an orphaned young model’s adventures in the stylish upper echelons of post-WWII London is more emotionally restrained and understated than its Yankee counterparts. But we will get to that.
Caricature, when done well, is the art of clarification through exaggeration. Which is not the same thing as simplification. The best caricaturists exaggerate, enhance, underscore and highlight some physical or character attributes that express a deeper insight about its subject. Thomas Nast’s iconic Boss Tweed was not just obese with graft. He was gelatinous, overwhelmed and almost inert from his own power and greed. It was a portentous portrait. It argued visually the seeds of Tweed’s own destruction, an appetite for power that was overcoming his own control and better judgment. It did what caricature does best by attaching ideas and arguments to figures in ways that reach beyond simple journalistic proof or language. And because political and social caricature almost always personifies issues, it tends to explain social problems as aspects of human imperfection.
Paper dolls and cut-out toy models are centuries-old, but the format was a natural fit for the modern newspaper comic from its beginnings. We tend to identify the comic strip paper doll with “women’s strips” from the great fashionistas, Jackie “Torchy” Ormes or Gladys “Mopsy” Parker. But in 1934, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon got into the act with a series that ran in every Sunday from August 18 to December 16. While Raymond focused mainly on Dale Arden as well as the various princesses and other female characters the still-young strip had amassed by then, he covers most of the cast, from Zarkov in a tuxedo to Ming the Merciless’ collection of flamboyant collars.
Before becoming the anodyne logo of Disney’s saccharine-soaked family image during the post-WWII era, Disney’s Mickey Mouse had some heroic chops. Make no mistake, Mickey was never even remotely “edgy” let alone hard-boiled in the style of some other 30s pulp protagonists. But he was imagined by Disney in the original animated shorts and then by Floyd Gottfredson in the daily comic strips, as a spunky, resourceful adventurer. In the 1930s, Mickey was thrust into a number of roles and across all of the pop culture genres: sky jockey, detective, western outlaw hunter, ghost-hunter, even sci-fi adventurer. As tame as Mickey’s 30s adventures may seem, the Disney corporation in its most controlling moments in the past has tried to disappear come of the earliest imagery of their corporate logo packing a gun or interacting with some cringe-worth but commonplace racial stereotyping of the era.
Panels & Prose 