Tag Archives: 1900s

The Obsessive American: Fixations, Tics and Mania in Early Comicdom

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Superstitious Sam

Early newspaper cartoonists had a fixation on fixations. From the relentless politeness of Alphonse and Gaston to the ravenous Hungry Henrietta to Mr. Jack’s apparent sex addiction, the comedy of dysfunction was central to the first decade of the medium. Rooted in caricature, and visual shorthand, cartooning has always been dominated by social typing of one kind or another. Racial stereotyping was rife, of course, in the first decade of strips especially. But they joined prankish kids, hapless husbands, befuddled cops, prissy socialites, country hayseeds, and wacky inventors in a kind of repertory cast of the comics pages in these years. But sometime after 1900, many cartoonists zoomed into specific characteristics, obsessions, and idiosyncratic tics to define a strip.

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“Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet…And Lands on Policeman’s Head”

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In the first decade of newspaper comics, the line between familiar illustrated journalism and the emerging styles of cartooning sometimes blurred. My favorite example of those two worlds commingling is this news drawing from The San Francisco Call (Jan. 30, 1901), “Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet From Hotel Fire Escape and Lands on Policeman’s Head.”

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Making Charles Dana Gibson Sexy Again

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This is a good time for modern comic strip fans to recall Charles Dana Gibson’s role in late Victorian American culture. The most famous illustrator of his day had a calming, languid line and upscale focus that contrasted sharply with everything the early newspaper comic strip represented. Just as a tsunami of recent comic strip reprints celebrate the raucousness of 20th Century cartooning, Gibson’s epoch-defining artistry reminds us of what the “vulgar” new medium was disrupting. It also suggests why the scions of civility found the Sunday supplements so offensive and magazine illustrators like Gibson so engaging.

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Random Nightmares: Winsor McCay Gets Rarebit

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Where do we even start to highlight the wicked strangeness of Winsor McCay’s “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend?” The master comics artist drew over 800 nightmares in the first decade of the 20th Century, and most of them include startling examples of his surrealist imagination like the above. The conceit was simple. A normal scene in the opening panel quickly devolves into some bent reality: giant insects sucking a man’s forehead; a gent sneezing his head into the street; various limbs expanding to absurd sizes; people exploding willy nilly; or the characters themselves dissembling or penetrating the cartoon panels themselves. And it all ends in a final panel of the man or woman involved waking up and cursing the rich melted cheese dish (“Rarebit”) that prompted the nightmare.

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Dingbat Calls In the Klan: Herriman’s Bourgeois Obsessive

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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. 

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Chatty Pantomime: Little Tragedies Strikingly Told in Four Words (1903)

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There were no firm rules for comic artists during that first 10 or 15 years of newspaper strips. Formats, aesthetic conventions, even panel shapes and limits hadn’t been fully established. The medium was still elastic. And so we see in these years wild experiments in artistic styles, unfettered explorations of page and the panel structures, even testing different interactions of words and image. Little Tragedies Strikingly Told in Four Words contains that spirit in its own title. It frames itself as an experiment. Crafted by the otherwise forgettable Alfred W. Brewerton for the New York Evening World between Oct. 1903 and June 1904, it was an unusually long-lived title to appear several times a week. True to its title, the strip is indeed striking because it blends pantomime and text in a novel way that is also compact, highly stylized, even wry. It recalls that famous quip about Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy being easier not to read than to read. And like Nancy, the strip gets at something elemental about how comics work.

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Screwball 101: The Opper Spin

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F.B. Opper was a founding father of newspaper comics generally and slapstick physics in particular. His wild spinning technique established a staple of screwball comics, Here from a 1904 episode of And Her Name Was Maude. More on Opper’s machine poetry here.