Tag Archives: 1930s

Cool and Calculating: 20 Favorite Comic Strip Villains – Part 3

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As the 1930s progressed, comic strip adventuring matured its visions of villainy. And the times were changing, as world war was becoming a reality rather than a distant rumble. As we saw in Part 1 and Part 2 of our favorite comic strip badasses, the thuggish, petty, and naturally mean antangonists of the 20s and early 30s (Bull Dawson, Sea Hag, etc.) had given way to the world-eating maniacs like Ming and The Cobra. By the late 30s, villainy becomes a bit more real and local – often focused on espionage or just personal greed. And the characters are evolving as well, more conniving and cerebral, less tied to gangsterism and power-madness than to cool demeanors and low-key malevolence. Evil was no longer wearing crowns, medieval cloaks or mustaches. They were well-dressed and brainy – the villain next door.

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World-Class Malice: 20 Favorite Comic Strip Villains – Part 2

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As we move more deeply into the 1930s and the peak years of comic strip adventure, some of the most recognizable and enduring cartoon fiends emerge. The villainy enlarges to suggest global criminal conspiracies and political power as it also becomes more sadistic. Newspaper comics are edging towards the outsized heroes and super-villains that formed the foundation of the comic books to come. [For the first installment of our valley of villains, refer to Part 1.

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Evil Is As Evil Does: 20 Favorite Comic Strip Villains – Part 1

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Villainy is, well, a necessary evil. At least so far as popular adventure is concerned. What is a hero without an antagonist, morality plays without sin? Whether it is the Satan of Genesis or of Milton, the slave-driving Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Holmes’s worthy nemesis Moriarty, villainy is always a statement about evil itself that is somehow embedded in its time and its creator’s world view. That is what makes baddies so much fun to unravel. Paradise Lost is the original object lesson in our finding evil more intriguing than heroism. But the comic strip had particular roles in the evolution of popular scoundrels. Along with dime novels, pulp magazine fiction and film serials, it was among a cluster of turn-of-the-century mass media that relied on serialized heroes and stories. From these new modes of endless storytelling arose a popular sensation, the recurring villain. Moriarty (Conan Doyle), Fu Manchu (Rohmer), Fantômas (Allain and Souvestre) and a range of black-masked kidnappers of the chronically imperiled silent film heroine Pauline (Perils of Paulin) set the pattern. But the comic strip brought to evildoing its unique aesthetic strengths: believable absurduty, the light tone of caricature, and relentless irony. With some exceptions, this medium made evil unserious, fun, or at least safely farcical.

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Book Review: Hal Foster’s Tarzan Years – Building A Great White Father

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We could easily frame Hal Foster’s 1931-1937 run of Tarzan Sunday comics merely as a pleasant preamble to his magnum opus, Prince Valiant. By his own admission, Foster was a reluctant cartoonist. The successful magazine and commercial artist carried that world’s condescension towards the comic strip. Famously, he quipped in 1984 that being invited to replace Rex Maxon on the Tarzan Sundays was “To be asked to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.” But the Great Depression had hit advertising and print media hard, so Foster took the life raft. But as TASCHEN’s new and definitive reprint of his Tarzan years shows, Foster was doing more than warming up. Others like Frank Godwin and Nell Brinkley had already started to introduce less cartoony, more illustrative styles to comics pages. But Foster brought into the mix dynamic, realistic figure art, a remarkable attention to color, and an appreciation for spectacle that newspaper Sunday pages hadn’t seen since the earliest years of experimentation by the likes of McCay and Feininger.

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Popeye is “Amphibious”

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Weekly Weird. Cross-dress Tuesday with Popeye. In a lengthy 1930s story arc by Segar, the “amphibious” sailor infiltrates a criminal hideout by passing as Mollie.

Little Lefty: Kid Kommunist

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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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Quips and Curlicues: Mopsy’s Stylish Return

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Gladys Parker was among the most recognizable and well-reported cartoonists of the 1930s and 40s. It was hard to miss her. She was the spit-curl image of her avatar Mopsy, the sharp-tongued and stylish star of her own single-panel comic (1937-1966). It is hard to say which came first, Parker’s cartoonish look or Mopsy’s, but they shared the same shock of black curlicues, sharply lined brows and eyes, and a precisely “sticked” set of lips. And since Parker was also a noted, audacious clothes designer, Mopsy was a working girl with a seemingly endless closet of ultra-modern fashions.

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