The role of WWII in the history of women, equality and feminism in America is widely known and usually mythologized in Rosie the Riveter tales. With many men abroad, women filled roles in industry and management that typically had been denied them. According to the thumbnail version, newly empowered women suffered a kind of cultural whiplash with the post-war return of men to the States. Industry, government and pop culture generally actively discouraged women from enjoying their newfound role outside of the home in range of unseemly ways.
Roy Crane doesn’t seem to garner the kind of reverence held for fellow adventurists like Milton Caniff and Alex Raymond, even though he pioneered the genre in Wash Tubbs and Capt. Easy. Perhaps it is that he lacks their sobriety. After all, Crane evolved the first globe-trotting comic strip adventure out of a gag strip about the big-footed, pie-eyed and bumbling Tubbs. But when he sent Wash on treasure hunts and international treks into exotic pre-modern cultures he kept one foot in cartoonishness style and the other in well-researched, precisely rendered settings, action and suspense. It was a light realism, with clean lines, softly outlined figures, often set in much more realistic panoramic backgrounds. This was not the photo-realist dry-brushing and feathering of Raymond, nor the brooding chiaroscuro of Caniff.
American popular culture took a number of odd turns in response to the trauma of the Great Depression in the 1930s. A fascination with pre-modern civilization, lost ancient worlds, aboriginal tribalism was one of the most pronounced that fueled comic strip fantasy. From Tarzan and Jungle Jim, to The Phantom, Prince Valiant and even Terry and the Pirates, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy and Flash Gordon, the connection is obvious. At a time when most contemporary institutions were failing, Americans were understandably fixated on pre-modern, anti-modern, prehistoric and fable-like alternative worlds. One of the oddest subsets to this pop anti-modernism was the motif of fantasy monarchy, especially as a setting for comedy and satire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Panels & Prose 