V.T. Hamlin was unambiguous about introducing to Alley Oop’s kingdom of Moo the interloping dictator Eeny in 1938. “She was Hitler,” he admitted in an interview later in life. Even three years before America’s entry into the war in Europe, Hamlin felt it was inevitable. The villainous dictator Eeny would reappear during wartime as well, but in this first episode we see Hamlin’s take on how bad leaders co-opt good people.
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Disney’s Silly Symphonies comic strip of the 1930s would not be my go-to place for veiled references to weapons of mass destruction, hobo philosophy, trench warfare or impoverished ghettoes. Much to my surprise, the first year of this brand extension of the studio’s hit animated short series included all of those dark themes and more.
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Comic strip history fans should run, not walk, to grab the one indispensable reprint project of this holiday book season, Trina Robbins and Pete Maresca’s Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics (Fantagraphics/Sunday Press, $100). And I don’t mean “indispensable” as a blurb-able critical throwaway, either. The female characters and creators reprinted here from the 1930s and 40s have been “dispensable” in too many histories of the newspaper comic. The central value of this volume is the smart editorial decision Trina and Peter have made here: surfacing strips and artists who have been underserved by the standard anthologies and reprint series. Whether it is Frank Godwin’s pioneering adventuress Connie or Neysa McMein and Alicia Patterson’s Deathless Deer, Bob Oksner and Jerry Albert’s Miss Cairo Jones or Jackie Ormes’ Torchy Brown Heartbeats, the editors have not only featured previously un-reprinted and forgotten material. We get here substantial continuities from each strip that allows a much deeper appreciation for each strip’s character interactions and story arcs than we get from typical anthology samples. You are in the hands of two masters here. Trina has single-handedly championed the history of women comics creators in a number of previous historical and reprint works. And the longtime editor and founder of The Sunday Press, Peter is not only a walking library of comic strip history, but a sensitive curator and restorer. As a book, Dauntless Dames has the same qualities as the heroines it reprints: at once brainy and drop dead gorgeous.
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Between August 1936 and March 1937, Mandrake the Magician and his right-hand man Lothar teleported into one of author Lee Falk’s most wildly imagined worlds, Dimension X. It was a universe of altered physics and futuristic super-beings: robotic “Metal Men” made of “animated metal”; “plant people”; ignited, swooping firebirds; man-eating plants; pacifist “Plant People”; and ruthlessly cruel “Crystal Men” who use the skin of captured men to keep their bodies shiny and ready to refract light. Ew! And, of course, no dystopia is complete without hordes of enslaved humans who dream of liberation. It was bonkers, even for a strip that had weird implausibility baked in. And while Mandrake’s side-quest into Dimension X seems like the most fanciful escapism, it was very much of its time.
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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.
Continue readingRoy 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.
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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.
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Panels & Prose 