Frank Godwin’s 1927-1941 adventure strip Connie should have been among the standout strips of its day on a number of counts. While its launch as a Sunday light-hearted take on the modern working gal (a la Tillie the Toiler, Ella Cinders), its extension to a daily in 1929 turned the lithe and stylish Connie Kurridge (yes, “Kurridge”) into one of the first comic strip adventuress. While others consider her the pioneering female adventure character, it seems to me Harold Grey’s Little Orphan Anniehad already been working this genre since 1924. Still, Connie was the first woman in strips to take on the typical tropes of pulp drama – globe-hopping, eccentric villainy, world-shattering consequences. She employed a combination of savvy, courage, physical daring and comely attraction to both overcome and disarm her antagonists. And the scene-shifting was impressive. In the first years of the strip she moves from being an aviator to reporter to charity worker and eventually in the 1930s as a white defender against the “Yellow Combine” when she time travels to 2349 AD.
Nearly 90 years ago yesterday Jan. 22 1934, the collaboration between Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond launched as Secret Agent X-9. Designed to respond to Dick Tracy’s massive success with the literary cachet of Hammett and the rising talent of Raymond, X-9 looked better on paper perhaps than it did, well, on the actual page. The famous innovator of the hard-boiled style was at the tail end of his productive output and clearly did not give his best effort. After crafting just a few very uneven scenarios, Dash got canned.
I admit to coming late to appreciating Noel Sickles’ artistic prowess and influence. Several years ago I found an affordable but beaten copy of the LOAC volume on the artist and his short, legendary stint on the Scorchy Smith strip in the mid 1930s, though I barely cracked it at the time. Sickles is best recalled by comics historians as Milton Caniff’s friend, studio-mate and collaborator who introduced the more famous artist to the chiaroscuro style that came to define Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. Sickles himself spent but a few years leading his own strip before moving on to a lucrative career in commercial art, magazine and book cover illustration.
Now that I have dug into the LOAC Scorchy Smith reprint, with deft commentary/background from Jim Steranko and Bruce Canwell, I am gobsmacked by how thoughtful a talent he was. Moreover, his trail of influence reaches far beyond Caniff.
There are many reasons to celebrate and treasure this year’s most lavish reprint project. More than a decade after its inaugural Terry and the Pirates reprinting, the Library of American Comics revisits the pioneering adventure strip in a planned 13 volume, 11×14 format and using much better source material. This is the clearest look we have ever had at Milton Caniff’s masterpiece. But the best part of the project is the regular, compressed calendar on which LOAC is releasing quarterly volumes.
V.T. Hamlin’s caveman epic Alley Oop has been reprinted in several formats before, but Chris Aruffo and his Acoustic Learning Press have exceeded predecessors in several respects. First, the series reprints in parallel the two major eras and artists of the run, V.T. Hamlin’s original and most creative storylines of the 1930s as well as Dave Graue’s wildly imaginative takes on the Oop world in the 1970s. Even better, these dailies are being released in a regular quarterly cadence and at a very affordable price. Finally, these are the cleanest versions of Alley Oop I have seen. Hamlin’s fine line and unique visual style really pop here. Acoustic has also picked up the Sunday reprint series dropped by Dark Horse years ago. And coming in 2023, the reprint series will leap into the 1950s, promising event larger renderings. Hats off to Aruffo for this ambitious and disciplined publishing project. I don’t know if he is profiting at all from all of this, but I certainly hope so. He is doing God’s work.
You don’t expect a bro-mantic episode from Al Capp. Conventional wisdom in cartoon history characterizes the creator of Li’l Abner as a sharp-tongued and often reactionary crank at best and a mean sexual predator at worst. At Li’l Abner’s creative peak in the 1940s and 50s, he poked mercilessly at celebrities and politicians from every angle. His quick wit, and willingness to aim it at all comers, made him perfect for radio and TV talk shows, where he quickly became one of the most visible, familiar comic strip artists of his generation. While generally a populist defender of underdogs in his work and thought, Capp was repulsed by student activism in the 1970s. He did a contentious speaking tour of campuses in the late 60s and 70s, delighting in mocking and arguing with student rebels. The schtick was immortalized on film in 1969 when Capp dismissively argued with John Lennon and Yoko One during their Montreal Bed-In for Peace. And Capp is best (or worst) remembered these days as a serial sexual predator. Actresses Goldie Hawn and Grace Kelly and activist Jean Kilbourne wrote of Capp’s unwelcome, aggressive advances, and he pled guilty to sexual misconduct because of exposing himself to co-eds during his college speaking tour.
I’m a sucker for a good mad scientist, and the 1930s were brimming with them. We find them in pulp magazines, film and comic strips. Often bald, bespectacled, puny, deeply alienated and resentful, they were the prototypes of nerds-gone-wrong. The power-mad doctors, professors and other masters of technology were cautionary tales for a modernizing America about the risks of science without moral guardrails. In 1936, Al Capp put his unique satirical spin on the tropes when Mammy and Pappy Yokum briefly encounter Dr. Lopez, who is doing the old brain-transplant scheme. And Capp goes against type, making his laboratory fiend an elegant Spaniard in a tux and well-coiffed goatee.
This is a brief episode from the early years of Li’l Abner, and it finds Capp lurching towards the pop culture parody and signature visual stylings that would propel the strip into its greatest period in the 1940s and 50s. In its first stages, Capp felt constrained trying to satisfy the two dominant strains of mid-century comics – adventure and domestic sit-com. Capp leaned heavily on country vs. city culture clashes in the early years. Con men and thieves drop into Dogpatch, only to be defeated by the “rubes,” and hillbillies come to the city to send up the pretentions of sophisticates and expose the shallow selfishness of city folk. But after a few years, Capp starts turning to pop culture as his enduring source for send-ups and social commentary.
Capp’s wit, comic timing and visual style are also maturing here. He focused on faces, taking pride in facial expression as the center of the strip. Despite a crew of assistants often inking bodies and drawing backgrounds, Capp always insisted on doing the faces himself. According to one biographer, he kept a mirror near the drawing board so he could act out the facial expressions of his characters. And this comes through if you track these panels just via the faces. He loves putting eyebrows, eyes and mouth in extreme poses. You can almost see Capp mugging for his mirror in order to capture just the right pose. Few cartoonists of the 30s relied so fully on facial expression as Capp. Alex Raymond comes to mind. In fact it wasn’t until the 1950s when Raymond’s brand of realism became standard, and the comics panels shrunk, that we see cartoonists use close-ups and facial drama in the ways Capp is doing in the 1930s and 40s.
But I especially like the pacing, humor and pathos in the strip above. When Dr. Lopez aborts his plan to trade Pappy’s brain for a gorilla’s (because Pappy’s is too small), Mammy soothes her shamed husband with the assurance, “mebbe it were an unusual smart gorilla.” It is both a great punch line, timed and framed perfectly as a kicker in the back ground, but it is tender. The Yokums are a matriarchy that Capp had claimed was based on the relationship between his own assertive mother and retiring father. Capp’s burlesque of that dynamic in the Yokums turns Mammy into an assertive Mom with a killer punch. At one point Pappy recalls their elopement, when it was Mammy who brought the ladder and whisked her man off. But Capp crafts Mammy carefully, and perhaps informed by emotional notes of his own family history. She is always careful never to diminish her husband and minister to his ego as mindfully as she does to his body.
Panels & Prose 