The home front during World War II was a wonderful arena for gender reassignment. As we explored via E. Simms Campbell’s quick-witted and curvaceous “Cuties,” women adopted new roles with so many American men overseas, and this helped shake up, if for a while, a number of longstanding stereotypes across popular culture. Just as women were ready, willing and able to fill vacant jobs from the assembly line to management, they were just as ready to become adventure heroes.
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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 they traditionally had been denied. According to the thumbnail version, newly empowered women then suffered a kind of cultural whiplash with the post-war return of men to the States. Industry, government and pop culture generally openly discouraged women from enjoying their newfound role outside of the home in a range of unseemly ways.
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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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Like all American mass media of the last century, demographics and market forces provide the frame within which trends in comic strip content lived. Harry Haenigsen’s Penny launched in 1943 directly out of the intersection of two new social realities – gal power and the “invention of the teenager.” It is not surprising, then, that Haenigsen took an almost sociological approach to portraying two things he certainly was not – young nor a girl. Like any good cartoon anthropologist, he decided to go native. The Oct. 6 1946 Philadelphia Inquirer reports how the New Hope artist researched Penny by eavesdropping on soda shop conversations and even hosting cookouts for the local high schoolers.
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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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Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy has been among the most reprinted strips of all time. The reasons are obvious, and I don’t need to rehash this site’s exegesis on my personal favorite. Tracy was the strip that turned me on to classic newspaper comics. Gould’s singular visual signature, his grisly violence, grotesque villains and deadpan hero made Dick Tracy compelling on so many levels. And now we get yet another packaging style from the same Library of American Comics group that finished its magisterial 29-volume complete Gould run, 1931-77. With new publishing partner Clover Press, LOAC has reworked some of its earliest projects, like the magnificent upgrade of Terry and the Pirates and the first six volumes of The Complete Dick Tracy. And now we get slipcased, paperback editions of prime-time Gould, 1941 through 1944. Much more affordable, manageable, and available than the original LOAC volumes, each of which covered about two years of comics, the four $29.99 books are also available as a discounted set from Clover. This new series started as a crowd-funded BackerKit project last year.
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The Weekly Weird. Coulton Waugh’s experimental adventure hero Hank was the first disabled character to lead a comic strip. Shortly after losing his leg, the veteran Hank finds inspiration from real-life Broadway sensation, Peg-Leg Bates. Bates was a sensation on the stage show circuit around the country during the 30s and 40s on Broadway. The sharecropper’s son lost his leg in a cotton gun accident at the age of 12. He was determined to overcomethe disability and eventually turned it into a dance routine. More on Hank and Bates here.
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