Moving through this year’s shelf of notable titles for comics aficionados, I wanted to call out several projects that revived forgotten or previously uncollected work. From a pharmacist heroine to an illustrated prayer, the ultimate 20s flapper to a pioneer of cartoon journalism, 2024 surfaced some real gems.
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Jungle Jim Is A Ramblin’ Man…And Quite the Charmer
No one could mistake master artist Alex Raymond for a proto-feminist. In his and scribe Don Moore’s dual successes of the 1930s, Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, barely-clad distressed damsels abounded. To be sure, Raymond understood better than any comic strip artist the erotic potential of the formal, His male and female bodies were delicious. But it also goes almost without saying that the adventure genre has always been about male prowess and potency against forces natural, exotic, institutional and especially feminine. Comics artists like Carl Barks and Al Capp, among others, have recounted that newspaper editors often cited the 12-year old boy as the ideal target market for adventure strips. Well, yeah, sure…along with their horny Dads.
The adventure hero’s cavalier approach to women, romance, and all that icky girly stuff is clear in Jungle Jim’s caddish handling of two rival gal pals Lil and Kitty in this late 1941 interstitial between two episodes. Jim has no time for romance, and writes to Dear Jane letters, excusing himself from commitment. Lil gets the I’m-just-a-ramblin’-sorta-guy” brush off and Kitty gets the mock magnanimity ploy. “Find a nice substantial businessman… .” What a gentleman.
Continue readingPrehistoric Nazis: Alley Oop Knows a Fascist When He Sees One
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.
Continue readingElla Cinders Deserves Her Moment
Ella Cinders (1925-61) was a female comic strip character with genuine character. And this is no small thing in an era of flappers, housewives and career girl stereotypes. While overlooked and under-appreciated, there have always been women both drawing comics and depicted in them. In the 20s and 30s alone we can point to Winnie Winkle, Tillie the Toiler, Dixie Dugan, Polly and Her Pals, Blondie, Connie, Fritzi Ritz, etc. But aside from the most visible heroine of the 20s and 30s strip, Little Orphan Annie, few of these female figures rose above bland cut-outs for the generic idea of the “New Woman.’ Even in the late 1940s, in the crop of more adventurous “Dauntless Dames,” that Trina Robbins and Peter Maresca featured in their wonderful new book, most heroines asserted their presence into the outside world more than they did assert an identifiable personality. Male helpers or wise-cracking boy sidekicks tended to provide the action and sharp banter. Aside from Annie, Dale Messick’s Brenda Starr (1940) is the first leading woman in comic strips to assert ambition and a full range of emotion.
Continue readingBook Review: From Distressed Damsels to Dauntless Dames
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.
Continue readingJust In: LOAC’s Updated Dick Tracy Editions
A lot of comic strip fans have been looking forward to these updated early volumes of The Complete Dick Tracy. Here are Vols. 1 and 2, just in today. This project reprints the first six volumes in the larger format that matches the rest of the series.
Continue readingMandrake in Dimension Bonkers
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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Panels & Prose 