In the first days of Alex “Flash Gordon” Raymond’s post-WWII detective adventure Rip Kirby, it was clear the master was going to redefine the look of comic strip adventure. Day two of the March 1946 launch story speaks volumes about the influence Raymond was going to have on a decade of 50’s adventure style. The panel progression here is so engaging. The first two panels are energized so that you can almost feel the weight of the murder victim slump into Kirby’s arms and instantly change valence of the scene. And that final close up communicates the deadly reality of the situation by bringing us right into the complex reaction to beauty and death. The photo-realism is here, as is the increasing influence of cinematic points of view, timing, and close-ups. And arguably, the next decade would also see in comic strip adventure a turn inwards, toward psychological realism, the emotional lives of characters, that accompanied the more photographic style of the art. All of these elements would be deployed in different ways by Stan Drake in the Heart of Juliet Jones, Leonard Starr in On Stage, Warren Tufts in Casey Ruggles and Lance and John Cullen Murphy in Big Ben Bolt.
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Casey Ruggles: Beauty and Brutality, Fact and Fantasy
Warren Tufts (1925-1982) was a self-taught artist and historian of the mid-19th Century Westward migration, and he combined both avocations into two of the most compelling and distinct adventure strips of the 1950s. In Casey Ruggles (1949-1954) and Lance (1955-1960) he brought visual and historical realism to an otherwise romanticized vision of the West that flourished in post-WWII pop culture. In Tuft’s West of the 1840s, settlers were as often selfish, greedy, cowardly, incompetent, sadistic and capriciously violent as they were an heroic forward guard of civilization and commerce. Tufts had a mixed view of human nature that allowed all of these qualities, good and bad, to coexist in many of his characters.
The Death of Flattop (1944)
Feels like peak Gould. This May 1944 Sunday shows off Gould’s visual sense of place, love of clean geometry and perspective, retributive Justice.
A Bit of Prince Valiant Beefcake
While it goes without saying that Hal Foster was a much more buttoned down, stiff and restrained adventure artist than the ebullient Alex Raymond, he had his moments of gratuitous cheesecake. Here, from some 1939 sequences, Prince Valiant strips down for some manly bathing.
Hal Foster was never shy about pouring on the bloody swords, celebrations of battle, corpse-coated fields of war. In fact some foreign markets censored the strip when they felt Prince Val’s love of war crossed the line. But showing skin? Not so much.
In the Air: Barney Baxter Flies With Style
Even comics aficionados barely recall the very popular aviation adventure strips of the late 1920s and 1930s, perhaps because, well, they just weren’t very memorable. Tailspin Tommy, Scorchy Smith, Smilin’ Jack, Flyin’ Jenny, and Skyroads, to name a few, were definitely of their time, tapping into the most romantic technology of early 20th Century – aviation. The wild tales of WWI air battles, the triumph of machine and human endurance in Charles Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic, the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance fueled film, pulp magazines, and even popular science journals with an admixture of human spirit, adventure to far off lands and technical jargon that many audiences, especially boys, ate up. The strips captured that blend. Many of them were created by pilots who brought their love and knowledge of flight to the strips. Much of the art was unremarkable. Noel Sickles’ work on Scorchy Smith was a legendary exception, and Russell Keaton had a polished and breezy style in Flyin’ Jenny. For the most part, however, aviation cartoonists were more in love with the planes than their own characters, and they tended to focus effort and attention on the planes themselves.
Frank Miller, however, brought Barney Baxter in the Air (1935-1949) a special whimsy to the genre both in his characterizations and line work. From the Art Deco/Machine Age feel of his lettering to the rounded nature of his figures, everything about this strip feels sophisticated, considered, modern . His faces are comprised of a few deft dabs of ink. The upholstered texture of his people and objects are somewhere between big foot cartooning and classic adventure realism. And this allows him to bring his style to either extreme as it fits the scene. It reminds me of (or foreshadows) Rick Geary, whose style I also love. Miller is adept at using a variety of panel framings to keep the eye energized across the progression. His narrower close-up panels call out important moments of gesture or expression. And he has such a stylized way of rendering shadows in a pointillist style. It all adds up to a visual signature that light, witty, and yet functional as a vehicle for adventure. The feel is similar to Capp’s Li’l Abner.
His skills often came together in some truly creepy villains.
Miller lavishes attention and invention on his Sunday pages. He is breaking frame, manipulating panel shapes and sizes with the kind of energy we usually associate with McCay, King or Sterrett. The detail and color in his rocky backgrounds are just wonderful for establishing setting. He maneuvers our point of view radically from panel to panel to bring us into the scene by circling us around it. And just look at that open parachute as the visual centerpiece of the whole layout. If that isn’t an homage to McCay, I don’t know what is.
Frank Miller, obviously not the Frank Miller of later comic book fame, ran the strip throughout its 15 year span and until his premature death in 1949.
Wimpy Gives Popeye a Sissy Lesson
In early 20th Century theater and film, the “sissy” was the dreaded antithesis of two-fisted pulp hyper-masculinity, at best, and at worst was a stereotypical euphemism for what was unspoken in general culture, homosexuality. Wimpy, the dandyish, appetite-driven counterpoint to Popeye’s principled violence, is of course Popeye’s best tutor for all things “sissy.” To make this sexual dynamic even weirder we have Popeye’s Pappy bewildered by his prancing progeny. It reads like an unintended burlesque of Popeye “coming out”. Per a previous post, These dailies precede Popeye deceiving the underground demons to come up and fight.
It is important to note that this gender-bending sequence was followed immediately by another adventure cycle involving Popeye getting the crap beaten out of him in a land of highly muscled women. And this is all happening right after E.C. Segar’s death in October 1938. The strip was being continued unsigned by assistants for the time being.
- Nemo’s Consumer Dystopia: The Man Who Owned Mars (1910)Between April 24 and Aug 23 1910 Winsor McCay sent Little Nemo and his wise-ass sidekick Flip to Mars, making for one of the longest and most politically pointed of the Little Nemo in Slumberland… Read more: Nemo’s Consumer Dystopia: The Man Who Owned Mars (1910)
- Our Shelves Runneth Over: POD Spews a Gusher of ReprintsThe new generation of print-on-demand (POD) platforms, most notably Lulu, has inspired several ambitious strip aficionados to become one-man reprint publishers. And so, our cup runneth over. In just the last six months the zone… Read more: Our Shelves Runneth Over: POD Spews a Gusher of Reprints
- From Oaky Doaks to Bruce Gentry: Behind CSAG’s Reprint RushAmong several self-publishers in the reprint space, Stefan Wood and his Comic Strip Appreciation Group are far and away the most prolific. His Lulu Bookstore boasts about 25 titles as of this writing. And judging… Read more: From Oaky Doaks to Bruce Gentry: Behind CSAG’s Reprint Rush
- Little Lefty: Kid KommunistAs we found with Coulton Waugh’s lost gem Hank, the radical comic hero Little Lefty is often mentioned in comics history but rarely read. This mainstay of the Daily Worker through much of the 1930s… Read more: Little Lefty: Kid Kommunist
- Quips and Curlicues: Mopsy’s Stylish ReturnGladys 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… Read more: Quips and Curlicues: Mopsy’s Stylish Return
Can This Villain Destroy Dick Tracy?
Foreshadowing some of the more colorful arch-villains in the 40s and beyond, Dick Tracy’s early 1933 encounter with Stooge Viller was a standout as Chester Gould developed his style and focus. Stooge is imported to the city by a broken crime ring to discredit the now-famous gangbuster Dick Tracy. He is a master pickpocket and a bit of an effete dandy. He successfully frames Tracy and even causes Tess Trueheart to fall out with the love of her life.
Here we get our introduction to Stooge.
Stooge plants counterfeit bills on Tracy, who eventually is confronted and accused.
Our hero feels the world collapsing around him and descends into the bane of masculine mythos – self-doubt.
By 1933, Chester Gould ‘s overall style is gelling around those signature thick lines and dense bodies, those wonderful masses of black. But he is also experimenting with evocative design ideas. Here Dick’s emotional nadir, Tess Trueheart’s rejection, is depicted as a full-on silhouette strip.
And adding insult to male ego injury, Stooge moves in on the disillusioned Tess. In the strip’s early years especially, Gould deployed a range of female stereotyping on poor Tess. Often flighty or naive, she was a gender foil for the dripping masculinity of Dick Tracy. As we covered in an earlier post, neither Gould nor his avatar Tracy were progressive feminists by any means.
While Gould’s style and design sense evolved mightily throughout the 30s, and his imagination just got zanier, one thing never evolved – his reliance on unlikely plot contrivances. Viller’s scheme and Tracy’s innocence are revealed to Tess when she finds a draft of Stooge’s wire to Eastern gangsters that conveniently narrates his entire plot against her estranged boyfriend.
When Tess ends up getting shot in the course of her misadventure with Stooge, we have to wonder if this is Gould himself expressing some resentment towards her loss of faith in Dick. The panel in which she declares herself a fool is a wonderful composition that frames her frail, swooning, naive femininity against the burly expanse of the Chief’s grimace, perhaps voicing Gould’s own disappointment in her.
When Dick and Tess do finally reunite and reconcile, Gould exercises what would become a signature move for him, a radical juxtaposition of mood and action from one panel to the next. Gould had a talent for using the panel structure to jar the reader, to interrupt a mood in one panel with a surprising twist in the next. In this case a romantic interlude is upset by the capture Stooge inexplicably trying to slit his own throat.
It goes without saying that in a strip focused mainly on dramatizing the masculine prowess of his hero Chester Gould showed no understanding or sympathy for his female characters. Not surprisingly, he is equally inept even at drawing human intimacy. Tess and Dick’s kiss has all of the romance and finesse of a fender bender.
And yet we wee in the Stooge Viller episode Gould clearly expanding his palette and moving towards more stylized approach to depicting character and capturing mood and emotion especially through shadows and literally dimming the lights on scenes that try to dramatize deeper emotion.
Stooge Viller would be among a small handful of Tracy villains to recur over many years. He proves to be a deft nemesis in the detective’s early years. He is a clever schemer who seems smarter than the glorified thugs of the earliest strips. At Stooge’s hands, Tracy is put out to the physical and psychological wilderness. Stooge not only frames Tracy as a counterfeiter and gets this beloved cop drummed from the force, but he steals Tess’s affections. Tracy’s career, reputation and girl are taken from him all at once, a true trifecta of masculine humiliation.
The hero of pulp adventure seemed compelled to enshrine masculinity by having it beaten down. In order to triumph, heroes must be bound, trapped, tortured, emasculated or simply ruined by villainy before emerging from humiliation to assert their power. This eccentric opera of masculinity in pop fiction has always led to weird homo-erotic depictions of S&M, bondage, dominatrix encounters, subjugation, and banishment of all sorts. The classic heroes of myth had to suffer taxing encounters with nature and monsters to complete their quest or rescue the land. But the peculiarly American style of pulp heroism often required male humiliation of some sort in order for our hero to assert the righteousness of his masculine power.
Panels & Prose 