Tag Archives: comic strips

The Grumbling American: Jimmy Hatlo’s Benign Hell

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Jimmy Hatlo’s They’ll Do It Every Time (1929-2008) was as long-lived and beloved as it was throughly benign. To be fair, this single-panel museum of petty grievance had banality baked into its title and premise. The actual identity of the “they” is kept usefully loose enough to encompass an “other” of our choosing, but most likely all of humanity but us. And their “doing it every time” is by definition rote and predictable. But of course it is the aching familiarity of Hatlo’s observations that gave the strip purchase. Widely praised for poking at the small hypocrisies, human foibles, bombast of everyday existence, the strip had a special populist appeal. Hatlo was inspired by readers who submitted ideas and got daily credit with a “tip of the Hatlo hat” and even their name and street address for millions to see. Indeed, that was a vastly different era when it came to personally identifiable information. And yet, not so ancient. We can see in They’ll Do It Every Time predecessors of both user-generated content (UGC) and observational humor.

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Queer-Coding A La 1948: Buz Sawyer Flexes His Pecs

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The sublimations of the American comic strip are legion. Whether it is the unbridled eroticism of Flash Gordon or the beefcake of Prince Valiant, the kinkiness of The Phantom or the stripteasing of Terry and the Pirates, the most “innocent” of modern American mass media contained many quiet erotic sub-texts for horny readers across ages and sexes. Case in point, Buz Sawyer in the 1940s. I have no idea what was going on with Buz’s artist Roy Crane and writer Edwin Granberry in the 1947-48 years, but the strip seemed a bit obsessed with gender-bending, sexual stereotypes and masculine identity across storylines in those years. In two adjoined episodes, our two-fisted hero deals with the barely-veiled advances of an effeminate gun-runner and sexual harassment at the hands of a masculinized female Frontier executive. This is one of those many cases where the most reserved and adolescent of modern media, the family newspaper strip, traded in suggestive imagery and innuendo that would never pass muster in other media of the day.

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Roy Crane: Shades of Genius

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Roy 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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Royal Fetish: Screwball Monarchy in 30s Cartooning

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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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Red Ryder: Fred Harman’s Scenic Route

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One of the longest-lived and popular Western series of the last century, Red Ryder (1938-1965) is barely remembered today…mostly for good reason. Unlike richer, historically-informed efforts like Warren Tufts’ masterful Casey Ruggles and Lance, Red Ryder was closer to Western genre boilerplate, The titular hero is a red-headed journeyman cowpoke who finds and resolves trouble wherever he roams. His woefully typecast sidekick “Little Beaver” was an orphaned Native American boy who provided identification for kid readers, a sounding board for the solitary and stoic Red, and comic relief of a distinctly stereotyped sort. In truth the strip made little effort to delve into character let alone suspense or high adventure.

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Caniff’s Art of the Recap Striptease

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It was something of a sport among many comic strip artists of the last century to find ways of slipping bits of light erotica into the back pages of the otherwise buttoned-down, conservative newspaper medium. Publishers, especially of smaller town papers, were famously prudish and strict about keeping their content family-friendly. But comic artists and syndicate editors were always well aware of that adult readers appreciated a flash of flesh with a wink and a nod. From the ubiquitous Gibson Girls of the the 1900s to the curvy and well-delineated flapper daughters and office gals of 20s strips to the imperiled damsels and femmes fatale of 30s adventure, cartoonists understood they were wedging adult cheesecake into a “kids’ medium. Milton Caniff understood better than anyone the potential here for serving the needs of a daily adventure strip while also pushing the boundaries of the conservative editorial propriety of national syndication.

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Li’l Abner’s Culture Wars: Superman, Sinatra and Zoot Suits

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One of the pleasures of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner across the decades was that the strip never took itself or any other pop culture phenomenon very seriously. In fact, Capp may have been at his best in his absurdist parodies of pop culture fads, rising celebrities, and politics. Satirical proxies for Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando showed up in the strip at the height of their popularity. Larger issues like the Cold War, student unrest, Third World politics all found their way to Dogpatch, or Dogpatchers somehow found their way to them. Ironically, what started as a comedy about a backwards and alienated community of big-hearted naives, was really illustrating in its own light way how interdependent and mass mediated the world had become by the 1930s. In Capp’s hands, Dogpatch is anything but disconnected from the rest of the world. The wide world rushes through the hillbilly berg.

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