Tag Archives: comic strips

Roy Crane, Wash Tubbs and the Art of Cartoony Realism

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Roy Crane always seemed to me underappreciated in the pantheon of comic artists. True aficionados of the medium recognize his talent, of course. But in that larger gallery of cartoon notables, we tend to mention him more than study him. Too often, Crane is recognized off-handedly for originating the continuous story adventure strip with Wash Tubbs (1924), a genre that then reached its height in Alex Raymond’s detailed illustrative style, Milton Caniff’s chiaroscuro and cinematic effects or Chester Gould’s primitive Grand Guignol.

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Paging Dr. Perfect: Rex Morgan Wants a Word

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This just in from 1948… . Let’s give it up for doctors, expertise, institutional authority and the principles of science they represent. Nothing speaks to the post-WWII shift in American culture and comics as starkly as this Christmas 1948 message from Rex Morgan, M.D. The rise of the institutional hero was clear.

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“Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet…And Lands on Policeman’s Head”

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In the first decade of newspaper comics, the line between familiar illustrated journalism and the emerging styles of cartooning sometimes blurred. My favorite example of those two worlds commingling is this news drawing from The San Francisco Call (Jan. 30, 1901), “Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet From Hotel Fire Escape and Lands on Policeman’s Head.”

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“Stop Biting!”: Cairo Jones’ Hard-Boiled Cheesecake

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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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Campbell’s Cuties: Wartime Women Had Their Moment

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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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The Little Bears: Paws and Personality Germinate a New Medium

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Jimmy “Swin” Swinnerton drawing his Little Bear


Jimmy Swinnerton’s adorable cartoon bears are generally considered the first recurring daily newspaper comic character. More than that, however, he may have been smarter than the average bear. He may also be an important bridge across traditional newspaper illustrated reporting and editorial cartooning that spawned the very different conventions of comic strips as we came to know them. 

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Mad Science: The Original Tech Bros of 1933

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Getting nervous about the prospect of an AI oligarchy, a kind of anti-democratic sensibility that the Tech Bros finally say out loud? That they see in their own machines the prospects of a “post-human” future where rational engineers like themselves finally get the respect, authority and control they think they deserve? That compassion, democracy, maybe humanity itself are only for the weak willed? That this could be a better world if only pesky governments and, you know, people, would just leave them alone?


Welcome back to 1933. 

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