Frank King’s Gasoline Alley may be the “Great American Novel” of the 20th Century we didn’t know we had. This remarkable multi-generational saga of the Wallets evolved in several panels a day across decades, exploring the domestic and emotional lives of small town Americans during a century of intense change. And in its heyday during the post-WWI era, this strip was singular in its affectionate embrace of suburban family life at a time when post-war disenchantment overwhelmed the intellectual class, when glamour, sex and emotion dominated the film arts and magazines and glitz dominated Hollywood. When more famous social commentators like H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippman and Sinclair Lewis lampooned, decried and doubted the small town American intellect – the so-called “revolt from the village” – King celebrated what Mencken called the “booboisie.” Comics historians often characterize the post-1915 period of the medium as a kind of literal and figurative domestication. As newspaper syndication expanded into every burg, the mass media business of comics needed to shave the edges off of a once-raucous and urban-focused art form. Shifting the focus to family relations and suburbia, relying on more repartee than prankish violence, made the comic strip more acceptable to a mass audience.
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The Rapidtoodleum Will Save Us All
In the New York World on April 5 1904, a giant but apparently friendly robotic beast vaulted from an unfinished New York City subway entrance to address some of the city’s most pressing concerns. Daily, and for the next week, this cartoon “Rapidtoodleum” offered rapid transit that solved for a much-delayed subway project, exposed gambling in Harlem, proposed an alternative to overpriced city housing, outpaced a newfangled automobile, and lampooned the florid fashion in women’s hats.
Continue readingFlesh, Fantasy, Fetish: 1930s and the Return of the Repressed
The sheer horniness of the otherwise circumspect American newspaper comics in the 1930s is as unmistakable as it is overlooked in the usual histories. I have written about the kinkiness of 30s adventure in bits and pieces in the past. But rereading Dale Arden’s “obedience training” at the hands of the dominatrix “Witch Queen” in Flash Gordon, reminded me how much unbridled fetishism romped through the adventure comics of Depression America. Any honest history of the American comic strip really needs to have “the sex talk” about itself.
Continue readingReframing Star Wars: From Manning to Williamson
Even taking a superficial glance across Russ Manning’s introduction of Star Wars to newspaper comics and Al Williamson’s subsequent pick up of the series is a contrast in different talents. Manning, heralded for his years on the Tarzan beat, was self-conscious of how the strip had to translate the film epic into the language of strips. He launched the series deliberately with the familiar movie characters, if only so they could ease the audience into his new stories and creations. In what is literally a handoff of villainy, his “Blackhole” acts as Lord Vader’s evil extension. But Manning crafts Blackhole visually as a newspaper strip presence, a silhouette in half tone, using shape and gradients, fading in and out, to define this malevolent force. Likewise, Lucas’ Vader was graphically a screen villain. He is defined by moving reflections of light on dark glossy surfaces, the elemental stuff of film.
Williamson’s lifetime in otherworldly comics and strips also comes through when he takes the helm after Manning’’s withdrawal. Al Williamson, who had some of the most striking sci-fi and fantasy art in pre-code comics brought that aesthetic into the strip. The photo-realistic cosmos, swathes of shadows across close-up, emotive faces, could have been cut from the pages of Weird Science, with Wally Wood inking.
One of the intrinsic appeals of the comic strip medium, I suspect, is the enduring power of craft in an age of mechanical reproduction and collaborative media. Consider the deep ironies of the modern comic strip. It was distributed by the most read mass produced media -of the last century. The reporting voice, photography, and advertising too, were industrialized, usually homogenized, event anonymized. The comic strip was one of the only non-collaborative mass media of the modern age. Assistances and syndicate editors notwithstanding, the visual voice of Capp, Schulz, McManus, Caniff et. Al. , the idiosyncratic personal vision of individual strips, was unmistakeable.
The Maturing of Milton Caniff
Milton Caniff’s landmark adventure Terry and the Pirates has been among the most reprinted newspaper strips of all time…and deservedly so. The artist’s fame for establishing the tone, cadence, composition and dramaturgy of the mid-century adventure genre in comics is well known. I won’t rehash it here. The latest and most ambitious reprint Terry project concluded this week when Clover Press and the Library of American Comics shipped the final three volumes in the 13 book Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection. As I said in my initial review of the first volumes, the series is magnificent, if you don’t mind juggling oversized tomes. The sourcing of best available art, coloration and overall reproduction are the best I have seen among the many renderings of Terry over the years. This is LOAC’s second go at the strip. The imprint was launched two decades ago with a 6-volume oblong set. The first 12 volumes of the Master Collection reprint the full run from inception in 1934 through Caniff’s exit in 1946. A thirteenth volume carries new commentary, ancillary art and all of the front matter from the earlier series. Kudos to LOAC and Clover. Unlike many comic strip reprint projects that lumber for years, or peter out in mid-run, this one only took three years to complete. This final tranch of volumes also comes with a packed in bit of extra art (see above.
Continue readingMickey Mouse Diplomacy: Disney’s Ambassador of American Exceptionalism
By the summer of 1937, Disney’s Mickey Mouse cartoons and the syndicated strip had already become worldwide ambassadors of American mass media. Like Charlie Chaplin in the previous decade, Mickey’s simple visual signature and deft antics translated well from Europe to Asia. The Mouse had effectively displaced The Tramp as an international icon of slapstick. But in August 1937, with Floyd Gottfredson’s Medioka story line, the ambassadorship becomes self-conscious and reflexive..even politicized by both creators and at least one government. Mickey journeys off to the vaguely Slavic kingdom of Medioka to save its corrupt government and oppressed people from feudalism with American ingenuity, empiricism and democratic character. It is the most explicit exercise of the American exceptionalism mythology we are bound to see in comics history, even if it has all of the political subtlety of a Yellowstone episode.
Continue readingThe Democratic Genius of Clare Briggs
The great Clare Briggs (1875-1930) continues to impress me as perhaps the most under-appreciated figure in American comics history. He was by no means a distinctive stylist or draftsman of the sort that helps us better remember fellow greats like McCay, McManus, Herriman, Sterrett, King or Gould. But in the staggering range of cartoon series he conceived (When a Feller Needs a Friend, The Days of Real Sport, Mr. and Mrs., Real Folks at Home, Movie of a Man, Wonder What _____ Thinks About, among others) he demonstrated a range of human empathy, attention to emotional detail, and a social/class sensitivity that seems to me unmatched by any other American comic artist. Briggs was among the highest paid cartoonists of the 1920s, and widely known and beloved by audiences who were shocked at his premature death at aged 55 in 1930. His loss to the field was so deeply felt that his publisher issued a multi-volume memorial retrospective of his greatest work shortly after his death.
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Panels & Prose 