Tag Archives: comics

The Impaling of The Brow

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Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark. Impaled on an American flagpole, sadistic WWII spy and Dick Tracy villain The Brow gets poked by poetic justice. More grisly villain deaths from Tracy creator Chester Gould here.

Gould’s Dick Tracy is my lifetime favorite strip, which I have already recounted in our About Panels and Prose section. I have covered Dick Tracy from many angles since starting this site years ago. You can find pieces on Flattop, Flattop Jr. the arch conservatism of Gould and his here, as well as assorted short takes on Tracy here.

“Fake News” Hot Off the 1894 Presses

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The Weekly Weird. In 1894, Puck magazine took aim at the rising influence of increasingly sensational and less costly city newspapers. Here, Frederick Burr Opper, who would go on to be one of newspaper comics’ founding fathers, called out Joseph Pulitzer in particular as a purveyor of “fake news.” More on the full cartoon here.

A Bigger Barks: Taschen Supersizes the Duck Man

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Is a bigger Barks a better Barks? Taschen’s long-awaited Disney Comics Library: Carl Barks’s Donald Duck. Vol. 1. 1942–1950 supersizes the Duck Man, and we are all the richer for it. This is one of their “XXL” volumes, so let’s go to the tape. It weighs in, literally, at 11+ pounds: over 626 11 x 15.5-inch pages that include the longer Donald Duck stories from 15 issues of Western Publishing’s Four-Color series.  up to 1950. These include some of the greatest expressions of Barks’s quick mastery of the comic book format. In “The Old Castle’s Secret” (1948) he uses page structure, atmospherics and pace to create real suspense. His masterpiece of hallucinogenic imagination married to landscape precision surely is “Lost in the Andes” (1949). And his well-tuned sense of character is clear in creating a purely American icon of endearing greed in Uncle Scrooge in “Christmas on Bear Mountain” (1947). Of course we have seen these and many of the other stories in this collection reprinted before. So, to answer my own question, does scaling up Barks give us a better Barks?

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Markets Booming, Bullets Flying, Booze Flowing – Happy 1926!

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New Year’s Day in Chicago 1926 felt like peak 1920s. The common tropes of the “Jazz Age” congealed on the front page of Tribune: “Gay, Wet New Year’s: 11 Shot – Prosperous U.S, Forecast by 1925 Success” barked the headline. Front page stories reported that the manufacturing and consumption were driving demand-side growth to new levels. Meanwhile, casual gunplay celebrating New Year’s Eve resulted in one dead child and multiple woundings. And at the height of Prohibition, citizens and journalists openly mocked officials trying to enforce alcohol bans in the local nightclubs. According to The Trib, two barely guised Prohibition agents were assigned to each club, while revelers succeeded in hiding their hooch throughout the night. One club crowd had had enough and chased the agents out the door. The cops refused to intervene, claiming that they wanted to remain “neutral.”

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Historic Christmas Comics: A Holiday Journey

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The grand tradition of the Christmas-themed comic episode started pretty much with the modern comic strip itself. Topicality was baked into the newspaper format. But as recurring characters and extended storylines developed, artists found a range of creative ways to integrate holiday greetings with their strips. Today, let’s dance across some noteworthy, even historic, Christmas funnies. Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland often referenced an upcoming holiday. In 1906, Nemo dreams up a pony as his own present.

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Get Me to The Church on Time: Decoding the Postwar Cartoon Marriage Boom

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“It is a old comical strip trick – pretendin’ th’ hero gotta git married.” It keeps “stupid readers excited,” Li’l Abner claims in 1952. Days later he unwittingly weds Daisy Mae, ending a nearly 20 year tease. But this time it was no “comical strip” trick. In fact, several perennial bachelors of the comics pages fell in a post-WWII rush to the altar. Along with Abner, Prince Valiant, Buz Sawyer, Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake all enjoyed funny page weddings between 1946 and 1957. Comic strip heroes were just following the lead of the real-world heroes returning from WWII. Desperate to make up for lost time and return to normality, over 16 million Americans got hitched in 1946, the year after war ended in Europe and the Pacific. But each of these strips framed the new normal in American life differently. As the best of popular art often does, Vale, Dick, Abner, Buz, Kerry and their mates offered Americans a range of stories, myths really, about what this new normal meant.

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The Year in Pre-Code Comic Book Reprints, 2025

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I am an EC chauvinist. I should cop to this before rounding up the notable pre-code comic book reprints from the last year. For decades now I have been devouring the many crime, horror, sci-fi, and romance comics that were part of the glut of adult titles after WWII, in part because they represented the unrealized potential of the comics format in post-war America. This was a real pop culture moment. War veterans ate a steady diet of comic books “over there” and seemed primed to follow the medium into more nuanced and adult storylines in the 40s and 50s. Likewise overseas, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées were on a similar path towards the popular, if not literary, mainstream. But in the U.S. that evolution was derailed and slammed into reverse by anti-comics crusades and the industry’s own “Comics Code Authority” in 1954. Self-censorship effectively arrested the medium in pre-adolescence, focused the industry on anodyne morality tales and pubescent fantasies of super-human prowess for at least a couple of decades.

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