Tag Archives: comics and culture

Hey Hef! What Does That Comic Mean?

Posted on by

Bawdy, boozy, bonkers cartoonist Virgil Partch (VIP) enjoyed his own spread of sex-themed comics in the inaugural issue of Playboy (Dec. 1953). But one of his offbeat toons proved too obtuse for some. The magazine felt compelled to reprint the panel with an explanation for one inquiring reader in the following issue (Jan. 1954). Honestly, I was with reader Frank Crosley when I read it, too. Peeping Tom humor somehow doesn’t age well. Playboy aficionados will recall that VIP not only appeared in the first issue of the pioneering men’s mag but was also previewed on the cover, right under Marilyn Monroe’s waving arm. Famously, Hugh Hefner was himself a frustrated cartoonist, and so his magazine became a trove of great comic art. Hef had published his own book of Chicago-themed carttoons just two years earlier.

Screwball 101: The Opper Spin

Posted on by

F.B. Opper was a founding father of newspaper comics generally and slapstick physics in particular. His wild spinning technique established a staple of screwball comics, Here from a 1904 episode of And Her Name Was Maude. More on Opper’s machine poetry here.

Peg-Leg Bates Gets a Cameo in Hank

Posted on by

The Weekly Weird. Coulton Waugh’s experimental adventure hero Hank was the first disabled character to lead a comic strip. Shortly after losing his leg, the veteran Hank finds inspiration from real-life Broadway sensation, Peg-Leg Bates. Bates was a sensation on the stage show circuit around the country during the 30s and 40s on Broadway. The sharecropper’s son lost his leg in a cotton gun accident at the age of 12. He was determined to overcomethe disability and eventually turned it into a dance routine. More on Hank and Bates here.

“Fake News” Hot Off the 1894 Presses

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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?

Continue reading →

Elmo Gets Hairy

Posted on by

Force-fed a new brand of cereal by his kidnappers that grows hair uncontrollably, Cecil Jensen’s country rube Elmo is awash in a pool of his own tresses. More on this strange late 1940s satire here.

Recovering Hank: America’s Anti-Fascist Hero

Posted on by

A WWII veteran amputee who doesn’t want to journey (or save) the world. Just a grease monkey who yearns to get back to the garage, marry his sweetheart, and figure out what he and his pals’ great sacrifice really meant. That was Hank Hannigan, the titular, unlikely hero of the short-lived 1945 comic strip Hank, which creator Coulton Waugh conceived as an answer to traditional adventures. “To get a new character I go into the subways and actually draw them,” he told Editor and Publisher before Hank’s April launch. “I want the people of America to stream into the strip.”

Continue reading →