Misanthropic and petty, scheming and nagging, reviled by their neighbors and barely tolerable to themselves, The Bungle Family was the quintessential domestic comic strip of the 1920s. Critical historians like Bill Blackbeard, Rick Marshall and Art Spiegelman have singled out Harry J. Tuthill’s masterpiece as an especially dark and pointed critique of the modern petit bourgeoisie. But George, Jo and Peg Bungle were really the penultimate satirical family of 20s strips. George was no more a man on the make, looking for that get-rich-quick invention or financial scheme, than Barney Google, A. Mutt or even Andy Gump. His wife Jo was no less socially self-conscious and ambitious, nor more of a nag, than Jigg’s Maggie. And Jo wasn’t even in the habit of throwing things. Nor was the Bungle family dysfunction any worse than the in-fighting at Moon Mullin’s boardinghouse.
In early 20th Century theater and film, the “sissy” was the dreaded antithesis of two-fisted pulp hyper-masculinity, at best, and at worst was a stereotypical euphemism for what was unspoken in general culture, homosexuality. Wimpy, the dandyish, appetite-driven counterpoint to Popeye’s principled violence, is of course Popeye’s best tutor for all things “sissy.” To make this sexual dynamic even weirder we have Popeye’s Pappy bewildered by his prancing progeny. It reads like an unintended burlesque of Popeye “coming out”. Per a previous post, These dailies precede Popeye deceiving the underground demons to come up and fight.
It is important to note that this gender-bending sequence was followed immediately by another adventure cycle involving Popeye getting the crap beaten out of him in a land of highly muscled women. And this is all happening right after E.C. Segar’s death in October 1938. The strip was being continued unsigned by assistants for the time being.
Here is your Weekly Weird. Call it comfort food for robots. When Lee Falk and Phil Davis sent their Mandrake the Magician into “Dimension X” in 1937 they found early stage AI. Metal Men were… Read more: Mmmm…Coal!: Mandrake’s Metal Men Are Hungry
John Held Jr.’s highly stylized, fine line cartoons are identified with “The Jazz Age” of Fitzgerald’s 1920s for good reason. His imagery on the covers of Fitzgerald books, in his Oh, Margy and Merely Margy… Read more: “I Shot Him In the Ass!” John Held Jr.’s Lewd Linocuts
Lee Falk’s tux-clad adventure hero Mandrake the Magician was among the strangest characters on the comic page since his mid-30s launch. As we have covered here before, some of his strips were downright surreal. And… Read more: Baby Mandrake’s Evil Twin?
I don’t know who this Ferd. C Long was, nor how long the engaging “How You Felt” strip ran. But it captured me instantly as a great example of early cartoon experiments that explored some of the unique qualities of the new medium. The great team at Barnacle Press, who nobly harvest every scrap of early comic strips they can, gathered these. Like many strips of the day, it took up a simple single conceit – in this case using visual exaggeration to capture a feeling. The result is a fantastic surrealism that communicates in a singular way a range of small and common responses to the world.
Comic disharmony between Jiggs and Maggie over their social climb was the central joke of George McManus’s Bringing Up Father for over four decades. For all of McManus’s fine sense of humor, he banged that one note across four panels six days a week and a full page every Sunday. To be sure, he layered in nuances of class and generational conflict. Jiggs was a hod carrier who struck it rich, never adjusted to his own ascent, and clashed with wife Maggie and daughter’s ambitions to join the social elite. The dynamic was rich with potential and embodied the experience of millions of American emigrees moving into the modern middle class. But many of the daily strips tediously replayed Jiggs’s sneaking out to his former watering hole Dinty Moore’s, embarrassing his family with etiquette transgressions or ducking Maggie’s thrown dishes. These were conventions that American newspaper readers enjoyed hearing for a handful of panels and 30 seconds a day over its 87-year run. McManus, however, was especially adept at maintaining reader interest in the familiar with his mastery of visual style, panel sequencing and timing.
Foreshadowing some of the more colorful arch-villains in the 40s and beyond, Dick Tracy’s early 1933 encounter with Stooge Viller was a standout as Chester Gould developed his style and focus. Stooge is imported to the city by a broken crime ring to discredit the now-famous gangbuster Dick Tracy. He is a master pickpocket and a bit of an effete dandy. He successfully frames Tracy and even causes Tess Trueheart to fall out with the love of her life.
Here we get our introduction to Stooge.
Stooge plants counterfeit bills on Tracy, who eventually is confronted and accused.
Our hero feels the world collapsing around him and descends into the bane of masculine mythos – self-doubt.
By 1933, Chester Gould ‘s overall style is gelling around those signature thick lines and dense bodies, those wonderful masses of black. But he is also experimenting with evocative design ideas. Here Dick’s emotional nadir, Tess Trueheart’s rejection, is depicted as a full-on silhouette strip.
And adding insult to male ego injury, Stooge moves in on the disillusioned Tess. In the strip’s early years especially, Gould deployed a range of female stereotyping on poor Tess. Often flighty or naive, she was a gender foil for the dripping masculinity of Dick Tracy. As we covered in an earlier post, neither Gould nor his avatar Tracy were progressive feminists by any means.
While Gould’s style and design sense evolved mightily throughout the 30s, and his imagination just got zanier, one thing never evolved – his reliance on unlikely plot contrivances. Viller’s scheme and Tracy’s innocence are revealed to Tess when she finds a draft of Stooge’s wire to Eastern gangsters that conveniently narrates his entire plot against her estranged boyfriend.
When Tess ends up getting shot in the course of her misadventure with Stooge, we have to wonder if this is Gould himself expressing some resentment towards her loss of faith in Dick. The panel in which she declares herself a fool is a wonderful composition that frames her frail, swooning, naive femininity against the burly expanse of the Chief’s grimace, perhaps voicing Gould’s own disappointment in her.
When Dick and Tess do finally reunite and reconcile, Gould exercises what would become a signature move for him, a radical juxtaposition of mood and action from one panel to the next. Gould had a talent for using the panel structure to jar the reader, to interrupt a mood in one panel with a surprising twist in the next. In this case a romantic interlude is upset by the capture Stooge inexplicably trying to slit his own throat.
It goes without saying that in a strip focused mainly on dramatizing the masculine prowess of his hero Chester Gould showed no understanding or sympathy for his female characters. Not surprisingly, he is equally inept even at drawing human intimacy. Tess and Dick’s kiss has all of the romance and finesse of a fender bender.
And yet we wee in the Stooge Viller episode Gould clearly expanding his palette and moving towards more stylized approach to depicting character and capturing mood and emotion especially through shadows and literally dimming the lights on scenes that try to dramatize deeper emotion.
Stooge Viller would be among a small handful of Tracy villains to recur over many years. He proves to be a deft nemesis in the detective’s early years. He is a clever schemer who seems smarter than the glorified thugs of the earliest strips. At Stooge’s hands, Tracy is put out to the physical and psychological wilderness. Stooge not only frames Tracy as a counterfeiter and gets this beloved cop drummed from the force, but he steals Tess’s affections. Tracy’s career, reputation and girl are taken from him all at once, a true trifecta of masculine humiliation.
The hero of pulp adventure seemed compelled to enshrine masculinity by having it beaten down. In order to triumph, heroes must be bound, trapped, tortured, emasculated or simply ruined by villainy before emerging from humiliation to assert their power. This eccentric opera of masculinity in pop fiction has always led to weird homo-erotic depictions of S&M, bondage, dominatrix encounters, subjugation, and banishment of all sorts. The classic heroes of myth had to suffer taxing encounters with nature and monsters to complete their quest or rescue the land. But the peculiarly American style of pulp heroism often required male humiliation of some sort in order for our hero to assert the righteousness of his masculine power.
Most media, cultural and certainly women’s studies historians have long understood that the post-WWII era represented a twisted nadir for the representations of women in American popular culture. During wartime, women famously took on more prominent, responsible and even strenuous roles in the workforce than ever before. And once the war ended and the male troops returned, these same women upon whom the home front depended were explicitly urged by ever quarter of American society to surrender these gains for the sake of passing these jobs back to the traditional male breadwinners. There was nothing subtle to this process either. Many women were badgered back into domesticity, often accused of “stealing” livelihoods from returning veterans. Other aspects of popular culture like the the rise of the femme fatale trope in noir and crime fiction, the ditzy blonde bombshell, the irrational, imbalanced feminine figure in thriller genre – all helped undermine the legitimacy of women taking more powerful roles in the post-war “man’s world.”
This context makes the premise of the Twin Earths sci-fi strip all the more curious and fascinating. Running from the middle of 1952 to 1963 in dailies and 1953-1958 in a separate storyline in Sundays. When the overlooked strip is remembered at all, it is for some prescient gadgetry that anticipated later everyday tech. To be sure, the writing by comic book illustrator and editor Oskar Lebeck and drawn by comics veteran Al McWilliams was often leaden and unexciting. But Twin Earths was home to some genuinely intriguing and thoughtful futurism that echoed literary science fiction. And as I make my way through the strip’s early years, it is the basic premise of Twin Earths’ divergent social organizations that is most striking. The twin Earth (Terra) is a female-dominated society where a diminishing population of males is retained mainly as idle breeders. The Terran spy Vala infiltrates our earth to ensure this male-dominated planet is not developing its technology towards destructive ends. She pairs up with FBI agent Gary Verth to avoid Communist spies and assassins from her own host planet. The banter between the two, especially Vala’s accusations of masculine aggression (an early take on male “toxicity”?) is a remarkable standout at a cultural moment when most popular culture sought to diffuse, defeat and mock women aspiring to power.
“Off to a Flying Start” is how V.T. Hamlin titled his introduction to the Alley Oop character and world in late 1932. And in fact Hamlin’s eponymous hero cries for help in the opening panel…only to be chased by the prehistoric dinosaurs of this fantastic “Bone Age.” For the next six or seven years, Hamlin’s art and story were at their best when his furry-crowned, thick-limbed everyman scurried at the center of screwball mayhem. We now have a great opportunity to review and reconsider Alley, as the small press Acoustic Learning recently launched reprint series of both Hamlin’s early adventures and later work by his successor Dave Graue.
My first impression diving into Alley Oop is Hamlin’s strong feel for set, background and character design Hamlin had from the beginning. Unlike Segar’s Thimble Theatre, Capp’s L’il Abner and certainly Gould’s Dick Tracy, Alley Oop doesn’t begin in a crude style that only finds its signature style over months and years. Hamlin goes into Alley Oop knowing he wanted to contrast fine-lined, simple but polished characters with detailed and accurate scenery and dinosaurs. Hamlin had a cultivated curiosity about prehistoric creatures in one of his many jobs as an illustrator in the Texas oil industry. He well knew the historical fantasty at the center of Alley Oop. The age of dinosaurs long preceded any human ancestors. But he was dedicated to drawing, naming and animating his Bone Age dinos as accurately as he could.
By contrast, his cast of cartoon humans, the males at least, are carefully built with a bit of the era’s deco minimalism. Oop, his rhyming buddy Foozy, Guz, the King of the Moos and the tribes of cave men are small of head, with enviable four-pack abs, and forearms and calves shaped like bowling pins. He builds his characters in order to animate them. Those bottom-heavy limbs become wonderful devices when fleeing, fighting or rioting. The action poses, freeze-frames of punches thrown and received, crowds of cave men imploding or exploding, all have an expressiveness that sits between cartoon abstraction and naturalism. This fine-lined, controlled art style is served very well in this reprint. The strips fully render Hamlin’s thin line shading of background flora and the dinosaurs.
Alley Oop is also one of those rare strips, along with Walt Kelly’s later Pogo, that renders the words as part of the art. From the strip’s first panel, Hamlin shows his distinct deco styling for characters shouting. They move from small to larger type sizes, megaphone-like, into the air. And Hamlin plays with bolding, differing type styles and sizes, words moving in and out of word baloons, to express tones, crowd murmerings, sound effects. In some ways he was bringing to his comic strip layers that mimiced the early days of the talking motion picture, still in its infancy when Oop appears in 1932/33.
And much like Segar’s approach to Popeye, even Gray’s Annie, Hamlin brings a populist sensibility to the strip. Conventional wisdom suggests that Alley Oop becomes more interesting and a genuine adventure strip in 1939 when he introduced a time travel device that brought Oop and girlfireind Ooola across major historical ages. But from the start, Oop is an everyman hero, good of heart, who is less of an adventurer than a victim of circumstance. He quickly becomes the unintentional antagonist to King Guz, the insecure and thin-skinned leader of the Moos. Guz envies Oop’s popularity when the cave man returns to the tribe astride his tamed pet dinosaur Dinny. Guz’s machinations to retain prestige and diminish Oop is the driving force of the strip’s first year. Oop fits neatly within the pantheon of Depression-era common many heroes. Prohibition, which didn’t end until the December 1933, and a deepening Depression had already undermined public trust in institutional authority, the purity and wisdom of legal and political institutions. Popular culture registered a generalized distaste for authority in everything from the romanticization of gangsters in the press to images of kings, politicians, policemen and bosses as either hapless or imperious. We usually come upon common men like Popeye, Tom Joad, Micky Mouse and Mr. Oop just trying to go about their business, only to become heroic in the face of the moral duplicity (or just stupidity).
As simple and familiar as these everyman heroes may seem, the idea of the inherently moral, simple and unpretentious “nature’s nobleman” runs deep and long in American culture, extending back to the tales of James Fennimore Cooper’s frontier hero Natty Bumppo and Jacksonian politics of the 1840s. American popular literature is filled with examples of the naturally ethical, American individualist asserting basic common sense and morality against both little human and big insitutional corruptions. Cast as he may be in the Bone Age, Oop was certainly in that tradition, one that had special valence to Depression-Era.
Panels & Prose 