It didn’t take long for Popeye and Olive to hook up after the pugnacious sailor joined the Thimble Theatre in 1929. Popeye because part of the Sunday Theatre in 1930, which is now being reprinted by Fantagraphics. E.C. Segar’s characters had a special kind of grittiness and irascible repartee. And here we see how Thimble Theatre could get remarkably raw. Popeye and Olive’s noisy smooching gets under Mr. Oyl’s skin. The sexuality of the younger generation in 1920s America had been an important topic of discussion across media. WWI had exposed an entire generation to less inhibited European attitudes towards sexuality. The arrival of the automobile especially created a way for boys and girls to escape the scrutiny of their parents. Moral arbiters worried publicly about this new wave of “petting parties” where youth explored their bodies in troubling ways. Apparently, Olive Oyl and Popeye used the Oyl living room for their own personal petting party.
Gasoline Alley may be a singular American masterpiece. It was unlike any other cultural utterance of its day. In it, creator Frank King exposed aspects of modernizing American culture other cultural sources overlooked.
The remarkable gentleness of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley is its signature distinction from much of the comic strip universe of the 1920s and 30s. It has no henpecked husbands, no nagging wives, no snarky kids, no withering repartee among supposed friends. All of the familiar domestic and small town tensions are there, but King’s is a sweeter, gentler version of the tropes his fellow cartoonists deployed in The Gumps, The Bungles, Moon Mullins, Barney Google, Mr. and Mrs., Thimble Theatre or Bringing Up Father. These strips were the heart of the medium’s move in the late 1910s and 1920s into the suburban and family sphere. But King’s take on this world was distinct for what it was not. Husbands don’t suffer flying rolling pins or eviction from their homes at the hands of jealous spouses in Gasoline Alley America. In the narrow confines of this alley, wives get mildly peeved when their husbands do too many favors for the new single woman in town, and they follow her lead in bobbing their hair. Walt’s garage tribe, Avery, Doc and Bill, gently chide one another without ever truly straining their eternal friendship. So far in my reading of King, I have yet to see a character get angry enough with a friend or spouse even to stop talking to them.
King’s talents ran deeper. The little gestures and moments of emotional significance were his terrain. And he created a perspective for the reader that was more giving and loving than the grumpy, shallow nostalgia and easy irony effected by rest of the comic page. In the Thanksgiving 1921 image above we see the classic gender divide that fuels much of comicdom. But in King’s hands it is rendered as separate but mutually respectful spheres. During a road trip to National Parks, King creates a strip of panels depicting passersby waving hello to the travelers. It is a quiet testament to quiet human connection.
Frank King (1883-1969) himself may not have understood how the title for his Gasoline Alley strip suited his own aesthetic ambitions for his decades-long novel. The strip was named after the the back alleys of early 20th Century American cities, where pioneering car owners erected the first backyard garages to house and maintain the first romanticized gadgets of the modern age, the car. But his frame was quite narrow, with the feel and composition of a small town, much like the Tomah, Wisconsin of his own childhood. His initial focus was a tightly woven group of friends, Walt Wallet, his fellow car enthusiasts Avery, Bill and Doc and to a lesser degree their wives. That world expanded slowly, organically in real time with the introduction of the foundling Skeezix on Walt’s doorstep in 1921. It was indeed an alley of American life. But King was not crafting the usual “slice of life” comic we find in J.R. Williams Out Our Way, Gene Ahern’s Our Boarding House or the many Clare Briggs series like Real Folks at Home, even though King apprenticed under many of these strips and artists. defined by immediate family, small town sensibilities, friends who know each other subtly and deeply.
Often it is hard to grasp what any given Gasoline Alley strip is about or what was accomplished by that day’s four panels. There is rarely an obvious gag or punch line, and if there are they feel weak. Skeezix gets sand in his pants from playing in the sandbox. Walt comes upon his evolving love interest Mrs. Blossom sewing Skeezix’s drawers and decides not to intrude. Walt agrees to wait for a package coming to Mrs. Blossom, only to sit all day in vain. During a road trip to National Parks, King creates a strip of panels devoted solely to wordless images of passersby waving hello to the travelers. “Ho Hum” a frustrated Walt says in the final panel, a feeling a reader might share at the end of many Gasoline Alley dailies. Nothing happens.
And yet, everything happens. In the unique cadence and focus of Frank King’s comic strip world a little and a lot are going on at once. These little glimpses of Skeezix, without gag or storyline, mark his development for us and help put us into the everyday world of the Alley and its commonplaces. And as the only major strip to watch its characters age in real time, King is mimicking the incremental changes much the way King himself was observing and marking his own son’s childhood. King peppers these little checkins with Skeezix every few weeks. In one we see him favoring Walt or Mrs. Blossom, all according to who last gave him a piece of candy. And each is mildly hurt by feeling snubbed. Yes. The little protean, irrational responses of a toddler can tug at our personal insecurities and self-worth in emotionally piercing ways. In another daily, the family maid Rachel wonders who is ringing the front door bell, only to find it is little Skeezix. Yes. A small moment tells Rachel and us shows without telling how a child grows into self-consciousness, power over things and people. It uses the unique cadence of the everyday strip and pantomime to pull us into the vision of a young parent watching the subtle ways a human being develops. And it uses a plainspoken, very Midwestern, show, don’t tell, visual voice to do it. There is a reverence for the small, everyday expressions of inner feeling and emotional exchange, done without mawkish sentiment. As Donald Phelps put it expansively in his Reading the Funnies, “the function of his art seemed not to impose the folksy haberdashery and cosmetics of Norman Rockwell, not yet to yoke with his interpretation of their lives, but to convey, by pooling his craft with theirs, and by rendering their corporate style as a way of life itself (p. 198).”
Gasoline Alley’s special place in modern American culture, its genius really, is in counterpoint to the modern aesthetic sensibilities around it both on and off the comics section.
Start with the visual center and emotional heart of the strip – the doughy, roly-poly Walt Wallet. Visually, Walt is the opposite of the typical bigfoot characters around him on the comics page. His is not the squash, big-headed figure of Fisher’s Jeff (Mutt and Jeff), McManus’s Jiggs (Bringing Up Father), Milt Gross’s Pop (Nize Baby) or DeBeck’s Barney Google. Walt is the inverse bigfoot – massive, but impossibly small-headed and relatively small-footed. King usually depicts him as a mass divided by ink black trousers and white button-down shirt. He is often canting forward and seems ready to teeter. He is all-heart, all pillowy comfort. And while he dominates most panels in form he never dominates in spirit. With the arrival of Skeezix in 1921, Walt becomes the most unlikely of pop culture males – the sensitive man-nurturer – perhaps the only one in American pop and literary culture at the time. And like his visual contrast to other strips, Walt is apart from the bloviating, scheming satirized fathers like Andy Gump, Barney Google, Moon Mullins. And Perhaps King meant this Walt’s weight problem is baked into the character from the start.
In the newly domesticated comic strips of the 1920s, most artists were inventing the tropes of modern situation comedy that grounded radio, romantic comedy and television: disempowered, scheming but hapless husbands; domestic disharmony borne of miscommunication; gender politics; wives manipulating husbands; husbands’ misfired jealousies. It lacks the withering, distrustful repartee of Mr. and Mrs. and Moon Mullins, let along the flying rolling pins and plates of Maggie and Jiggs. Gasoline Alley dallies on occasion with these sit-com elements but at heart was onto something else. It was a gentler vision of domestic and neighborly relations, a daily idyllic respite from the the knowing, ironic and sharp-tongued tone of 1920s American culture.
While Gasoline Alley was inspired by and originally set in the urban alleyways and walkups of 1910s Chicago, where King conceived of the strip, it looks and feels more like a small town. In fact, there is little visual evidence of urban life here, and King generally was leaning on his memories of his boyhood rural home and people in Wisconsin. More to the point, Gasoline Alley embraced the village ethose that Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, H.L. Mencken’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s smart set were fleeing, mocking and condemning. Much of American letters of the time engaged in a “revolt from the village” that rejected the sentimental regionalism of William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Charles Chestnutt that tended to locate the spriritual heart of the nation in the small town idyll.
King was extending the dwindling traditions of American Regionalism, the tone of Hamlin Garland, Edward Egglesten, Willa Cather. Like many of these authors, King envisions the village as self-contained, comfortably insular and defined by its limited populace. Outside developments like the auto, bobbed hair and clothing styles and radio technology are engaged, even embraced, as alien intrusions that are absorbed through the sensibilities of the town. Walt’s eventual love interest Mrs. Blossom introduces the bobbed hair style to the wives of Gasoline Alley, but it is a curio that gets quickly dropped. The car itself, a model of modern tech and mass production, is recast as a locus of male bonding and a vehicle for engaging natural landscapes. Gasoline Alley is the inverse of modernization. Its world changes and shapes modernity at least as much as modernity changes them.
Frank King had nothing but understanding and curiosity about the small town American. And just as importantly he had no reverence for them either. There is no mawkish sentimentality to Gasoline Alley. King depicts many touching moments of small human connection and kindness among his cast. A day’s strip shows Walt and co. on vacation touring the country, depicted as three wordless panels of locals making welcoming waves at the passing car. Walt sewing Skeezix’s britches as the child is bent over his knee. Walt hugging the one person among his friends who praised his new wire car wheels rather than bemoan their downsides. Walt in silhouette in four successive panels getting up in the middle of the night to feed Skeezix and sleepily slip into bed. Most of these sequences are pantomime, and King never feels the need to underscore them with sentiment. Again, this is the embodiment of the plainspoken American style – show, don’t tell. And what King showed for the most part was an inner emotional reality with a subtlety and complexity that rivaled and perhaps exceeded the richest introspective novels.
Much of 1922 is spent on a romantic slow burn of Walt coming to realize what the reader and his friends already know – that he is in love with newcomer Mrs. Blossom. Walt is a confirmed bachelor. A signature Gasoline Alley sequence shows some awkward domestic exchange among Bill, Avery or Doc and their respective wives, ending in a panel of Walt strutting away declaring how he is so “well off” being single.
He protests too much of course. The attractive Mrs. Blossom moving into the neighborhood initiates one of the longest approach-avoidance sequences in modern literature. And here is where King uses the iterative qualities of the daily strip to render ambivalence on a grand scale. One day finds Walt peering over fences wondering what the newcomer looks like or claiming indifference to his buddies stumbling over one another to help her tend to her car. When Mrs. Blossom starts gushing over Skeezix, Walt is overcome with mixed feelings – pride, resentment, jealousy, and more. In one memorable strip Walt marches through the first panels insisting he will firmly reject Mrs. Blossom’s offer to take baby Skeezix for a ride in her car. But upon confronting her in the final panels, he hands the tot over to her and then wonders why he just did that. King is exploring ambivalence, suppressed feeling and befuddlement over one’s own real feelings in a way only the comics strip can dramatize. Each day’s strip displays his feelings moving one way or the other, so that cumulatively we feel their depth.
And King’s touch is so light but sublime in capturing the silly beauty of our inner lives. One strip has Walt putting on jacket and tie, brushing up his signature hair swoop in front of a mirror – primping and sprucing uncharacteristically for Walt. And in the final panel we see that all of this preparation was not to go on a date but to make the phone call to ask Mrs. Blossom out for a date.
It took a full week of strips for the eponymous hero of Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magician strip to make his grand entrance. June 11, 1934 was the first strip, which evokes some of the feel of a classic mystery wind-up. But on June 15, in what has to stand as one of the most unambiguously racist intros in pop culture history, Mandrake’s “servant” Lothar heralds the coming of his “master.” One doesn’t even know where to start here. Falk’s full bore colonialism is more fully and relentlessly explored in his later The Phantom series whose origin we covered here and whose fetishes we covered here.
For all of its weaknesses, Mandrake remains important both to comic strip and comic book history in that his is the first strip to move towards a super-powered hero. Mandrake’s “magic” is only nominally super-natural, in that it is based on the power of suggestion and influence over others’ minds. But it precedes the appearance of Superman by 5 years and aldo nods towards costumed heroism, which would be more fully introduced in Falk’s The Phantom.
Billy DeBeck described his own comic anti-hero as a “low-life” with a heart, but it took a few years from Barney Google’s introduction in 1919 for DeBeck to find his real character. Barney started as yet another henpecked husband, a servile schemer whose daily antics focused on outflanking his overbearing wife. From the start, however, DeBeck’s imagination veered towards outlandish solutions to everyday slights and oppression, At one point the early Barney plots to avoid his wife’s wrath by getting beat up to garner sympathy. Barney was DeBeck’s man on the margins, bouncing from job to job, always broke, forever buffeted by wife, bosses, circumstances or dumb bad luck.
As DeBeck came to understand his own character, Barney literally shrank in stature, from a tall but stooped supplicant to a figure half that original size, now more crushed than stooped, a compact underling of life whose famously oversized “google eyes” always seems to be looking up at other characters. With so little space between Barney’s nose, mouth, torso and legs, he looks like a crumpled ball of formerly human features, the visual embodiment of a man pressed down into a diminutive stature.
But the real heart of Barney Google comes out when he connects with Spark Plug, the horse that would win and lose countless races over the next decade. See above the first strip in 1922 introducing Sparky. In many ways, the horse replaced Barney’s wife as his love-hate interest. Barney raged whenever his nag lost a race but never could bring himself to stay mad for long. There was real romance here. It is not surprising that Spark Plug became a merchandising hit in the 1920s. One later comics historian compared the nag to Snoopy in the level of his fame.
But the coming of Spark Plug also literally raised the stakes for Barney’s conniving. Now he is on a larger stage, traversing the country with Sparky, plotting to get race entry fees, looking for shortcuts. And his fortunes rise and fall radically, from wealthy purses Sparky wins to big bets that come cup a cropper. And Barney starts looking the part, now donning a top hat and formal coat. He has evolved from petty existential haplessness to riding up and down the rollercoaster of American pluck and luck. Barney Google becomes both a celebration and satire of American ambition. He is always on the make, looking for the big chance, and a universe of pitiless institutions, authorities and chance bounce this compressed ball of a character up and down fortune’s wheel. DeBeck is working in a grand tradition of American comic archetypes and echoing some of the tropes that were driving the great slapstick silent clowns of the same decade. Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton also explored the marginal man, luckless but big-hearted and managing an absurd cosmos with clever survival skills.
And there was relentless scheming, DeBeck knew no bounds in dreaming up ways that Barney could make money, thwart rules, fool race officials, or just cheat to help Spark Plug win. In the strip above he gets Sparky a facelift in order to convince the race judges that his horse is a genuine three-year-old.
DeBeck’s plotting of Barney Google’s machinations to succeed were so convoluted that he became famous for recap strips that just reminded readers what his little schemer was up to. And it is this low-level conniving that is the beating heart of Barney Google. Barney is a hapless creature in the comic strip tradition of Happy Hooligan, Slim Jim, Mutt and Jeff, Boob McNutt, Boob Baxter and even Baron Bean. The lovable loser was a particular hero of the American comic strip. It begs so many questions about the role of this art form in Americans’ everyday lives. There was a special kind of social satire going on here, under cover of clever banter, situation comedy and screwball antics. At heart, many of the comic strip figures of the 1920s – Google, Andy Gump, Boob McNutt, Moon Mullins — were more victim than victor.
This 1903 installment of Frederick Burr Opper’s Our Antediluvian Ancestors bears an eerie resemblance to Hanna-Barbera’s 60’s cartoon sit-com The Flintstones. From the Stone Age name play to the pet dinos to the rock-wheeled auto, it almost feels like source material. The anachronistic approach to the ancients took fuller form in Alley Oop in the 19300s and then again in B.C.
Opper was best known of course for the hapless hobo Happy Hooligan strip and the maddeningly polite duo of Alphonse and Gaston. But in this series we see his affection for the small comic details. Dig that crank and belt mechanism for the Antedeluvians’ car. Apparently, brakes had not been invented yet. Catch the blacksmith shoe-ing the mastodon. And of course there is Opper’s mastery of mayhem. Part of Opper’s physical comedy comes in his telegraphing the disaster unfolding yet still surprising us with unexpected twists. He was helping to invent some of the basic grammar of comic strip slapstick as well as the art of comic timing between panels. I think Opper doesn’t get the credit he deserves for refining some of the physics of early cartoon comedy. He represented frenetic action, cause and effect, and the slow motion effect to establish what made the funnies funny.
Our Antediluvian Ancestors started in Hearst papers in 1901 and ran for several years. While not as popular as some of his other longer running work, this series was reprinted at the time.
Those curls! Those explosions of curls often outsized even the heads of Nell Brinkley’s (1886-1944) famous “Brinkley Girls” of the 1910s and 1920s. They had a life of their own, dense with insanely, finely penned line detail. In some of Brinkley’s full pagers of the 1910s, those curls could own the page, become part of the character’s expression, somehow embody the heady fantasies in which “Brinkley Girls” usually engaged. It was a visual signature so recognizable and appealing they launched Brinkley-endorsed hair products with her name attached.
But those Brinkley curls were more than a cartoonist’s signature. They embodied important aspects of Nell Brinkley’s art and contribution to comics and pop culture that critics miss… when they pay attention at all. For, even though she was called the “Queen of Comics” in her day, Nell Brinkley has been poorly served by subsequent comics history. She doesn’t appear in many anthologies, and I have heard some question whether her work even qualifies as comics. Thankfully, Trina Robbins has maintained her reputation and memory in a book devoted to the many iterations of the “Brinkley Girls” and more recently by devoting 50 pages to reprinting her work in the magnificent The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age. I can only speculate how the overwhelmingly male field of comics history may not appreciate, let alone value, the hyper-romanticism of Brinkley’s work. I believe she deserves to be included among the pantheon of greats. In many ways, Brinkley extended into the emotional realm the principles of caricature and fantasy that McCay had practiced in Nemo and screwball cartoonists like Milt Gross brought into the physical slapstick realm. They were over-the-top, eccentric and implausible, and unapologetically so. Her artistic command of the full Sunday comics page, her use of line, color, expression and fantasy rival anything the better-known pioneers put to paper. The cartoon aesthetic established by McCay, Opper, Gross and Herriman allowed artists and readers to defy logic, bend propriety, bruise conventions, rearrange physics, ignore plausibility. Indeed her 1910 fantasy image for the New York Evening Journal, “The Chorus Girl and the Lobster,” showed how well she could mimic the rarebit fiend hallucinations of Winsor McCay. But across the rest of her career, Brinkley channeled the latitude cartooning allows into realms of emotion, gender roles, social relations, romance.
Born in Colorado, Nell’s early artistic talent found its way into children’s books and illustrations in the major state newspapers. Hearst lured her to New York in 1907 where her effusively curly heroines, quickly dubbed “Brinkley Girls,” were a major hit. They were featured in songs, theatrical revues and even licensed hair curling products. While Brinkley did many spot illustrations and even famously covered a scandalous murder trial, her most enduring work took the peculiar form of the graphic short story. Running across a dozen or more weekly episodes, these finite “Romantic Series” included the wartime “Golden Eyes” ( a fiancé follows her betrothed to the front lines), “Kathleen and the Great Secret” (a couple involved in corporate espionage), “Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages” (a romance projected by crystal ball into past historic eras), “The Adventures of Prudence Prim” (a farm girl comes to the big city), “Dimples’ Day Dream” (heroine fantasizing adventure, fame and career success).
Golden Eyes was a full-page single image and text serial across late 1918 and early 1919. It tells the patriotic wartime tale of Golden Eyes, her dog Uncle Same and her man Bill when he (Bill, that is) leaves to fight as the US entered the European war “Over There.” But it is also where Brinkley weaves a socio-political fantasy for the women who were left to serve and support from home by putting Golden Eyes and Uncle Sam into the intrigue and muck of the war. Girl and pooch dash off toward the front, get captured by the enemy, cold cock a rapacious Hun with a champagne bottle and even crawl through the mud of the barren No Man’s Land among WWI trenches. And she looks impeccable and stylish doing it.
And that is no small thing. Golden Eyes’ has a seemingly endless wardrobe of brightly colored ruffled and layered gowns, high heels, and tightly tailored uniforms in which she could model alluring style ideas to her loyal followers while also saving the world for democracy. It is too easy to dismiss such fancy, because Therin lies the appeal and cultural power of Brinkley’s work. She uses the improbabilities of cartoon world to make the personal political, to overlay romance and patriotism. It imagines Golden Eyes and her readers out of the helplessness and fear of being “Over Here” and fantasizing power and effectiveness in the world.
And this is the alluring dance she does throughout the teens, 20’s and 30s, blending the personal and political, letting her heroines assert themselves into a man’s world within the safe context of fantasy or eventual domestication into marriage. But assert herself she does.
What Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl” was to pre-WWI America, an attempt to visualize an “ideal” American womanhood, the “Brinkley Girl” was to the 1910s and post-WWI culture. And the contrast between the two archetypes are as stark as the eras that each idealized. Popularized in the 1890s, The Gibson Girl generalized and abstracted the white middle class woman as curvy and fully corseted but far from subservient. Gibson often depicted them as independent and well-educated, always striving for both self and social improvement. She often took on progressive causes, like Women’s Suffrage, but never seems fully poised to step into a man’s world. She embodied many of the social changes for women that were in the air without challenging the status quo. Visually, Gibson depicts her as composed and aloof, a robust hourglass figure topped by a massive pompadour, often with half-closed eyes that gave a sense of control and remove. The Gibson “girl” was very much a self-contained woman in control.
The Brinkley Girl was dramatically different. Brinkley was revising the archetype quite self-consciously. As she describes one early character, “Frank and strong, and happy and good, just a girl — an American girl such as many of you know — a strange young combination of peacock and saint, little girl and sapient woman, athlete and romantic baby, changing as the winds — and as unchanging.” It would be a mistake to reduce Brinkley’s romantic heroines to Flapper era party-girls, although she loved to draw Gatsby-style gala scenes. She was capturing in her heroines a sense of expression and independence that was radically different from Gibson’s idea and as explosive as their signature head of hair. Just as she was replacing the upswept pompadour with coronas of unruly curls, bodices with sequins, feathers and flowing gowns, Brinkley was liberating the feminine personality. That explosion of curls was also an explosion of self-expression, a notably more passionate and performative assertion into the world. Part of the fantasy she crafted so effectively in her art was indeed letting women have it all.
And so the journey could get wondrous and weird hallucinations, conflations and juxtapositions. Golden Eye decided to pursue her love for Billy to war torn France, where she could at once help win the war and win her man. She is accompanied by their patriotic dog Uncle Sam and the visual symbol of love, a cherub. Having a fashionable woman with seemingly endless wardrobe changes traipsing through the ruins of Europe’s front lines leads to surreal scenes. In one week we find her deep in the French trenches, in a spotless white dress amidst the dark outlines of muddy fields and scorched trees. The Betty and Billy series used a crystal ball device to project these two lovers into every imaginable era of world history. From pre-historic jungles to Egypt, Babylon and Old Virginia.
Brinkley worked unapologetically in a mode of high fantasy, but of a self-conscious kind. And that was what makes her work so glorious. She called attention to the fantasizing of her heroines and seemed to celebrate the radical leaps from reality she and they were taking. There was nothing frivolous about these daydreams. In fact, one of her 20’s characters, Dimples, spends the entire series resisting her lover’s pleas to marry him in favor of her daydreams of having a range of careers, including become the first woman President. Her romantic serials almost always resolved these adventures in the marriage of our heroine, but Brinkley made the journey more compelling and important than the final, if inevitable, nuptial.
Visually, Brinkley built her fantasies carefully. In the first serials, the stories were told in each Sunday episode by a single evocative full page scene with accompanying text. In the stories of the 1920s this format evolved into something closer to but not quite like a comic strip, with five or six numbered vignettes and blurbs advancing the story. Brinkley never resorted to speech balloons or even firm panel outlines. Instead, her vignettes floated on the page without definite borders in a dreamlike motif.
In all of these formats, Brinkley invented a visual style that was at once ethereal and precise. She was famous for a thin and heavily detailed pen line that echoed Art Nouveau. She used this line work to build incredibly rich environments, whether the stone walls of Montezuma or the crowd scenes at a flapper party. The scrolling stonework or the floral arrangements, or the face of a desert camel – all had a density of realistic attention. Compared to the simpler line work of contemporaries in the Sunday section like Herriman, King, or even fellow nouveau stylist McManus, Brinkley’s art was downright Baroque. And yet she also colored this line work with a watercolor wash that bathed the scenes in mood just as it ran across the careful penwork. The effect was uniquely dreamlike, vivid in detail but unreal.
Comics historians often cite the ways in which early innovators like McCay or Feininger used the full Sunday page to experiment with color and format, but Brinkley in her own way was bringing this spirit into the post-WWI newspaper in these remarkable flights of fantasy. While it is true that Sterrit, Herriman and King did continue to innovate in their Sunday formats especially, no one was working with color, mood and detail as richly as Brinkley.
Also unique to Brinkley’s palette were her primary colors of emotion and expression. She focused on the expressive face in ways that other cartoonists couldn’t within the constraints of panels and balloons. She registered on her characters’ faces those heightened moments of shock, joy, envy, snobbery, ardor and more. There is an emotional intensity to Brinkley’s work that is working at the same high volume as the fantasy. To be sure, she was working in a genre of romance that traded in intense emotion, but she was visualizing these inner feelings on the faces that dominated her page. Indeed you could say that emotional moments were the driving force of her Sunday pages. While most comic artists were using sequential drawing to drive story progression, a slapstick gag or physical action, Brinkley’s sequence of vignettes are illustrating the emotional peaks of a story that is really being told in a linear way in the text. Was anyone else in the comics section working to surface such a full range of emotion and inner worlds? One has to look to the silent screen for this kind of singular focus on expression and visualizing personality.
In Brinkley we see the ties between self-expression and the increasing materialism of modern consumer culture. Her heroines are generally affluent, soaked in the largesse of high fashion, travel, lavish parties. By the late 20s she had become adept at visually swooning over luxe objects, from shiny limos to ornate nightclubs. But Brinkley always seemed to insist on the substance of the surface. She never trivialized the fashion and multiple wardrobe changes of her characters, but instead made them outward expressions of some inner emotion, identity, mood. Her lush use of color, detail, texture lends an erotic quality to all of her work, whether it is depicting an embrace of lovers or a gleaming auto. She seems to be in love with the material world and her art is struggling to lend some sense of depth and authentic emotion to this world of abundance that modern consumer culture had made available, at least to some.
And yet, Brinkley is determined to immerse her heroines in adventure and escape from domesticity. The theme throughout her art, culminating in the 1930s in her final great series celebrating pioneering and accomplished real life women of the sort she foreshadowed and fantasized about in her 10s and 20s strips. Ultimately, Nell Brinkley was a feminist working within the tropes and genres available to her and her audiences in an unmistakably patriarchal America. Brinkley allowed her readers to have it both ways, to pursue the goal of romance and marriage while also engaging the adventure and career identity with which modern American seemed to tease women as possible, if not preferable.
