Charles Dana Gibson was the grandmaster of magazine illustration by the time the first wave of Pulitzer and Hearst’s cartoonists disrupted the media universe after 1895. And from the beginning, it was clear that newspaper artists, even those that migrated from the humor weeklies, were stretching both the form and subject matter of caricature beyond the genteel sensibilities of Puck and Life. The line was becoming more elastic, the expressions more animated and emotive, the action more extreme. Magazine humor was witty but remained politely seated in the middle-class parlor. Newspaper humor was raucous and usually situated out of doors, where just about anyone or anything could happen. For their part, magazine editors knew a cultural and economic threat when they saw one. Many magazine columnists and editors denounced Pulitzer and Hearst as vulgarians actively debased the culture with sensationalism. But the comic strip in particular was singled out for celebrating violence and appealing to juvenile sensibilities.
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Charles Dana Gibson Educates Mr. Pipp
For comic strip devotees, Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) is often treated as a sidebar. And yet in the last decade of the 19th and first of the 20th Centuries he may have been the most famous and recognizable cartoonist in America. Best known for his “Gibson Girl” idealizations of middle class feminine youths, he worked mainly in Life and other humor and mass market magazines of the 1890s and 1910s. In fact after WWI Gibson became editor and eventually owner of Life. But by that point the newspaper revolution had diminished the power and role for weekly humor periodicals. This may be why both Gibson’s style and career seems at odds with the evolving comic strip. He represented the more gentle and genteel humor of a magazine world that sniffed at the crude humor and violence of the massively popular dailies.
Continue readingIn the Big House With Ella Cinders
The more I read of Bill Conselman and Charlie Plumb’s Ella Cinders strip (first explored here), it is clear this spunkiest of comic strip heroines has been woefully underrepresented in pop culture history. She was at once big-hearted and hard boiled. She rode the roller coaster of 20s and 30s boom and bust, passing through pop culture fads and economic trends. And this girl took no shit. She was aiming withering barbs at cocky lovers years before Mae West, trading edgy banter a decade before Kate Hepburn, Carol Lombard and Barbara Stanwyck. Comics historians who point to Connie Kurridge, Flyin’ Jenny, Miss Fury or Brenda Starr as pioneering women in comics pages are missing one of the most interesting examples. Ella Cinders resembled Little Orphan Annie, a picaresque that was less ponderous and lighter. And the tale of a New Woman making her way through inter-war America was rendered as a unique distinct world – with its own linguistic and visual style. The panel above shows how the strip’s sharp voice and thoughtful composition could work together. Ella and brother Blackie, backs to us, framed by a predatory pawn shop, quip about getting fleeced.
Continue readingPrehistoric Nazis: Alley Oop Knows a Fascist When He Sees One
V.T. Hamlin was unambiguous about introducing to Alley Oop’s kingdom of Moo the interloping dictator Eeny in 1938. “She was Hitler,” he admitted in an interview later in life. Even three years before America’s entry into the war in Europe, Hamlin felt it was inevitable. The villainous dictator Eeny would reappear during wartime as well, but in this first episode we see Hamlin’s take on how bad leaders co-opt good people.
Continue readingNot-So-Silly Symphonies: Disney Meets the Depression
Disney’s Silly Symphonies comic strip of the 1930s would not be my go-to place for veiled references to weapons of mass destruction, hobo philosophy, trench warfare or impoverished ghettoes. Much to my surprise, the first year of this brand extension of the studio’s hit animated short series included all of those dark themes and more.
Continue readingBook Review: From Distressed Damsels to Dauntless Dames
Comic strip history fans should run, not walk, to grab the one indispensable reprint project of this holiday book season, Trina Robbins and Pete Maresca’s Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics (Fantagraphics/Sunday Press, $100). And I don’t mean “indispensable” as a blurb-able critical throwaway, either. The female characters and creators reprinted here from the 1930s and 40s have been “dispensable” in too many histories of the newspaper comic. The central value of this volume is the smart editorial decision Trina and Peter have made here: surfacing strips and artists who have been underserved by the standard anthologies and reprint series. Whether it is Frank Godwin’s pioneering adventuress Connie or Neysa McMein and Alicia Patterson’s Deathless Deer, Bob Oksner and Jerry Albert’s Miss Cairo Jones or Jackie Ormes’ Torchy Brown Heartbeats, the editors have not only featured previously un-reprinted and forgotten material. We get here substantial continuities from each strip that allows a much deeper appreciation for each strip’s character interactions and story arcs than we get from typical anthology samples. You are in the hands of two masters here. Trina has single-handedly championed the history of women comics creators in a number of previous historical and reprint works. And the longtime editor and founder of The Sunday Press, Peter is not only a walking library of comic strip history, but a sensitive curator and restorer. As a book, Dauntless Dames has the same qualities as the heroines it reprints: at once brainy and drop dead gorgeous.
Continue readingThe Grumbling American: Jimmy Hatlo’s Benign Hell
Jimmy Hatlo’s They’ll Do It Every Time (1929-2008) was as long-lived and beloved as it was throughly benign. To be fair, this single-panel museum of petty grievance had banality baked into its title and premise. The actual identity of the “they” is kept usefully loose enough to encompass an “other” of our choosing, but most likely all of humanity but us. And their “doing it every time” is by definition rote and predictable. But of course it is the aching familiarity of Hatlo’s observations that gave the strip purchase. Widely praised for poking at the small hypocrisies, human foibles, bombast of everyday existence, the strip had a special populist appeal. Hatlo was inspired by readers who submitted ideas and got daily credit with a “tip of the Hatlo hat” and even their name and street address for millions to see. Indeed, that was a vastly different era when it came to personally identifiable information. And yet, not so ancient. We can see in They’ll Do It Every Time predecessors of both user-generated content (UGC) and observational humor.
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Panels & Prose 