Kicking off this year’s roundup reviews of notable books for comics history buffs, let’s start with the annual Taschen doorstop.
Continue readingShelf Scan 2024: Taschen’s Ultimate Duck
Tag Archives: comics and culture
Rockwell Kent: Accidental Cartoonist
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was not a cartoonist in any typical sense of the genre. He was insanely prolific across all media and seemed oblivious to formal silos that bother art critics and scholars. He worked in book and magazine illustration, painting, greeting cards and postage stamps, bookplates, murals, and, yes, comics (under the playful pseudonym, “William Hogarth, Jr.” for Vanity Fair). He was a working artist who liked to turn a buck, as entrepreneurial as he was genre agnostic. Which is to say that he was an artist in the American grain.
Continue readingBuster Brown: ‘Race Suicide’ v. Family Planning, Circa 1903
Talk of declining fertility and birth rates, even white nationalist mumblings about “race suicide” have become a weird sidebar this election cycle. At the turn of the 20th Century, all of these themes had already been well rehearsed. In 1903, R.F. Outcault’s blockbuster hit Buster Brown alludes to contemporary arguments around changing gender roles, women’s increased autonomy, family planning and, yes, “race suicide.”
Continue readingI Hear America Talking: Stan Mack’s Real Life
Earlier this summer, I got to chat with visual journalist Stan Mack as he launched the indispensable compilation of his most famous work, Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995. The interview is embedded below with a cursory review after that.
Advertising Decency: The Cartoon War on Hate
Hate is an easy sell. In the marketplace of hearts and minds, intolerance, grievance, anger are some of the most compelling product features of any cause or candidate that is new to the political shelves. Likewise, simple, high aspirations tend to market more easily. See “Hope and Change.” Appealing to base instincts or ambition and aspiration is Marketing 101 in America’s cultural economy.
Continue readingLittle Orphan Annie: Character Is The Real Hero
On August 5, 1924, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie premiered. Historians often remember the strip for its verbose didacticism or regressive politics. Gray famously crowded his panels with Annie’s homilies to self-reliance and in the 1930s anti-New Deal screeds. This explains historians’ interest in Little Orphan Annie, but it doesn’t account for readers’ love affair with the chatty moppet. In many ways Gray’s strip blended genres of adventure and domestic drama. It was among the earliest serial adventure strips. As much as Americans may have identified with Annie’s core self-reliant values and humane sympathies, she was forever the outsider, often overhearing key conversations or sitting in the corner of a panel as an onlooker. Annie was a picaresque figure who embodied modern Americans’ sense of social dislocation and alienation. She was both in and outside of this changing America of new cities, capitalist and government shenanigans, aggrandized power…and its victims. Gray’s Annie captured a complex relationship modern Americans felt towards their culture that was harder to articulate than it was to depict in character and situation. That is what great art, high or low, does for a culture.
Continue readingA Tale of Two Comics: Gibson vs. The Comic Strip
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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Panels & Prose 