Tag Archives: comics and culture

Mandrake in Dimension Bonkers

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Between August 1936 and March 1937, Mandrake the Magician and his right-hand man Lothar teleported into one of author Lee Falk’s most wildly imagined worlds, Dimension X. It was a universe of altered physics and futuristic super-beings: robotic “Metal Men” made of “animated metal”; “plant people”; ignited, swooping firebirds; man-eating plants; pacifist “Plant People”; and ruthlessly cruel “Crystal Men” who use the skin of captured men to keep their bodies shiny and ready to refract light. Ew! And, of course, no dystopia is complete without hordes of enslaved humans who dream of liberation. It was bonkers, even for a strip that had weird implausibility baked in. And while Mandrake’s side-quest into Dimension X seems like the most fanciful escapism, it was very much of its time.

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Sherlocko the Monk: The Great Mystery of the Everyday

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The running gag in Gus Mager’s 1911-1912 small wonder Sherlocko the Monk is that this send-up of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective rarely uncovers a crime. Mager’s parody sleuth usually unravels “mysteries” around a henpecked husband’s scheme to avoid his wife, an absent-minded fop forgetting where he left the missing object, a neurotic too scared to show up for work. The mystery is really around character and behavior more than around misdeeds. And this is why Sherlocko the Monk is such a satisfying but under-appreciated relic of the first decades of the American comic. Sherlocko pulled together into a coherent narrative whole, themes and narrative conceits that had been germinating in a more haphazard way across many artists and strips since 1895. Sherlocko is the apotheosis of early comics’ preoccupation with social and character types, traits and obsessions. he took that trope and developed it into coherent theater. And along the way Sherlocko maps out where the comic strip had been by 1911 and where it was headed as an American popular art.

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Campbell’s Cuties: Wartime Women Had Their Moment

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The role of WWII in the history of women, equality and feminism in America is widely known and usually mythologized in Rosie the Riveter tales. With many men abroad, women filled roles in industry and management that typically had been denied them. According to the thumbnail version, newly empowered women suffered a kind of cultural whiplash with the post-war return of men to the States. Industry, government and pop culture generally actively discouraged women from enjoying their newfound role outside of the home in range of unseemly ways.

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Queer-Coding A La 1948: Buz Sawyer Flexes His Pecs

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The sublimations of the American comic strip are legion. Whether it is the unbridled eroticism of Flash Gordon or the beefcake of Prince Valiant, the kinkiness of The Phantom or the stripteasing of Terry and the Pirates, the most “innocent” of modern American mass media contained many quiet erotic sub-texts for horny readers across ages and sexes. Case in point, Buz Sawyer in the 1940s. I have no idea what was going on with Buz’s artist Roy Crane and writer Edwin Granberry in the 1947-48 years, but the strip seemed a bit obsessed with gender-bending, sexual stereotypes and masculine identity across storylines in those years. In two adjoined episodes, our two-fisted hero deals with the barely-veiled advances of an effeminate gun-runner and sexual harassment at the hands of a masculinized female Frontier executive. This is one of those many cases where the most reserved and adolescent of modern media, the family newspaper strip, traded in suggestive imagery and innuendo that would never pass muster in other media of the day.

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Royal Fetish: Screwball Monarchy in 30s Cartooning

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American popular culture took a number of odd turns in response to the trauma of the Great Depression in the 1930s. A fascination with pre-modern civilization, lost ancient worlds, aboriginal tribalism was one of the most pronounced that fueled comic strip fantasy. From Tarzan and Jungle Jim, to The Phantom, Prince Valiant and even Terry and the Pirates, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy and Flash Gordon, the connection is obvious. At a time when most contemporary institutions were failing, Americans were understandably fixated on pre-modern, anti-modern, prehistoric and fable-like alternative worlds. One of the oddest subsets to this pop anti-modernism was the motif of fantasy monarchy, especially as a setting for comedy and satire.

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Red Ryder: Fred Harman’s Scenic Route

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One of the longest-lived and popular Western series of the last century, Red Ryder (1938-1965) is barely remembered today…mostly for good reason. Unlike richer, historically-informed efforts like Warren Tufts’ masterful Casey Ruggles and Lance, Red Ryder was closer to Western genre boilerplate, The titular hero is a red-headed journeyman cowpoke who finds and resolves trouble wherever he roams. His woefully typecast sidekick “Little Beaver” was an orphaned Native American boy who provided identification for kid readers, a sounding board for the solitary and stoic Red, and comic relief of a distinctly stereotyped sort. In truth the strip made little effort to delve into character let alone suspense or high adventure.

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Junior Marries Moon Maid

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By the end of his career in 1977, Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould was notoriously reactionary. His disdain for the counter-cultural forces at play in the 1960s and 70s, for liberal explanations of criminal behavior, were clear in the strip itself. In fact, his resistance to leniency in America’s legal system, and progressivism in general, had been baked into his epic since its roots n the gangster era of 1931. From the start, Dick Tray was an exploration of individual valor and evil rather than institutional or social forces. Gould’s take on the 50s moral panic around “juvenile delinquency” via Flattop Jr. is an excellent example. And the moral universe of Dick Tracy hinged on the personal evil of villains(usually embodied in physical abnormalities) and the poetic symmetry of their deaths via some kind of retributive justice.

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