Where do we even start to highlight the wicked strangeness of Winsor McCay’s “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend?” The master comics artist drew over 800 nightmares in the first decade of the 20th Century, and most of them include startling examples of his surrealist imagination like the above. The conceit was simple. A normal scene in the opening panel quickly devolves into some bent reality: giant insects sucking a man’s forehead; a gent sneezing his head into the street; various limbs expanding to absurd sizes; people exploding willy nilly; or the characters themselves dissembling or penetrating the cartoon panels themselves. And it all ends in a final panel of the man or woman involved waking up and cursing the rich melted cheese dish (“Rarebit”) that prompted the nightmare.
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They Had Faces Then: Close-Ups, 50s Photo-Realism and the Psychological Turn

The turn to photo-realism in the adventure comics after WWII is well-documented and obvious in any review of the major strips. Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, Warren Tufts’ Casey Ruggles and Lance, Leonard Starr’s On Stage, Stan Drake’s Heart of Juliet Jones, John Cullen Murphy’s Big Ben Bolt are just some of the clearest examples. The stylistic foundation had already been set in the 1930s, of course by Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant). They moved adventure strips away from the more expressionist modes of Gould and Gray, or the cartoonish remnants of Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs and Capt. Easy) or the sketchy illustrator style of a Frank Godwin (Connie). .But it is really in the post-war period that we see a clear ramping up of fine line, visual detailing, naturalist figure modeling and movement, as well as full adoption of cinematic techniques.
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Dingbat Calls In the Klan: Herriman’s Bourgeois Obsessive
Along with chaos, mayhem and violence, obsessive behavior was a core theme of early newspaper cartooning. Consider the many titular anti-heroes of these years, like Hungry Henrietta, Superstitious Sam, Jingling Johnson, Sammy Sneeze. Or the irrepressible raging “Outbursts of Everett True,” the sex addiction of Mr. Jack, the insufferable politeness of Alfonse and Gaston, or the numerous strips about absent-minded codgers or irrepressible pranksters. Seen through the lens of early 20th Century comics, the new American cityscape was characterized by obsessive behaviors, idiosyncratic personalities, uncontrollable ticks – compulsions of every sort. The annoying monomaniacs in our midst formed the heart of early comics. It was an art well-suited to the daily newspaper: a comedy of everyday frustrations and observations.
The Timid Soul Toys With Fascism
The authoritarian strain in modern democracies has only heightened since I first posted this bit of cartoon wisdom several years ago. In 1937, H.T. Webster’s Casper Milquetoast (The Timid Soul) responds to Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolph Hitler with his own fantasy of assertiveness. This 1937 vision of fascism’s psychological appeal to feelings of personal disempowerment is eerily relevant to the current ethos. Webster perceptively understands how the personal and political entwine around identity. And through Casper he renders it as a will to power that is at once frightening but also silly and petty. Webster even seems to understand something American liberals are only now grasping: the most effective response to bro-viating fascist cosplay is ridicule.
Continue reading“I Shot Him In the Ass!” John Held Jr.’s Lewd Linocuts
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 comic strips and especially in his work for the early New Yorker and other humor magazines pretty much defined that decade visually. He found a way toi make privileged youth look even more air-headed and frivolous than they prbably were. It made him enormously wealthy, for a time, and in constant demand. Yet, for all of his identification with modernity, Held was deeply nostalgic. Many of his other illustrated works departed radically from his signature flapper stylings and used instead a pre-modern linocut technique that gouged an image into a linoleum surface to effect a primitive woodcut-like effect. Rob Stolzer recently posted the full run of Held’s Civilization’s Progress series from Liberty magazine (1931-32), where Held contrasted the Gay Nineties with contemporary life by juxtaposin his flapper and linocut styles.
Continue readingBaby Mandrake’s Evil Twin?

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 so you just know that his origin story must be wild. According to a 1949 flashback sequence, orphaned twins Mandrake and Derek are raised by an island school of monk-like magicians. The boys learn ancient mystic secrets like “Instant Hypnosis, the art of making things appear to be what really aren’t — the art of the seemingly impossible.” But Derek shows his evil nature early and resurfaces in a 1949 story that threatens Mandrake’s reputation. Dig the signature slicked back hair on those toddler tops.
Calling Dick Tracy…Again: Shaking Up the Reprint Game
Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy has been among the most reprinted strips of all time. The reasons are obvious, and I don’t need to rehash this site’s exegesis on my personal favorite. Tracy was the strip that turned me on to classic newspaper comics. Gould’s singular visual signature, his grisly violence, grotesque villains and deadpan hero made Dick Tracy compelling on so many levels. And now we get yet another packaging style from the same Library of American Comics group that finished its magisterial 29-volume complete Gould run, 1931-77. With new publishing partner Clover Press, LOAC has reworked some of its earliest projects, like the magnificent upgrade of Terry and the Pirates and the first six volumes of The Complete Dick Tracy. And now we get slipcased, paperback editions of prime-time Gould, 1941 through 1944. Much more affordable, manageable, and available than the original LOAC volumes, each of which covered about two years of comics, the four $29.99 books are also available as a discounted set from Clover. This new series started as a crowd-funded BackerKit project last year.
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