There are now generations of young adults who have no memory of daily newspapers, let alone that back page and Sunday section of comics. Without that experience, I wonder how that legacy survives and continues to inspire everyday readers and young artists. If the volume of classic reprints this year is any indication, however, we graying lovers of newspapers past can’t be the only market for decades-old dailies. Many essential strips enjoyed fresh or continuing reprint projects this year that keeps the likes of Popeye, Nancy, Mandrake and more on current store shelves. Even the most reprinted strip of the last generation got revisited in 2024.
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Shelf Scan 2024: Taschen’s Ultimate Duck
Kicking off this year’s roundup reviews of notable books for comics history buffs, let’s start with the annual Taschen doorstop.
Continue readingAdvertising 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 readingA Usable Past for Advertising: Mucha and Art Nouveau’s Great Moment
This is a perfect time for a Mucha revival, I think. Advertising creative is exploring new depths of cultural irrelevance. Marketing seems to have become an unimaginative haven for data scientists and bureaucratic functionaries. And company efforts to align themselves with social progress and “meaningful branding” are now in full, cowardly retreat. And so, reviving both the art and thought of perhaps the greatest advertising illustrator of all time, Alphonse Mucha is not only welcome but necessary.
Continue readingJungle Jim Is A Ramblin’ Man…And Quite the Charmer
No one could mistake master artist Alex Raymond for a proto-feminist. In his and scribe Don Moore’s dual successes of the 1930s, Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, barely-clad distressed damsels abounded. To be sure, Raymond understood better than any comic strip artist the erotic potential of the formal, His male and female bodies were delicious. But it also goes almost without saying that the adventure genre has always been about male prowess and potency against forces natural, exotic, institutional and especially feminine. Comics artists like Carl Barks and Al Capp, among others, have recounted that newspaper editors often cited the 12-year old boy as the ideal target market for adventure strips. Well, yeah, sure…along with their horny Dads.
The adventure hero’s cavalier approach to women, romance, and all that icky girly stuff is clear in Jungle Jim’s caddish handling of two rival gal pals Lil and Kitty in this late 1941 interstitial between two episodes. Jim has no time for romance, and writes to Dear Jane letters, excusing himself from commitment. Lil gets the I’m-just-a-ramblin’-sorta-guy” brush off and Kitty gets the mock magnanimity ploy. “Find a nice substantial businessman… .” What a gentleman.
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.
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.
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