Tag Archives: history

Happy 100th Bloomsday: Read Something Hard

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On June 16, 1922, Jame Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris and quickly became a monument to the many strands of modernism that had been coursing through the literary and visual arts in the first decades of the 20th Century. And it would confound scholars and students ever after. To celebrate, here is a small collection of David Levine’s wonderful caricatures of the great Dubliner from The New York Review of Books. Levine’s puckish takes on revered literary figures in NYRB served as a welcome counterpoint to the somber and studied tone of the critical prose in the magazine.

Whatever one thinks of Joyce’s Ulysses, I am experiencing rereading it this week as an important antidote to the culture of now. So much of our high and low art on the 100th Bloomsday in 2022 is aimed at pandering, to providing messages and experiences that demand nothing of us. The digital targeting of messages and news through social media, art that likewise targets our sense of our own identity, leaders who follow – nothing about our culture makes us work at understanding anything beyond who and where we are now. Joyce is hard and disorienting, and reading him demands both attention and aiming higher than our current understanding. It is worth putting those demands on ourselves and our arts.

Joyce himself was not a visual artist, even if his prose was a master class in imagery. But he did try his hand at cartooning once in an artist’s studio when recovering from one of his many eye surgeries. Below is his rough rendering of Ulysses’ protagonist Leopold Bloom. I believe the words above it are the opening lines of the Odyssey.

If not Joyce, then try something else that is hard to read. Happy Bloomsday.

McManus’s One Joke, Deftly Told

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Comic disharmony between Jiggs and Maggie over their social climb was the central joke of George McManus’s Bringing Up Father for over four decades. For all of McManus’s fine sense of humor, he banged that one note across four panels six days a week and a full page every Sunday. To be sure, he layered in nuances of class and generational conflict. Jiggs was a hod carrier who struck it rich, never adjusted to his own ascent, and clashed with wife Maggie and daughter’s ambitions to join the social elite. The dynamic was rich with potential and embodied the experience of millions of American emigrees moving into the modern middle class. But many of the daily strips tediously replayed Jiggs’s sneaking out to his former watering hole Dinty Moore’s, embarrassing his family with etiquette transgressions or ducking Maggie’s thrown dishes. These were conventions that American newspaper readers enjoyed hearing for a handful of panels and 30 seconds a day over its 87-year run. McManus, however, was especially adept at maintaining reader interest in the familiar with his mastery of visual style, panel sequencing and timing.

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Napoleon: The Gentle Art of Everyday-ness

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Clifford McBride’s portrait of the affable, accident-prone and corpulent Uncle Elby and his puckish oversized dog Napoleon is one of those great American comic strips that are about nothing. There is no adventure or much of an ongoing storyline to the Napoleon and Uncle Elby strip. Nor are there gags, verbal or physical, really. It is more a strip about everyday mishaps. Uncle Elby is proud of his new white suit, which an affectionate Napoleon meets at the the front door with muddy paws. Constructing a simple tent results in a tangled mess. Napoleon chases a fleeing rabbit, chicken,  cat or whatnot (it’s a frequent theme), only to be chased by his prey in the end. Elby mows over one of his dog’s hidden bones, which conks him on the bean. Elby gets out of his car to open the garage door only to have it slam shut before he can drive through.

No, really, the action in the Napoleon strip is that banal and trifling…relentlessly…and apparently by design.

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Gasoline Alley 1922: Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

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Premiere Panels: Mandrake Materializes…Eventually

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It took a full week of strips for the eponymous hero of Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magician strip to make his grand entrance. June 11, 1934 was the first strip, which evokes some of the feel of a classic mystery wind-up. But on June 15, in what has to stand as one of the most unambiguously racist intros in pop culture history, Mandrake’s “servant” Lothar heralds the coming of his “master.” One doesn’t even know where to start here. Falk’s full bore colonialism is more fully and relentlessly explored in his later The Phantom series whose origin we covered here and whose fetishes we covered here.

For all of its weaknesses, Mandrake remains important both to comic strip and comic book history in that his is the first strip to move towards a super-powered hero. Mandrake’s “magic” is only nominally super-natural, in that it is based on the power of suggestion and influence over others’ minds. But it precedes the appearance of Superman by 5 years and aldo nods towards costumed heroism, which would be more fully introduced in Falk’s The Phantom.

Opper’s Antediluvian Ancestors: The Original Flintstones

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This 1903 installment of Frederick Burr Opper’s Our Antediluvian Ancestors bears an eerie resemblance to Hanna-Barbera’s 60’s cartoon sit-com The Flintstones. From the Stone Age name play to the pet dinos to the rock-wheeled auto, it almost feels like source material. The anachronistic approach to the ancients took fuller form in Alley Oop in the 19300s and then again in B.C.

Opper was best known of course for the hapless hobo Happy Hooligan strip and the maddeningly polite duo of Alphonse and Gaston. But in this series we see his affection for the small comic details. Dig that crank and belt mechanism for the Antedeluvians’ car. Apparently, brakes had not been invented yet. Catch the blacksmith shoe-ing the mastodon. And of course there is Opper’s mastery of mayhem. Part of Opper’s physical comedy comes in his telegraphing the disaster unfolding yet still surprising us with unexpected twists. He was helping to invent some of the basic grammar of comic strip slapstick as well as the art of comic timing between panels. I think Opper doesn’t get the credit he deserves for refining some of the physics of early cartoon comedy. He represented frenetic action, cause and effect, and the slow motion effect to establish what made the funnies funny.

Find a deeper dive into Opper’s visual poetry in this earlier post.

Our Antediluvian Ancestors started in Hearst papers in 1901 and ran for several years. While not as popular as some of his other longer running work, this series was reprinted at the time.

Serious Fantasy: Nell Brinkley’s Flapper Feminism

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A wildly successful woman in the man’s world of cartooning, Nell Brinkley (1886-1944) was intent on letting her comics page heroines have it all. Fantasy was the passport Brinkley used to ferret her characters and readers from the domesticity most experienced to a world of self-expression, assertiveness, fame and professional success. I have written a bit about Brinkley in an earlier review of Trina Robbins’ superb Flapper Queens, and I am in the middle of writing an extended essay on her under-appreciated importance to comics history. But here is a compact example of the wonderful extravagance of her romantic fantasies and the ways she channeled for women a growing frustration with the social roles available to them in 1920s America.

Dimples’ Day Dreams from 1928 came late in the series of graphic short stories Brinkley drew through much of the 1920s, each of which would run for a dozen or so weekly episodes. In Dimples, Brinkley underscores a theme present in most of her work, modern women breaking out of the domestic sphere into adventure, professional competence, intrigue, fame. Romantic engagement and marriage often served as the end point of these series, but not the substance of most episodes. In fact, by the time we get to 1928, Brinkley’s Dimples premise is the tension between social expectations of women, Dimples’ boyfriend begging her to marry, and dreaming of bigger, more satisfying lives.

“Be Pretty Mrs. Jones” urges Dimples “droning” boyfriend. Broken down here into its rough panel structure, this episode embodies Brinkley’s use of feminine escapist fantasy as a motif. And the sheer extravagance of that fantasy is such a delicious part of Brinkley’s work. Dimples isn’t just a celebrated film star in this day dream, but her erotic power threatens to “burn the fuses.” The thrill of Brinkley’s work is its excess. There is the excess of line work and detail. There is the material excess of her heroes’ embrace of Gatsby-era materialism, high fashion, eroticism. It is all there and all over the top.

Compared to just about anyone else working in the Sunday comics pages of the 1920s, Brinkley extended the form into a unique kind of visual storytelling. Her “panels” are aimed less at advancing a linear story than hitting different emotional notes to flesh out a central fantasy. Most of her Sunday strip culminate in an emotional climax rather than a gag or story resolution in an oversized splash image. Compare this progression to that other great comics master of fantasy, Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend0. McCay’s fantasies end in a final panel where his protagonist wakes from the dream. Brinkley end with the fantasy at its peak.

Nell Brinkley is not only an undervalued pioneer of American comics, but she is an important figure in understanding the complex history of American women in the last century. On a weekly basis she was engaging her audience’s discontent with the social roles available to them and fantasizing a broader range of options. That she had to use extravagant fantasy and daydreaming to get there only underscored the constraints her admiring audience experienced and felt.