Women-led “Amazon” worlds popped up in a ranges of comic strips during the 1930s and 40s, and they voiced a range of ideas about the prospects for matriarchal rule. In an earlier article we explored otherworldy femtopias in Buck Rogers 25th Century, the Connie strip’s vision of the 30th Century and even in the “Bone Age” of caveman Alley Oop. More muscular he-men heroes like The Phantom and Tarzan, however, found the prospect of matriarchy a bit more, well, shall we say, threatening?
“It is a old comical strip trick – pretendin’ th’ hero gotta git married.” It keeps “stupid readers excited,” Li’l Abner claims in 1952. Days later he unwittingly weds Daisy Mae, ending a nearly 20 year tease. But this time it was no “comical strip” trick. In fact, several perennial bachelors of the comics pages fell in a post-WWII rush to the altar. Along with Abner, Prince Valiant, Buz Sawyer, Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake all enjoyed funny page weddings between 1946 and 1957. Comic strip heroes were just following the lead of the real-world heroes returning from WWII. Desperate to make up for lost time and return to normality, over 16 million Americans got hitched in 1946, the year after war ended in Europe and the Pacific. But each of these strips framed the new normal in American life differently. As the best of popular art often does, Vale, Dick, Abner, Buz, Kerry and their mates offered Americans a range of stories, myths really, about what this new normal meant.
I am an EC chauvinist. I should cop to this before rounding up the notable pre-code comic book reprints from the last year. For decades now I have been devouring the many crime, horror, sci-fi, and romance comics that were part of the glut of adult titles after WWII, in part because they represented the unrealized potential of the comics format in post-war America. This was a real pop culture moment. War veterans ate a steady diet of comic books “over there” and seemed primed to follow the medium into more nuanced and adult storylines in the 40s and 50s. Likewise overseas, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées were on a similar path towards the popular, if not literary, mainstream. But in the U.S. that evolution was derailed and slammed into reverse by anti-comics crusades and the industry’s own “Comics Code Authority” in 1954. Self-censorship effectively arrested the medium in pre-adolescence, focused the industry on anodyne morality tales and pubescent fantasies of super-human prowess for at least a couple of decades.
“A hundred yard jump! And a girl soldier, too! Say, sister, need help?
The first thing Buck Rogers sees when he wakes from his 500 year slumber is a flying bare-legged woman…with a gun. That Jan. 7, 1929 strip launched American newspaper comics into a new age of heroic continuity strips, which historians have dubbed “The Adventurous Decade.”1 And across Buck, Flash (Gordon), Dick (Tracy), Pat (Ryan), the Prince (Valiant) and of course Tarzan, this decade in the newspaper back pages became famous for a pulpy hyper-masculinity that culminated in the rise of the superhero in the late 30s. And yet, as Buck’s premiere strip suggests, it would also be one of the weirdest stretches in the depiction of powerful women in popular culture. This would play out especially in adventure comics’ curious fixation with putting women in charge during the Depression years. Amazon tribes, criminal gal gangs, and futuristic matriarchies peppered adventure strips. We are all familiar with the creation of Wonder Woman in 1941 and her origin on the ladies-only Paradise Island.2 But this trope started in comics more than a decade earlier, first with Buck but then resurfacing in The Phantom, Tarzan, Alley Oop, and Frank Godwin’s Connie. Fantasizing about matriarchal societies within the adventure genre was not just a clever escapist plot device. Each of these Amazon worlds imagined different alternative societies where women called the shots and shaped the culture. Taken as a while, this pop culture trope suggested a deep ambivalence about the changing roles and independence of women. Putting women in charge was a kind of gender lab that played with ideas of feminine power under the stress of both Depression and modernization.
Across five decades of adulthood, every woman I have ever known was familiar, often intimately, with Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy (1976-2010). Our heroine’s struggles with new and old gender roles, the pressures of fashion and body messaging, diet trends, new tech, workplace culture…and MOM, always MOM, found their way into more diaries, onto more refrigerators and clipped into mother/daughter exchanges than any comic of its day. Tis a pity that so many of us male comics readers passed it over as “not for us” or simply unfunny. Spending a couple of days immersed in the new and most welcome 4-volume Cathy 50th Anniversary Collection ($225, Andrews McMeel) makes clear that Cathy was among the most insightful, witty and intelligent strips we had about the experience of post-counter-culture America. And I could have avoided a lot of stupid missteps with the women in my life if I had paid even glancing attention to Guisewite’s wisdom.
“Bah, for Mr. Charles Dana Gibson,” declared the Spokane Press in early 1908. Who needs the signature Gibson Girl anymore. “Miss Fluffy Ruffles is the newest type to which all the girls aspire.”1 The job-hunting, resourceful, and decidedly independent heroine became a national sensation shortly after her Feb. 3 premiere in the New York Herald. Fluffy was a pioneering woman in the workplace battling a reversal in fortune by making weekly tries as a journalist, florist, schoolteacher, dairy maid, waitress and more. The full page Sunday story was conceived and told in comic verse by a professional woman of note herself, the children’s and mystery writer Carolyn Wells. Herald illustrator Wallace Morgan dramatized the tale in vignettes that seemed to channel Charles Dana Gibson’s genteel magazine style. The series ran until early 1909 and quickly a multimedia juggernaut. The early episodes of her job-seeking stage were reprinted in book form before 1907 ended. Within six months of the launch The Herald started contests to find real-life Fluffy Ruffles that migrated to partner newspapers around the country. Paper dolls, chocolates, sheet music, branded hats and suits, even cigars, soon carried the Fluffy Ruffles brand. A 1908 Broadway musical production would travel the country until at least 1910, a year after the strip itself had ended.
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.
Panels & Prose 