Dingbat Calls In the Klan: Herriman’s Bourgeois Obsessive

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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. 

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The Timid Soul Toys With Fascism

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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.

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Chatty Pantomime: Little Tragedies Strikingly Told in Four Words (1903)

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There were no firm rules for comic artists during that first 10 or 15 years of newspaper strips. Formats, aesthetic conventions, even panel shapes and limits hadn’t been fully established. The medium was still elastic. And so we see in these years wild experiments in artistic styles, unfettered explorations of page and the panel structures, even testing different interactions of words and image. Little Tragedies Strikingly Told in Four Words contains that spirit in its own title. It frames itself as an experiment. Crafted by the otherwise forgettable Alfred W. Brewerton for the New York Evening World between Oct. 1903 and June 1904, it was an unusually long-lived title to appear several times a week. True to its title, the strip is indeed striking because it blends pantomime and text in a novel way that is also compact, highly stylized, even wry. It recalls that famous quip about Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy being easier not to read than to read. And like Nancy, the strip gets at something elemental about how comics work.

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Mmmm…Coal!: Mandrake’s Metal Men Are Hungry

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Here is your Weekly Weird. Call it comfort food for robots. When Lee Falk and Phil Davis sent their Mandrake the Magician into “Dimension X” in 1937 they found early stage AI. Metal Men were made of conscious “living metal” that dined on coal and oil and enslaved humans. This was a remarkable episode with loads of compellng art and wildly imaged alternative physics. We went into it in depth here.

Why Popeye Wears His Pants So Low

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“I Shot Him In the Ass!” John Held Jr.’s Lewd Linocuts

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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.

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Baby Mandrake’s Evil Twin?

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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.