Shock Treatment: EC’s Opposite Direction Comics

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Unlike many previous reprints of EC Comics, Fantagraphics organized its “Artists’ Library” not by title but generally by artist. Better still, a black and white format highlights beautifully the line and ink work by legends like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, etc. And it shows these masters rendering some of the most suspenseful, violent, ghastly and otherworldly material across a range of stories so lurid and weird they attracted censorious government scrutiny. In other words, the Artists’ Library showcases the best cartoonists at the height of their powers and working on content that editor Al Feldstein deliberately matched to each one’s specific strengths. The project has been magnificent, especially in showing Davis, Wood, Kurtzman, Craig, Kamen and others evolve over time and respond to different material. It has been a thoughtfully designed series that makes even aficionados of EC think differently about what is in my mind the greatest run of comic book art ever. But the 40th volume in the Library, Shock Treatment, is unusual in many respects.

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Zeitgeist Funnies: The Paranoid Style…Of 1898

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We often forget that the first generation of newspaper cartoonists were  newspapermen.  Pioneers of the “funnies,” like R.F. (Yellow Kid) Outcault, Rudolph (Katzenjammer Kids) Dirks, F.B. (Happy Hooligan) Opper, Jimmy  (Little Jimmy) Swinnerton, Winsor (Little Nemo) McCay, as well as Art Young, Walt McDougall, George Luks emerged from newsrooms into the new comics supplements after 1896. They often spent years illustrating breaking stories and drawing pointed editorial cartoons while they were also inventing the comics as a new mass entertainment. The tone and style in these new comics pages were different – often ironic and satiric, screwball and sketchier – but they brought to these lighter arts the journalist’s deep acquaintance with all aspects of turn-of-the-century America. Outcault himself recounted how news gathering journeys through the slums of New York in the 1890s provided the raw material for Hogan’s Alley.

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Radical Physics: Milt Gross In Motion

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One of the basic joys of comics is every artist inventing their own physics. The distinctive cartoonists, at least, use line weight and figure shapes, action and reaction to create physical rules to govern their world, their own sense of gravity.

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“Gin-Guzzling Females” Play Catch With Baby: The Police Gazette’s Victorian Leer

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It was a kind of Victorian soft porn. For over a century, The National Police Gazette was ubiquitous at men’s clubs, barber shops, saloons, general store backrooms. The Gazette was the 19th Century forerunner of modern men’s magazines, the supermarket tabloids of my generation, and the viral news memes of today. It was also part of the changing visual culture of the late 19th Century that seeded the ground for the flowering of newspaper cartooning to come.

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The Obsessive American: Fixations, Tics and Mania in Early Comicdom

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Superstitious Sam

Early newspaper cartoonists had a fixation on fixations. From the relentless politeness of Alphonse and Gaston to the ravenous Hungry Henrietta to Mr. Jack’s apparent sex addiction, the comedy of dysfunction was central to the first decade of the medium. Rooted in caricature, and visual shorthand, cartooning has always been dominated by social typing of one kind or another. Racial stereotyping was rife, of course, in the first decade of strips especially. But they joined prankish kids, hapless husbands, befuddled cops, prissy socialites, country hayseeds, and wacky inventors in a kind of repertory cast of the comics pages in these years. But sometime after 1900, many cartoonists zoomed into specific characteristics, obsessions, and idiosyncratic tics to define a strip.

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McDougall’s Trolley Launches the Sunday Comics

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This Walt McDougall comic should be more famous than it seems to be. On May 21, 1893, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World published the first true color comics supplement of the modern era.1 It was a landmark effort that soon placed cartooning at the center of newspaper circulation wars and sparked a new mass medium. It is beyond me why this inaugural comic supplement cover is not more widely studied.  McDougall’s “Broadway Cable Car Possibilities” was more than an historical marker.  It carries within it, much of what made newspaper comics so appealing so quickly.

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Thimble Theatre Before Popeye: E.C. Segar, American Humorist

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Popeye’s impact on E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre in 1929 was so enormous that the previous decade of the strip’s life soon became a footnote to comics history. But, of course, Segar’s legendary storytelling skills in sagas like Plunder Island and the Popeye’s Ark/Spinachova cycle did not spring spontaneously from any newfound talent. He spent the previous decade developing a unique comic voice. Until now, the only deep dive into Pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre came from the beautiful, oversized, pricey collection from Sunday Press that collected select color Sundays across the1920s. But two new reprints of extended daily runs now let us zoom into the maturation of this singular American humorist through extended runs of the dailies. Thimble Theatre, The Complete Dailies, 1919-1920 (Boring Comics) initiates a multi-volume reprint project of all pre-Popeye strips from Library of American Comics veteran Kurtis Findlay.  And Thimble Theatre: “The Saga of Cylinda Oyl” Vol. 1, which covers April 22, 1926-Jan. 19, 1927) starts three-volume coverage of a major story, which comes to us from filmmaker Frank Tovar.

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