As we move more deeply into the 1930s and the peak years of comic strip adventure, some of the most recognizable and enduring cartoon fiends emerge. The villainy enlarges to suggest global criminal conspiracies and political power as it also becomes more sadistic. Newspaper comics are edging towards the outsized heroes and super-villains that formed the foundation of the comic books to come. [For the first installment of our valley of villains, refer to Part 1.
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Villainy is, well, a necessary evil. At least so far as popular adventure is concerned. What is a hero without an antagonist, morality plays without sin? Whether it is the Satan of Genesis or of Milton, the slave-driving Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Holmes’s worthy nemesis Moriarty, villainy is always a statement about evil itself that is somehow embedded in its time and its creator’s world view. That is what makes baddies so much fun to unravel. Paradise Lost is the original object lesson in our finding evil more intriguing than heroism. But the comic strip had particular roles in the evolution of popular scoundrels. Along with dime novels, pulp magazine fiction and film serials, it was among a cluster of turn-of-the-century mass media that relied on serialized heroes and stories. From these new modes of endless storytelling arose a popular sensation, the recurring villain. Moriarty (Conan Doyle), Fu Manchu (Rohmer), Fantômas (Allain and Souvestre) and a range of black-masked kidnappers of the chronically imperiled silent film heroine Pauline (Perils of Paulin) set the pattern. But the comic strip brought to evildoing its unique aesthetic strengths: believable absurduty, the light tone of caricature, and relentless irony. With some exceptions, this medium made evil unserious, fun, or at least safely farcical.
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Alert the gender police! Recruit the culture warriors. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip was bending gender norms more than 70 years ago. In fact, this 1953 story arc weirdly foreshadowed current skirmishes over cross-dressing, drag performance, legal gender reassignment and even “men” playing in women’s sports.
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We could easily frame Hal Foster’s 1931-1937 run of Tarzan Sunday comics merely as a pleasant preamble to his magnum opus, Prince Valiant. By his own admission, Foster was a reluctant cartoonist. The successful magazine and commercial artist carried that world’s condescension towards the comic strip. Famously, he quipped in 1984 that being invited to replace Rex Maxon on the Tarzan Sundays was “To be asked to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.” But the Great Depression had hit advertising and print media hard, so Foster took the life raft. But as TASCHEN’s new and definitive reprint of his Tarzan years shows, Foster was doing more than warming up. Others like Frank Godwin and Nell Brinkley had already started to introduce less cartoony, more illustrative styles to comics pages. But Foster brought into the mix dynamic, realistic figure art, a remarkable attention to color, and an appreciation for spectacle that newspaper Sunday pages hadn’t seen since the earliest years of experimentation by the likes of McCay and Feininger.
Fantagraphics celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and continues its mission to preserve and promote the comic arts. We spoke at length to the company’s longtime editorial fixture, From Popeye to Pogo, Krazy Kat to Charlie Brown, few companies have been such prolific archivists of the comic strip tradition. Anniversaries are a good time to check in. And so we visited with VP/Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds to explore preserving comics history and preview of the delicious releases they have planned for this milestone year.
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This is a good time for modern comic strip fans to recall Charles Dana Gibson’s role in late Victorian American culture. The most famous illustrator of his day had a calming, languid line and upscale focus that contrasted sharply with everything the early newspaper comic strip represented. Just as a tsunami of recent comic strip reprints celebrate the raucousness of 20th Century cartooning, Gibson’s epoch-defining artistry reminds us of what the “vulgar” new medium was disrupting. It also suggests why the scions of civility found the Sunday supplements so offensive and magazine illustrators like Gibson so engaging.
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Panels & Prose 