The United States of Snark: Tad Dorgan’s Indoor Sports

Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan (1877-1929) was a master of the miniscule moment. His wildly popular Indoor Sports single panel strip (1913-1929) captured, and mercilessly chided, the small stuff: judging the new boyfriend, or the new suit, or the new office boy; impressing the boss by laughing (too hard) at his jokes; saving face when the least experienced poker player wins the big pot; evaluating the new stenographer; a barroom braggart. This was a kind of cartoon social realism that would become familiar in comics pages across the next decades, because Tad pioneered the format. These indoor landscapes typically foregrounded minor pretention with a surrounding “peanut gallery” of onlooking family, office workers, bar customers offering snide asides on the situation.

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Deep Cuts: Quick Takes on Our Golden Age of Comic Strip Curiosities

About 10,000 different comic strip series emerged in American newspapers during the medium’s first 75 years, Jerry Robinson estimated in his 1974 history. I guess it all depends on what you count. Holtz’s magisterial 2012 “Encyclopedia” included just over 7,000 entries covering more than a century of strips. Whatever math you use, however, it is clear that a signature feature of the comics medium has been the sheer volume of creative variety. In fact, I would argue that among the competing commercialized mass media of the last century, the comic strip enjoyed a unique range of idiosyncratic, highly personal artistic visions.

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The Bungles Are Us

Misanthropic and petty, scheming and nagging, reviled by their neighbors and barely tolerable to themselves, The Bungle Family was the quintessential domestic comic strip of the 1920s. Critical historians like Bill Blackbeard, Rick Marshall and Art Spiegelman have singled out Harry J. Tuthill’s masterpiece as an especially dark and pointed critique of the modern petit bourgeoisie. But George, Jo and their daughter Peg were really the penultimate satirical family of 20s strips. Many of the qualities that characterized 1920s domestic strips were here, too. Like Mutt, Jeff, Barney Google and Andy Gump, George was a lower-middle-class man on the make, relentlessly attracted to get-rich-quick inventions or financial schemes. Jo was as much a nag, a scold and social climber as Jiggs’ Maggie. And the Bungle family dysfunction, bickering and resentments were at least as sharp as those at Moon Mullin’s boardinghouse or the suburban enclave of Mr. and Mrs.

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Roy Crane, Wash Tubbs and the Art of Cartoony Realism

Roy Crane always seemed to me underappreciated in the pantheon of comic artists. True aficionados of the medium recognize his talent, of course. But in that larger gallery of cartoon notables, we tend to mention him more than study him. Too often, Crane is recognized off-handedly for originating the continuous story adventure strip with Wash Tubbs (1924), a genre that then reached its height in Alex Raymond’s detailed illustrative style, Milton Caniff’s chiaroscuro and cinematic effects or Chester Gould’s primitive Grand Guignol.

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Paging Dr. Perfect: Rex Morgan Wants a Word

This just in from 1948… . Let’s give it up for doctors, expertise, institutional authority and the principles of science they represent. Nothing speaks to the post-WWII shift in American culture and comics as starkly as this Christmas 1948 message from Rex Morgan, M.D. The rise of the institutional hero was clear.

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“Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet…And Lands on Policeman’s Head”

In the first decade of newspaper comics, the line between familiar illustrated journalism and the emerging styles of cartooning sometimes blurred. My favorite example of those two worlds commingling is this news drawing from The San Francisco Call (Jan. 30, 1901), “Demented Woman Drops Thirty Feet From Hotel Fire Escape and Lands on Policeman’s Head.”

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“Stop Biting!”: Cairo Jones’ Hard-Boiled Cheesecake

The home front during World War II was a wonderful arena for gender reassignment. As we explored via E. Simms Campbell’s quick-witted and curvaceous “Cuties,” women adopted new roles with so many American men overseas, and this helped shake up, if for a while, a number of longstanding stereotypes across popular culture. Just as women were ready, willing and able to fill vacant jobs from the assembly line to management, they were just as ready to become adventure heroes.

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