#Al Capp (cartoonist)

[spaceintruderdetector]

A textbook on cartooning written in 1956, now in the public domain. Written by some of the most well-known cartoonists of the era, such as Al Capp, Rube Goldberg, and Milton Caniff.

Famous Artists Cartoon Course : Al Capp, Rube Goldberg, Milton Caniff, Harry Haenigsen, Willard Mullin, Guerny Williams, Dick Cavalli, Whitney Darrow Jr., Virgil Partch, Barney Tobey : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

#comics #sequential art #drawing

[oldshowbiz]

Rapist cartoonist Al Capp

#al capp #comics #The Sixties #comedy records

[beatleshistoryblog]

LECTURE 19: COMING APART (PART 2): If you’ve got an hour and 11 minutes to spare, have a look at this documentary about the so-called Bed-Ins that proved to be a favourite tactic of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their anti-Vietnam War activism. They held their famous Montreal Bed-In at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel from May 26 to June 2, 1969. At about 8 minutes into the documentary, cartoonist Al (Li'l Abner) Capp comes walking into their hotel room in Montreal, introducing himself as a “dreadful fascist.” Capp leaps into a heated debate with Ono and Lennon about their Bed-In. He’s full of sarcasm and insults, even though he tries to stay jovial, and, at times, he seems open to hearing other points of view. It’s clear that Capp is a cultural conservative who doesn’t care for antiwar protests. Dick Gregory also makes a moving appearance in the film, after Capp is done ranting. There are lots of other lively scenes in the documentary, and it is an important document of its time, and it demonstrates convincingly that John and Yoko were committed to peace activism. Hang in there until about 51 minutes into the film, when John and Yoko perform a rousing version of “Give Peace a Chance.”

#John Lennon #Yoko Ono #Bed-Ins #Anti-Vietnam War Movement #Al Capp #Dick Gregory #Give Peace a Chance #documentaries #film #cinema #Montreal #1969

[gordoymas]

Some of the comic strips which were significant influences on Arriola as a working cartoonist included Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Folks, Al Capp's Li'l Abner, Walt Kelly's Pogo and Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, the latter of which earns a cameo in this self-referential strip from February 10, 1952.

#gordo #gus arriola #comic strips #ernie bushmiller #nancy

[chazzbot]

My Year in Reading: 2023

Here is every book I read over the last year, listed in the order I read them. These are the books I read cover-to-cover and completed. Books I particularly enjoyed are in boldface. Books I’ve read multiple times are marked with an asterisk.

James Tiptree, Jr. - The Girl Who Was Plugged In*

Kazuo Umezz - The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 2

Vonda N. McIntyre - Screwtop*

Hitoshi Iwaaki - Parasyte 8

James Spooner - The High Desert

Ernest Hemingway - True at First Light

Adrian Tomine - The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

Jeff Lemire - Mazebook

Neil Gaiman & P. Craig Russell - Norse Mythology, Vol. 1

Veronica Roth - Arch-Conspirator

Annie Ernaux - Getting Lost

Seamus Heaney - The Burial at Thebes

John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Alexander Theroux - The Enigma of Al Capp

Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips - Fatale, Book Two: The Devil's Business

Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips - Fatale, Book Three: West of Hell

Jason - Upside Dawn

Nick Hornby - Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

Scott Snyder & Jeff Lemire - A. D. : After Death

Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Alisa Kwitney & Mike Norton - Mystik U

Kelly Barnhill - The Crane Husband

Steve Brodner - Living and Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020 - 2022

Hua Hsu - Stay True

Stephen King - Billy Summers

Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock: A Diary

Salman Rushdie - Joseph Anton: A Memoir

Alberto Moravia - Agostino

Don Winslow - City on Fire

Paul Auster & Spencer Ostrander - Bloodbath Nation

David Milch - Life's Work: A Memoir

Larry McMurtry - Horseman, Pass By

Patti Smith - A Book of Days

Gahan Wilson - Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons, Book Three: 1994 - 2008

Claire Keegan - Foster

Lucinda Williams - Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

Fantasy & Science Fiction (Oct/Nov 2000)

Fantasy & Science Fiction (January 1972)

Michael Connelly - Dark Sacred Night

Denise Mina - Three Fires

Jon Fosse - Aliss at the Fire

Kristen Radtke - Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

Bob Layton - Hercules: Prince of Power*

Gahan Wilson - Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons, Book One: 1957 - 1973

Annie Ernaux - The Young Man

Julia Wertz - Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story

Sean Murphy - Batman: Curse of the White Knight

Paul McCartney - 1964: Eyes of the Storm

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 9.28

Beer Birthdays

Alexander Rodenbach (1786)

Frederick Schaefer (1817)

Gerard Adriaan Heineken (1841)

Gregg Smith

Five Favorite Birthdays

Brigitte Bardot; French actor (1934)

Confucius; Chinese philosopher (551 B.C.E.)

Janeane Garofalo; comedian, actor (1964)

John Sayles; film director, screenwriter (1950)

Dita Von Teese; burlesque artist (1972)

Famous Birthdays

Al Capp; cartoonist (1909)

Caravaggio; Italian artist (1573)

C.J. Chenier; Zydeco musician (1957)

Jerry Clower; comedian (1926)

Thomas Crapper; English inventor (1836)

Hilary Duff; actor, singer (1987)

Peter Finch; actor (1912)

Jeffrey Jones; actor (1946)

Ben E. King; singer (1938)

Sylvia Kristel; actor (1952)

Marcello Mastroianni; Italian actor (1924)

Janet Munro; British actor (1934)

Carre Otis; model, actor (1968)

William Paley; CBS founder (1901)

Mira Sorvino; actor (1967)

Ed Sullivan; television host (1902)

Koko Taylor; blues singer (1928)

J.T. Walsh; actor (1943)

Naomi Watts; actor (1968)

Kate Wiggin; writer (1856)

William Windom; actor (1923)

Moon Unit Zappa; actor (1967)

#Birthdays

[strictlyfavorites]

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 91 years ago today

Silverstein grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago and attended Roosevelt High School. Later, he went the University of Illinois before he was expelled. He then attended Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Roosevelt University for three years, until 1953 when he was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan and Korea.

Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the works of Al Capp. "When I was a kid — 12 to 14, around there — I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls, but I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn't have anybody to copy, be impressed by,” he told Publisher’s Weekly.

“I had developed my own style. I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn't rather make love, but the work has become a habit."

After returning to Chicago, Silverstein began submitting cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks. His cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.

In 1957, Silverstein became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments called "Shel Silverstein Visits..." as a feature for Playboy.

Employing a sketchbook format with typewriter-styled captions, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony, the Chicago White Sox training camp, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Fire Island, Mexico, London, Paris, Spain and Africa.

Silverstein's passion for music was clear early on as he studied briefly at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. His musical output included a large catalog of songs — a number of which were hits for other artists, most notably the rock group, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.

He wrote Tompall Glaser's highest-charting solo single "Put Another Log on the Fire," "One's on the Way" (a hit for Loretta Lynn) and "25 Minutes to Go," sung by Johnny Cash, about a man on Death Row with each line counting down one minute closer.

Silverstein also wrote one of Johnny Cash's best known hits, "A Boy Named Sue." Other songs co-written by Silverstein include "the Taker" by Waylon Jennings and "On Susan’s Floor” by Gordon Lightfoot and a sequel to "A Boy Named Sue" called: "Father of a Boy Named Sue" which is less known, but he performed the song on television on The Johnny Cash Show.

He also penned a song entitled "F*** 'em" which is lesser known and contained a reference to "f*** children."

Silverstein styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copies.

On May 10, 1999, Silverstein died at age 68 of a massive heart attack in Key West, Florida.

[laughingblue12]

So Ugly...It's Beautiful?

So Ugly…It’s Beautiful?

Lena the Hyena appeared in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner in 1946. Basil Wolverton (1909 to 1978) became famous as a cartoonist by winning a contest. He submitted the picture of Lena to Al Capp’s newspaper strip to answer the question of what Lena, who had been appearing for weeks in Li’l Abner underneath a black square with an editor’s warning printed on it that she was just too ugly to be…

View On WordPress

#Basil Wolverton #cartoon review

[joshquagmire]

Your bunnies are sooooo cute. Do you have any artistic or celebrity inspirations or are they just an amalgamation of what you find cute/sexy?

Thanx for the note - as to inspiration, there's a lot of great cartoonists & Animators who's work I love, Al Capp's "Lil Abner" Bob Clampett's "Coal Black", Avery & Preston Blair's "Red Hot Riding Hood" - the works of Osamu Tezuka, Walt Kelly, Elsie Segar and so on... as for the Bunny herself, she was a sort of fluke, I never expected that her popularity would linger on after her last comix was printed back in the 90s...

Don't know if you've checked it out, but for the past few year's I've been doing a web comix at: www.bunzandkatz.com or (www.totaldoom.com) works as well... Cutey has made a few cameos there as well in a couple of Rudie Easter pages... Though the main strip itself concerns a couple of underachieving alien invaders... also, it's all *Free*...

Note, if you email me, ([email protected]) I can send along a few odd bunny pix

Thanx again... JQ

[beatlesblog]

LECTURE 19: COMING APART (PART 2): If you’ve got an hour and 11 minutes to spare, have a look at this documentary about the so-called Bed-Ins that proved to be a favorite tactic of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their anti-Vietnam War activism. At about 8 minutes into the documentary, cartoonist Al (Li'l Abner) Capp comes walking into their hotel room in Montreal, introducing himself as a “dreadful fascist.” Capp leaps into a heated debate with Ono and Lennon about their Bed-In. He’s full of sarcasm and insults, even though he tries to stay jovial, and, at times, he seems open to hearing other points of view. It’s clear that Capp is a cultural conservative who doesn’t care for antiwar protests. Dick Gregory also makes a moving appearance in the film, after Capp is done ranting. There are lots of other lively scenes in the documentary, and it is an important document of its time, and it demonstrates convincingly that John and Yoko were committed to peace activism. Hang in there until about 51 minutes into the film, when John and Yoko perform a rousing version of “Give Peace a Chance.”

#John Lennon #Yoko Ono #1969 #Al Capp (cartoonist) #protest #Anti-Vietnam War Movement #documentary films #Montreal #activism #radicalism #Dick Gregory

[altcomics]

A shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with stubby legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows, and sparse whiskers—but no arms, nose, or ears. Its feet are short and round, but dexterous, as the shmoo's comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions and often expresses love by exuding hearts over its head. Cartoonist Al Capp ascribed to the shmoo the following curious characteristics:

They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.

Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself—either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.

They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timbers, depending on how thick one slices them.

They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.

Naturally gentle, they require minimal care and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoos is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.

Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch, however. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, use a paper bag, flashlight, and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they may be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

[weirdlandtv]

From 1942 onwards, L’IL ABNER occasionally featured a second strip within its pages, a parody of Chester Gould’s DICK TRACY: Lester Gooch’s FEARLESS FOSDICK, “ideel of all red-blooded American boys”. This strip-within-a-strip started out as a playful one-off, then became a running gag, then a full-fledged continuing strip that sometimes sidetracked its parent strip for weeks on end. It ended when L’IL ABNER itself ended in 1977 (the last Sunday strip was a Fearless Fosdick story). Al Capp must really have loved Fearless Fosdick.

And not just Capp. Fearless Fosdick is L’il Abner’s one true love. Abner does whatever Dick does, worships him, idolizes him. If Fosdick is happy, Abner is happy. If Fosdick is almost killed, Abner almost kills himself. (As I wrote in a previous entry, L’IL ABNER is a fairly homoerotic comic.) Abner’s smitten devotion to Fosdick is much to the dismay of Daisy Mae of course, who passionately yearns for Abner but never gets anywhere with him. Time and again Daisy Mae finds herself competing with the fictional Fosdick for Abner’s attention, though it’s not much of a competition. She can’t win. She hates Fosdick obviously, but quietly, so as not to evoke Abner’s anger. And man does he lash out when anyone dares to criticize the object of his worship. It’s not even funny. He’s mental. Was it Al Capp’s intention to create a character so dense that the reader just wants to punch him—punch, karate kick, steamroll, and shoot full of holes, the way that kind of thing habitually happens to Fosdick? (Fosdick in fact looks like a Swiss cheese under his suit, but he dismisses the gaping bullet holes in his body as “merely flesh wounds”.) Abner is both an infuriatingly stupid oaf and a passive-agressive terror, a mix between Goofy and Gaston and Barney Rubble. Daisy Mae really must hate herself to love him so undyingly. Abner keeps putting her down, keeps calling her ugly and dumb and desperate and laughs at her in her face, and yet she forgives him like a mother forgives her cruel and moody son that’s going through puberty.

When Daisy Mae and Abner eventually do marry in 1952, it’s only because Fosdick in the comic marries and Abner is keen to imitate his icon. And even then Abner only agrees to get married because he expects Fosdick will figure out some way to escape at the last possible moment, like he always finds a way out of death-traps. But no: it happens, Fosdick marries, so Abner has no choice but to follow suit. The marriage between L’il Abner and Daisy Mae was big news at the time, making the cover of LIFE magazine. Imagine that though. Popular cartoonists were STARS—Al Capp was a star, who moved in high circles and received letters from presidents and celebrities alike.

Then, Abner and Daisy Mae having finally tied the knot, things change. After having put up with Abner’s all-consuming standom for 10 years, the demure Daisy Mae starts to develop something of a rebellious streak. Here she is, a housewife, sentenced to a life of cleaning and cooking, while that fosdickhead Abner is still goofing off with no eyes for anything but his big comic strip idol. It’s like Daisy Mae is waking up. Her attitude changes. No longer does she come running to Abner every morning with the day’s paper in her hand, anxiously awaiting how Fosdick’s mood will affect Abner’s mood, now she looks at the whole situation with a kind of simmering hatred. There’s this panel where Daisy Mae is playing with their son, and the letters of the ABC blocks spell out “Fearless Fosdick is an idiot”. It’s hilariously subtle, but not so subtle. She’s not just playing. She’s rallying support.

#lil abner #l’il abner #al capp #comics #comic art #art #vintage #newspaper #strips #daisy mae

[beatlesblog207]

LECTURE 19: COMING APART (PART 2): If you’ve got an hour and 11 minutes to spare, have a look at this documentary about the so-called Bed-Ins that proved to be a favourite tactic of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their anti-Vietnam War activism. At about 8 minutes into the documentary, cartoonist Al (Li'l Abner) Capp comes walking into their hotel room in Montreal, introducing himself as a “dreadful fascist.” Capp leaps into a heated debate with Ono and Lennon about their Bed-In. He’s full of sarcasm and insults, even though he tries to stay jovial, and, at times, he seems open to hearing other points of view. It’s clear that Capp is a cultural conservative who doesn’t care for antiwar protests. Dick Gregory also makes a moving appearance in the film, after Capp is done ranting. There are lots of other lively scenes in the documentary, and it is an important document of its time, and it demonstrates convincingly that John and Yoko were committed to peace activism. Hang in there until about 51 minutes into the film, when John and Yoko perform a rousing version of “Give Peace a Chance.”

#John Lennon #Yoko Ono #Bed-Ins #Anti-Vietnam War activism #Al Capp #Dick Gregory #Give Peace A Chance #documentaries #films #cinema

[richardnixonlibrary]

#Nixon50 #OTD 11/24/1970 President Nixon looking at a bust of himself given during a meeting with cartoonist-sculptor-inventor-author-engineer Rube Goldberg, Mrs. Irma Goldberg, and Daniel J. Boorstin, Director of the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology. (Image: WHPO-5136-14).

The President also met that day with cartoonist Al Capp. (Image: WHPO- 5140-08A) Both Goldberg and Capp were in Washington to attend a dinner held in Goldberg's honor by the Smithsonian Institution. Sadly, Rube Goldberg died two weeks later on December 7th at the age of 87.

[arecomicsevengood]

I’ve been trying to slow down the pace of my anxious brain, to move it away from the obsessive unsatisfying masturbatory procrastinating of clicking refresh. I want the presence of mind that comes from focused reading, I want to heal the destroyed reward mechanism of my brain. Absent the structure to days that comes with leaving the house, quarantine conditions have exacerbated these problems. I sought out older newspaper strips, because they have a leisurely pace. While no one would actually read a book-length collection a day at a time, in recreation of how they were originally read, the guiding principle that they be taken in as a diversion while doing other things is worth keeping in mind, as it runs opposite to current directives to binge-watch TV shows. Theoretically, having these narratives exist in parallel to the procession of days would be a nice respite from quarantine’s time-warp effect. However, when reading older newspaper strips, especially if you’re paying attention to the news at all, one is frequently jarred by the presence of racial caricatures.

I really try to avoid being someone offended by work that comes from a completely different cultural context. I’m a white dude, and while I don’t want to be quick to forgive anyone’s racism, I also don’t want to be one of those people that rush to condemn things as a way to posit myself as some sort of enlightened authority. Trying to “cancel” someone who’s long dead really only makes you into someone dismissive of history, which only works to one’s detriment.

Still, when the protests against police violence turned to easily-communicated gestures of symbolic speech, and iconoclastic energy was directed against statues of historical colonialists rather than the more immediate threats presented by police cruisers, conservatives defended such statues arguing their historical importance. This argument is extremely disingenuous. We can choose the historical narrative we want to present to ourselves. While the majority of opinions enshrined in law throughout the course of American political history were those slave-owners and genocide-justifiers, there’s nonetheless a vast cultural history it would serve as well to look to and posit as who we are. Every decision made was the result of argument, the losers of the arguments unaccountably brave. Ever since reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I’ve been convinced that if any woman should be preserved on our money, it’s Jeanette Rankin, if only so her story would then be taught in schools. The work of a historian is to make an argument by collecting threads of a narrative out of the collective chaos of ongoing time before it’s all lost to entropy and rot.

Much credit is due to comics historian Bill Blackbeard, who edited the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics, for what it is now clear is the considerable effort he must’ve made to avoid including too many depictions of racial stereotypes in his survey. He did so because he was arguing for comic strips being an art form, and avoiding the laziness of racial caricature helps that argument be made. He doesn’t bypass them completely: They’re in a Herriman strip, Baron Bean, albeit only for a few panels. They’re also on prominent display in the McKay Little Nemo strips. Maybe they’re somewhere else I didn’t look at too closely, it’s a large book.

But imagine my surprise and mortification when I bought a big collection of Polly And Her Pals Sunday strips and encountered these “mammy” caricatures in the depiction of servants. And then, when I bought a collection of Walt And Skeezix dailies, there it was again. These strips are well-regarded, considered the best of their day, and the comic strip as a whole was regarded as intellectually superior to the comic books that followed. When Gary Groth wrote his introduction to the first issue of Love And Rockets, these strips were the works he cited as the historical apex of the form.

(Apologies may be in order for my not wanting to actually include the relevant imagery of racial caricature here, and this post being all text. I would definitely need to apologize if I did include them though.)

The thing about the racial caricatures is they demonstrate the limitations of their artist’s ambition. The most charitable reading I can afford to give is that the caricatures exist within a larger context where all of the characterizations are burlesques, intended strictly for laughs, and somewhat thin. Gasoline Alley, currently being reprinted as Walt And Skeezix, is meant to evoke some sense of feeling, and while there are some melodramatic plotlines, the bulk of the work it does to accomplish that end is by being low-key and gentle. If you view the strip not as a light comedy historical piece, and admit you are meant to project your feelings onto the white main characters, you kind of have to concede that maybe Frank King didn’t really see black people as human. You know black people read these strips! It ran in a Chicago newspaper. If you lived in Chicago at this time, you would see black people living their lives, which would surely include the buying and reading of newspapers. It seems really weird to then depict black people as dumb and superstitious, even if the depiction of them as working as servants was primarily how the cartoonist would have encountered them in the middle-class milieu he lived in and depicted.

Herriman is a fascinating complicating factor. Because he’s black, and he’s arguably one of the best strip cartoonists of this era, and was respected by his peers. But he was also white-passing, in all likelihood because he knew his racial background would create problems, including with his peers. I think there’s a strong case to be made for the case Ishmael Reed basically implicitly makes with his Mumbo Jumbo dedication: That Herriman is one of the great artists of the twentieth century, and his art is informed by his blackness in the same way that blackness informs the great American art form of jazz. That his identity was denied to his peers doesn’t make his own art any less great, it simply complicates the ways that art works. But if you think of Cliff Sterrett being one of the guys who called Herriman “the Greek” and then drew this comic strip that features these horrible stereotypes, it just hurts your soul.

Sterrett is even I think someone whose work gets called “jazzy,” because there’s a certain modernist verve to it, a visual inventiveness. While the limit to King’s work is in how well-written you can really view it as being when you’re considering the racism, the limit to Sterrett’s is in how well-drawn and actually wild it is, considering that every strip  has the same gridded layout, when contrasted against the more inventive architectures of a Feininger page, or Charles Forbell’s Naughty Pete, or a Garrett Price White Boy strip. (I haven’t actually read the White Boy collection. The people who have read it and like it cite how it’s beautifully drawn, and how not-racist it is in the depiction of Native Americans, as being the things that credit it.)

Here’s something: I’m not even reading the strips drawn by conservatives! I’m not reading Chester Gould, or Harold Gray, or Al Capp. Each of these cartoonist is their own weird thing, with effectively different forms of conservatism, who I don’t wish to dismiss. I can get down with some Dick Tracy strips, whatever. To a certain extent, being an adult in dealing with history means seeing the virtues in people you probably disagree with in many ways. But it’s seeing the weird unconscious attitudes of people you would like to genuinely admire that makes you want to throw the whole project in the trash and start anew, because it displays evidence of such a deep taint.

Racism is basically America’s original sin. Comic strips are, along with jazz, the great American art form. It basically follows that you can’t talk about comics in any sort of accurate historic light without talking about racism. (There’s also racial caricature in Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo strips, obviously.) Reading the supplemental essays in these books of reprints, or critical reviews of them, you realize the desire to distance oneself from talking about the racism in the work is similar to how the conservative view of “American exceptionalism” goes hand-in-hand with a refusal to acknowledge the racist premises at the heart of its founding: People arguing for the exceptional quality of these strips are not addressing the elephant in the room, or only address it in the most cursory and hand-waving way imaginable. They are trying to paint a portrait without blemishes, without flaws, and in so doing depict a platonic ideal that does not actually exist.

These strips are not the work of Robert Crumb, where the racist imagery being employed has ostensibly an satirical end. It’s not Huckleberry Finn either, where the use of racial slurs is commonplace to set up a default mindset that then becomes undercut as a common humanity is realized. I’m actually unclear on if you could print such racial slurs in the newspaper at this time, or if it would be avoided as strenuously as any other profanity that couldn’t run in a “family newspaper.” What you see in these strips is the soft racism of paternalistic attitudes in the twentieth century American North laid bare for what it is. The volume I have of Walt And Skeezix collects the strips from 1923 and 1294, the Polly And Her Pals collection collects work from 1928 to 1930. This was an an era where black people could be reliably counted on as Republican voters, in the era before the realignment in politics that came with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The current ahistorical posturing of Trump’s Republican party has them occasionally downplaying their overt anti-black racism to claim the “party of Lincoln” banner. So these strips are relevant, essentially, for depicting the sort of status quo the Republican party seek a return to, prior to FDR-instituted social programs, where black people exist primarily as servants and their concerns or agency, beyond how they exist in service to liberal white people, who address them from a place of charity, while conservatives would theoretically exist in all-white enclaves, are dismissed. The racism in the world depicted in these strips is inarguable, but the hope exists, in the eyes of conservatives, that liberals will see the way it flatters them, and wave it away as basically acceptable.

The alternative, as ever, would be in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, “the future liberals want,” where race and gender are forever up for debate in an shifting desert landscape. The issue there, of course, is the basically true argument that the strip doesn’t make any sense, and the more-up-for-debate point that the unique language of the strip is the result of repression of identity and internalized self-loathing. It’s also notable that the strip lacked popular appeal but was allowed to continue existing because it won the support of a wealthy benefactor. Maybe one day we’ll all learn to vibe with it, but I don’t really see that happening.

[twiststreet]

1 - Did you see that Fleen post about the Eisners data breach? What a time for Comic Books. 2 - While researching Lil' Abner's late period meltdown at College Students, I found a USA article from "Cartoonist Al Capp exposed in ‘Life to the Contrary’" (2/25/2013). Despite everything this month, did not think "learning Al Capp tried to rape Grace Kelly." was on the menu.

1- I hadn’t seen that— that sounds much worse than I expected. I was thinking it was a database glitching. Unsecured accounts?

2- It’s funny— I was just talking about Al Capp the other day because I had written about him and just used the phrase “sex pest”, and the person editing me was like “I think we can just say sex predator on that one.” It’s funny though how I always remember him trying to rape Goldie Hawn and always forget that he tried to rape Gene Kelly even tough Kelly’s the bigger star. I don’t know why that is. Plus exposed himself to all those college girls.

Still under his Wikipedia, it says under Personality “Although he was often considered a difficult person, some acquaintances of Capp have stressed that the cartoonist also had a sensitive side.” He was the sensitive rapist.

There are a couple good songs in the musical but time really has forgotten that strip. The only time he ever comes up now is to mention this stuff. Caniff, people still dig his inking. Same for maybe Sickles? Most of the rest of his peers are trivial pursuit answers now. And they were all 10,000 times more famous than any of these comic book dudes can ever imagine.

#Worst Hobby or Worstest Hobby?