Punch Up: The Undefinable 9th Arts
1902
The culture of capitalism in America intersects at every corner in America. Outcault’s Buster Brown comic strip will go on to become advertisement mascot for Brown Shoe Company and Buster’s fashion will become ad shorthand to the lexicon for a boys suit style. Prussian immigrant child, Wilhelm Heinrich Detlev Körner, will study under Norman Rockwell’s professor, George Bridgman at the Art Students League, where he was classmates with N. C. Wyeth. He would go on to paint illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post (Curtis Publishing Company, publisher, founded in 1897) and produce a painting which eventually find its way to being hung in the Oval Office when George W. Bush occupied the White House. Körner’s short lived, Chicago Tribune published 1902 comic strip, Hugo Hercules, is considered to be the earliest “superhero” comic. The Bad Dream That Made Billy A Better Boy, Kitty Kildare, Metropolitan Movies, Phyllis, All the Comforts of Home, Stepbrothers, and Poor Mister W cartoonist, Gene Carr debuted with rich white lady savior, Lady Bountiful, which “would be the first balloon comic in which a female character plays a starring role,” according to lambiek.net. Anecdotal tidbits, serving to intrigue and elevate the artist and the work. San Franciscan, Tad Dorgan would become a published cartoonist, who would do on to create numbers slang terms utilized for generation of Americans.
White men, gripping power, maintain appearances within the records of American comics history. Historians leave me with questions: Are we to believe that Sally Slick’s creator is the Jean Mohr who fought in World War I? Cartooning for Pulitzer, was Oakland native, Mary Williams, pseudonymously Kate Carew, actually "The Only Woman Caricaturist?” Answers here have a dollar backing them up. A dollar in America is produced through exploitation and distortion of human capital in servitude of cultural narratives. However, the dollar’s influence erodes over time and global reach of NAFTA is 92 years away.
In the spirit of Americana, enters the unassuming protagonist of the 1st quarter of this America’s comic story, George Herriman, his birth certificate stating “colored,” raised till age ten in Tremé, was Créole, “mixed-race” with at least African and European ancestry, “passed” as white, along with his family once they moved to LA. After college, Herriman, picked up a gig that involved the occasional political cartoon and by 1901 he had snuck aboard a fruit train headed to New York City. That year he managed to get cartoons published in Judge where he often utilized sequential art in his cartooning. He also had a strip published by Pulitzer in 1901. This lead to him committing to comic strips as a format for Pulitzer with Musical Mose comics, beginning in February of 1902. The strip depicted a pervasive trope, Sambo character design, further cloaking Herriman’s heritage in our racist society, as his hats would cover his “kinky” hair. By April, that year George’s work had assimilated into standard white male cartoonist tropes in Acrobatic Archie. This represented perhaps the first work by a Black cartoonist in American history. A fact, which even George worked to cover up. Playing the cards he was dealt.
Meanwhile at the rival news moguls papers, Irish immigrant teen, Marjorie Organ was the only female cartoonist on staff for Hearst. Producing a number of strips, most remember her strips for the New York Journal being Reggie and the Heavenly Twins. Just as Herriman would eventually work for his employees rival, so did Organ. Pulitzer published The Man Hater Club and Strange What a Difference a Mere Man Makes. After a 1908 wedding, her life, unlike Herriman’s, became less integrated into comics; a feature of misogynist cultural norms.
