Punch Up: The Undefinable 9th Arts
“Comics could use more creators with something worthwhile to say. ”
-Jim Woodring
Victoria’s American Comics Scene
As the American centennial came and went, the American cartoonist would produce single panel and by the end of the century sequential panels to satirize & serve the people in servitude to capitalism. Advertisement products, political cartoons, folk tales, racist caricatures, populist and utilitarian comic almanacs and titles beginning with “Strange Adventures;”: the format, be it broadsheet newspaper or small pamphlets; meandering towards collective consciousness’ "comics."
Unearthing English speaking comics during The Victorian Era is not simply Punch Magazine & John Leech’s Cartoon No.1 and straight line to American Newspapers. However, there is a through line that exists, as long as past being prologue is adhered to and thus we acknowledge that erasure indicates a number of invisible threads contributed to these comics moments. At the dawn of our Modernism, it is probable that Punch inspires the insertion of American magazines; Puck in 1871, Judge in 1881 and Truth also in 1881. In 1882, Rose O' Neill began working as a cartoonist for Truth, becoming our first remembrance of women working in American comics. Equally inspired, Life Magazine, “yes, that Life,” began in 1883, the same year Pulitzer József made his secretive trip from Saint Lois to NYC to buy New York World and Palmer Cox’s The Brownies was published. Elven years later, Puck Magazine staffer, Roy L. McCadell mentioned to New York World’s Sunday Editor, Morrill Foddard about Truth Magazine’s “street children” artist, Richard F. Outcault. Who was influenced by Cox.
Outcault’s first known drawing of social commenting and stereotyping Yellow Kid, appeared in the pages of Truth, on one his street children drawings. A year later, Pulitzer’s New York World Sunday edition published Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, featuring Yellow Kid. The same year that San Franciscan native & and Citizen Kane inspiration William Randolph Hearst became publisher of New York Journal-America. Pulitzer and Hearst, these two “progressive,” “anti-corruption,” “anti-big business,” Democrats had branded their ego driven newspaper style of journalism; “Yellow Journalism.” Perhaps birthing an American thread which has mutated over the subsequent century plus into conversations around “fake news” and driving America through the events of January 6th, 2021 and beyond; which may mark the end of Post-Postmodernism, trans-postmodernism, post-millennialism, digimodernism, metamodernism, or what have you, and the beginning of working title, Intersectional (thanks Kimberle Crenshaw) Realism. Throughout the history of American comics and American journalism we have existed in a world where individuals intentionally twist fact to inform narrative which serves their tangible warping of society, by way of lies, misleading information, crude exaggeration and sensationalism. The ingredients here are Outcault as subject of commodity, his creation as subject of intellectual property, George Luks (George Lukes, to come up later), as nock off artist, and a story to sensationalize; preferably a war. Success was America’s entry into actual war; the Spanish-American War. Comics as a vehicle to increase circulation of propaganda and influence perspectives of otherism is a foundational context in American Comics. The vanity and ego, driving competition, measured subjectively bye influence and objectively by economics.
Elements of American comics’ foundations pile up. In 1892, Barker’s ‘Komic’ Picture Souvenir, a racist and pastelist advertisement, is published by Barjker-Moore & Mein Medicine Co., in Philadelphia. That same year, Northern Californian, Jimmy Swinnerton, was hired by Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner to create a cartoon section called the California Bears. Making The Little Bears America’s first comic strip, or at least fodder for East Coast, West Coast battles. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, in the midst of the Meiji era, first half of the Empire of Japan, as Japan transitioned from a feudal system, influenced by colonization and industrialization, Western ideas had brought Australian, Frank Arthur Nankivell and Kitazawa Yasuji (Kitazawa Rakuten) together in 1895, working on the pages of English language “Box of Curios.” Nankivell would emigrate to America and work for Puck. By 1899, Kitazawa would move on to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Jiji Shimpo, becoming an outsized influence on the world of cartooning. Trafficking in immigrant stereotypes and anti-authoritarianism, as well, as featuring immigrant children protagonists, the 1897, Hearst’s NY Journal publication of Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids, was the most memorable and perhaps first sequential cartooning to bring all the elements of a comic strip together. ‘Now this was a comic!,’ some white males would proclaim, in a verity of settings for the next 100 plus years. Thirty-four years ahead of it’s time, Funny Folks collected Puck Magazine comics by Franklin Morris Howarth into a proto-comic book. However, this was two years after, The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats collected 196 black and white comics pages into a book with the words "Comic Book” on its cover. Also, before the “invention of the comic book,” the first colored “comic book,” literalism and racism both applicable, was created by Edward Kemble. Not to be confused with, in the interest of decency, even while flirting with speculation for narrative effect, The Blackberries created in 1897, by racist E. W. Kembleis, with his perpetuation of the Sambo stereotyping, The Blackberries Hearst publication in 1901. Hearst most certainly would publish Sambo imagery, which has been maintained within comics all these years, but not in his The Blackberries. Racism is foundational in America. Racism is foundational in American Comics. Racisms is maintenance by cultural and historical erasure, but equally “intellectualism.”
The target audience was voters, white men. This was politics. This is politics. Comics are politics. Erasure is fair play as much as selective memory by their rules. Propaganda is politics. This is spinning a yarn. This is comics history.
There were no binary paths in American comics, as there never has been in America. The closing of this incomplete account of the the 19th Century unfolds in this way: In 1900, The Bay Area’s Gelett Burgess, in his, The Lark, published his comic, Goops An instructional for children on manners and politeness, as defined by Burgess’ own whiteness, which ran for 50-years. The comic fit within the puritanical, capitalist and patriotic narratives that the EBF, Centron Corporation and Coronet Film films projected into the minds of mid-20th-century youth’s “educational” classrooms. An example being, Lunchroom Manners (1959), a feature of Pee-Wee Herman’s stage show and Mr. Bungle’s debut album, notable to the latchkey generation. As art critic, poet, and cartoonist, Burgess worked within the American Dream narrative propaganda, a 14-year-old, Harry Hershfield, “The Jewish Will Rogers,” began drawing sports cartoons, and eventually War’s Ebb & Flow, comic dog Homeless Hector, Bill Slowguy, Christopher’s Luck, Adventures of a Fly, Tiny Tinkles, The Fortune Teller for The Chicago Daily News, broadly introducing Jewishness into comics culture. Jewishness would play an outsized role within the comics industry, however narratives of Jewish control of culture must be inspected with a spectrum of lens, which unpacks how it feeds dog whistles of Jewish shadowed control, while also, contextualizing the substantial impact Jews have had on comics and this notion of an outsized influence on American culture. Jewish control of comics as media art, is a problematic American societal contextual narrative, as comics hobble into the 21st Century and hands its button onto a diverse spectrum, which is likewise not a cabal, but certainly is maintained and advanced with leadership similarly from queer influence on comics in the first quarter of the 21st century. Jewishness when spoken of with bigotry, comes out one side of the mouth as Whiteness and a conspiracy undermining or in servitude of Whiteness on the other side. Like all identities there is no monolithic conspiracy amongst Jews. Because Jews are a diaspora, there is not only no central ideology or politic, there is also no singular pigment or culture, we have no plan to control the world. There is no place for conspiracy to exits in the reality of Jewishness. It is a symptom of the sickness of bigotry, which Jews themselves are not immune to and Whiteness maybe the root cause, but it is not only whites whom are stricken and spread this bigotry. To what Jewishness actually is, will be explored in the same context we explore America, comics and the subsequent century, plus the early 21st century, and intersections of outsized cultural influences within comics. Perhaps, Burgess, would simply note it impolite to discuss such matters. Perhaps he would be the sort who would note it impolite to frame the totality of anyones work within a binary choice. Here we acknowledge, much like Jewishness and Queer identity, comics maintain a potential and actual effect which provides outside the box thinking that has been critical to the maintenance of America, like a Book Scorpion in a library.
