Punch Up: The Undefinable 9th Arts

“our passions have outsized cultural pull, but the medium itself remains fringe…”

-Magdalene Visaggio

1901

Welcome to the century of American ascension and with it, in part because of it, American comics. Not all Americans are a product of pain left behind in pursuit of rugged individualism. Some were already here, caring for this place. Some were abducted away from their autarkic lives. All of those who inhabit America are shaped by and shaping America, having picked up a comic or not. Still the American comic has had its role to play. What shapes America has never stopped at its boarders.

Japanese retention informed us, the influential Rakuten Kitazawa, Jiji Manga Sunday strip cartoonist, immersed himself in comics and found inspiration from American cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper. Kitazawa’s work would inform cartooning which crosses many boarders many times.

Remembered is son of Austrian immigrants, High School and Coopers Union drop out, Opper, as a cartoonist for Puck and The New York Journal. His cartoonist perspective at times focused on satirizing a nü wave of sensationalism. Loss of eyesight ended his career and he was elegized by Alex Raymond and Russ Westover upon his death. Opper’s comic strip, Happy Hooligan, depicted a well intended, but down on his luck traveling man, who  struggled to acquire basic necessities to survive in America. Already a comic trope, it fit seamlessly within the cultural appetite at the time, and illuminates the future. Our culture also retained Opper’s Alphonse and Gaston, as their catch fraise entered the lexicon, “After you, my dear Alphonse,” and their routine was commonly used to identify behavior, “Alphonse-Gaston Syndrome,” to the point that the term lives on into the next century. September 23, 2009, New York Times editorial: "For years, China and the United States have engaged in a dangerous Alphonse-and-Gaston routine, using each other’s inaction to shirk their responsibility.”

Obscured is, New York Harold cartoonist, Louise Quarles’s comics strip, Bun’s Puns. Researching Quarles, leads directly to identity confusion with perhaps another person all together, who, sharing the same name, with addition of married name perhaps, and probably living in a different state, worked with racist Sambo imagery and not “our” Quayle’s delicately illustrated anthropomorphic foods.

We retain elements of format and function. What is foundational is not fundamental in American comics. In America, things are never so easy or pure. For you cannot erase the truth. You can however, forget it, or by design, erase it.