Book Review: Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, edited by Qiana Whitted

Reviewed by Michael Kobre

Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, edited by Qiana Whitted. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 358 pp. ISBN: 9781978825017. U.S. $34.95. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/desegregating-comics/9781978825017

 

            Taken together, the critical essays in Desgregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics tell a history of American comics that many of us don’t know or, at best, only know in part. As the collection’s editor Qiana Whitted points out in her introduction, “the earliest and most prolific decades of the comics industry also correspond with the Jim Crow era” (6). Consequently, like pretty much everything else in American life, comics pages too were places where borders (both literal and figurative) were regularly policed and sometimes subverted, where equal opportunity was constricted and mostly denied, and where struggles were fought all the time over representation and images of blackness. As Whitted goes on to say, our understanding of this convergence between comics history and Jim Crow America raises important questions “about access, ideology, and the politics of interracial contact, both in the panels and in the production of comics” (6).

            In exploring this history and taking on these questions, Desegregating Comics ranges widely. Some chapters examine the work of well-known creators like George Herriman, Will Eisner, and Matt Baker. Some discuss the early comics work of Black painters and muralists like Romare Bearden and Al Hollingsworth, whose achievements in the visual arts were, as the authors here argue, shaped at least in part by their work as cartoonists at the beginning of their careers. Many chapters highlight the importance of the Black press, notably the comics section of The Pittsburgh Courier and the paper’s vibrant print culture. Other chapters examine characters who are obscure to us now, such as Neil Knight, a Buck Rogers-like space adventurer fighting colonialism on other planets in The Courier’s comics section; Lobo, a Black cowboy in a typically short-lived series (for titles with Black characters, that is) published by Dell in 1965; and The Voodoo Man, a Fox Feature Syndicate series in which the villainous title character was invested with a rare sense of agency for Black characters in the 1940s in stories created by whites. Whitted’s chapter details both the rare achievement of All-Negro Comics #1, published in 1947, “the first comic book to be to be written, illustrated, and published by and about African Americans in the United States” (182), and the all-too-familiar disappointment of its lost second issue, in the face of resistance to the title from white vendors, distributors, and retailers —a fate reprised in another chapter on the truncated run of Fawcett’s Negro Romance comic in 1950, which lasted for only three issues of original content. Still other chapters focus on Black readers, trying to imagine their responses to comics and their reading habits, in one instance detailing how a group of students from Harlem went to the offices of Fawcett Comics to protest Captain Marvel’s minstrel show sidekick, Steamboat. “This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half million readers will think it so,” they told Fawcett’s executive editor (214).

            That issue of representation opens some of the first chapters of Desegregating Comics. Ian Gordon and Andrew Kunka respectively look at the use of racist stereotypes in the cartoons of Rosie O’Neil, one of the first women cartoonists whose work was published regularly in the humor magazine Puck from 1897-1905, and in Will Eisner’s character Ebony White, the minstrel show sidekick to the title character in The Spirit. Gordon’s chapter, which describes O’Neil’s use of “the sort of typographies found in minstrelsy, the bumpkins Tambo and Bones, the dandy Zip Coon, and so on” (27), effectively begins the collection by pointing to the long history of the kind of stereotypes that would routinely appear later in works of white cartoonists like Eisner, who, at the height of his acclaim, would struggle again and again to explain or justify his creation of Ebony. Kunka’s essay scours Eisner’s varied and often defensive responses to criticism of Ebony. Of Eisner’s claim that he was just following the popular conventions of his time—a defense repeated by many other white creators—Kunka argues that “such defenses stand in curious contrast to Eisner’s claim to an important historical role as an innovator and experimenter in the comics form: on the one hand, he actively pushes against many comics traditions and connections; on the other hand, he stands helpless in the face of another” (63).

            Yet most of Desegregating Comics focuses on the work of Black creators pushing back against these stereotypes and the racist power structure of American life that they helped to sustain and justify. In Nicholas Sammond’s chapter on Krazy Kat and in Chris Gavaler and Monalisa Earle’s formal analysis of Matt Baker’s art on Fox Feature Syndicate’s Phantom Lady, for instance, the authors examine ways that Black cartoonists slyly challenged and subverted that power structure. As Sammond suggests, Herriman in Krazy Kat—particularly in the strip’s “playful, polysemous, and allusive” language (45)—appropriates tropes and techniques from the tradition of minstrelsy. Yet like such Black minstrel show performers as Bert Williams who used their blackface masks for their own subversive art, Herriman, a Black man passing as white for most of his life, “borrowed freely from, and reimagined, white fantasies of Black speech to deform and destabilize language and meaning in Coconino County” (48). In so doing, Sammond argues, Herriman also used the unstable landscape of Coconino County and Krazy’s ever-shifting gender formations as “a useful metaphor for a life lived in passing,” creating in his pages a world that rejected the rigid racial binary his society was built around (41). In a comparable fashion, Gavaler and Earle suggest that Matt Baker, “the most successful Black artist in midcentury U.S. Comics” (95), used what Joseph Witek has called a “high baroque” layout style with complicated designs that disrupt the reader’s movement across the page to subtly express Baker’s own “protest against his racial relationship to the midcentury comics industry” (98). In particular, they note the subversive quality of the way Baker’s layouts routinely broke panel borders in order to extend a character’s body—notably the long legs of The Phantom Lady—into another panel. These page designs would offer the white boys or young men reading the comic an opportunity to let their eyes linger over the legs or torso of The Phantom Lady in a way that would be dangerous for a Black man like Baker, hiding behind the pseudonym of the strip’s supposed creator Gregory Page and complicating the operation of the male gaze even more by his own sexuality as a gay man. As Gavaler and Earle note, the very act of seeming to look at a white woman with desire was enough to get Emmett Till murdered in the very same year that Baker’s “good girl” art was condemned on the Senate floor during a hearing on comics and juvenile delinquency.

            Many chapters though discuss the more explicit resistance to the Jim Crow era in the comics, columns, and editorial cartoons in the Black press. As Julian Chambliss writes in his chapter on the Neil Knight comic strip, “Black newspapers offered an essential space for extending the visual language around blackness and the vision provided to African Americans about their place in the visual culture of the United States. In particular, the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest Black newspapers, which claimed over a million coast-to-coast readers by the 1940s, was a crucial space for offering an alternative vision of blackness” (284). So Neil Knight, introduced in the Courier’s new color comics section in 1950, evolved from the adventures of Black air ace in its first four years into a science fiction strip with Knight as a space explorer, who in one signature storyline defends a helpless planet of aliens whose skin “is presented in green and brown hues” against the colonialist aggression of another alien empire (290). This “intersection of speculative practice and liberation” (290) helps define Neil Knight, Chambliss argues, “as the earliest example of Afrofuturism in newspaper comic strips” (293). In other strips too, like the single-panel gag strip Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger and the romance strip Torchy in Heartbeats, both by Jackie Ormes, the first Black woman cartoonist, Eli Boonin-Vail finds not only politically-tinged jokes and storylines, but “a complex and playful relationship with Black middle-class ideas of gender and respectability” that also extends into Ormes’ own early column writing and other women’s columns in the Courier (152). Examining the editorial cartoons in the Courier and other Black newspapers, Rebecca Wanzo analyzes the early work of Black artists like Romare Bearden to show how their mature styles reflect their work in comics—as Bearden’s cartoons, for instance, manifest “representational practices that gesture to the universal and an embrace of nonrealist aesthetics” in his later work (82). Delineating these connections, for Wanzo, is a way “to push against artistic silos that limit the frameworks through which we interpret Black liberatory aesthetic practice” (82). Yet the commitment of a newspaper like the Courier to promote a kind of respectability politics within the Black community could be problematic too. As Mona Beauchamp-Byrd shows in her chapter, Kandy, a romance strip created in 1955 by Al Hollingsworth, featured a protagonist whose “racially indeterminate [features and skin tone] and/or white-passing ‘Good Girl’ figure” reflected “a colorism that was actively present in African American media” (229).

            Yet many important chapters of the history that Desegregating Comics brings to life are haunted by counterstories that attempt to fill gaps in existing evidence or scholarship—as in Carol Tilley’s effort to imagine the comics reading experiences of Black youth by analyzing three photographs, including the photo of the bed with a handful of comics strewn across it that Emmett Till was taken from on the night of his murder—and by what the poet Kevin Young has called “shadow books.” In Young’s massive critical attempt at a field theory of Black culture, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, he describes the concept of “a shadow book”: “a book that we don’t have, but know of, a book that may haunt the very book we have in our hands” (11). In The Grey Album, Young identifies three kinds of shadow books: ones that were never written or completed, like Ralph Ellison’s second novel; ones with “removed” meanings, which gesture toward unspoken ideas, “the secret book just behind the others, its meaning never to be fully revealed” (12); and a third kind, the lost shadow book, “at once the rarest and most common—written and now gone” (13), like Phillis Wheatley’s second book of poetry and, as Whitted argues in her chapter of Desegregating Comics, the unpublished second issue of All-Negro Comics.  In characterizing All-Negro Comics #2 as a lost shadow book, Whitted cites comics historian Tom Christopher’s assertion that the issue had been planned and that at least some of its art had been completed; its fate, Whitted suggests, “offers a disruptive counterhistory of the comic book industry’s Golden Age of success” (184). Though All-Negro Comics #1 was filled with promises of future issues and further installments of individual stories, its creator and publisher Orrin Cromwell Evans suddenly found that no one would sell him the newsprint he needed to publish a second issue. As Whitted writes, “its haunting absence echoes all the unrealized comic books of the era that attempted to underscore Black lives, that became ensnared in the power differentials behind comic book production, distribution, and sales” (184). For that matter, other shadow books too, representing each kind that Young conceptualizes, also haunt Desegregating Comics. There are the unwritten and undrawn comics that might have been produced if Negro Romance and Lobo hadn’t both been abruptly cancelled, and there are the “removed” meanings that Sammond finds in Krazy Kat and that Gavaler and Earle see in Matt Baker’s baroque page designs. As Young writes, in a passage quoted by Whitted too, “In some crucial ways, the lost shadow book is the book that blackness writes every day. The book that memory, time, accident, and the more active forms of oppression prevent from being read” (14).

            Ultimately, the counterhistory of American comics that Desegregating Comics presents is panoramic, with connections that abound across chapters. As previously noted, for instance, multiple chapters detail the importance of the Pittsburgh Courier and other Black newspapers. But lives and careers of important creators intersect across the book as well, like the comics artist Al Hollingsworth, whose work is the subject of two separate chapters. Hollingsworth worked alongside Matt Baker in the comic book industry and may have been one of the artists on Negro Romance; his comic strip Kandy replaced Jackie Ormes’ Torchy in Heartbeats in the Courier; and later in his life, in his career as a celebrated painter, he joined the Black art collective Spiral co-founded by Romare Bearden. Yet the most difficult and heartbreaking connections across chapters involve the murder of Emmett Till. In her effort to imagine a counterstory inspired by the photo of Till’s bed on the night of his murder, Carol Tilly cites a neighbor’s comment in a Chicago Defender article two weeks after Till’s murder that his enjoyment of comics never included “any dirty ones or nasty pictures,” a comment that was, in the context of popular condemnations of comics in the 1950s, a way of asserting Till’s fundamental innocence and good character in the midst of what Tilley calls “the precarities of both comics and Black boyhood” (172). Elsewhere in Desegregating Comics, we witness the outrage that Till’s death inspired in the Black community when Eli Boonin-Vail cites a Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger cartoon by Jackie Ormes that appeared “on a page where ten of the twelve letters to the editor decry the acquittal of Emmett Till’s slayers the previous week,” in which little Patty-Jo tells her sister angrily, “I don’t want to seem touchy on the subject … but that new little white tea-kettle just whistled at me!” (143). In Gavaler and Earl’s reading of Matt Baker’s art too, we’re reminded of the potentially fatal consequences of a Black man sexualizing a white woman in Jim Crow America. Citing Frederic Wertham’s and a Senate subcommittee’s condemnation of one of Baker’s Phantom Lady covers, Gavaler and Earle ask, “How would Till’s murderers respond to Baker’s cover image knowing that [in Wertham’s words] its ‘sexual stimulation by combining “headlights” with a sadist’s dream of tying up a woman’ was a Black man’s?” (115).  

            Not every chapter of Desegregating Comics is equally revelatory and powerful, and occasionally its authors get bogged down in what, to this reader at least, felt like too much plot summary—although, to be fair, such summary may be necessary to recreate a lost work like a story in Negro Romance. But the cumulative effect of the collection’s panoramic perspective forces us to reconsider what comics fans have sentimentally called the Golden Age of comics, not simply as a halcyon period when a new form burst into popular culture, but as a site of conflict—again, like so much else in American life—where the country’s racial divide was enacted, reinforced, and challenged too. And this quality makes Desegregating Comics not only an important book for any serious student of comics history, but a timely one as well. At a moment in American life when political and cultural forces are actively working to restrict what can and can’t be said about America’s racial history—like the Oklahoma school superintendent who said of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, "Let's not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that" (Qtd. in Khaled)—Desegregating Comics offers a sweeping and nuanced exploration of how the country’s troubled racial history played out on comics pages too.

  

References

Khaled, Fatma. “Oklahoma Superintendent Denies Race Caused Tulsa Massacre.” Newsweek, July 7, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/oklahoma-superintendent-denies-race-caused-tulsa-massacre-1811608.

Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Graywolf Press, 2012.

Book Review: The Uncanny X-Men Trading Cards: The Complete Series.

Reviewed by Cord A. Scott, UMGC-Okinawa

Jim Lee and Paul Mounts. The Uncanny X-Men Trading Cards: The Complete Series. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2022. $25. https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/uncanny-x-men-trading-cards_9781419757242/

One of the most important parts of the comics industry have been the merchandising offshoots going back to the very beginning with the 19^th century’s Ally Sloper or the Yellow Kid. It became particularly virulent in the era of the 1980s and 1990s when the market was expanding and more people looked at the comic book market not necessarily as ephemera but as an investment for future wealth.  As with so many aspects of speculation over items made for children, or adults attempting to recapture their childhood, it is no surprise that when the market collapsed, that many would be left holding worthless investments (at least until the next bubble). This premise of continuing interest in comics-related material that was hot, then not, is the focus of this book reproducing an entire X-men trading card series.

                For some comic book collectors from that era, myself included, these cards will remind readers of their own collections and how they may have continued or ended. The book has a foreword from Ed Piskor (X-Men, Grand Design author) who writes how the industry had morphed from the traditional aspect of comic book sales (at supermarkets or newspaper shops), to direct sales shops and how Marvel wanted to capitalize on the success of their comic book lines and sell the characters to a wider audience. Piskor noted that many collectors hitched their bets on the market for many of these items. In the moment, the reasoning was sound. Marvel was having success with the popularity of their series, and the X-Men was the most lucrative. It was a “natural” development to produce trading cards of the X-Men characters for children to collect and trade, but how to sell even more sets? To that end, the cards had to have another hook to entice adult collectors. That hook was original artwork by Jim Lee, who had established himself as a talented artist for the Marvel bullpen (leaving to become a founder of Image Comics and he is now Publisher and Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics).

                Lee’s art is the driving element of this book. Each card was illustrated by Lee, and was, with few exceptions, original work. To make the potential collector even more interested, there was a statistics sheet (lifted from sports cards, but now integral to Marvel’s desktop card games), and trivia fact on the back side. All these characters were taken from the X-Men series or their offshoots over the years. As was noted by Piskor, “Jim Lee’s superpower is dynamic illustration” (p. 10). Piskor gives the reader some background on Lee’s other work from that era, Punisher: War Journal, which offered art which was more apparently more detailed than other traditional artists. The early part of the book also explains how Impel Marketing looked to expand the trading card market by starting a series of famous Marvel characters, which were sold in 1991 under the titles Marvel Universe I and Marvel Universe II. Both Impel and Marvel thought that another series might gain even more attention (i.e. money) for both companies and one Marvel series had such a depth of characters: X-Men.

Bob Budiansky, the writer of the introduction of the book, was the executive editor for Marvel special projects, which had a “catch-all” quality of any non-mainstream comic book-related items under his purview. His insights into how the series came about and the eventual inclusion of Lee’s original art are interesting reading about the creation of ephemera. Lee was asked, as was the unstated rule at the time, to not poach artists from other projects within the Marvel realm. Lee signed on knowing that he would have to create original art for the cards, despite working on more and more projects.

Budiansky begins the introduction with a brief history of the X-Men comic, from its creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, to its eventual end in 1970 when the company was having its financial problems, to its re-start in 1975 with new characters created to spur more sales. It was this “New” X-Men that gave the overall series new life and gained readers and success for Marvel. (Some would argue too much success, given the number of “X” titles produced both then and now). The production standards for the new cards were to be glossy to attract collectors, as well as give information and statistics to young people to spur interest in the comic books. It was also thought that some of these tidbits might gain more readers to the ever-increasing publications in the X-Men line. For the launch of X-Men volume 2, #1 in 1991, there were eight million copies sold, and this spurred on the frenzy for all things X-Men related. The series did sell well, and many thought the success would continue.

This section of the book also went into how the cards were created, and what sorts of subsets were created. For example, it was noted that card collectors were different from comic book collectors in their storage methods, using binders with plastic page with small sleeves for nine cards per page built in. This collector distinction changed the production, so that the cards were published not with ten per set, but nine, to fit the sleeve. To round it out to an even 100 cards in the series, a Danger Room montage was created with the last nine cards, and a checklist card was also created. Each package contained 6 cards. For the subsets within the sets, color coded Xs would appear in the lower right corner of the card, which denoted the team (gold and blue), red (allies), black (ex-X-Men), and villains (yellow). The back sides had to have written material that needed to be descriptive and original, including an “X-tra fact” but also be succinct enough to fit in 75 words. Lastly, Lee would personally sign some cards to be put into bonus packs, along with other limited issue items such as holographic cards. Budiansky includes some anecdotal evidence of how collectors reacted as children to the cards, which always brings a bit of life to a book of collecting items. 

The remainder of the book reproduces the entire series of cards, but apparently not all the variants included in toy packaging or comic book magazines that Budiansky describes in his introduction. In addition to the front and back of the card on consecutive pages, there are occasional production notes from colorist Paul Mounts who also worked on coloring the Lee drawings for the cards. One such notations is that for the Gambit card, the character is smoking. This simple illustration was a controversial one as the US cigarette industry was in lawsuits over the use of cartoon characters to promote smoking to children. There are in fact several cards with X-Men smoking: Gambit (p.92) Shadow King (p. 188), Mastermind (191) and Wolverine (p. 246).

Some of the characters produced for the series are old and familiar ones: Storm, Wolverine, Gambit, Magneto, Beast and Jubilee to name, but a few. Some of the characters seem wildly out of place, as they were sometimes new characters recently introduced to the X-Men series (Maverick, p. 133 is one) only to fall flat with readers who didn’t find the character compelling. Some characters such as Deadpool are far less defined then their character would evolve into. Mostly the cards center on what is became the bane of the X-Men series, and some say a central reason for the 1990s collapse of the comic book market: too many characters and teams, too many books, and too many variant covers and other gimmicks, which led to an oversaturated market. 

For example, there are some cards that deal with the various X-Men related comic teams. There is the Gold Team (Storm, Colossus, Jean Grey, Bishop, Iceman and Archangel) and the Blue Team (Cyclops, Wolverine, Beast, Rogue, Psylocke, and Gambit). X-Force is one that has Cable and a few other notable heroes. Excalibur was the British team. Some of the villains’ organizations come across sounding like modern terrorists or trade unions in hindsight: The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the Mutant Liberation Front, and the Hellfire Club. Other lesser known affiliated groups such as the Technet and the Upstarts are also included. There were some of the lesser known dead or retired Ex-X-Men, and finally the Allies of the X-Men. All these different characters and groups appealed to the hardcore readers, but they seem a bit redundant when one is trying to collect the main characters.

The last section of the book looks at the 9-part Danger Room scenario and the information associated with it, such as the power ratings and the aspects of the Danger Room. Here there was some re-printing of previous art, especially for that of Cerebro, the supercomputer. The art was taken from comic books and tweaked so that it would fit on the card. The hologram cards are also showcased. Throughout the book were commentary on how some designs were altered from the original aspect to allow for more dynamic viewing. Other comments noted the mistakes of the cards, which might make them more valuable due to passing quality control.

In all, the book was interesting in some aspects and a bit less in terms of the contribution to comic book history literature. Lee did some phenomenal illustration work, and the explanations of how the cards were presented to make the characters pop out, or otherwise become dynamic, was interesting. The side notes from Paul Blount or Ken Baroff from Impel added interest to those who might like to know trivia. And for the author of this review, it does bring back a nostalgia for the collecting from that time. However, the book also notes how the overreach beginning to be defined by X-Men comic books and derivative cards sets was the demise of the both markets in many ways. Too many variant issues and too many imprints drove the collecting market into different and unsustainable territories. If one didn’t have the money or time to purchase multiple issues due to the variant covers, eventually interest might be lost when the person decided to take their money elsewhere. When combined with the inflated prices for “rare” items, the speculation of what may make money or be valuable in time, combined with oversaturation of the market and plain old corporate greed, its easy to see where these cards may have added to the collapse of the speculator bubble in trading card and comic books.

None of this takes away from Jim Lee’s illustration work, nor does it diminish the overall book. It just reminds those collectors of that era what might have been, and what was. The book does what it was intended: it showed how one medium influenced a wider variety of merchandise to sell to possible new comic book readers as well as existing aficionados and trading card collectors.

Review Essay: Chicago: Center of the Comics Universe

Review Essay: Chicago: Center of the Comics Universe

José Alaniz

 

 

Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life. Chris Ware and Tim Samuelson. Sidney Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center, June 19, 2021-January 9, 2022. <https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/comics.html >

 

Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War. James Brundage. Pritzker Military Museum & Library: opened May 14, 2021-April 2, 2022. <https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/billmauldinexhibit >

 

Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now. Dan Nadel. Griffin Galleries of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, June 19-October 3, 2021. <https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2021/Chicago-Comics-1960s-To-Now >

For a few months in 2021, Chicago became the center of the US cartoon universe with no fewer than four major comics-related shows going on simultaneously, the majority of them focused on the Chicago scene and industry going back to its beginnings.

A visitor to the windy city, traversing its streets with their magnificent architecture at every turn (a museum in their own right), might well eschew the gargantuan Marvel: Universe of  Superheroes touring exhibition which was also in town (and reviewed elsewhere), and focus instead on the richness that is Chicago comics. Said visitor might come in from the metropolis’ autumn chill to the ornate halls of the Sidney Yates Gallery, on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, for Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life. Curated and designed by Chris Ware, with the collaboration of Chicago cultural historian emeritus Tim Samuelson, the show proved a revelation.

Figuratively and literally, the show had Ware’s fingerprints all over it, its every square inch reflecting his wry sensibility and meticulous attention to detail. The large space was divided into walled-off sub-units to create an interlocking series of mini-exhibits such that you might turn a corner and glimpse something from 50 years later or earlier before resettling your attention on what’s in front of you.   

“[C]omics are a rat maze,” Ware told an interviewer. “Look here, don’t look here, go here, go there. So I designed this show to act as a comic strip itself.”[1]

A rat maze designed by Chris Ware is bound to be crammed with far more information at a glance than any human being could take in, even over repeated viewings on multiple weekends — and that’s just what you got. The walls turned boustrophedon-like, with every step thought out as you penetrated into another sub-gallery. As noted, the twisty-turny architecture encouraged your gaze to wander from the object before you to those on the other side of the hall, all the way to the Chicago skyscrapers and Millennium Park outside the large windows. It felt like negotiating a mammoth 3D crossword puzzle with multicolored walls (82 of them!) spilling over with portraits, period pictures, art implements, video clips, figurines, period advertisements,  reproductions, original art, books, memorabilia, ephemera of all kinds, comics, artists’ furniture and merchandise — some of it hanging overhead. 

Blurbs covering material from Rodolphe Töppfer to the origins of the Chicago industry all the way to the 1960s were written by Ware, Samuelson, Tim Jackson, Caitlin McGurk, Hillary Chute, Warren Bernard, Trina Robbins and other scholars. The sheer amount of artists, editors, publishers covered — and all the stuff — was staggering.  

Much emphasis was laid on the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday comics page, which introduced the world to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (1918), Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy (1931) and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (1924). You may have heard of them. But what about Charles Lederer? John T. McCutcheon? William Schmedtgen? Bungleton Green? “Where Comics Came To Life” brought those and countless other turn-of-the-19^th-century and later figures, most known mainly by specialists, back from decades-long obscurity. Several were women and/or BIPOC. 

Laid out before us was a vibrant history of graphic narrative in Chicago, a history you literally walked through, with astonishing discoveries at virtually every step. What follows is a shamefully incomplete summation.

Chicago Art Institute alum Schmedtgen, while a staffer at the Chicago Mail in 1882, developed an intaglio process to expeditiously prepare and publish drawings – including in sequences of more than one – in the daily newspaper. Over the course of his career (he would move on to become art director at the Chicago Daily News), Schmedtgen capitalized on further technological advances and oversaw illustrators like McCutcheon and George Ade as they chronicled the life of the city in drawings. In this era they helped create the modern comic strip. Their trajectories complement — and in many cases precede — what was happening in the Big Apple at such publications as Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal. For example, The Chicago Inter-Ocean ­— not one of the New York papers — was the first to publish a color illustrated supplement and cartoons in 1892.

Through the aforementioned myriad effects as well as massive page reproductions taking up whole walls as background to the displays, the exhibit presented dimly-remembered newspaper strip icons like George W. Peck (1856-1916), the “father” of Chicago comics. His “Peck’s Bad Boy” was a transmedial sensation that outlived him, even into the television age. To take in strips like William Donahey’s The Teenie Weenies (1914), Johnny Gruelle’s lush color artwork in his “Mr. Tweedle” Sunday feature (which filled in the yawning gap left by Winsor McCay when he left the New York Herald in 1911) and the early work of Clare A. Briggs, Sydnie Smith and E.C. Segar is to catch glimpses of an era when cartoonists were highly-paid celebrities and much sought-after circulation-boosting stars in their own right. The Chicago Tribune could even make a claim for debuting the first comic superhero, in the guise of Heinrich Detlev Körner’s “Hugo Hercules” (1902).

The show devoted substantial attention to the city’s Black publishers and cartoonists, like Robert Sengstacke Abbott, who founded the seminal newspaper The Chicago Defender (1905). This boasted the largest readership of any Black publication; many credited it as a major factor in encouraging the African-American Great Migration from south to north. For me the stand-outs in this section included Leslie Malcolm Rogers, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute who joined the Defender as its second staff artist in 1919 and the next year launched “Bungleton Green,” the longest-lasting African-American-centered strip produced by an African-American (it lasted until the 1960s under various artists); Daniel Day, the “world’s youngest cartoonist,” who worked at the paper from the age of 12, contributing his strip of observational humor “Spotty” (1927) from the age of 14; and the better-known Jackie Ormes, the first and most successful Black female comic strip artist, who enjoyed a decades-long career and more than a million readers in the Black press, with work often centered on fashion as well as social commentary.

The Frank King section, taking up several walls on its own (about a third of the exhibit), provided an exhaustive, practically year-by-year account of the “Gasoline Alley” (1919) cartoonist’s life from childhood to his career at the Tribune to retirement in Florida. The walls were plastered with larger-than-life- King Sunday comics pages and strips, taking advantage of corners to highlight a color scheme or other effect. These devices recalled Ware’s own constructs, like his Rusty Brown lunch box, comics shop display stands and mobiles.

A visitor here felt as if shrunk down to ant size relative to the art. Looking up at them from close enough, the comics seemed to dominate from horizon to horizon. Comics heaven! As Ware puts it in his gloss, the design was inspired by Walt and Skeezix’s perennial nature walks “through the reds, oranges, browns and yellows of a crisply-rendered midwestern fall landscape.”

The King section also featured such additional material as photographs, a detailed biography, a printing plate of a Sunday strip from 1930, drawing implements, furniture, sketches, diaries, letters, appointment books, merchandise — even a pubescent Skeezix hanging from the ceiling. Some of these touches come off as a bit creepy in that Ware way. Ware has long idolized King and sees him as one of his greatest influences; that adoration was palpable in this show. Remarkably, some of the drawings in King’s sketchbooks strongly reminded me of Ware’s drawings from his.     

A show of Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life’s scope is bound to hold many surprises and discoveries, as I’ve tried to convey. One particularly captivating piece has stayed with me for how it made me rethink what I thought I knew about the history of LGBTQ+ representation comics. The strip “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye” (1905) by Anonymous, which ran in the Tribune for less than a year, used a recurring gag formula not unlike Winsor McCay’s “Little Sammie Sneeze.” Two women keep bidding each other farewell as one departs on a journey. But their utter absorption in and physical affections toward each other tantalizingly hint at something much deeper, even as chaos erupts. For these heroines, arrayed in extravagant Edwardian dress, parting is such sweet sorrow, and not even a tornado will tear them apart. This is comic “female hysteria” veiling what seems a strong same-sex attraction.

According to McGurk’s gloss, some evidence suggests that the artist may have been a man[2] with some awareness of the homoerotic theme’s potential for controversy: “[T]he artist may have concealed their identity to avoid complaint and controversy over interpretation of Lucy and Sophie as romantic friends or lovers.” In theme and execution, “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye” is a landmark work which the exhibit made available to whole new audiences. And it was just one of this event’s many-splendored treasures.

Not far from the Cultural Center one finds the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, site of the second star in Chicago’s celestial comics convergence of 2021-2022,  Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War. Where Ware and Samuelson’s exhibit was an epic with what seemed a cast of thousands, this show was chamber drama exceptionally focused on just one artist. But again, there were many discoveries to be had. 

 Drawn to Combat’s curator, James Brundage (a veteran of the Iraq war), brought together nearly 150 of the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist’s original drawings and published cartoons, along with personal material, documents, merchandise and books from his long career. Before even entering the space of the gallery, you were greeted by Mauldin characters painted on the walls of a long corridor leading to the entrance (Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life used a similar device).

Born in New Mexico in 1921, Mauldin studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and tried his hand at modest gag strips like Cactus Juice before WWII took him to the European theater. Attached to the 45^th Infantry Division, he saw the war firsthand, and was even wounded in the shoulder. He drew cartoons for the army newspaper all the way through the invasion of Sicily in 1943. His beloved “dogface” recruit characters, Willie and Joe, delighted readers of Stars and Stripes, while United Feature Syndicate distributed his work for a civilian audience. After that, his immortality was assured. By the time the war ended in 1945, Mauldin was widely syndicated, had published two booklets and won a Pulitzer Prize. Soon there was even a Willie and Joe movie deal.  

What was it about Mauldin’s war cartoons that proved so compelling for some many people? In a word, candor.

Willie and Joe, ordinary grunts, looked nothing like most civilians’ romanticized notions of corn-fed freedom-fighting warriors. In “Yer Lucky. Yer Learnin’ A Trade” (1944), the brutish Willie, dangling a cigarette from his fingers, matter-of-factly speaks those words to his bare-chested companion, who’s building a road over mud. Bearded, disheveled, loaded down with a rifle, grenades and knives, Willie looks like a walking arsenal, a scruffy Christmas tree of war. The shirtless Joe, dog tags jangling on his chest, looks up with slitted eyes, barely registering the sarcasm. Also unshaven, he almost resembles a hirsute Hulk as drawn by Sal Buscema. The bitter joke is that no skills learned on the front will really help soldiers transition back to civilian life, which might as well be on another planet.

“I Got a Hangover, Does It Show?” (1945) continues in this vein. Our two heroes are dirty, unkempt, what one might expect troops to look like after years of combat but which one rarely sees in the media even today. The men have full beards, detritus (twigs, camouflage, dirt) clings to their uniforms, they look exhausted, lines crisscross their faces. They have mud splotches (let’s hope they’re mud splotches) on their heavy coats. They all seem to chain-smoke, always with a bemused, contemptuous look, especially when an officer shows up. Their common soldier cynicism is a tonic to sham wartime propaganda.

Form echoes content in these cartoons. Mauldin’s confident thick lines and brushstrokes, both calculated and dashed off, seem almost expressionist. A bundle or rolled-up sleeping bag at a soldier’s hip is a mere swirl of thick lines with scratchy accents. Like the grunts digging trenches and shooting Germans, Mauldin’s art may not always be “pretty,” but it gets the job done.

In short, Willie and Joe make the “realistic” infantrymen of Saving Private Ryan look like Jay Gatsby. They in fact expose such hollow “patriotic” representations for the phony, glamorized facades they are. Mauldin’s cartoons conveyed the fact that, even in a “just” war, morale among the rank and file often sucked, for the simple reason that they were abused, taken for granted, undersupplied, overworked and needlessly exposed to danger. Like ordinary troops have been since time immemorial.  

Little surprise, then, that the people who created those conditions, the officer corps, tended to hate Mauldin’s work.

In Luxembourg, General George Patton himself called Mauldin on the carpet over his “scruffy” troops. Patton wanted to censor Mauldin’s cartoons in Stars and Stripes, due to their “demoralizing” effect. (To no avail — Patton’s boss General Dwight Eisenhower overruled him.) Mauldin commemorated the meeting with a drawing[3] of Patton’s open door to his office in what looks like an ornate 18^th-century palace. The great man of history himself (along with his bull terrier) sits sullenly inside.

Had Bill Mauldin died in 1945 or never drawn again after that point, we would still remember him today as a fiercely frank chronicler of war from a common man’s perspective. But in actuality Mauldin would go on to produce his most piercing and substantial work over the rest of the 20^th century, his editorial cartoons attacking such entrenched US evils as the mistreatment of veterans, racial prejudice, inequality of all sorts, the Vietnam fiasco and the environmental crisis. He won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1959, for a cartoon of the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak as a prisoner.[4]

Few things seem to have angered Mauldin as much as the particular brand of hypocrisy exhibited by white Americans who proclaimed freedom at home but denied it those who were racially different from them, regardless of service overseas. Many works just after the war detailed the rampant discrimination against veterans of color who were often denied benefits like the GI Bill’s provisions. A 1946 cartoon shows our heroes returned from Europe, standing before a want ad which requires applicants to “prove racial and religious background.” A clean-shaven Willie, still smoking, still with a caustic expression, says, “I ain’t got a chance, Joe. I had too many blood transfusions overseas.” A child stands next to them, looking at the sign. Mauldin is asking what lessons the nation is teaching the young.

In many similar cartoons, Mauldin brought attention to the racism against minority service members back from the war, who were not allowed to re-enter the society they had fought for — not as full citizens, anyway. (President Harry S. Truman did not outlaw segregation in the military until 1948, though changes were not fully realized until six years later.) Job discrimination was a major theme. In a 1947 work, a Black man stares down a white officer barring his way into a recruiting station. The officer has a black bird perched on each shoulder, one of them labeled “Jim Crow.” “Them old eagles sure spoil that new uniform, colonel,” the Black man says.

Another devastating piece from 1945 shows two white men smilingly conversing at the counter of a fruit and vegetable stand. A sign above them has the words Hitoshi Mitsuki (the former owner) crossed out, with “under new management” beneath. “Naw, we don’t hafta worry about th’ owner comin’ back,” says one man. “He wuz killed in Italy.” The cartoon references the all-Japanese-American 442^nd Infantry Regiment, which fought in the European theater and whose troops faced much discrimination following the war. Even more gallingly, the shop sports a sign with the slogan “Let’s Keep America for Americans” and US flags. In still another work on this theme from 1945, Mauldin draws a uniformed Japanese-American veteran on crutches at a bar. A surly bartender points to a “No J*ps Allowed,” sign and says, “Can’t ya read signs?” Yet another “America for Americans” sign hangs on the counter, though it lies partly in shadow.

In the 1950s Mauldin took a hiatus from cartooning to work on various ventures (including a film career) and to run for congress as a Democrat (he lost). From 1958 to 1962, Mauldin worked exclusively for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. If anything, his critical pen only grew sharper in these years and after, one of the most tumultuous eras of US history. In fact, some newspapers dropped his cartoons due to his skewering of racists.

As an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1962 to 1991, Mauldin’s role as chronicler took on a national scope, attaining heretofore unseen heights of outrage, cutting satire and biting denunciation as he commented on national tragedy and cupidity of all sorts.

In this period Mauldin produced his most famous work — one of the most famous editorial cartoons of all time — in response to the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He showed Abraham Lincoln (the one at the Lincoln Memorial) with his hands up to his face. The artist dashed off the drawing in less time than it takes most people to have a social lunch.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Mauldin deployed his acid wit against the KKK, red-baiting, homophobia, environmental destruction, militarism, the Vietnam war, the My Lai massacre and — less famously — gender/sexual identity discrimination.

For example, in “A Place For Everything And Everything in Its Place” (1978), an aproned woman slaves away at mountains of dishes, her foot shackled to the sink. (This part recalls “Down With Kitchen Drudgery!”, a Soviet propaganda poster by Grigory Shegal from 1931). Another room has the door closed, with a huge lock, which says, “Closets for Gays.”

This is what I appreciated most about Drawn to Combat: learning about the many other causes which motivated Mauldin besides the war. His remained a crucial and fearless voice on national affairs of all sorts right up until his retirement: “You Ain’t Gaining Much Altitude Holding Me Down” (1962) depicts a white bumpkin in wide-brimmed straw hat holding a shotgun, astride the shoulders of a Black man, who himself stands chest-deep in water (delivering the line, the latter looks the more dignified); “Bookmarks” (1968) portrays an extraordinarily violent year (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy both gunned down) through the visual metaphor of a thick book, its pages crammed with the stocks of guns, hangman’s nooses, swords, knives, guns, with blood trailing down from its pages and the title “The American Way: A Social and Political History”; a 1981 cartoon of a man with a crutch before a personnel officer sitting at a desk, who says, “If you want veteran’s privileges, you should fight a popular war”; another from 1965 with a dead bird in a degraded landscape, factories spewing pollution and a sick-looking fish popping its head out of filthy water to say, “It’s getting so bad, even people are complaining.”

Mauldin died in 2003 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with his extended band of brothers and sisters in arms. Drawn to Combat proved a fascinating portrait of a vital master of US comic art.

    Moving on to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s Griffin Galleries, a visitor encountered white walls decorated by the vaguely art deco stylings of Edie Fake. These fused architecture and comics, with doors akin to panels and speech balloons doubling as decorative motifs. Such was the entrance to Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, an exhibit curated by Dan Nadel which picked up more or less where Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life left off, from roughly the 1940s[5] to the present. It featured more than 40 cartoonists, and like Ware & Samuelson’s show, the design of the rooms sought to overwhelm the eye, with blown-up images and reproductions towering overhead. Walking through the various rooms, one could see into adjacent spaces all the way to the end of the hall, as if staring through panels/windows – comics as screen archway to other realities, other times, other people.

Through the mid-20^th century, the Chicago Tribune had the most widely-read national  comics section in the country. Yet this is only part of the story, since in the same period the Chicago Defender was serving a Black readership which white-oriented papers like the Tribune tended to forget. [6]

Chicago also became, in the 1960s and 1970s, a bastion of underground/alternative comics, and today boasts a thriving scene. “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” told that story through clippings, documents, comics, installations and tons of original art.       

Among the most gripping were large splash pages from “Home Folks” (1954) by Jay Jackson. Anticipating some of Will Eisner’s work of the 1970s, these single-panel portraits of several different conversations, featuring ten or more characters at a party or other such gathering, invite the eye to “pan” over the space, thus forging a narrative. It’s almost a comics version of a busy Breughel painting. Jackson’s “Speed Jackson” (ca. 1933) and his revived version of “Bungleton Green” (1934), which often ran side by side in the Defender, spared no punches in their satirical attacks on US racism.   

Originals by Jackie Ormes’ “Patty-Jo an’ Ginger” (1945) were a delight to lose oneself in, especially for those of us who had only ever seen reproductions. I found remarkable Ormes’ subtle use of dotted screen tones with highlights to achieve varied gradations of dark skin.

Other Black artists prominently featured in the show included National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, represented by his Black Humor (1970) gag cartoons; Richard “Grass” Green,  with Super Soul Comix #2 (1972); and Seitu Hayden, whose Waliku (1973-1974), a Berke Breathed-like strip on the everyday lives of black people, partly reflected the Black Nationalism of the era. In a 1972 strip, one Black youngster says to another,  “I might be a Black Muslim when I grow up ‘cause they help Black folks.” “Yeah, I might too,” says his friend, “if they start wearen’ two tone jumpsuits insteada them ol ugly suits an bowties they got now.” The latter fashionably sports a comb in his natural. (Sadly, today this work exists only as newspaper clippings.)   

Underground comix, published in such venues as The Chicago Seed (1967), appeared in the guise of works by, among others, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. 

The 1980s and 1990s saw the start of the alternative comics revolution in Chicago, centered around Quimby’s Bookstore in Wicker Park. Major figures of this period included Ware, John Porcellino, Lynda Barry, Nicole Hollander and other legendary names. Daniel Raeburn’s highly-regarded comics criticism zine The Imp (1997) covered the scene.  

For those of us of a certain generation whose later formative years coincided with this era and these artists, seeing their works displayed proved both nostalgic and demystifying. Especially to those mere mortals toiling in the comic arts who will never rise to the empyrean heights of, say, a Dan Clowes, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now was a weirdly encouraging experience. What I mean is that, no matter how insanely perfect and polished an artist’s work appears in print, the originals will always show flaws, cover-ups, material traces of rethinkings, hesitations, a tiny misapplied brushstroke and errant ink splatter. They’re human! At a certain proximity, even Clowes and Ware look rough, raw, crude. “Shit, I could draw that,” one thinks of a stray minimalist palm tree in the distant background of a Ghost World panel.

Leave it to Clowes himself, that arch meta-commentator, to opine on this very facet of comic art display in 90s Eightball: “To look at pages at their original size is to occupy the space of the cartoonist at their creation, a vastly different space than that of the printed object, much more intimate and physical.”

Also, who knew Lynda Barry draws so huge? Her mixed-media comics collages come to life even more in person; the gold glitter and plastic eyeballs on that Aswang demon (2000-2002) really stand out off the page.  

Speaking of off the page, Molly Colleen O’Connell’s 2020-2021installation Extra, Extra, Extra reimagined a mid-century Chicago newsstand as a colorful surreal smorgasbord of made-up publications, stacks of fake newspapers, figurines, consumer products and a purple alligator vendor with eyes for nipples: print culture as fever dream.

Other highlights for me were the section on Archer Prewitt’s disturbing Sof’ Boy (1990), a Casper-like character and faux icon with accompanying merchandise (plush toys, plate, pins, figurines, t-shirt) skewering the sort of commercialism of comics characters seen in the Where Comics Came to Life show, like Skeezix figurines and bubble gum. (There was plenty of exhibit-related merch on sale in the Contemporary Art Museum gift shop, too, by the way.)

Some of the most celebrated figures — Ivan Brunetti, Ware, Emil Ferris — got their own dedicated rooms (these only seemed to reinforce canonical hierarchies worth critiquing, but oh, well). Ware’s room had all the cold, disturbing and virtuosic qualities one would expect, with sections for Rusty Brown and other works, all arranged around a creepy mechanical doll/sculpture thing sporting a domino mask, titled God (unfinished, 2012).   

Those were great, but they exposed me to very little I didn’t already know. The value of any decades-spanning museum survey like this — especially one devoted to an art form with as many neglected figures as comics — should ultimately be measured according to how many artists it brings back into the public spotlight for new generations to discover. And in this respect, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now did not disappoint.     

Besides cartoonists like Ormes, Jackson and Johnson — who deserve their own shows — the exhibit highlighted several more recent Black artists, such as Yaoundé Olu, whose untitled 1977  photomechanical print reveals Afrofuturist inclinations that have come to proliferate throughout the mediascape in recent years. We could say the same about NOG, Protector of the Pyramids (1980), an extraordinary series of superhero Afrofuturism by Turtel Onli. It ran in the Defender for a few months in 1979, and Onli self-published a collection of the material in 1981. Looking though Olu and Onlil’s oeuvre reminded me of listening to Sun Ra’s concerts or watching a Janelle Monáe video. I was seeing the Afrofuturist roots of present-day Black artists working in the mainstream, like Ta-Nehisi Coates/Brian Stelfreeze with their Black Panther arc “A Nation Under Our Feet” (2016) and Nnedi Okorafor/Leonardo Romero with Shuri (2019).

Kerry James Marshall, who has been laboring on his graphic novel Rhythm Mastr for over 20 years, was another enthralling discovery for me. This is a work best appreciated at full size, in large inkjet prints on plexiglass displayed in sequence across three walls. Some of the storyline takes place in a jazz club, where across several panels we see a drummer go to town on a solo, all ablur. Marshall’s process is extraordinary: he bases the comics characters on dolls, for which he creates and sews costumes and constructs whole miniature environments (a parking lot, a jazz club with tiny circular tables, prints on the walls). In addition, he works in such a way that reverses standard comics production. As Nadel explains, “Instead of adding color during the printing process [as Jackie Ormes or Jay Jackson would do], his rendering of Black characters is integral to the drawings: black, not the white of the paper, is the baseline color of his cast.”

To repeat, works like those of Olu, Onli and Marshall demonstrate in startling fashion the value of shows like Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now: to shed a national light on creators too-little regarded and in many cases too long ignored, but whose art is nothing short of radical, challenging the underpinnings of US comics history itself.  

The show concluded with a sprinkling of younger artists like Lilli Carré, Anya Davidson, Gina Wynbrandt, Margot Ferrick, Eric J. Garcia and Nick Drnaso. Bianca Xunise was represented by a giant blow-up of a detail from her cartoon Mask (2020), which shows a Black woman wearing a mask and an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt. A bare-faced white woman with a petulant expression tells her: “If you can’t breathe, then take that silly mask off!” Perhaps the most 2020 image of all time.

In sum, the windy city made it worth the trip. As Nadel put it in his introduction to Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now: “Chicago has been a center for comics for decades — a haven not only for making and publishing cartoons, but also for innovating on the medium.”  

I’d put it this way: for those of us in love with this art form, these incredible shows demonstrated that for comics, it really was sweet home, Chicago.

 

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[1] Borrelli, Christopher. “Free Show: ‘Chicago Where Comics Came to Life’ at the Cultural Center is 82 Jam-Packed Walls by Chris Ware and Pal.” Chicago Tribune (July 1, 2021).

[2] Thrillingly, in August, 2021, detective work by staffers at Barnacle Press who were inspired by the show led to the discovery of the artist’s identity, Robert J. Campbell. See https://twitter.com/BarnaclePress/status/1432338728568111110.

[3] Mauldin recounted the story, with drawing, in his 1971 memoir The Brass Ring.

[4] Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year, chiefly for his “anti-Soviet” novel Dr. Zhivago, though he feared leaving the USSR to claim his award out of fear of Soviet reprisals against him and his family.

[5] Despite the show’s title, many works dated back as far as the 1930s.

[6] Nadel also produced a remarkable companion book to the show, It’s Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists In Chicago, 1940–1980, which takes its title from a 1970 Charles Johnson strip of a black artist describing his painting, a black square.