Exhibit Review: Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism

 Reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle.

Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism. Nhora Lucía Serrano (curator). Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio State University. December 13, 2023 to May 5, 2024. https://library.osu.edu/exhibits/depicting-mexico-and-modernism-gordo-by-gus-arriola-representando-mexico-y-el-modernismo

 Some years ago, I had one of those moments when it hits you: you’ve lived long enough to detect a major cultural shift.

I was standing in the order line at Chipotle, a chain which itself did not exist before 1993. Behind me, I heard a nasally voice coming from someone whom I would blithely describe as “central-casting young metrosexual white dude.” He was telling the server what he wanted, which included “some guac and pico.”

His words momentarily threw me. Then I realized what he meant: guacamole and pico de gallo. That’s the way I had indicated said items my entire life, wherever I resided, from deep South Texas to Northern California to Seattle. I felt a tiny flare of outrage at the casual Newspeaky butchering of “my people’s” language, but then I just shrugged. These words aren’t really “my people’s,” anyway. “Taco” has been English for a long time. We live in a country, after all, where around the year when Mr. “Guac and Pico” was born, salsa’s US sales overtook those of ketchup.¹

For this state of affairs we can thank — more than most cultural figures, and certainly more than any other cartoonist — Gus Arriola and his celebrated comic strip Gordo. For more than four decades, it was the Mexican-American Arriola who most helped a mid-century white USA gain a new appreciation for the language, history, culture and cuisine of its neighbor to the South. 

“By including Spanish words [in his strip], Arriola introduced an American audience to Spanish phrases such as ‘piñata,’ ‘hasta la vista,’ ‘ándale,’ and more,” wrote Nhora Lucía Serrano. “He also included traditional Mexican recipes, holidays and pottery.”

I quote from the introduction to “Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism,” the first US retrospective on the strip, which Serrano curated. As she further explained, Gordo was syndicated in over 270 publications by United Feature from 1941 to 1985, becoming the “most visible ethnic comic strip” of the 20^th century.

That means Gordo traversed the eras of the Cisco Kid, of Zorro and the Zoot Suit, of Touch of Evil (with Charlton Heston in brownface), of Speedy Gonzalez and Slowpoke Rodriguez, as well as the rise of the United Farm Workers and Chicanismo movements, the Frito Bandito (a 1960s Frito-Lay TV ad campaign featuring a cartoon Mexican brigand who stole your Fritos) and beyond.

How bad did the mainstream representation of Mexican-Americans get in that span of time? Well, how about this little gem: an early 1980s deodorant commercial featuring “an obese, sombrero-wearing mustached figure [who] calls his followers to a screeching stop, reaches into his saddlebag for a small can of Arrid spray deodorant, lifts up his arms and sprays. A voice-over says, ‘If it works for him, it will work for you.” As an encyclopedia of advertising put it, “[T]he campaign was not well received by the Latino community” (McDonough/Egolf, The Advertising: 1059).

A walk through Serrano’s show demonstrated to what an astonishing degree Arriola’s work was swimming against that cultural tide. Drawing from the Billy Ireland’s collections and those of private owners, “Gordo by/de Gus Arriola” presented over 165 items, including 85 comic strips, original drawings, books, photographs, letters, animation by Bret Olsen and even some Gordo merchandise. The exhibit was easily the most scholarly attention paid to this trailblazing 20^th-century figure since Robert C. Harvey’s 2000 book Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola. Serrano was the perfect person to pull it off, too. Originally from Colombia, she is a Comparative Literature professor and Director of Academic Technology, Teaching and Research at Hamilton College; a founding board member and Treasurer of the Comics Studies Society; and editor of Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction and Mimesis (Routledge, 2021).

During my visit one chilly February day, I was especially moved by the fact that Serrano presented all the exhibit literature, including item labels, not only in English but also in crisp, proper Español (no “guac and pico” here). Such a bilingual approach doesn’t just honor its subject’s heritage, it represents a model of inclusivity and outreach to non-Anglophone communities in Ohio and beyond. (I happen to have relatives in the region who would appreciate it.)

Gustavo “Gus” Arriola (1917-2008), born in Arizona, started in animation at Screen Gems, then went on to MGM. Gordo was his first comic strip. Envisioned as the Mexican L’il Abner, the series at first capitalized to an unfortunate degree on North America’s profound ignorance and prejudice regarding Mexico. Over time, though, the artist rethought that stance, and began to instead use the strip as a venue to educate as well as entertain. Gordo became a series where you could have a laugh and learn something about another culture — a fabulously rich culture that long predated Columbus. You might even pick up words like “amigo” and “muchacho.”

      Arriola traveled to Mexico for the first time in 1960. As for many Mexican-Americans, a trip to the mother country greatly impacted his sense of identity, making him even more resistant in his work to the neo-colonialist distortions of Latin America in the US mass media. Around then Gordo also got a lot more experimental, especially on Sundays.

In terms of plot and characterization, the strip is straightforward. We follow the doings of Perfecto “Gordo” Salazar Lopez, his nephew Pepito, and their various pets including Señor Dog and Cochito the pig down Mexico way. The debut, published on November 24, 1941, delivers on the poor English and stereotypes Arriola knew his readers expected. As Pepito declares: “An’ you wanna know somteeng? My uncle Gordo ees the mos’ bes’ bean farmer of the world!”

Gordo (“Fat man” or “Fats”) wears a sombrero, takes a lot of siestas, and lusts after women (some of them white).

      In short: the series, alas, leaned hard into the dehumanizing ethnic humor which was such a pillar of mid-century popular culture. It was the age of Amos ‘n’ Andy, of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (“I don’ have to show you any steenkin’ badges!”), of Fu Manchu and Disney’s The Three Caballeros,² a time when Desi Arnaz, half of the most famous inter-ethnic couple in 1950s television, was breaking ground — but still had to effect an exaggerated, mannered demeanor to match his white audience’s preconceptions of “Cubanness.”

Yet even in this period Arriola was educating his readers. In a December 12, 1948 Sunday strip, Gordo shows his old friend Santa Clos (i.e. Santa Claus) how to make a piñata to meet new demand, spurred by a previous strip on Mexican holidays, for the children’s game. That same year, so many people wrote to request Gordo’s “Beans Weeth Cheese” recipe that a ceramic Gordo Bean Pot embossed with the strip’s characters appeared in stores. (The exhibit had one under glass.)   

Then came Arriola’s 1960 pivot from material that tended to reinforce Mexican stereotypes to his embracing the role of ambassador to south-of-the-border culture, mores and language. For one thing, Gordo dropped the bean farming career and became a sort of itinerant tour guide, ferrying visitors in his colectivo (public bus), dubbed Halley’s Comet, to various interesting country locales. And where else on the comics page were you going to learn so much about the Day of the Dead? The October 29, 1967 Sunday strip presented a lovely exploration of the holiday, featuring sugar skulls, an altar and zempasuchitl, a type of marigold, the traditional flower of the dead. (The stylized, skull-laden title and creator credit to “Góstova Chanss” testifies to Arriola’s playful side.)

Even as he moved away from the more egregious ethnic humor, though, the artist retained much of the visual typage. As he told Harvey, “You needed them to establish certain things … For instance, Gordo would wear his big sombrero only as a sort of costume: if he went to play in his little orchestra or if was going courting, he would put on his charro suit. His costume established this activity as a special occasion. Any other time, he wore his bus driver’s cap. But the symbols had to be there, I guess, for quick recognition of what I was trying to say or do” (Accidental: 189).

Serrano arranged the show more or less chronologically, with areas devoted to various aspects of the strip. I especially enjoyed the part on Gordo’s animals, since these furred and feathered companions often had as much agency and importance as the humans. Another section dealt with homages to Arriola, including a 2008 strip by Alcaraz from his La Cucaracha (1992) and a 2001 tribute by Cantú and Carlos Castellanos, from Baldo (2000).

Among many other pleasures, seeing large-sized Gordo originals gave me a new appreciation for how Arriola’s work anticipates that of the Hernandez Bros, especially Beto’s Palomar stories. The use of silhouettes, the Latin American settings and architecture, the texturing on walls, the characters’ expressions, all point to the future comic art Gordo was shaping, which included Love & Rockets. You can see this especially clearly in the May 28, 1944 Sunday page (which Arriola produced while serving in the army!), in which our hero and his associates, on their way to explore the ancient Mayan ruins of Chichen-Itza, take a side trip to check out a cenote. As a caption explained: “The greatest part of the state of Yucatan is composed of limestone. The annual rainfall drains through the porous ground and forms subterranean streams! Because of high caverns, sections of surface layer collapse, causing deep pits with water 70 or 80 feet below the surface! – These are called cenótes!!” [sic].

      Apart from Gordo’s ethnographic value, Serrano subtitled the show “Depicting Mexico and Modernism” for a reason. Especially after 1960, no strip since Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley evinced such a modernist ethos — at times ecstatically so.

      Of course, as M. Thomas Inge in his “Krazy Kat as American Dada Art” chapter in Comics as Culture (1990) and more recently Jonathan Najarian remind us, comics and modernism were never really that far apart in their sensibilities: “the divisions between high and low forms of art were never as strong as conventional accounts of modernism made them seem” (Najarian, “Comics”: 5). Gordo, with its strong influences from Frank King and George Herriman, was an instance of film scholar Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism, characterized by what Glenn Willmott describes as “its paradoxical yet seamless fusion of overtly abstract and mimetic effects in cartoon style” (“Entanglements”: 29).

      I’m thinking here of a September 6, 1959 strip in which noisy kids prevent Gordo from enjoying his beloved siesta. Different panels explode with garish colors and abstract shapes denoting their racket. It makes for an intense evocation of sound in a silent medium. Once Gordo finally gets the rowdy youngsters to leave, the final panel glows a bright yellow, with the balloonless declaration: “Silence is golden.” (The lexia in this strip also bear mention for their unconventional proportions, anticipating Chris Ware’s work.) The episode recalls Hillary Chute’s observation that “There’s an excess about comics that makes people uncomfortable, like too much visuality, a plentitude. And this is almost always centered on the expression or representation of the body” (“Afterward”: 305, emphasis in original).     

Not only that; like Picasso, Arriola filtered the ancient through a modern idiom. See for example an extraordinary series of July/August, 1968 Gordo Sunday pages recounting the tragic romance of Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl from Aztec mythology in a style which fuses comics and pre-Columbian iconography. Another Sunday strip, from June 18, 1950, tells its story through character silhouettes on vases-cum-panels, while at still other times the artist evoked Mexican folk art (artesanía), pottery, and Egyptian ideograms.

Arriola could even give Ernie Bushmiller a run for his dinero. In a November 20, 1955 Sunday strip, Gordo finds himself on fire. Pepito quickly puts out the blaze, but in the aftermath they realize that the fire has burned a hole through the newspaper itself. Through it they can see the page underneath — which has a Nancy strip.  

Such bold visual gambits made Gordo among the most experimental mainstream series of its era, which, as Serrano put it, “permitted the Mexican character, and Mexico by extension, to be seen as a more accepted resident of a modernist ethnic America.”

There was another way Arriola sought to affirm his modern bona fides: through depictions of the counterculture. Case in point: Bug Rogers, the always “with it” Beatnik spider. 

“Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism” was a marvelous experience. I wish it would tour the world. It more than validates the trend of academics curating public-facing comic art exhibits (e.g. Ben Saunders, Charles Hatfield, Sarah Lightman, Jared Gardner). It’s a brilliant model to draw in (so to speak) as wide a public as possible to, I daresay, (re)learn what makes America America.

Arriola, through his humble Mexican everyman, taught valuable lessons to a nation that at the time knew next to nothing about its Southern neighbor — and most of what it did “know” was wrong and harmful. I wish I could say we’ve long moved past that issue in 2024. Instead, as I type this a candidate for president boasts about how, when elected, he will undertake the largest deportations of “illegals” in US history. To which I can only say, “Chinga tu MAGA, pendejo.” On the other hand, we do live in the age of guac and pico, which gives me some measure of hope.  

In any case, if we as a nation are ever to overcome retrograde Trumpian thinking, educational opportunities like Serrano’s exhibit will be part of the solution. That the Arriola show took place in the perfect setting of our nation’s premiere comic art repository, well, that’s just the cereza on top.

To Serrano and the Billy Ireland: “¡Muchísimas gracias!”

And pass me some guac and pico, please.

 

¹ And it wasn’t even close; that year US salsa sales beat ketchup by over $40 million (O’Neill, “Apple”: 49). That said, 1992 was also around the time when someone I dated in college (white) told me she thought pico de gallo meant “pick of the garden.” 

²This was part of the Good Neighbor policy, a US government initiative to blunt Nazi Germany’s influence on Central America during WWII. The film has its heart in the right place, but híjole it sure leaves no Latino stereotype unturned.

 

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary. “Afterword: Graphic Modernisms.” Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. Ed. Jonathan Najarian. University Press of Mississippi, 2024: 301-309.

     Harvey, Robert. C. Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

 Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

McDonough, John & Karen Egolf. The Advertising Age: Encyclopedia of Advertising. Vol. 1. Routledge, 2002.

Najarian, Jonathan. Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2024.

O’Neill, Molly. “New Mainstream: Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Salsa.” The New York Times (March 11, 1992): 49, 54. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1992/03/11/550992.html?pageNumber=49. 

  Willmott, Glenn. "Entanglements” in Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. Ed. Jonathan Najarian. University Press of Mississippi, 2024: 15-32.

Book Review: The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. edited by Tom Heintjes

reviewed by David Beard, Professor of Rhetoric, University of Minnesota Duluth

Tom Heintjes (ed.) The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. Bull Moose Publishing, 2024. $24.99 (Paperback). Available at

https://www.lulu.com/shop/tom-heintjes/the-complete-betty-brown-phg/paperback/product-zm82g7d.html

The field of comics studies stands on the same foundations, now, as other academic disciplines: scholarly rigor and, where possible, objectivity. To study comics really isn’t all that different from studying art, literature, film, mass communication, or other domains of human creative or literate activity.

And yet, there are differences, deep within our disciplinary DNA. For example, where connoisseurship, in art history, is built upon institutional records and practices in museums, in comics studies, the early connoisseurship was engaged by fans, eager to track down the artists on their favorite, unsigned strips. Biographical criticism of comics art often began, in some cases, in interviews conducted at conventions or by fanzines. Beneath the foundation of work in comics studies, in other words, is a layer of sediment created by passion.

The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G., by Tom Heintjes, is an example of such a passion project. (So, too, is Heintjes excellent Hogan’s Alley magazine, which celebrates (and sometimes excavates) the medium in interesting ways. See the website at <https://www.hoganmag.com/>

Betty Brown holds a Ph.G., a now-obsolete pharmacy degree which enables her to be both pharmacist and small businesswoman.¹ The pharmacy profession has changed a lot since the trade publication Drug Topics ran these strips, during the Depression and through the second World War (1934-1948). Betty Brown’s life (dispensing medication, working as the town’s unofficial healthcare provider, while also running a small business faced with cutthroat competitors) is filled with challenges, humor and some larger-than life, almost movie-serial style adventure.

Assembled in part as a passion project during the pandemic lockdown, The Complete Betty Brown appears to be an unlikely subject for a collection. While publishers have collected a lot of comic strips since the paperback’s creation (and more recently in the Library of American Comics series, and, less respectfully, in the quirky anthologies assembled by Yoe Books), no one was clamoring for Betty Brown. It took the Heintjes’ passion to demonstrate that we should have wanted this work. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. completes a picture of the work of its creators, it completes a picture of the medium of comics, and it completes a picture of one of the most important areas of healthcare, itself often overlooked. I mean “Completing the picture” in the sense of:

Completing the picture of the work of its creators, Zack Mosley and Boody Rogers

The creators are some of the most popular in golden-age comica history. Zack Mosley was a comic strip artist best known for the aviation adventures in The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, which ran in 300 newspapers at its height and was a transmedia phenomenon (starring in comic strips, books, radio, and movie serials). Betty Brown gives us a small window into an artist establishing his craft, alongside his early career colleague, Boody Rogers. (Rogers was the subject of a collection by Fantagraphics in 2009, Craig Yoe’s Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers, and a section of The Comics Journal in 2006.) As such, this work fills gaps in their biography.

Mosley worked on early Buck Rogers, and that should give a sense of the art style – the figures are built of undulating lines, curves, and swooshes. Built to live entirely in black and white, the strips use wells of black ink to pull the eye forward and back, left to right, in a way that makes the strips a joy to read – and an important part of our understanding of the developing style of their creators.

Completing the picture of the medium of comics

Our picture of comics, as a medium, tends to drift in two directions – the mass medium, aimed at broad audiences, printed in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies, distributed across vast geographies, and the art comic, aimed at a more intimate audience. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. served a different need.

Printed in Drug Topics, Betty Brown was read only by pharmacists and related professionals inside a pharmacy practice. The series, then, looks like its mass media counterparts, and bears superficial genre markers (oscillating between an empowered woman and a damsel in distress), but fundamentally, the strip was there to echo and to reinforce the ideas the trade magazine wanted to advance. When Betty discusses the best location for her pharmacy, she is parroting the points that Drug Topics makes about proper location for retail pharmacy.

At the same time as it is a marketing and education tool, the strip attempts to generate pathos and excitement and even a few cliffhangers, matching the energy of its mass media contemporaries. The compromises Mosley and Rogers made resulted in an unusual example of the medium, worth a look by any historian of comics.

Completing the picture of pharmacy in the Modern era

Finally, this volume should appeal to historians of medicine and perhaps even graphic medicine. Neither of these two fields focus on pharmacy, which is ostensibly one of the most intriguing professions in modern health care in the United States.

Retail pharmacists are among the only health care professionals who can be accessed without any insurance, anytime. In communities where poverty is high and underinsurance rates are higher, the pharmacist is a first responder, in many ways. The series of strips in 1942, in which Betty Brown helps take care of residents of her small town after a fire, reflects this – pharmacists are healers. (This is even more true today, when pharmacists hold not the antiquated Ph.G. but a Pharm.D. degree.)

And yet, retail pharmacists are also the most invisible in popular culture. While medical dramas are a staple of television and have been a staple of comics (from Ben Casey to the Night Nurse), the pharmacist does their work unseen. Betty Brown fills that gap. As Robert A. Buerki noted in his essay in Pharmacy in History,

Drawing its inspiration from the pages of Drug Topics, radio soap operas, and the pervasive fascination with sensational crime in the 1930s, Betty Brown, Ph.G. presents an unusual, even unique picture of the practice of pharmacy in America during the mid- 1930s and early 1940s.

Tom Heintjes has offered the community of scholars in comics studies, in graphic medicine, and in the history of medicine a gift of immeasurable value. I recommend this book for library purchase for scholarly purposes.²

^[1] “The Graduate of Pharmacy (Ph.G.)” was superseded by the Bachelor of Pharmacy degree (B.Pharm.) in the early part of the 20th century.  The B.Pharm. was itself superseded by the R.Ph. (Registered Pharmacist), which has been more or less superseded by the Pharm. D., though some pharmacists still practice with the R.Ph.

^[2] There are, as Heintjes notes, problematic representations of women and of people of color in this text which limit its usefulness to scholarly purposes. I could not give this book to a friend as a good read, but I could offer it to a researcher as an important source. And that is the spirit within which I offer it to readers of IJOCA.

 Citations

Buerki, Robert A. "The Saga of Betty Brown, Ph. G." Pharmacy in history 30.3 (1988): 163-167.

 

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.

Demystifying The U Ray, the better to rewrite the origin myth of Blake and Mortimer

 Éric Dubois

 ODDYSEY to the origins of Blake and Mortimer, Eric Dubois (curator), Brussels: Belgian Comic Strip Center / Comics Art Museum, April 7 – October 1, 2023. https://www.comicscenter.net/en/exhibitions/gallery/oddysey-to-the-origins-of-blake-and-mortimer

What does the ODYSSEY exhibition explain about the origins of Blake and Mortimer?

It shows that The U Ray (Le Rayon U) album is a missing link between comics in the English-language tradition and the Franco-Belgian one. Edgar P. Jacobs was inspired by Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, which he had started by plagiarizing in Bravo! magazine before going on to create his own story. The way in which the artist freed himself in a few pages from an American comic strip narrative and graphic codes such as text boxes and no speech balloons, to forge his own cartooning grammar is fascinating to observe, with period tracings and original pages on display as evidence. For his first attempt at a comic story, it's a stroke of genius. At the Comics Museum in Brussels, Jacob’s talent is displayed before our eyes.

More importantly, the exhibition changes the way we look at this album. U is more than the matrix of the characters and themes of the work to come when Jacobs creates Blake and Mortimer. In 1973, for the first collected album edition, Jacobs was not content to reassemble the original 1943 story from by just rearranging the original two panels per tier to three. He “Blake-and-Mortimerized” his U Ray. The album published by the Éditions du Lombard was no longer just the matrix of the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, but became an extension of that aesthetic. The direct comparison of pages from The U Ray album version and earlier plates from The Secret of the Swordfish, Atlantis Mystery and The Time Trap shows us the mythical character of this two-version album.

What are the most emblematic pieces of the exhibition?

The exhibition presents only original material and a majority are unpublished ones. Among the top pieces, the visitor can discover four panels sketched on tracing paper which are as sumptuous as they are extremely rare; two color-enhanced sketches of Flash Gordon, of which Jacobs only drew five pages in 1942; and two others of the two-panel version of The U Ray from 1943. These are the oldest documents from the story, as well as in the career of Jacobs as a cartoonist. Precious handwritten notes from this first story bear witness to the genesis of the names of places and characters. "Rayon V," "Rayon Vert," but also "Olrik," "Flying shark," and further on "Swordfish." We are struck by the premonitory character of such notes. They prove that from the start that Jacobs did not think in terms of comics, but in rather in terms of the novel, indicating "Roman d’aventure genre Gordon" at the top of his page. The exhibition also displays a small paper model of the album, bound by hand, on which Jacobs sketched all the boxes, the page connections, the strips to be redrawn, the new boxes, and so on, a further testimony to the needs of the draftsman to work out the story.

The visitor can view a selection of original pages from The U Ray. When observed carefully, it is possible to understand the full process of the reassembling of the story in an album and its second inception. Collages and overlays in white gouache and Indian ink abound, to house the speech bubbles as well as format the boxes. But above all, for six of the pages printed in sepia in the Journal Bravo! we have the complete redrawing. This is the exhibition’s key treasure.

Next to this black and white original art that has remained in the shadows for so long, the visitor has the chance to lift the veil on a series of sublime polychrome tracings. Abundantly commented on by Jacobs, a meticulous artist, these fragile sheets also testify to the care taken to document his work and constitute his archives. This is a process that will lead, in 1984, to the creation of the E.P. Jacobs Foundation, today in charge of preserving and promoting the heritage of the Belgian cartoonist.[1]

From what angle does the ODYSSEY exhibition approach the album The U Ray?

Six themes make up the exhibit: Under the Auspices of the Gods, A Modern Homer, Theater of the World, The Death Ray, Unknown Earth and The Eternal Return.

The ODYSSEY exhibition considers The U Ray’s comic strip origin, as well as its genesis from the angle of the myth and the great stories of antiquity, especially Homer's Odyssey. The exhibition explores the affiliations between the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer and American comics, in particular Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, while going beyond the model/copy pattern in order further to suggest relationships between the two stories, whose authors, Jacobs and Raymond, drank from the same literary and cinematographic sources. Jacobs' first story as an author appears as the missing link in a history of Franco-Belgian comics under American influence, of which the superhero became the titular figure, but was not when Jacobs began working.

The mythological angle therefore invites us to see Jacobs as a storyteller. It is a bridge between two generations and two cultural shores. There is a genius for storytelling in him, which cannot be reduced to the sum of the references or the tropes used. This means that despite all the analyses, even the most scholarly, there will always be something more to say about his work. Where Jacobs is at his strongest is in his ability to appropriate the narrative codes of the great tradition of storytelling and mythical narrative. We forget their influence - conscious or not - when one reads a Blake and Mortimer comic book. Jacobs is a true storyteller and that's why his stories are timeless.

I think of Jules Verne and his Voyage to the Moon, but also in particular Arthur Conan Doyle with his novel The Lost World. Behind this fantasy story, that has the trappings of a pseudo-scientific novel, hides a sociological study on the brutality of human relations in a civilized environment. I perceive in Jacobs this same universalism in the narratives with a reflexive background. In his stories, Jacobs reconnects with the primary vocation of storytelling, which was to give food for thought by striking the imagination with edifying tales, thereby creating images capable of inspiring or transmitting a certain morality.

The exhibit layout plays a major role. How did you envision it?

My creative process played on radical changes: scale, light, and color, and is inspired by the spectacle side of amusement parks. The exhibition is initially fully lit before darkening and then returning to light, following a ritual symbolism of the return to the starting point. The design is based on large sets playing the role of thresholds. It was a question of giving the space an aura of grandeur, but also of punctuating the visit with twists -- such as acts in the theater. Right from the entrance with its giant octopus, the tone is set. These decorations evoke the fairground attractions of Coney Island in New York, the model of all modern magic and source of inspiration for Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo.

Under the Auspices of the Gods is dedicated to Flash Gordon and the Journal Bravo!. It presents the tracings of the 2^nd and 4^th panels of Flash by Jacobs. Modern Homer concentrates on the characters. Attention is drawn to the "small note papers of Edgar P. Jacobs", which show to the method of reassembly for the album. The Theater of the World emphasizes spatio-temporal exoticism and the art of staging. Color is also evoked as an agent of the wonders of Jacobs’s world. The Death Ray is dedicated to the ultimate weapon which is the McGuffin of The U Ray. The Unknown Land is the famous Terra Incognita of old maps and terrestrial globes. In this part, it is about the ape-men and the perils that threaten the troop led by the Lord Calder character.

The final theme, The Eternal Return, is dedicated to the sequel to U and presents a series of original pages from The Fiery Arrow. This theme closes the time loop by highlighting the return to certain visual archetypes in this sequel, and the way in which, again in mythology, ritual (codified repetition) is the means for humanity to access the divine, and therefore immortality. From The U Ray onwards, Edgar P. Jacobs maintained a delightfully paradoxical relationship with time that was tempting to explore here, not to resolve or reduce it, but to settle in it and savor it.

How did you take into account the interior space of the building of the Comics museum, which is extremely bright?

To ensure the preservation of the works, it was essential to control the luminosity of the interior of the building, first designed by the Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta as an opulent and bourgeois fabrics store, which serves now as a showcase for the Museum. A paper ceiling was created to break the sunlight coming from the iconic glass roof. It also plays the role of the chromatic palette of the exhibition, directly inspired by that of the album. This design device is very significant visually, both for visitors who are below and for those seeing it from the mezzanine of the upper floor. As such, an exhibition addresses the mind as much as the body and create the conditions for an encounter with the work in its very essence, and not only in the materiality of the pages that made it possible.

We must not forget that the original work in comics is the printed and published story in an album. That is what is on display. So this exhibition puts itself forward even more as a true setting in this sense, because with Edgar P. Jacobs, the setting is as important as the action and the characters. I was careful to maintain a kind of sensory and chromatic unity throughout the visit, without forgetting the key contribution of sound to give the exhibition its inhabited character. Once again, my accomplice the composer Bruno Letort, knew how to create an atmosphere that gives soul to the exhibition. Letort is a fan of Jacobs who listens to Blake and Mortimer albums as much as he reads them. For the visitors we hope to have created an exhibition in which all the senses are awakened.

Éric Dubois is a design professor in Paris and has been participating with comic strip exhibitions since François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters set him on the path with their Drawing Machines in 2016 at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. After that, he worked with Blake and Mortimer, for which he created several exhibitions with journalists and comics experts Thierry Bellefroid and Daniel Couvreur: Scientifiction (2018), The Secret of the Swordfish (2021), MachinaXion (2022). Dubois is the sole curator of ODYSSEY exhibition on the origins of Blake and Mortimer. This is an exhibition dedicated to The “U” Ray, the first comic book by Edgar P. Jacobs.

 The Belgian Comic Strip Center

The Belgian Comic Strip Center opened its doors to the public on October 6th 1989. In no time this impressive museum became one of the main attractions of Brussels. Every year more than 250.000 visitors come here to explore 4,200 m² of permanent and temporary exhibitions, not to mention its comprehensive documentation center and rich collections. The BCSC collects anything that deals with European comics, from its prestigious beginnings to its latest developments.

Temporary and permanent exhibitions have transformed this Art Nouveau gem into a living and attractive temple. It is a dynamic and exciting place where everything is done to promote the Ninth Art (associated with the creation of the Brussels Comic Strip Route, the issue of Comic Strip stamps, etc...). The Belgian Comic Strip Center also produces, for many partners, conferences, books, creative workshops and counseling.

With more than 700 comic strip authors, Belgium has more comic strip artists per square kilometer than any other country in the world! It is here that the comic strip has grown from a popular medium into an art in its own right. Nowhere else comics are so strongly rooted in reality and in people's imagination.

---

[1] Since 2018, first under the aegis of the King Baudouin Foundation which hosted the Jacobs Fund for four years, then under the impetus of a renewed E. P. Jacobs Foundation, several exhibitions and publications have been able to highlight the unique qualities of the work of Edgar P. Jacobs. The work of preserving the archives left by the creator of Blake and Mortimer continues. The E.P. Jacobs Foundation is actively involved in this, in collaboration with the King Baudouin Foundation, which now assists it in this task. Created by Edgar P. Jacobs to guarantee the heritage of his work, it is possible today to look into its archives of unsuspected richness and to discover there the stages of an extraordinary creation. 

Book Review: Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History by Eike Exner

Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History by Eike Exner. Rutgers, 2021. <https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/comics-and-the-origins-of-manga/9781978827226 >

Reviewed by Sam Cowing, Denison University.

1. Introduction

Chronicling the history of comics is perilously difficult. While comics (or at least some comics) now enjoy unprecedented cultural cache, their present standing does nothing to remedy previously low cultural status and intentionally ephemeral production practices. Thankfully, a number of brave souls have labored long and carefully to provide us with a useful grip on the emergence and development of comics in Western Europe and North America. Obviously, such efforts were never going to supply us with a comprehensive history of comics, but with the ascendent popularity of manga, substantial ignorance regarding manga’s history has never been more conspicuous nor have questions about the relationship between manga and other comics traditions ever been more urgent.

Eike Exner’s efforts in this book are both timely and remarkable. Exner carefully explores the development of manga and its changing status through the 1890s and up through the 1930s. At each turn, Exner looks both forward to the forms of relatively contemporary manga and backward to preceding Japanese print traditions. Taking aim at historical accounts which position contemporary manga as nothing more than the present incarnation of an isolated, centuries-long, and essentially Japanese artistic tradition, Exner forcefully argues instead that

 [C]ontemporary manga and other audiovisual comics are in fact one and the same medium and did not emerge from mutually alien traditions, as far too many histories of manga and comics would have one believe. (178)

Exner’s case against viewing manga as a hermetically sealed tradition draws on close readings of the narrative and formal elements of early Japanese cartoonists such as Imaizumi Ippyo, Kitazawa Rakuten, and Okamoto Ippei as well as a detailed examination of the adaptation and reception of George McManus’ Bringing Up Father and other foreign strips throughout the 1920s. Exner then explores the influence of the latter on the subsequent production and popularity of comics strips by Japanese cartoonists.

As Exner notes, possible motivations for positing a culturally isolated lineage between Japanese print traditions and contemporary manga are complex. Cultural prestige, public interest, and nationalist sentiment are only three of many factors that have sustained questionable manga historiography. When broaching these issues, Exner is a subtle and convincing commentator. Better still, he is capable of sifting through a complex visual record with an eye towards salient detail. The result is a watershed contribution to comics studies that is mandatory reading for scholars interested in manga and its history. In what follows, I offer a rough sketch of Exner’s efforts and then examine a striking conjecture about the nature of comics that emerges in this book: the historical dependence of contemporary comics upon the invention of the phonograph.

2. Overview

Given the limited historical scholarship on manga available in English, a separate overview of the economic context, material production, or narrative trends of manga’s emergence would be terribly useful. It is an evident strength of Exner’s book that he is attentive to each of these and many other dimensions of manga, regularly observing important narrative developments (e.g., recurrent characters, use of anthropomorphism), formal innovations (e.g., layout and ordering conventions, generic styles), and professional developments among creators. In addition to supplying a vivid sense of the manga “industry” in the periods under study, Exner’s observations should spark productive historical interest into lesser-known works and creators involved in the importation and transformation of comics in Japan. The attentive reader is sure to leave this book terribly curious about a previously unknown figure, puzzled by the specific reception of this or that American strip, or desperate for a translation of one of the many Japanese texts Exner draws upon.

Exner sets out the ambitions for the book and a summative interrogation of competing histories of manga in the introduction and epilogue, respectively. A prologue charts some of the terminological history regarding manga and serves as a crucial tool for evaluating the impact of imported American strips upon the Japanese comics tradition. Like any good historian, Exner is eager to welcome others along to dig deeper into the questions with which he is concerned. A useful appendix lists foreign comics printed in Japan between 1908-1945, and, at several points throughout the book, Exner makes clear that much more remains to be discovered regarding this fecund era in comics history.

The first of the four main chapters discusses the production and reception of Bringing up Father, beginning in 1923 and running for seventeen consecutive years in the Asahi Graph. Exner scrutinizes the varying adaptation strategies in early installments that sought to bridge the reading practices of American creators with those of Japanese audiences—most notably, with regard to panel order and speech balloon orientation. As Exner notes elsewhere, the reprinting of foreign strips while ignoring the formality of copyright was a widespread phenomenon. Questions about why Asahi Graph editor in chief Suzuki Bunshiro seized upon McManus’ work and what role printing rights played in this choice are potentially productive and usefully specific questions that one might now explore further given Exner’s pioneering work.

Chapter Two is, in some ways, a detour from the main aims of the book. It offers a theory of the narrative and formal function of speech balloons, drawing from several episodes in non-Japanese comics. I examine Exner’s theory below, but the historiographic rationale for this chapter is that the emergence of what Exner calls “audiovisual comics”—roughly, comics that feature speech balloons and other emanata—is historically specific to the Western comics idiom. The absence of audiovisual comics from the Japanese print tradition, despite the presence of sequential graphic storytelling is subsequently marshalled as evidence of the impact of American comics’ importation. In particular, the adoption of speech balloons in contemporary manga is argued to be dependent upon their deployment in strips like Bringing Up Father in the 1920s.

In Chapter Three, Exner surveys the broader landscape of imported comics strips and examines trends that follow upon the distinctive reception of audiovisual strips. The continuing challenge of translation and competing practical and formal responses are examined. Exner also takes up the material question of how exactly the adaptation and reprinting was undertaken by Japanese periodicals. Additionally, the significance of editorial choices by figures like Inui Shin’ichiro and the role of comics-oriented periodicals like Shinseinen and Manga Man are discussed, especially as sites for innovation by Japanese cartoonists.

Chapter Four supplies a partial account of “fully audiovisual” manga created by Japanese mangaka. Exner charts the path of several creators from the period preceding the importation of foreign strips to an increasingly mature manga industry, one driven by audience enthusiasm for speech balloon-laden narrative rather than pre-1920s picture stories. Touching upon the formative influence of imported strips on Osamu Tezuka, Exner sketches a rough proposal for credibly explaining the subsequent divergences regarding style and transdiegetic elements between the manga tradition and foreign comics. Notably, this sketch leaves aside any controversial claims about the availability and impact of foreign comics throughout World War II. Much like those who invariably point to Japanese Punch and the British satirical tradition in framing the history of manga, those who place undue weight on anecdotes about the discarded comics of American G.I.s will find Exner’s observations an important corrective.

3. Exner on Speech Balloons

If one hopes to provide a historical account of the emergence of contemporary or what Exner calls “audiovisual” manga, a theory of what makes manga contemporary and, in particular, what separates contemporary manga from its precursors is needed. For Exner, the principal divide between contemporary manga and preceding comic strips is the presence of transdiegetic elements—most notably, the speech balloon. And, as Exner argues, this innovation stems from the importation of foreign strips. As he puts it, “most significant change in narrative manga brought about by the translation of American comics was this shift from picture story to audiovisual comic strip.” (165) This historical argument can be mounted with fairly modest assumptions about the nature of speech balloons and their history outside of manga. But, in Chapter Two Exner departs from the history of manga, narrowly conceived, to develop a theory of the function of speech balloons as well as their historical origin. Exner builds upon previous work by Thierry Smolderen here, but the result is a distinctive proposal sure to be of interest to anyone concerned with how comics work.

Exner’s theory of speech balloons comprises a taxonomic proposal, a functional thesis, and a historical hypothesis. The taxonomic proposal distinguishes speech balloons as transdiegetic elements of the comics form. Unlike the intradiegetic text that appears on objects like signs and clothing within the narrative world of a comic, speech balloons themselves are unseeable by characters. But, unlike other unseeable extradiegetic elements (e.g., box narration, panel borders), speech balloons also impact the narrative world by conveying dialogue that characters might hear. Given their peculiar role, Exner takes them to be most aptly described as hybrid, transdiegetic elements.

There are alternative taxonomies we might adopt regarding the visual technology of comics, but it is a virtue of Exner’s account that it makes apparent the peculiarity of speech balloons. And, within this taxonomy, there is room for competing views about how exactly speech balloons serve their transdiegetic function. According to Exner, speech balloons are basically depictive entities, functioning as sound images. There is, however, reason to be cautious about assuming the sound image view or something like it.

Suppose, for example, a comic includes a speech balloon with internal text reading “I am.” Suppose that a subsequent reprint of the comic revises this text to read “Eye yam.” Such a change is a substantive (and presumably illicit) alteration to the comic precisely because speech balloons convey more than sonic information. They present us with interpreted sonic information, which discriminates between sonically equivalent events on the basis of the semantic content of speech. For this reason, speech balloons prove even weirder than Exner acknowledges: they must convey information, not only about what sounds are made, but what is meant through the production of sounds. We should, for this reason, view speech balloons as more like pictures of speech acts than as pictures of uninterpreted sonic events.

Exner’s historical hypothesis binds the history of speech balloons to the history of sound-recording technology, asserting that “audiovisual comics developed in response to new conceptions and technologies of vision and hearing… with the invention and spread of the phonograph being particular essential to the creation of audiovisual comics.” (175) Exner holds this connection to be far from accidental, claiming that speech balloons are more or less unimaginable in advance of the phonograph. This conjecture about our conceptual powers and, in turn, the emergence of modern comics warrants closer scrutiny than a review permits. Here, however, it is worth noting that the case for the historical hypothesis looks rather different if we demure from the sound image view.

In arguing for the dependence of the speech balloon upon phonographic technology, Exner suggests that, if speech balloons had developed prior to the phonograph, we ought to have observed the appearance of non-linguistic sounds as a kind of intermediary form.(58) Presumably this is because such sounds are, in some intuitive sense, less complicated and therefore likely easier to depict. Notice, however, that if speech balloons present, not “raw” sound images, but instead interpreted sonic information (e.g., sounds qua speech acts), we would actually expect the reverse.

In the case of ordinary speech balloons, we exploit standing correspondences between text and spoken language. When it comes to presenting non-linguistic sounds, we are no less required to exploit linguistic conventions—in this case, distinctive ones that introduce lexical items to pick out non-linguistic sounds. Contrary to the intuition that comics present unmediated sound images of what happens when a car speeds by or a dog vocalizes, when we deploy ‘woosh’ or ‘woof’ in comics, we rely upon baroque, culture-specific linguistic conventions for interpreting and relaying sonic events. While an account of these conventions is a job of cognitive linguistics, there is no reason to believe it would antedate the more familiar linguistic conventions that are exploited in the ordinary speech balloon. Indeed, the capricious nature of how we represent animals sounds suggests it is an especially complex affair. Rather than generating the prediction that we should see “zip” and “plop” as precursors to the speech balloon, once we recognize transdiegetic text in comics typically presents interpreted sonic information, we should suspect that “ordinary” speech balloons would be first on the scene.

Importantly, Exner’s critical intervention in the history of manga remains intact even if we reject the more tendentious theses regarding the nature of speech balloons. It is, however, a testament to the richness of this book that, alongside re-shaping how we ought to view the history of manga, it challenges some basic assumptions about the nature of the comics medium.