Book Review: Drawling Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America

 Reviewed by Christina M. Knopf

Simon Appleford. Drawling Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023.  https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5814/     

The political cartoons of Herbert Lawrence Block, professionally known as“Herblock,” influenced leaders, shaped political discourse, and had a lasting impact on public memory. Herblock’s career, Simon Appleford notes, “lasted seventy-two years and encompassed the presidencies of thirteen men, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush” (1-2). Born in 1909 in Chicago, Block worked there and then in Cleveland as an editorial cartoonist until joining the Army in World War II. Following his discharge, he worked for the Washington Post for an amazing 55 years until his death in 2001. Appleford claims in Drawing Liberalism that Herblock was a significant advocate for, and voice of, postwar liberalism – one that is largely neglected in scholarly attention to liberal intellectuals of the era. Drawing Liberalism thus focuses on “how Block’s cartoon’s [sic] reflected and shaped liberalism in the domestic sphere” (15).

The book is organized into six chapters, prefaced by a brief introduction, and followed by a short epilogue. Forty-three Herblock cartoons illustrate the chapters, assisting readers’ understanding of Herblock’s style. The introduction establishes the significance of political cartooning in history and public discourse, while providing a brief overview of some of their rhetorical features. However, comics studies and political communication scholars with keen interests in the visual and rhetorical devices employed by cartoonists will find uneven attention to those features in the rest of the book. Appleford is a historian whose focus is on Herblock’s articulation of, and contribution to, postwar liberal ideology, not an art historian.

The first chapter provides a brief biography, outlining Herblock’s journey to the Washington Post in 1946, highlighting the influences and experiences that shaped Herblock’s politics and artistry. Chapter 2 focuses on Herblock’s work throughout the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s. Appleford introduces the chapter as one that “examines the visual devices that Block used to persuade his audience” that the fearmongering of anti-Communists was as much a threat to the country as Communist subversion. Some of the “visual devices” discussed include Herblock’s use of sports metaphors, allusions to Greek mythology, everyday scenarios with which readers could identify, and his development of the character of Mr. Atom – an anthropomorphic atom bomb. Appleford further identifies three categories of Herblock cartoons that represented threats to Americans’ civil liberties: cartoons that depicted the House Un-AmericanActivities Committee (HUAC) as vacuous and vindictive; cartoons that depicted HUAC members as overzealous and malicious; and, cartoons that depicted HUAC “in activities that struck against the very symbols of American democracy” (61). Indeed, as Appleford discusses in the chapter, Herblock is largely credited with coining the term “McCarthyism” after Senator Joe McCarthy, who he drew with a “thug-like, almost Neanderthal depiction [that] would become a recurring theme” (69) of Herblock’s characterization of opponents to civil liberties and civil rights.

In chapter 3, Appleford examines Herblock’s handling of segregation and racial violence, arguing that “Block identified the fight for African American rights as one of the most important social and political movements of the mid-twentieth century,” (16) – but one in which he was more concerned about white intolerance and bigotry than the Black experience. Appleford writes, “By privileging the actions of white elites […] at the expense of other participants – most notably of the African American community but also of women and children – Block gave his readers a significantly distorted picture” of events (87) – but he also brought the ideal of racial equality as fundamental to American values “to the attention of a much larger audience than might otherwise have been exposed to ideas of liberal intellectuals” (90). And the white Southerners drawn in Herblock’s cartoons took on the signature thug-like appearance that he used for depicting enemies of liberalism.

Chapter 4 argues that Herblock’s “cartoons serviced as proxies in the early stages of a national debate over the so-called culture wars that has characterized much of American political discourse for the past fifty years” (16). It begins with Herblock’s response to the Kennedy assassination and the hostility with which an anti-gun cartoon was received by many readers – which Appleford describes as a reflection of the early stages of the “culture wars.” The chapter then looks at Herblock’s cartoons during the Kennedy years, noting that the artist “drew inspiration from the self-styled rhetoric of the campaign” to depict Kennedy as “a courageous pioneer or clean-cut cowboy” (120). The reader is left to fill-in-the-blank, that such imagery reflected Kennedy’s use of the frontier metaphor. The chapter also examines Herblock’s disparagement of the right-wing John Birch Society and Daughters of the Revolution, where he again used his thuggish depictions to suggest the “presumed lack of education and propensity for violence” (127) of their members. Appleford connects such imagery to Herblock’s belief in an urban majority as more representative of American ideals than the rural minority, with which he connected a conservative ideology that was antithetical to American democracy,

Chapter 5 is concerned with Herblock’s lackluster response to the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s – one that “failed to give any legitimacy to protest movements” (16). Here, discussion turns again to Herblock’s handling of civil rights and his tendency to privilege the actions of, and impact on, whites. Appleford also discusses Herblock’s relative lack of attention to women’s rights issues as “a reflection of postwar liberalism’s own lack of interest in the questions [compared to] civil rights” (165). Appleford further notes Herblock’s reliance on the major tropes of “dangerous seductress, innocent victim, or as a symbol of American values” (167) – though such visual metaphors were infrequently related to women’s issues or civil rights, such as the Vietnam War caricatured and embodied as the mistress of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Overall, Appleford demonstrates in this chapter that Herblock’s lack of representation for women’s and other rights-based movements that emerged in the 1960s suggested an unwillingness to engage with critiques of “the patriarchal institutions and cultural practices of postwar liberalism” (169).

The final chapter focuses on the subject with which Herblock is most strongly connected in public memory – his portrayals of Richard Nixon. Appleford seeks to show how Herblock’s cartoons were pivotal in defining the public perception of Nixon, transforming him from a young congressman considered handsome and principled, “into an archetype of corruption, a chameleon whose position on the issues of the day changed based solely on political expediency, and whose features became synonymous with the abuse of power” (16). Throughout the chapter, Appleford frequently discusses the prominent “5 o'clock shadow” in Herblock’s caricature of Nixon – one that was a controversial point of contention for the president and his supporters. It is, however, almost by accident in passing that Appleford recognizes that the darkened face visually represents “the darker side of Nixon’s character” (206). Other common depictions of Nixon by Herblock as a vulture or undertaker and as a man who wore many masks. Perhaps the most insightful part of the chapter is Appleford’s exploration of Herblock’s cartoon coverage of Watergate, for which Herblock frequently used water imagery. Washington Post owner Katherine Graham noted that Herblock’s cartoons were well ahead of the news on understanding the significance of the Watergate break-in, and Herblock worked closely with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in making sense of the investigation.

The book’s epilogue briefly examines some of Herblock’s post-Nixon work to underscore Herblock’s lifelong commitment to democracy by using his pen to pressure the people and the government to “do the right thing.”

Throughout the book’s 234 pages, Appleford considers the ways in which Herblock “was attempting to tread the fine line between caricature and stereotype” (41). He rarely depicted African Americans in his cartoons – and some of those depictions relied on minstrel Black face features and some only showed the characters from the back. He also typically depicted women in traditional gender roles, as faces in a crowd, as members of a family, or in gender-appropriate professions such as teacher or nurse. Appleford particularly notes Herblock’s use of literary and pop-cultural allusions: Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Snow White. The Wizard of Oz. Poltergeist. Harvard University’s alma mater “Fair Harvard" (although Block never finished college). Readers would be well-advised to look through the end notes for additional insights.

Appleford deftly weaves the work of Herblock into the larger political history of the United States. As such, the book may be a great resource to any scholar looking to better understand the zeitgeist of postwar America. One weakness for classroom or reference use, however, is that chapters do not use subheadings to help organize or clarify the different topics or themes encompassed in each.

In the book’s focus on Herblock as an intellectual of postwar liberalism, Appleford is very successful. He carefully situates and explains the arguments advanced by Herblock in relation to other liberal thinkers of the time. Some attention to other cartoonists of the era might have also been informative, especially when Appleford presents perspectives on Herblock’s engagement, or lack of, with particular topics and imagery, to offer readers a sense of whether Herblock’s handling of these was unique or not. Nonetheless, readers are sure to gain a new understanding of the current political milieu through Appleford’s history. His attention to not only Herblock’s arguments, but also to the controversy they generated provides historical perspective on present day partisanship within the culture wars.

 

Christina M. Knopf, PhD is a Professor & Presentation Skills Coordinator in the Communication and Media Studies Department of SUNY Cortland.

Book review: Asian Political Cartoons by John A. Lent

reviewed by Matt Wuerker

John. A. Lent. Asian Political Cartoons. University Press of Mississippi, 2023. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Asian-Political-Cartoons

At the risk of revealing my own shallow occidental ethnocentrism, I have to say that I was largely ignorant of the cartoon culture of Asia.  I have always had the general idea that cartooning was something that was particular to Europe, especially England and France, but also Spain, Germany and Italy.

It’s true that what we in the west think of as the political cartoon did come out of Europe.  But, like meat pies, macaroni, and beer, cartooning spread from there through colonial expansion to other parts of the world.  Some of those colonial territories were very fertile ground for this crude, yet very powerful and popular form of art, I think of South America in particular.  But I always suffered from the mistaken notion that Asia was largely not taken with the idea of political commentary in the form of exaggerated drawing combined with humorous word bubbles.  John Lent’s new book “Asian Political Cartoons” shows me how wrong that impression was.

In 300 mostly-color and beautifully-laid-out pages Lent takes us deep into the rich and culturally complicated history of the political cartoon in a part of the world that has seen staggering and tumultuous political change over the last century.

While all these cultures enjoyed unique traditions of their own in the visual arts, the arrival of the colonial powers introduced the novel and odd European concept that political dissent can be expressed in funny pictures and distributed in penny sheets and humor magazines.  In China for instance suddenly there were China Punch, Shanghai Charivari, and Shanghai Puck all imitating their Western antecedents.  The simple power of thumbing your nose at power and authority with arresting caricatures and graphic exaggeration has an innate appeal.  It spread quickly.

Ironically enough as Chinese nationalism and the struggle against colonial occupation started to build this same graphic form was turned against the imperialists, and not just those from the West.

Political cartoons don’t always use humor, but instead can express deadly serious outrage. In the war with the Japanese Chinese political cartoonists marshaled their craft to contribute to the war effort.  Lent shows how these cartoonists melded their classical Chinese ink drawing styles with more Western cartoon imagery to create devastating war propaganda posters.

The Philippine cartoonists also used a similar kind of jujitsu and turned this colonial art form against those that would colonize them.  First sharpening their pens on their nineteenth century Spanish occupiers, they then turned their fire on their twentieth century American occupiers.

Philippine nationalists used satirical magazines, often graced with cartoons on their front covers to lambast those who had colonized them as well lampoon their own compatriots who were going along with and embracing being colonized.

 Another country among the dozens Lent examines is Bangladesh, one that I had the pleasure of visiting myself about 10 years ago.  Despite attempts by the parliament to introduce blasphemy laws that would punish any images deemed unsuitable by the Islamic mullahs, the Bangladeshis enjoy a thriving and very industrious cartoon community. Beyond popular printed magazines like Unmad they’ve also built a home and a platform on social media that includes great animation work. When I visited back in 2013, I especially enjoyed getting to know many of the bright lights in Dhaka, especially Nasreen Sultana Mitu, Tanmoy, and Mehedi Haque.

 Lent also shines a light on the struggles that many Asian cartoonists face as those in power attempt to intimidate and censor them.  The fight for freedom of speech in Asia has been tough… and continues.  Authoritarians of all stripes really don’t appreciate political satire.  From Mao to Suharto, to the current leadership in China, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as religious fundamentalist movements throughout the region, censorship, jail time, and threats of violence can be the cost of creating political cartoons. Over the years many brave cartoonists have taken great risks to stand up for the ”freedom to cartoon.”  In recent times and despite the best efforts of those in power to shut them up cartoonists like Wang Liming (Rebel Pepper) and Badiucao in China, Zunar and Fahmi Reza, Kanika Mishra in India, among many others, have kept up the fight.

As the book ranges all across Asia, it also highlights the five decades that Lent has dedicated to studying and chronicling the cartoon culture across the continent.  He’s met and personally knows many of the prominent practitioners, as well as many of the new generation.  It’s a grand tour through cartoon territory not very well known by many of us.  A journey well worth taking.

Wuerker is a practicing cartoonist for Politico, and has won the Pulitzer, Berryman and Herblock awards/prizes.

Book review: Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts

reviewed by Chris York

Michelle Ann Abate. Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts. University of Mississippi Press, 2023. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Blockheads-Beagles-and-Sweet-Babboos

 It is difficult to overstate impact of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, both on the American comic strip and, more broadly, on international popular culture. Regardless of the metric—critical acclaim, financial success, longevity, franchise recognition—Schulz is inarguably one of the greatest American comic strip creators. Michelle Ann Abate notes, however, that scholarship regarding Schulz has been relatively limited considering the magnitude of his contribution. Her new volume adds to this growing corpus and, in many ways, it is a welcome addition.

 Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos approaches the core cast of Peanuts from unfamiliar perspectives in order to yield, in Abate’s words, “new critical insights about the composition as well as the aesthetics of Peanuts” (9). The first chapter is devoted to Schulz, himself, while each subsequent chapter focuses on a specific Peanuts character: Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Franklin, Woodstock, and Linus (A complete list of chapter titles in provided below). Abate’s approaches vary from an exploration of Charles Schulz’s essential tremor to a correlation of Lucy Van Pelt with Lucille Ball, and from an analysis of Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt to some thoughts on the origin of Woodstock’s name.

 Despite these wide-ranging analyses, the book is most successful when it concentrates on the composition of Peanuts. The chapter “Franklin and Pig-Pen: The Aesthetics of Blackness and Dirt,” for example, compares Schulz’s rendering of Franklin, for a long time the strip’s only non-white character, with Pig-Pen, a character known for his inability to stay clean. The simplicity of his composition has always been a hallmark of Schulz’s greatness, but Abate points out the challenges such simplicity can pose when differentiating between characters. Discussions of Franklin have long centered around representation and whether the inclusion of Franklin (first introduced to the strip in 1968) was a positive step toward breaking down racial barriers or whether it was just another instance of tokenism. Abate gives attention to this debate, but the chapter’s real focus is the techniques Schulz used to identify Franklin as non-white. At times, she notes, the shading technique he employs is similar to the way he illustrates Pig-Pen’s dirty face. The visual similarities between the two characters, Abate argues, recalls a correlation between blackness and dirtiness that has long existed in American culture.

 Other instances when she focuses on Schulz’s composition are also compelling. Early representations of Lucy Van Pelt, Abate argues, bear a striking resemblance to Lucille Ball, whose sitcom “I Love Lucy” made her one of the most popular and recognizable celebrities of the 1950s, the decade in which Peanuts launched. Abate makes this comparison particularly compelling by focusing on Lucy Van Pelt’s eyes, which were initially drawn differently than every other Peanuts character, and seem to mimic the wide-eyed, startled look that was one of Lucille Ball’s signatures. Abate also analyzes Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt design as a triangle wave. Musical elements play a significant role in Peanuts, largely through the character of Schroeder, but Abate suggests that reading Charlie Brown’s shirt as a triangle wave engages him in the rich aural dimensions of Peanuts.

 The epilogue explores Schulz’s legacy by focusing on the echos of Peanuts in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For. Although Abate notes that Bechdel never cited Schulz as a direct influence, the similarities between Schulz’s Linus Van Pelt and Bechdel’s Mo Testa, including clothing that is often horizontally striped, are compelling. The fact that Bechdel never consciously acknowledged Schulz as an influence only seems to reinforce how ubiquitous his impact has been on the American comic strip.

 At times, however, Abate’s explorations are less successful. She devotes her first chapter, for instance, to a discussion of Schulz’s essential tremor, which manifested in the early 1980s and led to his increasingly unsteady lines in Peanuts. His disability is, as she notes, a largely ignored element within Peanuts criticism. As such, Abate’s willingness to engage in this discussion is, in itself, valuable. For much of the chapter, though, she seems to be in search of something meaningful to say. She outlines, for example, the history of disability rights in the United States and notes that this history is largely concurrent with the fifty-year run of Peanuts. However, for Peanuts’ first thirty years, Schulz was not affected by essential tremor, and he never introduced disabled characters into his strip, so the concurrence Abate identifies leads her to no significant revelations. She does argue that viewing the strip through the lens of the disability “changes the way that we view, engage, and interpret it,” and while this is an intriguing claim, she rarely moves beyond generalization to draw more concrete conclusions about engagement and interpretation (30).

 Despite some inconsistencies, though, Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos is a useful addition to the critical literature of Peanuts. Abate’s approaches yield some interesting insights and illustrate that there is still much to be said about one of the world’s most popular and critically acclaimed comic strips.

 

Table of Contents:

Introduction. Character Studies: The Peanuts Gang, Reconsidered.

Chapter 1: “Sometimes My Hand Shakes So Much I Have to Hold My Wrist to Draw:” Charles M. Schulz and Disability.

Chapter 2: What’s the Frequency, Charlie Brown? Sound Waves, Music, and the Zigzag Shirt.

Chapter 3: “Why Can’t I Have a Normal Dog Like Everyone Else?” Snoopy as Canine — and Feline.

Chapter 4: I Love Lucy: The Fussbudget and the First Lady of Sitcoms.

Chapter 5: Franklin and Pig-Pen: The aesthetics of Blackness and Dirt.

Chapter 6: Chirping ‘Bout My Generation: Woodstock, Youth Culture, and Innocence.

Epilogue: Peanuts to Watch Out For: Linus van Pelt, Alison Bechdel, and the Legacy of Charles M. Schulz.

Book Review: Into the Jungle! A Boy’s Comic Strip History of World War II by Jimmy and Michael Kugler

reviewed by James Willetts

Jimmy Kugler and Michael Kugler, Into The Jungle! A Boy’s Comic Strip History of World War II, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2023. < https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/I/Into-the-Jungle>

Few readers, even those intimately familiar with 1940s comics, are likely to have heard of Jimmy Kugler. As a schoolboy creator of comic strips, Kugler fits into a long tradition of children producing their own cartoons in imitation of commercial comics. Into the Jungle! collects his war stories for publication for the first time. Written and drawn when Kugler was an adolescent in the immediate aftermath of World War II, his strips present a fictionalized reflection of the war in the Pacific through a conflict between anthropomorphic frogs and toads. Drawn in pencil on both sides of scrap paper – including on the back of school handouts on poetry and public speaking – these comic strips present an archive of one boy’s response to the war. The story is told over the course of four chapters; “The Fall of Frogington,” “The Fate of a Toad Convoy,” “The Battle of Toadijima,” and “The Fall of Eagle Island.” Each of these are reprinted in full, amounting to over a hundred pages of material with a small number of supplementary images from Kugler’s horror comic and one-off panels.

            This collection of strips is compiled by Jimmy’s son, Michael Kugler, a history professor at Northwestern College in Iowa. Kugler provides a biography of his father, an introduction to his comics, as well as a brief explanation of what is happening in each section and how it relates to the broader course of the fictional war between frogs and toads. Michael’s sections are enlightening and demonstrate both a deep love for his father’s legacy and a recognition of what a reader will need to understand the comics. One of the central problems in compiling the book is that there is no official chronology to fit the strips into. Once the war begins “it is not clear which chapters follow which.” (29) Michael has worked to try and develop an order for the stories based on in-text developments about the course of the war. He also argues for a reassessment of what order Jimmy wrote certain comics in. He disputes the chronology of Paul Karasik who suggests, in ““Die, Frogs!”: The Lost Comics of James Kugler” in The Comics Journal no. 307 (Winter-Spring 2021), that the war comics were written and drawn after “The Mystery of the Winged Frogs,” Kugler’s horror comic, which was reprinted in full alongside Karasik's article.  Karasik's analysis of the drawings in the comic strips suggests that Kugler's artistry underwent a process of development between "The Mystery of the Winged Frogs" and the “War of Frogs and Toads,” which Professor Kugler reverses. Instead, he argues that the “Famous War of the Frogs and Toads” is a thematically – if not artistically – more sophisticated story and likely served as one of the last things that Jimmy Kugler created.

            Michael Kugler situates these comics within the wider history of American post-war adolescence. He notes the influence of newspaper comic strips, comic books and movies on his father’s work. Jimmy’s father worked as a typesetter for Lexington’s newspaper, the Clipper. While the paper didn’t carry syndicated cartoons, Jimmy’s father may have provided him with cartoons from other papers. Certainly, Jimmy’s personal items included a page of comics from Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, alongside collected reprints of Li’l Abner, Tarzan, Mickey Mouse comics, and Alley Oop. Alongside these, Jimmy Kugler’s war comics were certainly influenced by the horror films showing at Lexington’s Majestic Theatre. These disparate influences combine to create a vision of a war without mercy infused with individual acts of heroism and brutality.

            The diversity of Kugler’s pop-culture influences was also filtered through wartime propaganda, with anti-Japanese films and imagery taking form in his comic strip’s portrayal of brutal toads attacking the peaceful cities of the frogs. Once the war begins with the toads attack on Frogington, neither side shows any remorse for their actions. There is no attempt at dialogue or character development for either side. The only focus on both sides is a campaign to exterminate the other completely. While the narrative chronology of the war is not always clear, the duels between individuals or airplanes are lovingly rendered. Kugler’s depiction of aerial combat is some of his best work. While the majority of the illustrations are unsurprisingly crude, Michael does well in drawing attention to the sophistication of his father’s cartoons of aircraft. Jimmy had been drawing pictures of planes which he kept in a scrapbook for years before he started his war comics. He may have observed American fighters from nearby airbases engaging in training flights, alongside reading newspapers, or maybe comics, as a reference. While his frogs and toads are always shown in profile, Kugler includes a range of perspectives to portray aircraft in action, from overhead shots of a flight of enemy planes approaching Frogington through the clouds (67) to bombing runs, enemy aircraft strafing defenseless civilians, and even aerial dogfights (86-87).

            Michael Kugler notes the importance of his father’s comics as a largely untapped archive representing a “a boy’s imagination filtering his experience of popular culture and mass media immediately after wartime.” (27) Kugler’s stories can – and should be - analyzed as both an artifact of post-war adolescence and as objects of historical memory. Introducing these comics to a wider audience makes Into the Jungle! a significant first step in what is sure to become wider study of Kugler’s work.

April 26 at Princeton U: A Cartoon History of Latino USA with Lalo Alcaraz

An East Coast appearance by the award-winning cartoonist.

https://proces.princeton.edu/news/cartoon-history-latino-usa-lalo-alcaraz

https://plas.princeton.edu/events/2023/spo-cartoon-history-latino-usa

https://spo.princeton.edu/events/lalo-alcaraz-cartoon-history-latino-usa

https://www.princeton.edu/events/2023/lalo-alcaraz

Maurice Horn's How It All Began, Or Present at the Creation, from IJOCA 4:1 (Spring 2002)

Comics scholar Maurice Horn passed away last December, but the news just came out this month.  John is writing an obituary for him, but here's Horn's autobiographical piece from 20 years ago. (As a reminder, all issues are available for digital purchase).

Exhibition review: Carrément poilu at the Comics Art Museum, Brussels

Carrément Poilu. Sophie Baudry (curator). Brussels: Comics Art Museum, October 20, 2022 - August 15, 2023.

 

reviewed by  Laurie Anne Agnese

 

Carrément Poilu (Squarely Furry), an exhibition celebrating Le Petit Poilu (Little Furry), is currently on view at the Comics Art Museum in Brussels.  In 2007, the Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly and scriptwriter Céline Fraipont created the bande dessinée for preschool children; it has since expanded into an animated cartoon series and Dupuis will release the 28th album in March 2023. Le Petit Poilu’s world, his empathy and his penchant for humor also grows with each adventure and each album.  Like the comic itself, this playful and interactive exhibition offers something for visitors of all ages but especially for fans of the comic.  

 

The colorful entrance signals that this is a special comics exhibit - a small door welcomes just children under 5, and a larger one for everyone else.

 

 

There are no words, dialogue or narration in Le Petit Poilu. Children as young as three years old enjoy reading these wildly complex visual stories on their own.  Since the albums can be read independently without their parents, Bailly and Fraipont speak directly to their youngest readers. “Wordless comics may have the strength to be able to speak to children as equals with a whole series of strategies to convey emotion, poetry, things like that” says Bailly in a video interview playing at the exhibit (translation from French is mine). 

 

Le Petit Poilu balances simple and fun adventure stories with serious themes such as migration, gender or playground aggression. Bailly and Fraipont put immense care into the sequencing of the story and ultimately a great deal of trust in children: “We offer them an opportunity to go very far in their capacities, in their intelligence to be able to decipher a story, even at 3 years old. I think it makes children, as soon as they bite, want to taste it again.”

 

Once in the exhibit hall, children immediately notice the free maps of the exhibit and without words or instructions, they also know exactly what to do with them.  The maps showed the layout and also gave them a mission at each stop: find the colored stamps to complete the map. The map is also self-referent to the series. It is a souvenir to take, like Petit Poilu, who always returns home with a special object from his adventures.

Photo credit: Daniel Fouss/Comics Art Museum

 

There are several large enclosed wooden cubes with small entrances that invite visitors to get low to the ground and discover what is inside.  There was a note to give priority to the youngest visitors, but families tended to explore the cubes together. So the young and the old climbed, jumped, hid and crawled through each of them and immersed themselves in these unique worlds that reference particular stories in the series. 

 

Each album of Le Petit Poilu follows a similar structure with endless variety, like the daily life of a preschool child.  Poilu wakes up, uses a toilet that is too big for him, eats breakfast, says goodbye to his parents and walks to school. But then something strange and magnificent happens. He discovers a new universe and an unexpected adventure awaits him. The cubes capture this magical turning point: bright, vivid images from the bande dessinée combined with the sensory experiences of music and textures to depict this triggering event that puts the story into motion.

 

For example, the cube for La Sirène Gourmande (the first album in the series) is an underwater story where a large hungry mermaid swallows Le Petit Poilu, and he lands in a pile of rubbish that is her belly where the adventure to get out takes place.  The cube is awash in the beautiful underwater imagery and sounds, and the belly of trash is soft.

 

 

 

 

One very small cube discreetly sits in an unremarkable corner, and could be mistaken for a mouse hole. Once down on the ground, the visitor sees that it depicts the adventures in Madame Miniscule, where the size is turned upside down, and Le Petit Poilu as the child is large, and the adults and all of the objects around them are very small in comparison.

 

 

Because of its clever use of structure and repetition, Le Petit Poilu has a musical and rhythmic quality.  Each story hits similar moments with visual cues: Poilu shakes hands with a friendly character who will help him in the conflict; he looks longingly at a photo of his mother to give him courage to face the mounting adversity, and when the problem has resolved itself, he receives a special object to take home. All 27 objects from his 27 adventures are collected in a special cabinet adorned overhead with his clown nose:

 

 

 

 Like Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth, Le Petit Poilu is ultimately a voyage and return adventure story. Once he receives the special object, the story ends by unspooling itself: Poilu returns home, reunites with his parents, eats dinner, and goes to bed. All alone in his room, he checks his bag and finds the object that he received - proof that the magical adventure took place - and brings both his world and the magical one together.

 

Lining the perimeter of the hall, large reproductions from the albums, sketches, original artwork and descriptive panels invite parents and children to learn together about the creation and backstory of the comic.  These panels are kept simple and placed at sight level to interest the younger visitors, but in reality, I did not see many children looking at them. They explained the process of creating a wordless comic, which starts with words and storyboarding first. Other panels highlighted the process of creating the look of Le Petit Poilu from a drop of ink.

 

 

 The exhibit ends with two adjacent rooms - one is furnished with a soft rug, floor cushions, and low bookshelves with multiple sets of the entire series available to read; the other features a television screen. Many visitors lingered there for nearly an hour.  It is a unique opportunity to read all 27 albums in one uninterrupted sweep, and visitors approached it in their own way. Some parents sat down on the floor and read the books to their children - that is, the parent created and narrated a story out loud from the pictures. Some children and parents were side by side reading silently to themselves.

 

Photo credit: Daniel Fouss/Comics Art Museum

Photo credit: Daniel Fouss/Comics Art Museum
 

 The other room features a looped video interview with Bailly and Fraipont.  The bench for watching is full-sized, and is surrounded by small sketches hung high.  In the video, the sound is off, and the subtitles are on - squarely aiming this space for the adults, perhaps to distract them long enough to leave the children alone to read the books. 

 

In the video interview, Bailly remarks how sometimes “words freeze and block things.” Drawing on a parallel with the silent films of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, he adds “there is not only burlesque, there are also a lot of emotions and humanity. This kind of intimacy with character is something that we can understand and feel without words.” In the albums, as well as the exhibit, there is space for fantasy within the reader and for their own words to tell the story.

 

 

 All photos taken by Laurie Anne Agnese unless otherwise noted.