Interpreting the News

Interpreting the News
COMIC STRIPS COME UNDER FIRE
By Joseph MacSween
Lethbridge Herald, May 23 1962.

It was probably inevitable that the trend of United States comic strips would eventually draw a blast from Soviet officials. Some “funnies” have already caused uneasy comment at home.

For Vyacheslav N. Bounine, first secretary of the Russian embassy in Tokyo, it was just too much that a pig starring in the current episode of Pogo looks curiously like Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Bounine wasn’t comforted when the cartoon character – instead of confining himself to oink-oinks – began spouting proverbs in the manner of Khrushchev.

Chatting with a well-bearded goat who bears a striking resemblance to Premier Fidel Castro of shortage-ridden Cuba, the talkative porker declaims:

“You forget prominent proverb! Very funny in Russian: The shortage will be divided among the peasants.”

Pogo artist Walt Kelly has used satire against figures of both left and right in the political field. He depicted the late senator Joseph McCarthy as Simple J. Malarkey and recently published a collection of strips dealing with the Jack Acid Society, aiming at the rightist John Birch Society.



But at least one magazine -- the New Republic – has carried criticism of a new trend in U.S. so-called comics, naming of all people, Little Orphan Annie as the chief offender -- “presenting real political situations at home and abroad, often with extremist right-wing solutions.”

Ben H. Bandikian wrote in the New Republic that “the old pow! zock! blooey! school of humor in the next-to-last page of the paper is becoming illustrated political propaganda.”

Things had changed since 1947 when author Coulton Waugh was able to speak in his book The Comics of a not-so-unwritten law that comics syndicates kept out of politics.

Even loveable old Maw Green – inspired no doubt by foreign aid debate in Washington – recently told a tax-collector: “Try an’ give my money to some really nice country, eh?”

Bagdikian is intrigued by the way little Orphan Annie, who is really 37 years old although ever a little girl, toppled Castro as Mustachio Toro, dictator of Tributo.

The writer once counted 75 men killed or maimed in Annie’s strip in 3 months, “all done in with patriotic righteousness.” Other un-comic examples:



A high-busted lady in the aviation strip Smilin’ Jack was recruited as a double agent against a spy ring at Cape Canaveral.

Terry Lee of Terry and the Pirates, having foiled a Russian attempt to cover up a man-in-space failure in the Pacific, flew to Berlin where one of his men became entangled with a ballerina who was really working for her maid, a soviet spy, a ringer for Mrs. Khrushchev.

Joe Palooka rescued an American scientist from Communist agents in Austria.

Buz Sawyer marshaled the South Vietnamese to fight Red guerrillas from North Vietnam.

The Blue Waterfall

Best story ever featuring George Herriman and Jimmy Swinnerton: The Lincoln Star, October 11, 1922

A trip through the Arizona Desert, taken two weeks ago in the cause of art, came close to having a tragic ending for George Herriman and James Swinnerton, the cartoonist creators of “Krazy Kat” and “Little Jimmy” when a search for water led them to a “hole in the wall” hedged by steep cliffs which for centuries has been a strategic stronghold for Hopi Indians but which has not been visited by white men since a United States survey party was guided through it thirty years ago.

Swinnerton and Herriman found their way into it by accident and remained inside its baffling labyrinth for two days when a sudden fog descended and obscured the narrow point of entry which forms the only opening by which anyone can get in. When finally they were rescued by friendly Indians they had eaten the last of their food and had lost all hope of finding their way out.

It was in the expectation of finding a certain “blue waterfall” which is one of the wonders of the desert country and which Swinnerton was anxious to embody in a landscape painting that the two artists began the journey which so nearly ended fatally for them. Both men have spent many summers in the southwest country and know the desert well. They began their journey from a trading post sixty miles away from the waterfall, travelling on horseback with their food and camp equipment strapped to a pack horse.

It was on the second day while seeking water for the horses that they lost themselves in the strange rock formation from which they were rescued just in time. They had come to a known water hole clearly marked on the chart they carried. They had found it dry but decided that there must be water in a steep formation of cliffs which lay to the north of the trail about a mile away.

Riding up to the foot of the cliffs they found what appeared to be a natural path up the face of the steepest of them and leaving their horses made their way up, carrying only a small amount of food for they were certain that they would find water and be back in a couple of hours. Fog is the exceptional phenomenon in the part of the country through which Herriman and Swinnnerton were travelling and they did not notice, as they toiled up the steep wall of rock that a heavy vapor had filled all the valley below and was growing denser every moment and slowly creeping up behind them as they climbed. Neither of them looked back when they had reached an opening, just large enough to crawl through, in the blank face of the rock and saw that it led into a wide bowl among the cliff tops several hundred feet in area and filled with upstanding rocks many of them as high as fifty feet and all set close together. What mostly interested them was a shining pool of water at almost the exact center of the natural amphitheatre. Then they stepped through into the open space and the fog followed them and filled it.

For two days they were prisoners there. Their compasses were of no use to them for by the time they tried to get their bearings from them they had lost the general location of the small opening by which they made their way in. It seemed to disappear, as they have explained since, as soon as they were a few feet away from it, and in the semi obscurity created by the fog all the high stones about them became alike for any help they offered as distinctive points from which to work a way out to safety.

As Herriman describes it:

“It was exactly, but in deadly earnest, like being in one of those made labyrinths which used to be such a feature of expositions and the amusement parks. It was completely baffling. Every rock and rock face appeared exactly like every other piece of stone, and although we gave every moment of our daylight to the search for the way out we had come in by, or some other way if there was one, we found no success whatever and we were getting close to the lowest frame of mind there is – frantic despair – when at almost one and the same moment the fog was dispersed and help came.

The help arrived in the form of two Indians who had come upon the artists’ horses in the valley and figured that their owners must have gone up the face of the cliffs, and lost their way. The Indians happened to be two who were familiar with the entrance to the cliff pocket and who knew how to get out again after getting in. The circumstance was fortunate for Herriman and Swinnerton for many of the younger Indians thereabout no nothing of the place.

Years ago it figured conspicuously in the hill wars of the Indians, for it had great strategic value to a war party since the single entrance to it could be guarded indefinitely by a few warriors against hundreds. The only entrance and exit is the one by which the artists stumbled in, and although they think they could find it again they do not expect to make the attempt but on the contrary propose to avoid it the rest of their natural lives.

Shuster's Hideous Drawings

There were rumours* that "Joe Shuster used to draw hideous illustrations for sex-sadistic torture-pornography paperbacks..." as far back as 1971, although it was a long time before the "hideous" drawings came to light as shown in Secret Identity. Clizia Gussoni has put together a hilarious animated short set to music at Secret Identity blog HERE.

*Riverside Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 1,
From a Corner Table at Rough House's
by Bill Blackbeard pg. 54

Runyan on Herriman

The Brighter Side
by Damon Runyan
January 25 1939

Just for the purpose of the record, we want to say that nearly all the funny fowl, insect and animal characters, and the fantasy thereof that you see in movie shorts and in newspaper comic strips trace to one man.

We mean as far as the idea is concerned, and of course it is the idea in a thing of this kind that is important. Without the idea what have you got? The answer is nothing.

George Herriman is the man we are talking about. He is a slightly built, self-effacing chap, so mild that he would not say boo to a crawfish, and he has considerable fame in his own right as the author of well-known newspaper comic strips which appear in what children call the funnies.

George is probably comfortably fixed in this world’s goods but we venture to say that if he had a royalty of 1-2 of 1 per cent on the gross “take” from ideas that stem directly from his ideas, he would be an enormously rich man. That “stem” is putting it mildly for some cases.

We do not say that George originated the insect or animal or even the fowl comic character. They are older than the hills in humorous drawings but what we do say is that he was the daddy of fantasy in this field and certainly he was the originator of certain specific characters that others have used to greater financial advantage than George.

“Krazy Kat” is one of the more familiar of George’s characters, this being a cat that has the most fantastic adventures and is often coupled with “Ignatz Mouse.” We are pretty sure that George was the first to employ the lowly mouse as a character and to give it a definite, living personality, but after “Ignatz” came other mice to achieve greater fame than George’s brain child, which was alright, perhaps, except that we have never yet seen any of these other mice labeled “with a bow to George Herriman.”

Probably George himself has never paid any attention to the matter, but we just think that when laurels are being passed around for ideas there ought always be a sprig for the fellow who had the idea first, even though he may not have capitalized on it to the same extent as someone else.

The trouble with George has always been that he is too prolific in ideas. He has so many that he never misses one when it is borrowed from him. It is his admiring friends, like us, who burn up when they hear someone being exploited as the originator of an idea that George thought of first.

It must have been nearly 30 years ago that big, bluff Charley Van Loan, who loved Herriman as a brother, walked into the art room of the American and Journal, then in the old Rhinelander building on North William street, and growled at an artist who afterwards became famous and who was not noted for not being choosey where he got his ideas:

“Well, I see you grabbed Herriman’s duck this morning. Why don’t you take his cat and then you’ll have it all?”

That was the end of a speaking acquaintance.

It shows you how long ago Herriman was using a duck as a character in his strips, and it was that long ago that he was using “Krazy Kat” and “Ignatz Mouse.” The artist that Van Loan addressed that day did not take Herriman’s cat, too, but another artist did. He made an entire comic strip of the cat and for a long time it enjoyed considerable popularity.

The artist is dead now. He never had much standing as a creative artist among his fellows with that cat strip because they all knew where it came from.

If you ask the average comic artist of today his idea of an artist he will probably tell you George Herriman. He is what might be called an artist’s artist.

That is to say, his work is more appreciated by his fellows than by anyone else. He may not be the greatest draughtsman in the world but he has the imagination of a Grimm and the lyrical expression of the poet.

Dogs, coyotes and all kinds of animals have been endowed with amazing individuality by Herriman in his drawings. Generally he makes them humorous, but sometimes he makes them sad, and always through their lives run a curious streak of fantasy. Herrriman was probably a man born to be a teller of fairy tales for children. The exigencies of life put him to work as a newspaper cartoonist.

He lives out in California somewhere, probably in the southern end of the state. It is our impression that he is a native born. We used to see him in New York occasionally but he always looked so sad and lonesome that we would be glad when we heard that he had gone back west. Those Californians away from home are enough to break your heart.

If you do not know George Herriman’s work, look it up right away and take off your hat while inspecting it. You will be looking at the work of a genius.