Comic Science Investigation #1

OLD DOC YAK TAKES HIS SPACE

by Chris Beneke

     COMIC EXPERIMENT. American comics of the early 1900s were rich with experimenters and experimentation. Within a decade or so, and certainly by the close of World War I, if not before, this experimentation had given way to a formula, based on strong characters and what-came-to-be-called sequentialism.

     Here’s how Sidney Smith began Old Doc Yak in The Chicago Tribune in February 1912, with Yak’s kicking his way through a miniaturized front page:

In my recollection of my first encounter with this strip, it was somewhat different: A single panel on the paper’s actual front page. The historical record does not seem to bear out this memory; this first installment seems to have been on an interior page.

     Chicago readers of the sports page of Hearst’s competing Chicago Examiner would have recognized Smith’s anthropomorphized goat (or goat-o-morphized man) as Buck Nix.

Chicago Examiner, August 9, 1908

The Buck Nix dailies in Blackbeard’s Smithsonian newspaper comics collection remain a highlight of that book. On my one visit to Blackbeard’s San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, seeing more Buck Nix was a top request: the Smithsonian seems to have presented the most interesting episodes, however.

     Smith’s goat predated his Examiner run: The goat had been a comic commentator in Smith’s editorial work for The Toledo News-Bee as early as 1907, some of which are collected in Yankee Boodle Army [HERE], published in that year and reprinted in 1928. Like so many other comic characters, Nix/Yak just grew.

The Toledo News-Bee, September 30, 1907

     In the 1912 Chicago Tribune, during his first week, Old Doc Yak used the tools and plans that Smith had drawn for him to expand his space, but an even more powerful tool, one specific to comics, balloons, enabled Yak to act seemingly independently of creator Smith. Balloons opened the words and thoughts of comics characters to direct reader observation, free of a creator’s traditional literary tools, like narration or explanation; balloons freed comic characters, at least seemingly , of a creator’s control. [Read HERE at Barnacle Press]

Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1912

     By week’s end, on Saturday, the strip had unfurled to occupy the page’s full width. The animal neighbors sharing this panorama with Yak would be featured in later dailies.

Chicago Tribune, unknown month and day, 1918

     A color Old Doc Yak Sunday page, usually centered around his car, followed a month later.
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Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1918

     Old Doc Yak had built the space that would be his home for the next five years. Through Yak, creator Smith claimed his own regular space in the daily newspaper, a space that would outlast Yak, thanks to Smith’s later, more popular feature, The Gumps.

Film Daily, Nov 26, 1923

     Even the most disinterested newspaper reader that first week would have noticed the strip’s expansion from day to day. This novel debut might have attracted readers to the new feature.

Chicago Tribune, April 9, 1933

     Bud Fisher had begun the first daily comic strip, A. Mutt, in 1907, only five years before Smith’s inaugural Old Doc Yak stunt. Smith’s stunt might have seemed incomprehensible to that earlier audience. That Smith dared, and apparently gathered and kept his audience, shows how quickly those 1912 comics readers had developed expectations of what a comic is (or can or should be): One or more recurring characters performing in a series of panels, separated by borders, and “speaking” through balloons.

     Strong characters had been instrumental in popularizing and sustaining comics features since the Yellow Kid, a diminutive waif who addressed the audience through “speech” scrawled on his nightshirt, made the overcrowded Hogan’s Alley, a full-page single panel, a popular weekly destination, and his creator, Richard F. Outcault, thanks largely to merchandising the Kid’s image outside the Alley, wealthy.

     Audience expectations about a comics’ content and form, already in 1912, were also understood by publishers and creators, eager to attract the most readers and fans and perhaps partake in the success that Outcault and his papers had enjoyed. In the 1910s, daily strips would depend on the popularity of such recurring, recognizable figures. Daily features in the 1920s and 1930s would develop more insistent hooks: continuing stories that required a reader’s daily attention.

     Smith’s 1912 self-conscious playfulness about his medium, equating a physical space on a newspaper page with a comic character’s home, was revisited in 1917, five years later: Yak’s bear landlord evicts Yak and son Yutch to ready the space for The Gumps.

     This gag repeats again in 1919, two years later, when the Gumps take possession of Old Doc Yak’s car (and his 348 license plate) and assume occupancy of the Sunday page. The Gumps would henceforth rule both spaces, and make that car an even more famous comic icon. A car-less Yak eventually reappeared in a Sunday topper strip.

Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1911

     The editor, of course, ruled every space on every page, though he was seemingly invisible (or hiding?) and, unlike a paper’s comic characters, faceless

Chicago Tribune, Mar 9, 1912

     With Old Doc Yak’s 1912 debut in The Chicago Tribune, Smith plays off his readers’ expectations of sequentiality, then a novelty, but rapidly establishing its dominance within the American comics medium. Hogan’s Alley had debuted only 17 years before and the regular use of balloons, begun by Opper or Dirks, was only a decade or so old. Captions under comics panels had persisted for much of the 20th century’s first decade; The New Yorker sophisticates have still not given up this holdover from 19th century illustrated humor. 

Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1912

     The comic formula that Sidney Smith gently mocked in Old Doc Yak’s debut week, one or more strong characters contained in sequential panels, became the formula that made American comics a mass medium for the next two decades or more. Later, talking films and radio would put a huge dent in comics’ dominance of American storytelling media.

This formula yielded the formulaic, a bad enough outcome, but, worse, as comics became equated with sequentialism, the understanding of comics, past and present, became hobbled, let us hope not permanently.

     Today’s lesson: Comics take up space

Chicago Examiner, July 19, 1908

UNDERSTANDING COMIC SCIENCE: 

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION 

Non-sequential tendencies, despite being ignored, unnamed, or glossed over, persist within comics. Some early American comics more boldly exhibit such non-sequential tendencies and a few comics from this experimental era seem wholly non-sequential. 

Comic Science considers the visible, not the invisible. These early American non-sequential comics will be examined in subsequent essays: They will not be dismissed as “non-comics.”

Comic Science asserts that the better comics of tomorrow will be built upon non-sequential principles, and with non-sequential practices. Subsequent Comic Science investigations into early American comic strips and pages will elucidate these principles and practices.

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Segar Dead for 80 Years

by Chris Beneke

Eighty years after his premature death on October 13, 1938, at the age of 43, Elzie Crisler Segar’s corpus cries out for exhumation and re-examination.

Segar reclaimed his immortal comic creations, wasted for decades babysitting the kids, before the startled eyes of contemporary readers, thanks to not one but two Fantagraphics series reprinting Segar’s complete Thimble Theatre with Popeye, beginning in 1984 with a suitably shabby black-and-white-only eleven-volume series. The six-volume set with original newspaper colors produced earlier this millennium is definitive. In Segar’s deft hands, Popeye, Wimpy, and the rest were revelatory, imbued with surprisingly adult passions and moved to often hilarious results.

There's more Thimble Theatre without Popeye, however, than there is Thimble Theatre with Popeye by Segar, and the continued neglect of this earlier material tarnishes today’s claim to being a golden age of comic reprints.

This neglect will be partially corrected by the forthcoming Sunday Press compilation of nearly half of the pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre Sunday pages, at their original published size and in their original colors, including the complete two-year-long adventure of Castor Oyl and Ham Gravy cowboying out west. This sequence was a favorite of Bill Blackbeard (he counted 1,700 panels on its 104 pages; was he right?) and its ending, with Castor and Ham returning home to discover Olive on Popeye in flagrante delappo, marked Popeye's takeover of both Olive’s fickle affections and the Sunday page. Popeye had taken over the distinct continuity of the dailies on August 5, 1929, more than six months after his debut, minus a month when Segar had abandoned his immortal sailor as just another bizarre supporting player.

Segar, unlike any other classic American comic strip artist, still provokes audible, belly-shaking laughter. Even Herriman, who is certainly appreciated more now than when he was living, pales besides Segar’s wicked, occasionally deadly funnybone. Segar and his characters engaged with harsh realities, where oversized “fisks” smacked faces that stayed smacked. They made no retreat to magical mesas, where mice chase cats and poetical bricks, hurled with hate, land on heads with strange, platonic love. In Segar’s deserts, unlike Herriman’s, vultures always lurk, waiting to eat or be eaten. Herriman’s currency, printed on preciousness with whimsy, could never buy Wimpy a hamburger – not today, not Tuesday.

Segar trucked in tougher stuff: Nature, of the “aminal” or “hoomin” kind, indifferent to the suffering of others, either satisfied or thwarted his protagonist’s raw drives and baser instincts. Amorality and criminality could be the answer, and often was, if survival was the question.

Segar’s bent for black humor enlivens his comics for modern audiences uniquely. No other pre-underground cartoonist is within shouting distance of his darkness, though Carl Barks, a Segar fan who, like Segar, concocted both long adventures and hilarious vignettes, passed through the neighborhood in his best duck stories, especially those produced during and after his second marriage dissolved.  

If that underground comparison seems specious, look again at Crumb’s early underground characters: They emerge from the same dank, bigfoot gene-pool from which Segar supped; Mr. Natural, much more a wiseass than Ahern’s lookalike nameless hitchhiker, and O. G. Wotasnozzle might not have been separated at birth, but they shared a mother.

Black humor was the descriptor used repeatedly by Bill Blackbeard in his multiple appreciations of Segar’s work. But this term was coined by Surrealist Andre Breton around 1940, in the airs of Segar’s last breath, for an anthology of the progenitors and proponents of this previously unnamed essential component of surrealist thought and art. Black humor, which fearlessly goes to extremes in pursuit of the liberating effects of laughter, survives as an idea, while surrealism (and its iterations) has been corrupted by misuse (e.g., since everything became surreal, whenever that was). That mysterious box shall be left unopened, unlike the other boxes from Uncle Ben Zene Oyl.

Three pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre runs of dailies, totaling a scant sixteen weeks, perhaps 96 strips (You count the panels!), have snuck into contemporary reprints since the early 1980s. Two of those sequences are from 1928, the year that Bernice the Whiffle Hen arrived, to be quickly followed by that whiffle-rubbing sailor man.

Blackbeard’s summary of the pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre storylines in Nemo #3 (1983) remains provocative and probably the most complete overview of that era of the strip, thanks to select reproductions of choice samples, including a few Popeye precursors who share his asymmetrical facial features but lack his personality. This issue also includes 15 episodes of Castor’s exasperating stint as a newspaper editor trying to hire a cartoonist. Blackbeard included a longer (24 total!) but jumbled selection of this sequence in Kitchen Sink’s Comic Strip Century (1995).

Fantagraphics’ first reprinting of the daily strips, The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye, Volume Five (1987), begins two months before Bernice’s arrival, the starting point for the dailies in the second complete reprinting. Ham Gravy is in conniving proto-Wimpy mode, wooing a rich old crone, and driving jealous Olive from delusional stalking into fits of lunaphobic madness.

The U.K.-published Popeye –The 60th Anniversary Collection includes five 1924 weeks (January 22 through February 27) of the Blizzard the fighting bird story that had begun in 1923 and would end in early July.

In these earlier episodes, the nuanced characterization and more assured graphic stylization that would arrive with Popeye and Wimpy is missing, but the strange situations and idiosyncratic gags, all flaunting social niceties, abound, as do the laughs. Scour mounds of moldering newsprint for a similar achievement: You will find nothing.

The flowering of genius that birthed Popeye surprised even Segar; he seemed content to abandon the sailor man and wend his merry way, as he’d been doing for nearly ten years, in relative obscurity. Had Segar died before he birthed his sailor man, these earlier Thimble Theatre dailies would have already enlightened our world with their dark laughter, probably among Bill Blackbeard’s overly ambitious 1977 Hyperion Press re-printings.

Popeye and Wimpy reign as cartoon icons, transcending their original medium, and recognized worldwide like few other comic characters. But the talent, if not genius, that created them was evident years before: In similarly sharp scripts acted by understudies, dress rehearsals without superstars. A complete Thimble Theatre before Popeye is too-long overdue.

Thimble Theatre and the pre-Popeye comics of E.C. Segar

Introduction by Paul C. Tumey with essays by Jeet Heer and Michael Tisserand.

Available now for pre-order – books ship around November 1st

144 pages, 13 x 17 inches, $85

Order HERE