A Century of Cartoons
As the comics got more serious, so did The Atlantic's approach to them. The comics even earned the right to some semi-literary analysis when Walt Kelly, creator of the immortal comic strip Pogo, penned an explanation of comic-strip language. In "Ka-Platz: The Delight in the Unexpected" (March 1963) Kelly explained why so many artists used strange-sounding, non-existent, or out-of-context words in their drawings.
If you have a noise, you might as well have a funny noise; not that you'll have to hold your sides when you behold "plink," but I think it's about 3 1/4 times funnier than "crash." Who laughs at the word "bang"? It used to be very important, but "bang" doesn't have much bang anymore. The better strips are using other words. Some of them in foreign languages, for impact. Style is very important. It would not do for Steve Canyon to fall with a Li'l Abner noise. Canyon is a dignified man and a sort of status symbol in the comic strip game. Likewise, Dick Tracy could never get hit on the head with a "whacko" noise.
But despite the humorous tone of Kelly's explanation, he had a serious point. Legalese, government-speak, and other forms of official language, he believed, had become ridiculous and impenetrable. Children, the most frequent readers of comics, had an instinct for the direct, simple language that could best convey meaning. He and they understood that making a reader laugh was often one of the best ways to keep him or her interested long enough to absorb the sometimes rather serious message behind the giggle.
Two decades later, Cullen Murphy, now managing editor of The Atlantic and for many years also the writer of the comic strip Prince Valiant, warned of the pitfalls of perhaps taking the comics a bit too seriously. In his article, "Ms. Buxley?" (December 1984) Murphy took a look at the impact of political correctness on Beetle Bailey when a number of readers sought to organize opposition to the strip. The object of their wrath was Miss Buxley, the comely secretary who worked in General Halftrack's office. Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey and a number of other nationally syndicated strips explained to Murphy:
"The feminists have been after me about her quite a bit. According to them, Miss Buxley is a stereotype of a dumb blonde secretary. Actually, I patterned her after Marilyn Monroe. I tried to keep an air of innocence, as if she doesn't know what she's got. She just wears those little dresses because she feels good in them, and even though they reveal a lot she doesn't notice she's revealing anything. There are a lot of feminists around now and a lot of them work on newspapers and a number of them got their editors to drop my strip ... or to leave it out when Miss Buxley was in it. My argument is that I'm really showing how silly the General is when he acts in a male-chauvinist fashion."
But his argument was in vain; in the end, Murphy observed, Walker capitulated and Miss Buxley got high-necked sweaters, knee-length skirts, and secretarial courses that included instructions for filing sexual-harassment lawsuits. Walker got his daughter Margie to serve as his political-correctness watchdog, and in Murphy's mind, the comics got a little bit less funny.
More recently, in a March 2001 article for Atlantic Unbound, Peter Swanson commented on the ascendance of the graphic novel and its significance for the medium of cartooning. The publication of Spiegelman's Maus, he explained, had heralded a revolution of sorts:
Spiegelman challenged the notions of what stories a comic book can tell, employing surrealistic, comic-book fantasy elements in his nonfiction account of his parents' Holocaust experience—Jews, for example, are drawn as mice, or else people wearing mouse masks; Nazis are cats; the French are frogs. These renderings add a distance and an allegorical frame that elevates his narratives to fine art.
In "The Humor of the Colored Supplement," Bergengren had dismissed cartooning for its crassness: "It is an insult to the whole line of English and American humorists—Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Twain, Holmes, Irving, and others of a distinguished company—to include as humor what is merely the crude brutality of human nature." But nearly a century later, Swanson expressed a very different concern. Perhaps, he suggested, comics today are attempting to become almost too sophisticated:
It seems there's a movement afoot to class-up comic books—both adult comics, by moving them out of the ghetto of specialty stores and sci-fi racks, and kids comics, by giving them a significant place in our pop-culture canon. I do not doubt for a moment the artistic merits of many of the books and writers in the comics field, adult or otherwise. What I wonder about is this sudden bid for legitimacy. If some of these upstarts find themselves lodged between the Styrons and the Tans on the big people shelves, will they still talk to the superhero comics?
Alyssa Rosenberg was recently an intern for The Atlantic Monthly.
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