A Comics Studies Reader

The “Vulgar” Comic Strip

46 The “Vulgar” Comic Strip Gilbert SeldeS Of all the lively arts the comic strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity , and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dullness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste. Certainly there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity in the comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is extraordinarily dreary. There is also a quantity of bad drawing and the intellectual level, if that matters, is sometimes not high. Yet we are not actually a dull people; we take our fun where we find it, and we have an exceptional capacity for liking the things which show us off in ridiculous postures —a counterpart to our inveterate passion for seeing ourselves in stained-glass attitudes . And the fact that we do care for the comic strip—that Jiggs and Mutt-and-Jeff and Skinnay and The Gumps have entered into our existence as definitely as Roosevelt and more deeply than Pickwick—ought to make them worth looking at, for once. Certainly they would have been more sharply regarded if they had produced the counterpart of Chaplin in the comic film—a universal genius capable of holding the multitude and exciting the speculations of the intellectuals. It happens that the actual genius of the comic strip, George Herriman, is of such a special sort that even when he is recognized he is considered something apart and his appearance among other strips is held to be only an accident. It is by no means an accident, for the comic strip is an exceptionally supple medium, giving play to a variety of talents, to the use of many methods, and it adapts itself to almost any theme. The enormous circulation it achieves imposes certain limitations: it cannot be too local, since it is syndicated throughout the country; it must avoid political and social questions because the same strip appears in papers of divergent editorial opinions; there is no room in it for acute racial caricature, although no group is immune from its mockery. These and other restrictions have gradually made of the comic strip Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author. Copyright © 1924 by Gilbert Seldes, renewed in 1952 by Gilbert Seldes. the “VulGar” ComiC Strip 47 a changing picture of the average American life—and by compensation it provides us with the freest American fantasy. In a book which appeared about two years ago, Civilization in the United States, thirty Americans rendered account of our present state. One of them, and one only, mentioned the comic strip—Mr Harold E. Stearns—and he summed up the “intellectual ” attitude perfectly by saying that Bringing Up Father will repay the social historian for all the attention he gives it. I do not know in what satisfactions the social historian can be repaid. I fear that the actual fun in the comic strip is not one of them. Bringing Up Father, says Mr Stearns, “symbolizes better than most of us appreciate the normal relation of American men and women to cultural and intellectual values. Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity are revealing” (italics mine). (Query: Is it vulgar of Jiggs to prefer Dinty’s café to a Swami’s lecture? Or of Mrs Jiggs to insist on the lecture? Or of both of them to be rather free in the matter of using vases as projectiles? What, in short, is vulgar ?) I am far from quarreling with Mr Stearns’ leading idea, for I am sure that a history of manners in the United States could be composed with the comic strip as its golden thread; but I think that something more than its vulgarity would be revealing. The daily comic strip arrived in the early ’nineties—perhaps it was our contribution to that artistic age—and has gone through several phases. In 1892 or thereabouts Jimmy Swinnerton created Little Bears and Tigers for the San Francisco Examiner; that forerunner has passed away, but Swinnerton remains, and everything he does is observed with respect by the...