Red Funnies: The New York Daily Worker 's "Popular Front" Comics, 1936-1945

As the Second World War drew to a close, CPUSA members began to discuss the Communist Party's future. In the summer of 1945, the pages of the New York Daily Worker were packed with an intense debate on the usefulness of the Popular Front policy that Earl Browder had initiated a decade before.¹ An article on July 28, 1945, under the headline "A Quick Look at the American Comic Strip," formed part of that debate. The piece began as an overview that, predictably enough, favored strips that satirized middle-class foibles over strips that promoted fantasy superheroes. But it quickly narrowed its focus, and with a relish that was barely disguised, pronounced an end to one of the few comic strips in the Daily Worker that had lasted more than a few months:

We have found that the usual daily comic strip in America suffers from the basic contradiction of trying to emulate real life on one hand, while dedicated to perpetuity on the other hand. At this very date, a once-popular daily comic strip in the Daily Worker is ill with that very disease. I mean "Pinky Rankin," the endlessness of whose adventures is beginning to bore some readers so that protests are coming in to the editor.²

An argument this specific was not the product of a hasty overview. The article's tone and logic resemble other attacks on "Browderism" in the Daily Worker. To eliminate a "disease" often meant the patient must die. The last episode of Pinky Rankin, on July 31, 1945, coincides with Browder's replacement by his long-time nemesis, William Z. Foster—a transfer of power that brought the Popular Front policy to an end.

A new artist had been drawing Pinky Rankin in the month that, as it happened, would be its last. And there was just time enough to shape an objection to the strip's demise in the last panel of its final episode. (Typical of Daily Worker procedures, this artist's identity was never wholly revealed: the strip was signed "WEI"—surname? initials? nickname?) "Guess they lived happily ever after," says the femme fatale Oona as she looks down (July 31, 1945) (Figure 1).³ Oona's character in the last weeks of Pinky Rankin had been nominally quite simple: she is the "bad girl" who had almost distracted Pinky from pursuing a pathway that concentrates on issues of fair play and justice. (When Pinky's girlfriend wanted to attend a rally on black marketeering, Oona wanted to go for a swim.)

Figure 1.

"WEI" (artist, hereafter "a"), [uncredited] (writer, hereafter "w"). "Pinky Rankin." Sunday Worker (New York). July 31, 1945. Although not evident here (and not relevant to the arrangement in this final panel), the figure of Oona in earlier episodes was a swipe from Milton Caniff's Miss Lace, in garb, forehead bangs, and almond-shaped eyes.

As the last panel in a final episode, the tableau in which Oona figures and speaks asks to be taken allegorically. Pinky Rankin's demise, the artist knows, signals not just an end to this title but an end to the idea of adventure strips in the Daily Worker—an end to an experiment in shaping a mass culture form to serve serious-minded and socially-conscious ends. When Pinky turns from us (he is gazing at villains the police are taking into custody) to grasp his girl friend's hand, Oona is left to speak her words to no one in particular, for Pinky can no longer hear her. Thus "bad" popular culture is reduced to a murmur and banished in defeat even as the representatives of morally-upright political correctness, happily complicit with forces of law and order, share a gesture of solidarity. Yet the artist not only allows Oona the last word but provides her with a disturbing but not unsympathetic pose. Even as Oona concedes, her under-the-breath comment raises questions about those who need "happy endings," about those who long for...