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88 Manny Farber “Comic Strips” From The New Republic, September 4, 1944, p. 279. Reprinted with permission. Comic strips are not what they used to be. Those in the New York Post, which are the ones I read, are getting increasingly genteel, naturalistic and like the movies, moving away from the broad comedy of their beginnings and into the pulp field. The old style in comic strips was to trip everything—drawing, dialogue, place, action— for laughs. The new style is almost never concerned with being funny; rather it tries to be as much like a soap opera as possible. The stories are either very gentle affairs full of cliches, corn and cozy morals (Mary Worth says: “I always thought old age was a genial companion”), or they are full of adventures starring a child named Dickie Dare, a woman in a slinky evening gown which is being endlessly ripped off named Miss Fury—easily one of the most difficult comics to follow—and the man in the union suit named Superman, easily the least romantic figure of all time. The technique and behavior in comic strips have been increasingly refined. Nowadays they show all kinds of people how to act, look, and what to expect from life, with a craftsmanship that is as flashy, high-powered and canny as the best advertising art in Vogue. Their drawing has become as realistic as it formerly was comically distorted and imaginative. A living example of this development goes on daily in the Post comic, Debbie Dean, which started looking as if its artist were drawing with wooden slats rather than pen and ink; since then everything in it has been dramatically and slowly turning more realistic and less wooden. The other comic which started recently in the Post, The Goldbergs, indicates how well meaning and well mannered they have become. In the early days of the comics, some national group was ragged by almost every cartoon in a crudely comic or merely vulgar way: the Swedes caught it daily in Yens Yenson, the French in Alphonse and Gaston, the Germans in the Katzenjammers, the Irish in three or four strips, and the Jews in Abie the Agent; in that strip, Abie Kabibble was ridiculed for his Jewishness in dialect, dress, profession, look and every action. The Goldbergs—taking up the old custom and particularly the Jews—is thoroughly civilized, dedicated to good works like encouraging nurseries, and is an awfully weak sort of pleasantness: the loss in intent since Abie died and The Goldbergs was born has been far more than one of ridiculing nationalities. The Post runs three daily comics, called Nancy, The Bungle Family and Silly Milly, and two ancients on Saturday, The Captain and the Kids and Mutt and Jeff, which seem to deserve the name of comic and are holding out against the movies. It is probable that Nancy is the best comic today, principally because it combines a very strong, independent imagination with a simplification of best tradition of comic drawing. Nancy is daily concerned with making a pictorial gag either about or on the affairs of a group bright, unsentimental children who have identical fire-plug shapes, two-foot heights, inch-long names (Sluggo, Winky, Tilly, Nancy) and genial self-powered temperaments. This comic has a remarkable, brave, vital energy that its artist, Ernie Bushmiller, gets partly from seeing landscape in large clear forms and then walking his kids, whom he sees in the same way, with great strength and well being, through them. Bushmiller’s kids have wonderfully integrated personalities combining smart sociability with tough independence. They also have wonderful heads of hair—Sluggo hasn’t any and calls his a “baldy bean,” Nancy’s is a round black cap with prickles, Tilly has an upsweep tied around the middle like a shock of wheat. Nancy is one of the few dominantly pantomimic strips left (Cicero, the baggy cat, being another). Stan MacGovern’s Silly Milly very insolently and precociously kids news items in three or four daily take-off, starring the heroine. Silly Milly is drawn in typical MacGovern style, as though by a wind current, and has a prehistoric animal for a hair-do, a very expressive, giant-sized eye, and a perfectly oval profile. It is one of those comics with animated decor, like Smoky Stover, with adjoining family portraits shaking hands, and one that tries for laughs in every part of the box. It has its pet vocabulary—all names...

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