Eek! Sob! It's the death of comics! - the loss of innocence, a sense of humor and enjoyment in today's heavy-handed comic strips - Cover Story

'LEAPING LIZARDS!" sounds too cheerful. "Good grief!" might be more appropriate. Look what's happened to the funnies. We should look seriously because this is a serious matter, touching on the state of the nation.

There are three peculiarly American art forms: the Western, the musical, and the comic strip; all of which, having come to full flower not so long ago, when they seemed to represent much that lay close to the American heart and much that the rest of the world admired in America, have manifestly degenerated. Of these three, comics have been the least studied but are by no means the least significant, if only because they came into, still do come into, almost every American home.

Solemn books have been written about them ("Underlying the action is a deeprooted sense of determinism and naturalistic despair, not unlike the world view of the more extreme Dadaists"), but such solemnity is a bad sign. Intellectuals theorizing about popular culture tend to be like opera singers rendering show tunes: they miss the point.

Comic-strip artists never aspired to compete with Rembrandt or Gillray. Their social importance lies not in aesthetic achievement but in their historic unifying role. They created a common culture that, for a while, brought old and young, immigrants and native-born, together across the breakfast table, providing not only thrills and laughs but values identifiable with what would then have been a generally accepted concept of Americanism.

A hint of their power can be gleaned from the words and phrases they coined or popularized, anyhow slipped into everyone's vocabulary: "piker," "jeep," "fall guy," "horsefeathers," "dumbbell" (meaning "stupid"), "ball and chain" (for "wife"), the "heebiejeebies," "time's a-wastin'," "you said it," "the cat's pajamas," "hard-boiled," "drugstore cowboy," "google-eyed," "baloney," "Dragon Lady," and "security blanket," not to mention wow!, pow!, bam!, socko, arf, and aargh! Some everyday commodities--Popeye's spinach, Wimpy's hamburgers, Dagwood's sandwiches--reflect gleams of comic-strip glory still.

But clouds have drifted across the sun. We are looking at what has been described as "a once great but now dying and misused field."

The ancestry of the comic strip can be traced back as far as you wish--to ancient Egyptian wall paintings or to the Bayeux Tapestry, each of which narrated successive events in a row of pictures. Eighteenth-century political cartoonists used speech balloons. However, the American comic strip grew, toward the end of the nineteenth century, out of two more or less simultaneous developments--photoengraving, which made possible relatively cheap newspaper illustrations, and the great flood of European immigrants, many of whom had only a tenuous grasp of the English language.

Rival newspaper groups, notably those headed by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, battled for readership. Hearst raided from Pulitzer an artist called Richard Felton Outcault, whose already popular strip, Hogan's Alley, featured a jug-eared urchin, soon to be known as "the Yellow Kid," reputedly because the color printer wanted a clear space on which to test his yellow tint and the boy's nightgown-type clothes were convenient. The Yellow Kid became the star of Hearst's new comic supplement, launched in 1896, "eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that make the rainbow look like a lead pipe." In response Pulitzer hired another artist to create an alternative Yellow Kid.

Even more tangled and much longer lasting was the tale of The Katzenjammer Kids, by any standard a classic of the genre. Based on a German pictorial series, Max und Moritz, it was adapted--truth to tell, plagiarized--into an American comic strip for Hearst's New York Morning Journal by Rudolph Dirks, himself a German immigrant, who added speech balloons and a narrative that advanced from panel to panel. When Pulitzer hired Dirks away, Hearst successfully claimed a legal right to The Katzenjammer Kids, which was thereafter drawn by another artist, Harold Knerr. But Dirks continued his own version, first as Hans and Fritz, and then, after the outbreak of war with Germany, as The Captain and the Kids. He went on drawing it until his death, in 1968.

In whichever form (and the two versions were practically indistinguishable), this was a charming strip. On a tropical island, otherwise inhabited by cigar-smoking cannibals and an occasional dusky maiden, der Captain, der Inspector, formidable Mama, and mischievous Hans and Fritz squabble in fantasticated German accents ("Mit bummers giffs no supper!" Mama warns). The overall effect was lovable and unforgettable in a way that no modern strip seems to be.

Popeye, created by Elzie Segar in 1929, was the first superhero, capable of amazing feats, though he used his great powers infrequently. His early adventures were far more complex and adult-oriented than the strip and film versions that followed; they told elaborate stories that went on from day to day and week to week. And Popeye himself was a richly conceived character, with a face (as his sweet-patootie, Olive Oyl, once put it) "like a shipwreck," wrestling to express himself in words, irresponsible, stubborn, naturally aggressive but gentle with a baby, inflexible in pursuit of what he considered justice, epitomized by the slogan Segar evolved for him, "I yam what I yam an' tha's all I yam." Popeye became the most widely published strip before Peanuts.