The Funnies: An American Idiom

DAVID MANNING WHITE and ROBERT H. ABEL (Eds.). The Funnies: An American Idiom. Pp. xvi, 304. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. $7.50.

It has long been a commonplace of communications theory that exposure on a mass medium itself confers status. Less evident, but perhaps more significant in its impact on elite intellectual life in America, is that mass communications research ipso facto confers status on the medium it "takes seriously." I would like, in commenting on this by-product of a Newspaper Comics Council, Inc. grant to Boston University's Communication Research Center, to distinguish between taking a common-place medium seriously and being seriously taken by modish commonplaces.

Having read this imposing looking compendium on the little old funnies with an increasingly peculiar feeling, I picked up the Sunday Bulletin comics which nearly everybody but me has been reading for the past ten years. In that decade, I had forgotten why I had long since given up even on Capp and Kelly-who both deserve Nobel prizes for the reverence they receive in this collection. This high-sounding collocation of polysyllabic content analyses has the net effect of eradicating a tiny but much more significant truth: the comics, for the most part, are a medium arrested in their development; they traffic in unbelievably immature trite-ness, sentimentality, and adventure.

Capp, Kelly, and Schulz are the sheerest exceptions proving a rule of unmitigated fatuousness. Francis E. Barcus says more than he intends in the concluding line of his essay, 'The World of the Sunday Comics." "The comic strip world, then, is not a 'bad' world; it is merely a very simple one." Indeed. But when does a world, kept simple to the point of innocence, be-come bad in the sense of ill-adapting its readers to life in a complex society? Long since, I would argue, with Robert Abel's piece on willing acquiescence in censorship by the creator of "Little Orphan Annie" fresh in my mind.

Poor reasons for taking comics seriously abound. They helped us win World War II. "Blondie" may be "read seventeen billion times in a single year (and before you tell us that there aren't that many people in the world, think of fifty million Blondie readers faithfully following the tribulations of Dagwood five or six times a week every week of the year" (p. viii).

This kind of silly statistical intimidation is irrelevant, demeaning a discipline in which Berelson and Salter taught us significant things about magazine fiction, and Lowenthal about popular biographies. No such sophisticated insight into the American character exists in this book, except perhaps in dissents like Kenneth Eble's and The Times Literary Supplement-"Any popular manifestation can achieve respect-ability by the metamorphosis to a 'native culture'." All of which brings us to the final bad reason, latent chauvinism.

Funnies are American. Gilbert Seldes probably started this bad intellectual habit in his bait-the-bourgeois-baters praise of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat"-"the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today. With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic" (p. 131). And again: Mr. Herriman was "working in a despised medium, without an atom of pretentiousness," as if humility about the obvious limits of one's craft is by definition the highest virtue.

"In the second order of the world's art [Seldes goes on] it is superbly first-rate-and a delight! For ten years, daily and frequently on Sunday, Krazy Kat has appeared in America; in that time we have accepted and praised a hundred fakes from Europe and Asia-silly and trashy plays, bad painting, woeful operas, iniquitous religions, every-thing paste and brummagem, has had its vogue with us, and a genuine, honest, native product has gone unnoticed until in the year of grace 1922 a ballet brought it a tardy and grudging acclaim" (p. 132). One can sympathize with Seldes' impatience at the American cultural cringe vis-&-vis Europe without accepting the "Buy American" overtones in this plea for the neglected "genuine, honest, native product."

In addition to the bad reasons adduced for taking triviality seriously which have already been mentioned, there is a public relations tone on behalf of comics which is completely out of place in a scholarly symposium. "Despite this slight dip in per capita readership, the comics remain on firmer ground than any other printed medium in this country" (p. 4).

In addition, the adjective "cultural" is used both in its objective social science sense and in the honorific normative signification-Al Capp's "cultural genealogy" (p. 31), with the net effect of bestowing "objective" praise on the despised medium. But perhaps the greatest weakness is a failing of all social science methodology, expertly or ineptly applied: its unwillingness-or in-ability-to conceive more satisfying alternatives.

Arnold Rose's piece on the positive effects of a mental health sequence in "Rex Morgan, M.D." brings an entirely new dimension to the subject, the unfulfilled potential of comics or color graphics as a medium of enlightenment. Humanists are, for the most part, too snobbish to care; media policymakers making enough money are too harried to dream of "doing good"; and social scientists ask only the questions they can answer with certainty. And there, unfortunately, the matter rests. Stephen Bosustow's animated cartoons show how maturely expressive the medium is under the control of thoughtful, responsible patrons.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 358, New Nations: The Problem of Political Development (Mar., 1965), pp. 245-246 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science