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Prehistory of the Superhero (Part Seven): Reign of the Superman

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Art by Joe Shuster

 

Once commentators could discuss the “Superman”, the “Super-Race”, and the “Super-Society” without drawing connections back to the philosophy from whence it sprang, the Uebermensch proved to be a concept able to accommodate any number of competing moral viewpoints. And once Nietsche could become a thinker with answers but no questions, and his philosophy a celebration of power rather than a testament to the need for human wonder, the Uebermensch’s naturalization into American intellectual and cultural life was successfully under way.
– Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche

 

See you in the Funny Papers

In the 1890’s an extremely successful new pop medium took off: the newspaper comic strip.

Millions of readers delighted in the daily comedy antics of the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, or Mutt and Jeff. The strips ran in black-and-white, but in 1897 the New York Journal published the first full-color Sunday comics supplement. In 1924 appeared what is generally considered to be the first adventure comic strip: Wash Tubbs, by Roy Crane (1901–1977).
 

Art by Roy Crane; click on image to enlarge

 
This opened the way for such classic adventure series as Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, and Dick Tracy.

The man who introduced the superhero to the comic strip was scripter Lee Falk(1911–1999). He created Mandrake the Magician in 1934, a dapper wizard who wielded his stupendous hypnotic powers against such villains as the Cobra and the Deleter.

Art by Phil Davis (1906-1964)

 
Mandrake has been the springboard for subsequent magician superheroes such as Ibis the Invincible, Dr Strange, or Zatara. Sometimes the imitation verged on plagiarism: witness Zatara:
 

Art by Fred Guardineer

 
Falks’ other classic superhero creation was the Phantom of Bengal (1936).

 
The Phantom had an original backstory: Kit Walker was the 21st Phantom in a lineage stretching back to his ancestor in 1516. By adopting the same mask and costume generation after generation, the Phantoms created the legend of an immortal fighter for justice:

Art by Ray Moore (1905-1984); click on image to enlarge

 
The Phatom‘s costume pioneered several of the visual tropes associated with superheroes ever since:  form-fitting top and tights, with the elegant innovation of underpants worn on the outside; a skull-hugging hood; and a mask with blanks hiding the eyes. All he lacked was a cape — which deficiency Mandrake supplied. Compare the Phantom to such later superheroes like Batman and Captain America, and it’s obvious how much the latter owe to Falks’ design.
 

All in Color for a Dime

Comic strips from the start would be gathered into book editions, with cardboard covers, much like modern European albums; they were relatively expensive gift items.

In 1929, Dell Publishing brought out a tabloid-sized newspaper supplement of color strip reprints, The Funnies, which ran for a year; in 1933,  Eastern Color Printing published a reprint pamphlet titled Funnies on Parade, featuring popular strips such as ‘Mutt and Jeff’, ‘Joe Palooka‘, and ‘Skippy‘. It’s considered by many to be the first true American comic book — with minor changes of format and printing technology, 2012 comic books resemble 1933 ones.
 

 
Funnies on Parade was devised chiefly as a way to keep Depression-idled printing presses busy. It was never sold, but used as a promotional giveaway by Procter and Gamble; everybody thought there was no money to be made selling what came free with the daily newspaper.

But Eastern Color’s salesman, Max Gaines, was sure there was a market out there, and so there was issued in May 1934 Famous Funnies, a 64-page reprint magazine retailing at 10 cents. It sold an incredible 90% of its print run. A new media industry was born.
 

Cover illustration by Jon Mayes

 
The newsstands were soon flooded with comic books. It’s not hard to understand their appeal; in our age of i-Pads and portable television, we have to remember that back in the 1930s immersive visual entertainment was limited to movie theatres.

The strip syndicates furnished the editorial content. This posed two problems: first, that the ravenous demand for comic books was quickly using up the available material; next, that the syndicates were charging some $10 per page, which cut cruelly into the profit margins.

The solution was to create new material at, say, $5 per page. Of course, such a fee would never attract established professional cartoonists; but, then as now, a horde of eager youths stood ready to write and draw for miserable wages, perhaps as a stepping-stone to the lucrative strip market. And the publishers were more than willing to exploit them.

Needless to say, this was a recipe for dreadful comics: inexperienced youngsters forced to hack out stories as fast as possible to earn a decent living. On the plus side, these tyros had youth’s energy and invention.

Although some new material had been incorporated from the start of the boom, generally the credit for the first all-new material comic book has been given to Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson‘s New Fun comics. It featured a mix of humor and adventure tales; some of the latter were provided by the teen-aged combo ofJerry Siegel (script) and Joe Shuster (art). We shall come back to this pair later on.

The pulps had found formidable competition for the reader’s dime. The more astute pulp publishers were quick to bring out comic books, often cartoon versions of their prose magazines; thus Fiction House simultaneously brought out, in 1939, the science-fiction pulp Planet Stories and its comic book sister, Planet Comics.

As we saw in the last chapter, the pulps had abundantly featured masked super-heroes. It is therefore logical that pulp and comic book publisher Centaur Publications should debut, in 1936’s Funny Picture Stories, the first original comic book superhero: The Clock, the secret identity of society swell Brian O’Brien.
 

 
But far from this publishing sideshow, 1933 is a year chiefly remembered for a dark and world-changing occurrence on the other side of the Atlantic: on January 30, President Paul Von Hindenburg appointed the  leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Adolph Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany.

The Nazis were now in power.

Hoch der Uebermensch!

In the decades since Nietzsche had formulated the concept and the wordUebermensch (generally translated into English as “superman” ), the notion had been warped and twisted into strange shapes indeed.

For Nietzsche, the superman was a spiritual goal for every human being, a new type unhindered by  religion’s focus on the world to come — rather, revelling in the material world, placing body above soul, and dedicated to discovering new values by which to live.

But what the culture at large retained was the word: superman. It became what we would now call a meme. And it came to be attached to the strongest, most world-changing idea of the late 19th century: evolution.

The Darwinian revolution — postulating the emergence and survival of species by mutation and selection — was often misunderstood, and its revelations misapplied. The idea of evolution ( a term Darwin himself was uncomfortable with, preferring “descent through modification”) seemed to imply that humanity could be transforming itself into a superior species — or at least some “races” of humanity could.

Pseudo-scientific racism was spawned in the latter half of the 19th century, from the Frenchman de Gobineau‘s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races(1855) through Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton< and his invention of the concept (and word) eugenics.
 

Illustration for the 2nd Congress of Eugenics (1921). Click image to enlarge.

 
Eugenics is an ideology that calls for the preservation or improvement of human genetic stock by encouraging “superior” individuals, and discouraging “inferior” ones, to breed. From the vantage point of the 21st century, after a hundred years of horror and suffering inflicted by such ‘scientific’ racism, it is hard to wrap our heads around the idea that this was once considered a humane and socially progressive idea; yet champions of eugenics included such forward-thinking persons as H.G.Wells, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw andSydney Webb.

And the first country to forcibly apply eugenics by law? The United States of America, where from 1907 to 1963 64000 forced sterilisations of “imbeciles”, “hereditary criminals” and other “degenerates” were carried out — 20,000 in California alone. (America was also the land where the term “master race” was coined, to justify Southern slavery.)

It remained for certain ideologues to push the folly of eugenics even further, to advocate the extermination of  ‘sub-human’ peoples — Untermenschen — such as the Jews and Gypsies, while seeking to breed a new race of masters– of Uebermenschen — of supermen.

These were the murderous Nazis, who had seized absolute power in Germany.

And their goal of extermination was hideously implemented in the Holocaust.

Their breeding program– the Lebensborn project — aimed at refining a supreme Nordic race. As SS leader Heinrich Himmler detailed it in 1936:

The organization “Lebensborn e.V.” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:

1. Support racially, biologically, and hereditarily valuable families with many children.

2. Place and care for racially and biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.

3. Care for the children.

4. Care for the children’s mothers.

–objectives that expanded to the kidnapping of  ‘racially desirable’ children in such conquered lands as Norway, Denmark and Poland, to be Germanised and raised as the vanguard of a new race of superior beings.
 

German propaganda poster, 1942. Note the contrast between the calm, strong “Uebermensch” German soldier and the defeated, multiracial French prisoners in the background.

 
(Before crossing the Atlantic back to the USA, let me repeat that Nietzsche himself was, contrary to popular modern conception, not at all a proponent of the sort of ruthless evolutionary pruning that characterised social Darwinists and eugenics enthusiasts:

There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race. — Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All too Human (1876)

He was also contemptuous of both nationalism and of racism; he proposed to deal with anti-Semitism by shooting anti-Semites in the face.)

Thus the idea of the superman was very much “in the air”– not just in Germany, but worldwide– in the early 1930s.

And this idea would bloom in the imagination of one teen-aged boy from Cleveland, Ohio, who would revolutionise the new comic-book field.

Man of Steel — and of Paper

The science fiction pulps spawned an exceptionally active and intelligent fandom from the start. Many of the greatest writers in SF history started out as teen-aged members of such fan clubs as the Futurians or the Science Fiction League: Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald Woolheim, Cyril Kornbluth. Other science fiction fans of the 30’s went on to be editors, some of comic books: Mort Weisinger, Julius Schwartz (both of whom would serve as Superman editors for decades.)

In Cleveland, Ohio, young Jerry Siegel (1914 — 1996) was one of the earliest SF fans: in 1929, at the age of fifteen, he produced what may be the first science-fiction fanzine, Cosmic Stories, on his typewriter– carbon copies were his ‘printing press’. When he was 16, Siegel met teen-aged artist Joe Shuster (1914 — 1992) at high school; they immediately clicked — ‘When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together’.

They put out a mimeographed fanzine together: Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilisation, in the third issue of which — in June 1932– they published the following story, written by Siegel (under the pen name Herbert S. Fine), illustrated by Shuster:
 

click on image to enlarge

 
This Superman was an evil tyrant with psychic powers. Siegel, later in life, recalled how the word and concept of a superman was much discussed at the time, in tandem with the rise of Naziism in Germany. Both Siegel and Shuster were Jews; this evil ur-Superman likely reflected alarm over growing Nazi power.

But the next iteration of Superman was a force for good; in addition to the obvious wish-fulfillment fantasies it represented, I suspect there was also a desire to appropriate and reclaim the idea of the superman from Nazi ideologues.

Certainly, that’s how some Nazis saw it:

Jerry Siegel, an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York, is the inventor of a colorful figure with an impressive appearance, a powerful body, and a red swim suit who enjoys the ability to fly through the ether.

The inventive Israelite named this pleasant fellow with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind “Superman.” He advertised widely Superman’s sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by the American youth.

As you can see, there is nothing the Sadducees won’t do for money!

Jerry looked about the world and saw things happening in the distance, some of which alarmed him. He heard of Germany’s reawakening, of Italy’s revival, in short of a resurgence of the manly virtues of Rome and Greece. “That’s great,” thought Jerry, and decided to import the ideas of manly virtue and spread them among young Americans. Thus was born this “Superman.” […] Woe to the youth of America, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.

(Das Schwarze Korps, April 25, 1940.)

(This was in response to a two-page strip done for Look magazine, in whichSuperman smashes the German army and brings Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations for judgment.)

In 1933, Siegel and Shuster produced sample strips of Superman with a view to newspaper syndication. This version of the character differed visually from the one we know, chiefly in his lack of costume:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
The above illustration shows another strong influence on Superman’s genesis, the pulp hero Doc Savage. Consider the below house advertisement for Doc:

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click on image to enlarge

 
Now began a five-year effort to sell the strip. It was turned down time and again by the syndicates. One editor commented: “The trouble with this, kid, is that it’s too sensational. Nobody would believe it.” Bell Syndicate told them, “We are in the market only for strips likely to have the most extra-ordinary appeal, and we do not feel Superman gets into this category.” United Features said that Superman was “a rather immature piece of work.” 

As Jim Steranko put it, the world’s hottest property was gathering dust on the shelf.

Meanwhile, Siegel and Shuster were making a living in the new market of original-material comic books, telling the adventures of Dr Occult and Slam Bradley. They tried re-tooling the strip for this market; still no success. Shuster, in a fit of despair, burned all his sample pages; Siegel was only able to salvage the cover:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
This act of destruction cleared the way for a new version. There was a new outfit, obviously inspired by newspapers’ The Phantom and by circus performers. As Shuster noted, they had created a  “kind of costume and let’s give him a big S on his chest, and a cape, make him as colorful as we can and as distinctive as we can.” This showbiz instinct was tremendously prescient. The image of Superman is recognised the world over — a marvellous branding success — and has been imitated by countless superhero characters up to the present day.

Joe Shuster at the drawing board, with Jerry Siegel hovering; click on photo to enlarge

 
Finally, the two creators were able to place the strip with Max Gaines at National Allied Publications — the future DC comics. It was looked on almost as filler material — editor Vin Sullivan didn’t have enough strips to round out Action Comics 1. Still, Superman was splashed on the cover — a cover that almost went unused because Gaines felt it was too silly:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

And indeed, even a year later, despite the character’s unheard-of popularity,Superman wasn’t the main cover feature on every issue–as shown in this 1939 house ad:

art by Fred Guardineer

 
The comic came out on April 18, 1938. It was an instant sellout. The age of the superhero comic book was born — and continues today, in a much-etiolated, decadent form, totally dominating popular comic books — to the point where superhero comics are actually termed ‘mainstream’. (Famously, Siegel and Shuster saw the merest trickle of the ocean of money Superman was to generate.)

The Superman of the late ’30s was an angry fellow. He battled crooked politicians and slimy capitalists– once dragging a coal tycoon down into his own unsafe mine. He grabbed generals sending soldiers to their deaths and placed them on the frontline.

This crusading attitude, as much as the dream of unlimited power, explains much of his instant appeal at the time. This was an America still crippled by the Great Depression, with the looming shadow of war causing anxiety. The ‘common man’ was frightened, exhausted, and furious. And here was this mighty champion taking on the bums of the power elite: it was a populist fantasy of revenge — the same one that Gramsci had discerned in the ‘superman’ characters of nineteenth-century popular novels, the same one that colored the dime novel Westerns, with their aggrieved outlaws.

We’ve spent the past seven columns tracing the distant origins of the superhero; a word or two on the immediate influences that fed the imagination of Superman’s creators.

Siegel mentioned, besides the Uebermensch concept, the swashbuckling movie characters of Douglas Fairbanks: among these, as seen in part 6 of this study, was the proto-superhero Zorro. He also cited Tarzan; but the latter’s creator–Edgar Rice Burroughs — surely also contributed the conceit of a visitor to another planet gaining super-strength and the ability to leap vast distances from gravity lower than his homeworld’s, in the John Carter of Mars stories.

The Doc Savage influence is manifest, even in small details: the  name of Superman’s alter-ego Clark Kent echoes Doc’s own, Clark Savage Jr;  Doc had a Fortress of Solitude before Superman did; Doc was billed the Man of Bronze, while Superman was the Man of Steel.

There’s controversy over the influence of a 1930 novel by Philip Wylie(1902–1971), Gladiator.
 

 
The hero of Gladiator, Hugo Danner, exhibits powers identical to those ofSuperman‘s in his first appearances: herculean strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to leap great distances. Danner got his power as a result of his scientist father’s attempt to replicate the proportional strength of insects; now read this early presentation of Superman, with a note at the end on his power:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
Wylie, in a 1963 interview with science fiction historian Sam Moscowitz, claimed that Superman was plagiarised from Gladiator, and that he’d threatened to sue Siegel and the publisher in 1940.

Siegel, for his part, denied ever reading Wylie’s book. It would seem plausible, as the novel had only sold some 2000 copies. And that comparison of insect strength in proportion to our own was already pretty old hat in 1938. But there’s a smoking gun: Siegel had reviewed the book in his fanzine Science Fiction…whose next issue featured ‘Reign of the Superman’.

Finally, an unconscious influence may be traced to Siegel’s Jewish heritage. Superman seems like a parody of the Messiah, sent from the heavens to redeem mankind. He is also strongly reminiscent of the legendary Golem of Prague, who with his superhuman strength protected the Jews against their oppressors.

An intriguing theory, but perhaps a far-fetched one.

Next: Inventory and Conclusion

Strange Windows:Keeping Up with the Goonses (part 7)

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This is part seven of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focussing on Britain

Art by Heath Robinson

Britain has a long, rich tradition of cartooning second to no other land’s. And, as we saw for American English, cartoons have contributed to the country’s popular language.

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Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 3)

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This is part three of our look at comics’ contributions to colloquial English.

Another prolific contributor to the language was Al Capp, creator of the strip Li’l Abner.

“My Mom and Dad met when she picked him out at a Sadie Hawkins dance.”

Sadie Hawkins is one of Capp’s memorable characters; she first appeared in November 1937, and until the mid-50s, November was known as Sadie Hawkins month and became an unofficial collegiate holiday.

Hawkins was the ugly daughter of the most wealthy and powerful man in town and was avoided by all the town’s men.

Hawkins’ father lined up all eligible males and shot off his gun. When the gun was fired, they ran for their lives and their freedom from matrimony.

click image to enlarge

The gunshot signaled the unwed women to enter the race and try to catch a man. When an unlucky male was brought back, kicking and screaming, he had no choice but to marry the woman. Thus was born a Dogpatch annual tradition: Sadie Hawkins Day.

Capp also came up with the idea for a Sadie Hawkins dance — a dance where only the ladies picked their partners.

The craze spread throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and continues today.


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Strange Windows: Keeping Up with the Goonses (part 2)

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Jeep! Jeep!

This is part two of our survey of language spawned by comics and cartoons.

Here’s a strip that, in comics, is one of the richest contributors to the language: Thimble Theatre, better known worldwide by the name of its protagonist, the sailor Popeye.

The strip’s creator, Elzie Segar (1894– 1938) is credited with several coinages, some of which are contested; let’s take them one by one.

“With a loanshark, it’s simple: you don’t pay, he sends one of his goons to break your leg“.

To Segar is generally attributed the word “goon”, but the truth is a bit more complex; the word long predated the strip.

However, it is arguable that Segar changed the sense of this slang term. Before, it designated a foolish simpleton.

But by the end of the thirties, after Segar introduced the fearsome but lovable Alice the Goon into the strip:

click image to enlarge

… the meaning changed to that of a hulking, violent thug.
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Strange Windows:Keeping up with the Goonses (part 1)

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Art by Rube Goldberg

As you raise spoon of soup (A) to your mouth it pulls string (B), thereby jerking ladle (C) which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and lights automatic cigar lighter (J), setting off sky-rocket (K) which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M) and allow pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth thereby wiping off your chin. After the meal, substitute a harmonica for the napkin and you’ll be able to entertain the guests with a little music.

“Fred’s neighbor buys a jeep, so of course Fred buys a Hummer. I zap him with ‘Keeping up with the Joneses, eh, Freddy?’ He was steamed up, but he doesn’t scare me. The palooka may be built like a goon, but he’s more Caspar Milquetoast than Superman.“

The ocean of the English language is fed by many rivers, and some of the main streams are those of popular media.

Movies, television, songs, theater, vaudeville, books, radio… all have created uncounted idioms, words, catch-phrases and phatic utterances.

Cartoons and comics have contributed their own rich share:

The comic-strip artist[…]has been a very diligent maker of terse and dramatic words.

–H.L. Mencken, The American Language

In this column we’ll review a sampling of these colorful idioms.

Part one of the five-part series focusses on American English from the early newspaper comic strips and cartoons.

Along the way, however, we’ll debunk some false etymology. And because, at times, cartoons have  influenced a word’s meaning without creating the word itself, we’ll also take note of such ambiguous cases. Most examples were invented by me, but if attributed they’re actual quotations.

We’ll kick off with a look at a man who was one of the most famous cartoonists of his day; although his life and work are now obscure, his coinages live on in the vernacular: Thomas Aloycious Dorgan (1877 – 1929), who signed his work Tad.

click image to enlarge

W. J. Funk, of the Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary company, placed Dorgan at the top of the list of the ten “most fecund makers of American slang.”

Tad is generally credited with either creating or popularizing such words and expressions as dumbbell (a stupid person; see cartoon above); for crying out loud (a cry of exasperation); cat’s meow and cat’s pajamas (as superlatives); applesauce (nonsense); cheaters (eyeglasses); skimmer (a boater hat); hard-boiled ( for a tough person); drugstore cowboy (loafers or ladies’ men); nickel-nurser (a miser); as busy as a one-armed paperhanger (overworked); Yes, we have no bananas, which became a popular song, still heard today; Twenty-three, Skidoo, (let’s get out of here); and dogs for shoes.

However, he is best-remembered today for coining the word “hot dog” for the frankfurter sandwich that appeared at the turn of the century.

Nathan’s of Coney Island, birthplace of the hot dog. The establishment is still there, and the nosh is still great.

Alas! This appears to be a case of faux folk etymology.

Supposedly, Tad had drawn a cartoon of a dachsund between two buns and christened it the Hot Dog– as in this modern re-creation:

However, no trace of this cartoon has ever been found in Tad’s works. The term probably came from common jokes about dog meat being inserted into cheap sausages.

This term for a sausage served on a bun got its start in college slang in the 1890s. The first known (printed)  use of the term is in the Knoxville Journal (Tennessee) on 28 September 1893:

“It was so cool last night that the appearance of overcoats was common…Even the weinerwurst men began preparing to get the “hot dogs” ready for sale Saturday night.“

From the Yale Record of 19 Oct 1895:

“They contentedly munched hot dogs during the whole service.“

Two weeks earlier, on 5 October, that same paper recorded a poem, “Echoes From The Lunch Wagon”:

“‘Tis dogs’ delight to bark and bite
Thus does the adage run.
But I delight to bite the dog
When placed inside the bun.”

No Tad in sight in hot-dog land… but he was still a mighty coiner of words!

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We are on firmer ground tracing how a cartoon led to the naming of a much-beloved toy:

President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was an ardent big-game hunter. One day in Mississipi, the game was scarce. Some of Roosevelt’s aides captured an old she-bear and tied it to a tree for the President to shoot. Roosevelt, disgusted by this lack of sportsmanship, refused.

The cartoonist Clifford Berryman was inspired by this anecdote to draw in 1902 the above cartoon, “drawing the line in Mississipi”. It was immensely successful and was copied the nation over.

Berryman began inserting a bear into any cartoon featuring Roosevelt, but changing it from an adult to a cub:

A shopkeeper, Morris Michtom, took two stuffed bear dolls made by his wife and put them in his shop window.
Michtom asked for permission from President Roosevelt to call them “Teddy’s bears”. ( His store eventually became the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company.) And thus was born the teddy bear.

That’s just one example of cartoon to toy to language.

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“With her apple cheeks and sweet smile she’s as cute as a kewpie doll.”

The Kewpies (derived from ‘Cupid’) were  the angelic babies featured from 1909 in the  magazine Ladies’ Home Journal, the creation of cartoonist and illustrator Rose O’Neill (1874– 1954):

In 1912 O’Neill licensed production of dolls based on her characters, thus creating one of the most successful toys in history.

Rose O’Neill surrounded by Kewpie dolls

A ‘kewpie doll’  look referred to  women who were pretty in a chubby, childlike way; it wasn’t always a compliment. (Animated cartoon star Betty Boop  owed a lot of her design to the kewpies.)

At carnival fairgrounds, kewpie dolls were frequent prizes at shooting galleries and other games. Hence the sarcastic expression ‘You win the kewpie doll’ when someone guesses  an answer correctly.

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“Jim’s neighbor has a tennis court, so of course Jim has to install a swimming pool — he’s just keeping up with the Joneses.”

This popular expression denoting envy- motivated consumption comes from the title of Arthur R. “Pop” Morand‘s strip chronicling the life of the McGinis family. These upwardly mobile middle-class denizens occasionally referred to their neighbours, the Jones family, with envy or anxiety in their constant war to one-up them:

Interestingly, the Joneses never appeared in the strip named for them.

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“The staples of old yellow journalism are the staples of the new yellow journalism: sex, crime; and, even better, sex crime.” —Nick Denton, Gawker founder

In the 1890’s, there was a fierce commercial war between two popular New York papers: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. They competed with sensationalist stories, eye-catching illustrations, and an innovation that was to spread to every newspaper in the land: the Sunday color comic-strip supplement.

One of the first regular cartoons to appear in the World was Hogan’s Alley by R.F. Outcault (1863– 1928), featuring comic vignettes of the slums.

The hero of the cartoon soon came to be a rascally urchin called ‘The Yellow Kid’:

Hearst lured Outcault and his cartoon away from the World; Pulitzer sued; the upshot was that Pulitzer continued Hogan’s Alley, now drawn by George Luks, while Hearst published Outcault’s version under the title The Yellow Kid.

The traditional press looked on these vulgar papers with distaste. In an 1897 article in the New York Press, veteran newsman Ervin Wardman attacked Pulitzer and Hearst for their “yellow kid journalism”. Shortened to yellow journalism, the phrase still designates sensationalist, populist media reporting, whether in print or on the air… or on the Internet.

” The entire filing system has to be fixed — as it is, it’s as screwed up as Hogan’s goat.”

Outcault’s strip also gave rise to an expression especially popular in the Armed forces, particularly the Navy.

Hogan’s Alley had a smelly, bad-tempered goat in residence.

Any situation that is seriously fouled-up is said to be as f—ed up as Hogan’s Goat.

However, another famous Outcault creation– Buster Brown— was not, as some say, the source of the nickname and epithet ‘Buster’, which had existed years before he drew the strip.

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“Wimps, I think; milquetoast souls who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for god’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram!”

—George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels

The disparaging word (noun and adjective) “milquetoast“,  evoking weak-tea wimpiness and pusillanimity, comes to us from Caspar Miquetoast, the pathologically shy and timorous ” hero”,  courtesy of H.T. Webster (1885 – 1953),  of the weekly comic panel,  ‘The Timid Soul‘.  Milquetoast:  it’s a word often used for so-called  “henpecked” husbands in the Walter Mitty vein.

“Voters in this election were almost all polled at saying they were sick and tired of milquetoast congressmen: they wanted rebels with the guts to challenge the status quo”.

As my composite example attests, it has been trotted out repeatedly in the 2010 midterm congressional election: google “milquetoast politician/congressman” for examples.

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“He spent the whole vacation complaining about the weather and worrying about the cost; it’s no fun having a gloomy Gus as a travelling companion.”

The appellation gloomy Gus for a depressed, pessimistic individual comes from Frederic Burr Opper (1857 — 1937)’s strip Happy Hooligan. Gus was one of the brothers of the hobo title character, and indeed he was in a perpetual state of  gloom; ironically, he always fared better than the optimistic Happy or the pretentious other brother, Montmorency, in their calamitous adventures.

Copyright registration for a Gloomy Gus doll.

In the panel below, Gus is at far left, next to Montmorency with Happy at the kissing booth at right.

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“Enter a haunted house? After you, my dear Alphonse!“

Another Opper strip gave us a lasting idiom: Alphonse and Gaston. It was a one-gag concept, featuring two Frenchmen who would waste time insisting, with preposterous courtesy, on the other’s precedence even in the direst situations.

A situation where neither side will take the first step in concerted action is often called an Alphonse- and- Gaston situation:

“Both Democrats and Republicans agree the budget must be reduced, but neither party wants to be seen cutting popular programs such as Medicare; thus the Alphonse-and- Gaston standoff in the House.”

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“One of the FBI interrogation techniques is the old Mutt-and-Jeff routine taught by Army intelligence.”– Washington Post, 30 August 1964

Mutt and Jeff was an immensely popular strip by Bud Fischer (1884 — 1954), featuring the adventures of a comically mismatched duo of friends, tall Mutt and small Jeff:

This physical disparity ensured that any pair of height-mismatched companions in America would be dubbed “Mutt and Jeff”.

The two differed in character, too.  Mutt fancied himself a sharp operator, quick with schemes to turn a fast buck, preferably at the racetrack. Jeff was a  gentle soul, something of an innocent, whose unworldliness would frequently derail unwittingly his compadre’s latest scheme, to the latter’s exasperation.

In police slang,  the “good cop/bad cop” interrogation technique was logically dubbed a Mutt-and-Jeff routine”

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“First you think we’ll miss the plane, then you’re afraid it’s overbooked– honestly, you’re such a worry wart!“

Art by J.R. Williams

From 1922, the cartoon panel Out our Way, drawn by J.R. Williams (1888– 1957)  celebrated the foibles of life in small- town America. A recurring character was the boy dubbed  the Worry Wart, because he created so many worries among others. When worry wart entered the language about 1956, the sense had shifted to one given to excessive worrying.

(Another Williams catch-phrase much beloved of my mommy was “Why mothers get gray“, trotted out at any egregiously foolish conduct on my part.)

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“He set up his own pump-and-filter system cobbled out of  reclaimed junkyard parts;  I’ve never seen such a crazy Rube Goldberg contraption.“

Sometimes it’s the cartoonist who gives his name to the idiom.

Rube Goldberg (1883 — 1970), a prolific cartoonist with a long career, is best remembered for his designs of insanely complicated machines, made of ridiculous parts, to accomplish trivial feats like knocking on a door or catching a mouse.

Here’s Goldberg’s idea of an alarm clock:

Any over-complicated,  jury-rigged machine or system is apt to be tagged a Rube Goldberg contraption. ( We also refer to bureaucratic systems of insanely complex red tape as Rube Goldberg systems.)

I recall, as a child, being inspired by these cartoons (and by the Goldberg-derived game ‘MouseTrap‘ — does anyone else remember that?) to build my own nutty contraptions.  I’ll wager Goldberg inspired many a future inventor or engineer.

Since 1949, Purdue University has run the Rube Goldberg Machine Competition, where contestants are assigned a simple task to be carried out by a machine; the most absurdly complicated machine wins.

At the 2007 competition, this device was for pouring orange juice into a glass:


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This was part 1 of a seven-part weekly series. In part 2, we’ll cover the great age of the comic strip…from Popeye to the Dragon Lady and beyond!

See you in the funny pages!

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This is part one of a seven part series; click here for part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6,part 7 and an index.

Part 3 concludes our look at strips; parts 4 and 5  cover the comic book; part 6, gag and editorial cartoons; part 7, British and Commonwealth cartoons; and I would like to have a part 8, consisting of French, Italian, and other European colloquial languages enriched by their cartoons.

Friends–I need your help!

If you have any suggestions for cartoon-derived idioms along the above lines, please mention them in comments– or e-mail me at the yahoo dot com address alexbuchet

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Here are some useful and interesting online resources for language:
The Online Etymological Dictionary, an exhaustive source of word and phrase origins.
The blog wordorigins tracks current and historic words; its index of words and phrases The Big List is guaranteed to keep you riveted for hours.
The lively blog Language Log features witty and perceptive contributions from linguists. They keep a special watch on cartoons and comics.
A wonderful source for information on classic comic strips is Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, and another is the famous Lambiek encyclopedia of cartoonists. The two are complementary.

Oh, and congratulations to Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni on the birth of their son Griffin! Mazel Tov!