While this study focuses narrowly on several strips over a period of time, it is important to acknowledge the wider context of these comic strips within the comics pages as well as within the history of female comic strip creators. These comics arose from a long tradition of comic strips that focused on families and domestic environments, and occasionally, on women. And although the majority of these comics strips were created by men, women also created comics, even though these accomplishments were often underplayed or ignored in historical accounts. Judith O’Sullivan explains:
In the strip’s infancy, isolated women cartoonists had occasion-ally carved a newspaper niche for themselves. The strips drawn by these women were usually domestic in nature, depicting, with vari-ous degrees of sentimentality, idealized children and animals. Chief among these early creators were Rose O’Neill, who is best remem-bered for her 1909 Kewpies (“Little Cupids”); Grace Gebbie Drayton, who depicted The Terrible Tales of Kaptain Kiddo (1909), and who lives on in the American imagination as the mother of the ever-popular
Campbell Kids (1905); and Frances Edwina Dumm, the first female editorial cartoonist, famous for her dog strip, Cap Stuffs and Tippie (1917). (115)
In fact, even as Rose O’Neill and Frances Edwina Dumm were con-juring sweet-faced children inhabiting idyllic domestic fantasies, they were also arguing for women’s suffrage. In her book Cartoon-ing for Suffrage, Alice Sheppard explains that “cartoonCartoon-ing as a men’s only domain had begun to change by the late nineteenth century.
Among the factors permitting women to enter the field were the rise of training facilities, the rapid simplification of the process, and the acceptance of women into positions of skilled employment” (28).
Thus, as more women created cartoons, many also entered the politi-cal arena, particularly campaigning for women’s suffrage. Sheppard identifies a number of prominent female cartoonists promoting the right to vote for women, including “Nina Evans Allender, Blanche Ames, Cornelia Barns, Edwina Dumm, Rose O’Neill, Frederikke Schjoth Palmer, May Wilson Preston, Ida Sedgwick Proper, and Alice Beach Winter” (96). These cartoonists were working to counter numerous vicious attacks on female activists. Elizabeth Israels Perry asserts, “Almost as soon as the American woman’s rights movement got underway in the mid-nineteenth century, negative visual images of women activists began to appear in the popular press. Some-times the image was of a lecturer on ‘free thinking’ portrayed as ‘evil temptress,’ sometimes the reformer in bloomers smoking a cigar” (3), yet, “as women prepared to renew their campaign in the early 1900s, they began to harness the power of images to work for their side of the argument” (3). Unfortunately, female cartoonists’ contributions to the campaign for women’s suffrage are not often recognized, in part because “the event they represented, the winning of the vote for women, has not been central to political history” and “even scholars who specialize in women’s topics have not necessarily valued wom-en’s pictorial rhetoric” (Perry 4). Thus, the political contributions of female cartoonists remain largely unappreciated, as the quest of women’s suffrage stays on the periphery of historical narratives, and even most feminist scholars tend to overlook the impact of visual rhetoric in early campaigns for women’s rights.
As many turn-of-the-century female cartoonists set their sights on swaying popular opinion on female suffrage, with women finally gaining the right to vote in 1920, newspapers and in particular news-paper comics pages were also in the midst of an enormous
trans-formation. Judith O’Sullivan stresses, “The birth of this national art form, the comics, is closely connected with turn-of-the-century American urbanization and with the communications explosion that produced and revolutionized the American newspaper industry”
(10). Numerous historiographies outline the importance of comic strips in the evolution of daily newspapers and point to the signifi-cance of Richard Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley (1895–1898), along with Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids (1897–2006), Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (1918–present), George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (1913–2000),Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (1905–1926), and Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids (1904–1905), among others, in contributing to the widespread appeal of the daily paper. Comic strips sold newspa-pers, and the extended relationship between comics and commerce is examined in great detail in Ian Gordon’s aforementioned Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890–1945.
In the earliest years of the comics, many strips focused on chil-dren, and what are now known as “kid strips” were particularly popular for their charm as well as their trenchant cultural critiques.
O’Sullivan maintains that “Outcault established the archetype of the idiot savant as social commentator. Enormously popular, the strip’s urban setting, crowded frames, expressive style, and slapstick humor reflected a country in transition, a land of burgeoning cities and immigrant populations,” and, “many early comics pioneered as pro-tagonist the visionary outsider. Mutes, madmen, children, and ani-mals constitute the comics’ early populations” (15), and “kid” strips have remained popular from the earliest days of newspaper strips.
Of course, some of the children featured in these early strips were female, but their representation may well have caused confusion for readers, particularly girls, as Lara Saguisag points out in Incorrigibles and Innocents:
For girls growing up at the turn of the century, reading the comic supplement may have been a pleasurable yet bewildering experi-ence. The supplement featured many series headlined by girls, which were presumably designed to appeal to young female read-ers. In these titles, the protagonists played boys’ games, upset their parents, and did not behave like “proper” girls. Also, prominently featured in the comic supplements were images of troublemaking women; these fictional females challenged authority figures, rejected marriage and motherhood, sought to pursue education and profes-sional careers, and demanded the right to vote. While the disorderly
girl was meant to elicit delightful, sentimental laughter, the “provoc-ative” woman was created in the vein of derisive humor. (144–45) Thus, the girls of these strips were allowed to follow along with their male counterparts, rebelling and antagonizing the grown-ups.
However, with maturity came gendered restrictions for these young women, as evidenced in the many family-focused strips that quickly gained in popularity.
As Saguisag points out, females took on an even more prominent role with the rise of several girl-centered strips, featuring girls and young women finding their way in the working world (with varying degrees of success and concomitant derision), reflecting a change in public consciousness following the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Maurice Horn claims that
1920 was a momentous year in the history of women’s rights in the United States: with the adoption of the 19th amendment to the Con-stitution women finally won the right to vote, after years of lobbying and agitation. The effect must have been electrifying on comic strip artists as it was on the country at large: in a matter of a few years women started populating the strips in ever-increasing numbers, as well as in more visible roles. (46)
And in that way the “girl” strips helped shape a new narrative of women entering the workforce and, as in the case of Little Orphan Annie, going on adventures of their own. Judith O’Sullivan found that
although the vast majority of “girl” strips created in the teens and twenties were drawn by men, they often provided exciting “role models.” Such strips, designed to appeal to young ladies entering the work force, include Polly and Her Pals, begun in 1912 by Clifford Sterrett; Winnie Winkle, the Breadwinner, created in 1920 by Martin Branner; Tillie the Toiler, originated in 1921 by Russ Westover; and, of course, the indefatigable Little Orphan Annie, the 1924 brainchild of Harold Gray. (119)
Along with A. E. Hayward’s Somebody’s Stenog (1918–1941), these strips showcased the new cultural landscape of women entering the workforce. Guisewite’s Cathy descends from these workplace-based
comics, as the main character seeks a successful career, a situation which is depicted as necessarily fraught, in that she is a woman, and her experience is represented as an anomaly or challenge rather than a commonplace. Interestingly enough, some of these “girl” strips evolved into domestic strips as the female characters were “tamed”
and returned their attention, once again, to the home.
Chic Young’s Blondie, which began in 1930 and continues in syndi-cation to this day, is perhaps the most notable example, as it echoed shifting national sentiment. Blondie originally presented “the chroni-cle of a liberated working girl and her numerous suitors” (O’Sullivan 57), but eventually, “paralleling shifts in American economy from plenty to want, and in political ideology from left to right, the strip’s focus changed from Blondie’s alluring independence and sexuality to Dagwood’s troubles at the office” (O’Sullivan 57), and the “for-mula that was to be maintained for fifty years was established—that is, the saga of the efficient wife and the well-meaning but bungling husband” (O’Sullivan 57). However, it should also be noted that in her earliest incarnation Blondie was perhaps more of a stereotypical
“dumb blonde” character than a focused career woman or calm and competent homemaker. Young is said to have modeled Blondie’s ear-liest iteration on flappers. In fact, an early ad campaign sought to tit-illate newspaper editors with sexual imagery, as a paper doll version of Blondie, clad in her lingerie, was delivered to newspaper editors with the note, “Here I am, just like I told you I’d be. Only, please, Mr. Editor, put some clothes on me quick. I sent them on ahead, you remember my pink bag. I’m so embarrassed! Blondie” (Harvey).
Over time, though, Blondie left behind her career and her suitors and, apparently, her sexuality, transforming into a kindly mother who cared for her family and corralled her bumbling husband Dag-wood in a thoroughly domesticated strip.
Domestic strips like Blondie, Sidney Smith’s The Gumps (1917–
1959), and George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (1913–2000) all focused on home and family, and all did so from a distinctly male point of view. O’Sullivan notes that “domestic strips provide reas-surance that the trivial tasks comprising day-to-day existence have cumulative meaning and that milestone events of courtship and mar-riage, as experienced by comic-strip characters who are the reader’s beloved familiars, are meaningful experiences reflecting the purpose-ful nature of the universe” (58). Some of these domestic strips focused on children, such as Barnaby by Crockett Johnson (1942–1952) and
Peanuts by Charles Schulz (1950–2000), and these strips even offered strong girl characters, such as the wise Jane, who accompanied Barn-aby on his many adventures, refusing the strictures of the adults with enviable self-possession, while remaining skeptical and grounded in regards to the mischievous antics of Barnaby’s fairy godfather Mr.
O’Malley. And Peanuts offered the strong-willed and influential fig-ures of Lucy, Sally, Peppermint Patty, and Marcie. Yet these strips still revolved around the male characters, with females in supporting roles.
These family-focused strips render a familiar and intimate experi-ence unfolding on a daily basis, thus reinforcing the significance of family bonds and community relationships. If these small, personal moments in the history of a household are worth celebrating, shar-ing, and archiving among the most important news stories of the day, this gives the readers’ own everyday encounters weight and heft. Domestic strips argue for the import of the ordinary life. How-ever, as previously discussed, comic strips both reflect and consti-tute popular opinion, and these early domestic strips often presented extremely stereotyped narratives of gendered behavior, particularly in regards to the adults, with forceful men transforming into submis-sive husbands after marriage to domineering wives. While Blondie is clearly the more capable partner and Dagwood much like another child, their amicable relationship was not the norm for many domes-tic comic strips. According to Monika Franzen and Nancy Ethiel in their book Make Way: 200 Years of American Women in Cartoons:
The overwhelming majority of cartoonists, especially in the early years, were men. And their cartoons have generally reflected not women’s view of themselves, but men’s view of women—a view much affected by the feelings, both positive and negative, that women evoke in men. Rarely did early cartoonists concern them-selves with women’s own feelings and desires—especially for equal-ity. They were far more concerned with the threat these desires posed to their own comfortable way of life. (13)
Moreover, women were frequently depicted as an especially potent
“threat” to men in early comic strips. In Women in the Comics, Mau-rice Horn calls upon numerous studies, including those of Ger-hart Saenger, which “found that while the male was traditionally the stronger sex, much more decisive, self-reliant and resourceful
as long has he remained unmarried (and correspondingly aloof), it was the woman who held sway as soon as the matrimonial knot was tied” (3). Marriage, then, represented a trap that emasculated men and turned women into shrews. Horn further claims that “of all the leading cartoonists George McManus was undoubtedly the decade’s greatest contributor to feminine iconography” (33), but he “was nothing if not a male chauvinist (albeit an inspired one): his female characters are either empty-headed sex objects or forbidding, repel-lant battleaxes” (34).
The trope of forceful female and submissive male recurred with a new twist as adventure strips gained in popularity, with women tak-ing on a more dominant role outside of marriage, frequently rescu-ing their more bashful male counterparts. O’Sullivan notes that the
“aggressive female and bashful male recurred in many adventure strips, from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner to Jerome Siegel and Jerry Schus-ter’s Superman” as well as in “Eisner and Iger’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle” (96). These adventure strips also featured numerous “exotic”
female villains looking to ensnare the handsome heroes with femi-nine wiles. While women took on a more independent role in these early adventure strips, over time they were, for the most part, once again relegated to either a villain or a victim. Horn explains, “In the adventure strip women first appeared as the girl friend or compan-ion of the hero,” but over time “girls were depicted with increasing lasciviousness as ingenious plot devices allowed for their representa-tion in strongly suggestive poses” (89), and “soon these female leads tired of their almost exclusively decorative roles and started stepping out of the ‘damsel in distress’ stereotype” (90). Ultimately, accord-ing to Horn, “girls were seen through the man’s eye: flawed in the individual but perfect in the aggregate, they represented the wish-fulfillment of every man’s fantasy; while the contradictions of man’s sexual and affective desires were reflected in their symbolic trinity of opposites” (92).
One exception to the trend of male-created, female-centric strips was the infamous Brenda Starr, Reporter, created in 1940 by Dale Mes-sick. O’Sullivan argues, “Chronicling the exploits of a daring female reporter, Brenda Starr transcended the restrictions of the domestic strip by incorporating elements of the adventure strip, then at the height of its popularity” (58). Dalia Messick, who took on the nom de plume “Dale,” created a daring hero in Brenda Starr, who even-tually married and had a child but never gave up her career or her
adventures. In Pretty in Ink, comics historian Trina Robbins noted that
“although the strip inspired a huge female following from the begin-ning . . . the artist never felt fully accepted by her male colleagues and she resisted joining the National Cartoonists Society” (63). Robbins argues that although women had been drawing comics previously, those women were focusing on “girl stuff,” (64) while Messick “was trespassing on male territory” (64) with her foray into the adventure strip.
Robbins also notes the importance of the creation of Wonder Woman by William Moulton Marston in 1941 as a female action hero (although she appeared primarily in comic books rather than strips) and Miss Fury, created by Tarpe Mills in “April 1941, eight months before the birth of Marston’s creation” (65). The strip features “Marla Drake, the socialite who becomes Miss Fury upon donning a form-fitting panther skin” (Robbins, Great 62) and took “the reader to from chic penthouses and nightclubs of New York to underground Nazi installations and anti-Nazi guerilla camps in Brazil” (62). The strip lasted until 1951, at which time Mills began working on romance comics.
Of course, with the institution of the Comics Code Authority in 1954, the comic book industry took a turn toward newly sanitized storylines, even as the Underground and Alternative movements pushed back against the constraints of mainstream publishing, exploring formally taboo subjects.2 However, the Underground and Alternative comics movements were, for the most part, dominated by white men, and many felt the movements were misogynistic in both the culture of the creators and in the comics they created.
R. Crumb, one of the most prominent figures in the Underground comics movement, was well known for depicting women as
2. This historical move has been well-documented in comics scholarship. See, for example, R. C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1996) and The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1994); Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2005); Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics: Liter-ary Masters on a Popular Medium (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2004) and A Comics Studies Reader (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2009); Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1990); Trina Robbins, A Century of Women Cartoonists (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993) and From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999); and Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989).
strous creatures, objects of fascination and repulsion. His female characters were frequently depicted undergoing sexual assault and brutality with a sense of unrepentant glee. Claire Litton notes of Crumb’s work, “Women were raped, dismembered, mutilated, and murdered, sometimes all at once.” She continues:
Ultimately, the underground comix movement was a squandered opportunity. Where there could have been an open forum for femi-nist art and collaborative, ground-breaking works, there was only hatred and sexism, often inspired by a man who admitted his fear and loathing of women.
Yet even as the Underground movement was, for the most part, a
“No Girls Allowed” clubhouse, female creators were pushing back.
Unfortunately, unlike the critical role feminist cartoonists played in the suffrage of women, their contributions were largely overlooked by the activities of the Women’s Liberation era.
In Graphic Women, Hillary Chute argues that second-wave femi-nism drew from the energy of the Underground comix movement, gaining inspiration from the rebellious spirit of the creators, even encouraging women to create their own space apart from misogyny associated with the movement. Chute suggests:
The growth of the underground comix movement was connected to second-wave feminism, which enabled a body of work that was explicitly political to sprout: if female activists complained of misog-yny of the New Left, this was mirrored in underground comics, prompting women cartoonists to establish a space specifically for
The growth of the underground comix movement was connected to second-wave feminism, which enabled a body of work that was explicitly political to sprout: if female activists complained of misog-yny of the New Left, this was mirrored in underground comics, prompting women cartoonists to establish a space specifically for