Stuff of Dreams

One February morning in 1896, readers of the New York Sunday World found something new in the feature section. It was a three-quarter-page colored panel titled The Great Dog Show in M'Googan's Avenue, and peopled with alley cats, stray hounds and slum bums in high-society clothes. Strutting in its center was a child in a bright yellow nightgown, whose slightly oriental face was sharp with precocious malice. The nasty creature was named The Yellow Kid, and his guttersnipe antics were soon on every New Yorker's tongue. It was the first successful comic strip.

The World's shrewd Publisher Joseph Pulitzer set Artist Richard Outcault to drawing more of the same, with the Kid's speeches lettered on his yellow nightgown. Over at the New York Journal, William Randolph Hearst fumed at the new weapon introduced into his bitter circulation war with Pulitzer. In October Hearst announced his own new color section: "eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a piece of lead pipe." Its star attraction: The Yellow Kid; Hearst had lured Outcault away. To replace him, Pulitzer hired George Luks, then a little-known painter, to draw a Yellow Kid for the World. The ensuing circulation battle of the kids gave the U.S. a new name for sensational papers--"yellow journalism."

In The Comics (Macmillan; $5), Artist-Author Colton Waugh, son of the late famed seascaper, Frederick Waugh, has brushed in the history of the funnies' first half-century. An ex-comic-stripper himself (he succeeded Milton Caniff as penman of Dickie Dare), Waugh has done a notable fact-finding job in charting the never-never land that Richard Outcault discovered.

Society Iss Nix. At first, Waugh found, the comics were steeped in an atmosphere of "toughness, of the harsh life of bums and thugs." Once publishers got the idea that comics might attract millions of child readers, the strips were scrubbed up. Replacing the often cruel Yellow Kid were sweet Buster Brown, dreamy Little Nemo, merry Little Jimmy. The Katzenjammer Kids were mean moppets, but in their rebellion against grown-up conventions they were on the children's side. As the long-suffering Inspector said: "Mit dose kids, society iss nix."

Syndication of the strips in 1915 launched the period of what Author Waugh rhapsodically calls the "old masters"--strips that expressed some real, if limited, human situation: Mutt, lean, mean and grubby, abusing Jeff, "symbol of the little man, kicked, downtrodden, and yet eternally coming back for more"; Barney Google in love with his shy, awkward horse, Spark Plug; Maggie scrambling up the social ladder while Jiggs pathetically tries to escape to the simple joys of corned beef & cabbage at Dinty Moore's place.

Love That Kat. Waugh agrees with many a highbrow in thinking that the greatest of all comic strips was the late George Herriman's Krazy Kat, a gentle, loving soul constantly tormented by her great love, Ignatz Mouse, whose joy in life was to "krease his [Kat's] bean" with a brick. Some partisans saw the Kat and Mouse as latter-day versions of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Poet E. E. Cummings found Krazy's faithfulness a vindication of the principle of love.

By the mid '20s, the comics had become a maker & breaker of publishing empires. The New York Daily News-Chicago Tribune Syndicate worked out the formula (it was the late Captain Joe Patterson's) of a balanced comic page to lure readers: The Gumps for "gossip, realistic family life; Harold Teen, youth; Smitty, cute-kid stuff; Winnie Winkle, girls; Moon Mullins, burly laughter; Orphan Annie, sentiment . . . Dick Tracy, adventure and the fascination of the morbid and criminal; Terry, adventure of the most up-to-date, sophisticated type; Smilin' Jack, flying and sex; Gasoline Alley . . . life itself."

What's So Funny? Why do people follow the comics? Not because they're funny: millions of Americans read them through without cracking a smile.

Comic strips, says Waugh, abstract bits of American experience and endow them with a sort of idealized timelessness. Dick Tracy always catches the crooks he chases; The Nebbs always quarrel; Blondie and Dagwood always make up. It is part of the American daydream, he thinks, to be as courageous as Steve Canyon, as sexually irresistible as Smilin' Jack, as honest as Joe Palooka. In his harried, uncertain life, the American newspaper reader is greatly sustained by the certainties he finds in the comic strip, the movies--and nowhere else.

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