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It's actually getting kind of cold down here in Georgia, though not cold enough to do that. I do wonder why Sluggo carries a water pistol around with him in the wintertime, though. Maybe he planned on playing a prank on someone. Maybe Nancy's contrarian attitude saved her from being the recipient of that prank...
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You can never be too careful in the snow. You never know what projectiles could be hurled at you, intentionally or not. Nancy is right to prepare, though I'd expect she'd do the exercises as well as wear some kind of body armor. I know I would.
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Pee Wee is a smart businessman. You've got to find every way to save on overhead costs. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite understand supply and demand yet, I don't think.
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The past two years, I've posted Christmas themed comic strips during December, so I thought I'd make it a tradition and do it again this year. We start with a not necessarily Christmassy but definitely wintery themed Nancy strip. I love Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, mostly because of its simplicity. After Bushmiller died in 1982, a few other creators have done admirable runs on Nancy, but none of them have the spirit of the original. Mark Lasky did the best at capturing the look of the artwork, but that was about it. I quite like Jerry Scott's version, but it might have been better served by being a separate comic strip entirely, because it certainly feels like it is. Guy Gilchrist, who does the strip currently, does fine, but it feels very generic. Bushmiller's is still the best. You might not think so from this fairly simple example, but you will as the month goes on.
This year, I also discovered the Scott McCloud invention Five Card Nancy, which I feel like I should have known about much earlier. It might be a nice game to play with your family on Christmas Eve or something. Also, if you don't want to go through the trouble of preparing physical cards, there's also a handy online version.
For the most part, comic strips are created by people who are mainly known for creating comic strips. The lay person who is not well-versed in comic strip history may not even know the names of the creators of most of the comic strips they read, and if they do know them they don't know them for anything else. There are, however, some comic strips that were created by people who were famous for other, entirely unrelated things. Sometimes this is because they had a personal interest in creating a comic strip and in doing something different from what they had been doing. Other times it's because a newspaper syndicate wanted a big name in order to promote their new feature.
Such is the case with Dashiell Hammett.
Hammett is mainly known for his novels about hard-boiled detectives (a term supposedly coined by Tad Dorgan) such as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. If you haven't read him, you certainly know the Humphrey Bogart version of his character Sam Spade from the movies. This was popular stuff in the 20s and 30s, and just like sci-fi adventures, it was beginning to leak over from the pages of pulp magazines onto the newspaper comics page. In 1931, Dick Tracy had begun in The Chicago Tribune, and was the biggest detective adventure comic at the time. After it had run for a few years and its popularity was apparent, King Features Syndicate wanted to have a feature to compete with it, much like they would do soon afterwards when they commissioned Flash Gordon to be created to compete with the Buck Rogers strip. In both cases, they hired Alex Raymond to do the artwork, though he was too obscure a name at the time. They needed a name on the feature that readers would recognize immediately, and thus immediately recognize the strip as a quality feature. They offered the job to Hammett, who, as luck would have it, was looking for new places to publish his work and readily accepted the offer.
The problem, however, was that it seemed King Features also wanted a writer they could control, and that was something Hammett was certainly not. He was used to writing stories about private detectives, which is why they hired him. For some reason, though, King Features really wanted a strip about a secret agent, not a private detective, and in order to reflect this there were substantial rewrites by the syndicate each time Hammett turned in his scripts. Because of this, it was very difficult to tell what exactly Secret Agent X-9 really was. He was a secret agent, but the agency he worked for was never revealed. He was also a private detective, but he only worked as one as a cover for his secret agent job. He acts like a detective and solves murders, yet the police don't seem to know who he is. It all ended up being quite the mess, and Hammett left the strip after less than a year. Raymond left a year after that, though he continued on several other King Features projects, including Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, and his own comic strip about an actual private detective, Rip Kirby.
Interestingly, Secret Agent X-9 still continued under several other writers and artists for 60 more years, ending in 1996. After Hammett left, X-9 became a full-fledged secret agent. Later on, his name was revealed to be Phil Corrigan, and the name of the strip was even changed to "Secret Agent Corrigan". It was never extremely popular, but it is amazing that even after an incredibly shaky start it had quite a long run.
For more info:
Secret Agent X-9 at Toonopedia
Secret Agent X-9 at Thrilling Detective
I've written previously, a few times, about language and idioms that first appeared in comic strips. For the most part, cartoonists are known for one or two things that they popularized and which have stayed around for years. Rube Goldberg had his machines, Al Capp had Sadie Hawkins Day, and George McManus had his newlyweds. Some, like Billy DeBeck, have a few more.
Then there's Tad Dorgan.
Dorgan was a cartoonist in the early 20th century who was best known at the time for his sports comic strips, such as "Indoor Sports", as well as his comic strips about dogs, like "Judge Rummy" and "Silk Hat Harry". He always signed his work as "TAD," although those were actually his initials. His real name was Thomas Aloysius Dorgan.
He is also a problem. He's credited, in more than one place, with either coining or popularizing a very large number of phrases and idioms. Some of them have gone out of style, some are still in common usage, and some have gone out of usage and have had a resurgence. As a comic strip history enthusiast, it's exciting to me to think that a single cartoonist has has that much of an effect on the language, in the short term and the long term. The problem, however, is that while he's credited with these, it isn't exactly clear whether he actually coined or popularized any of them.
Lots of places think they can fudge history by saying someone "popularized" a word or phrase, basically saying that while they may not have come up with it, they used it a lot and were instrumental in spreading it around. As quite a prolific cartoonist, his work was seen by millions on a daily basis, for many years, and therefore it stands to reason that any popular phrase he wrote would easily be spread. I just get a little suspicious when the list of things he "popularized" becomes as large as it is.
Here's what Wikipedia lists:
Now, as an example of how untrustworthy this list can be, let's look at Dumb Dora, a 1920s phrase for a woman who wasn't too bright. If any cartoonist should get credit for this one it's Chic Young, creator of Blondie, who created a comic strip in 1924 called Dumb Dora that was popular in its day. However, around the same time, Burns and Allen had been popularizing the phrase in their vaudeville act, and there had also been a movie by that name. Who knows where the popularization came from?
Then, of course, there's "hot dog." While it's been widely debunked, Dorgan is in several places still credited with first using the term to refer to a sausage at a New York Giants baseball game. The term, however, has been shown to be in usage at least 10 years before Dorgan ever used it in a comic strip.
The same goes for a number of these. There are other explanations for where they were coined and popularized, but somehow Tad Dorgan gets lumped in with them, probably because he was simply using popular language of his time. Now, I'm not saying that he didn't coin any of them, but the evidence certainly isn't good that he coined all of them.
I think of it like medicine: If a medicine or medical treatment claims to treat one particular symptom, it's much safer to believe that it legitimately does. If it claims to heal and cure a ridiculously large list of symptoms, it's probably safe to at least be extremely skeptical of its claims. While I enjoy Dorgan's work, and while I respect him as a prolific user of slang in a popular medium, I don't think he deserves all the credit that he's given.
We all know who John Q. Public is. He's the everyman, the man on the street, the guy the representatives in the government represent. He's who they want votes from. What he thinks is what politicians are supposed to listen to and build their platforms on. He's all of us. That said, he isn't just a turn of phrase, but was an actual newspaper comic strip character.
But who was his father?
The idea of a character representing the common man is traced by some back to Frederick Opper's character "Mr. Common People," a small, perpetually nervous looking man in a top hat, who appeared in many Opper political cartoons beginning in 1902. Mr. Common People is most often shown being taken advantage of by people who are far larger than he is. He is also easily identified by the large tag which always hangs off of his coat and reads "The Common People."
John Q. Public himself was created by by Vaughn Shoemaker and first appeared in an editorial cartoon in the Chicago Daily News in 1922. He appeared as a short, balding, messy-haired gentleman and, much like Mr. Common People, was often taken advantage of by larger people around him. An interesting series of cartoons also inserted John Q. Public into photographs depicting various societal problems. The captions mention his concern at what's going on and his confusion at why nothing is being done about it. The cartoons proved popular, and the phrase "John Q. Public" to refer to ordinary citizens lived on far longer than the character did. Many other similar characters cropped up over the years as well. The most notable of these was "Mr. Voter", created by Jim Lange for the The Oklahoman. That character proved so popular, in fact that in 2006 the Oklahoma State legislature adopted him as the state's official editorial cartoon.
Shoemaker had a very successful career even without John Q. Public, and went on to win two Pullitzer prizes for his work. His World War II cartoons were even criticized by Herman Goering himself as "horrible examples of anti-Nazi propaganda," which is high praise in my book. Most of all, he was able to create powerful symbols that stuck in people's minds, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of John Q. Public.
Additional Info:
John Q. Public photo collages at Art Institute Chicago
More of Vaughn Shoemaker's Work at "Comics Should Be Good" blog
Vaughn Shoemaker biography at Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, and their write-up on John Q. Public
Article on everyman characters at Slate
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Rounding off our December classic comic strips this year is another Rube Goldberg device for getting rid of a New Year's party guest who refuses to leave. They show up at every party, sometimes invited and sometimes not, and don't seem to realize that the party isn't at their house. Introverts such as myself won't need to worry about this problem, as we don't tend to throw parties in the first place, and if we do get roped into going to one, we usually leave quite early anyway. For those of you who do end up throwing a New Year's party, you will definitely need this contraption at some point, perhaps to dispatch more than one unruly guest.
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Another Frank King Gasoline Alley strip, this one on Christmas morning, as Skeezix discovers his presents and fails to get his adoptive parents out of bed. Just take a minute to admire that line work. It's beautiful. You really don't see comic strips like this anymore. Merry Christmas, everybody.
One of the go to Christmas movies for many people is the classic "A Christmas Story." There are a lot of things to love about it, but the most memorable part is the great desire that young Ralphie has for a BB gun for Christmas, specifically a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle with a compass and sundial. Ralphie looks in a display window and sees one, with a picture of Red Ryder himself pitching it to kids. This was a common thing. In many an ad, Red Ryder would tell kids to remind their parents to get them one for Christmas, or suggest that they buy it with their Christmas money. There were even "reminder kits" that kids could send away for with messages from Red Ryder to be placed in conspicuous areas for parents to find.
So he was obviously quite interested in kids getting their BB guns in any way possible, but who was Red Ryder anyway?
Red Ryder was, of course, the star of a comic strip, created by Fred Harman and which first appeared in 1938. Red was a cowboy who, along with his trusty steed Thunder and his kid sidekick Little Beaver, would rope up bad guys and do all the other stuff tough lawmen did in the old West. The strip ran for 26 years, ending in 1964. While that's not an extremely long run, the marketing machine behind it, led by Stephen Slesinger, was enormous. There were quite a large number of Red Ryder licensed products, and Red also appeared in comic books, a radio show, and movie serials. The strip itself was printed in 750 newspapers worldwide and was the most popular western comic strip ever, and even if you didn't see Red Ryder in the newspaper, it was hard to miss him everywhere else.
Daisy started selling the Red Ryder BB guns not long after the strip's debut, and from what I've read the movie is said to take place in the early to mid 40s. Thankfully, there are no anachronisms as far as that is concerned. Ralphie's dad does say that he had one of those when he was 8, but it obviously wasn't a Red Ryder BB gun, as it wouldn't have existed then. Daisy still sells the Red Ryder BB gun (only $39.99!), so even long after the comic strip ended, the famous name lives on.
For more information:
Red Ryder at Don Markstein's Toonopedia
Fred Harman at Lambiek Comiclopedia
