J. Hoberman praises Peter Maresca’s Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895-1915 for illustrating “just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years”:
The comics were the high-tech weapon of the great newspaper circulation war and
tumult, if not violence, was the new medium’s stock-in-trade. The term “yellow journalism” itself derived from the first comic-strip star, a denizen of the teeming, single-image slum tableaux Hogan’s Alley, who became known as the Yellow Kid. This jug-eared, barefoot urchin, draped in a canary-colored nightshirt, was created by thirty-three-year-old magazine artist Richard Felton Outcault at Pulitzer’s New York World….
Although replete with racial and ethnic stereotypes, the first newspaper comic strips were not so much an extension of vaudeville as precursors of the equally déclassé and temperamentally anti-authoritarian motion picture. The early strips thrived on choreographed violence, including runaway horse carts, baroque streetcar collisions, and a panoply of what [newspaper magnate William Randolph] Hearst might have termed polychromous explosions.
In an October review of Maresca’s book, Steven Heller summed up how the genre got its start:
The genesis of Sunday funnies began with technology providing a way to cheaply produce color newsprint pages, and out of a desire for an outlet to lampoon new social developments in transportation, communication, power. This was also a period of huge immigration, particularly from the poorer countries in Europe where English was limited and accents were the fuel of comic and stereotypical ridicule. A growing working class from different backgrounds shared a thirst for entertainment.
“With the masses specifically in mind, newspaper comics became the first popular culture as we know it today: synchronous, predictable, ephemeral, and with a near-universal appeal, well before cinema, radio, and TV,” Maresca says.
(Image of The Yellow Kid by Richard Felton Outcault, 1897, via Wikimedia Commons)
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