Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945

Abstract

Blanchard reviews "Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945" by Ian Gordon.

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 18901945. By Ian Gordon. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xii, 233 PP. $29.95, ISBN 1-56098-856-8.)

Comic art is big business today. In 1996, Sotheby's priced a copy of Action Comics, no. 1, at $125,000. In 1989, the movie Batman was the year's highest-earning box office feature, followed by sequel Batman movies in 1992, 1995, and 1997. Total revenue from Batman licensed products came to $1 billion in three years. Thus, Ian Gordon's Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 is an important book explaining how comic art shaped American society, both as a new form in advertising and as a commodity form itself.

Comic art began in American illustrated humor magazines and newspaper comic supplements of the late nineteenth century. Raucous humor and caricature gradually evolved into the recognizable comic strip format with known characters and narrative. By the 1890s, writers combined text, graphics, and humor and introduced stock images, the naughty boy of "Yellow Kid" and "Hogan's Alley," for instance. By 1900, newspaper chains such as William Randolph Hearst's syndicated the newly popular "Katzenjammer Kids" and "Buster Brown" to sell both papers and products. Gordon argues that Buster Brown was the crucial link between comic strips and the development of a visual culture of consumption in America.

But this culture also included the extension of commodity status to ideas and symbols. Comic strips transformed American culture, Gordon insists; their simple, repeatable, recognizable form made a modernist aesthetic widespread. Buster Brown sold products, but he also became an American icon himself Another figure, "Krazy Kat," which ran in Hearst papers from 1916 to 1944, is described by Gordon as the first funny animal character, but he was, as well, prototype for Walt Disney's successfully marketed Mickey Mouse.

By the 1930s, an important shift occurred. Advertisers moved away from the use of comic strip characters to sell products to the use of the art form itself. Comic strip-style advertisement became a form of communication and, more important, a form of entertainment. In addition, the new crop of comic strips, "Gasoline Alley" and "Winnie Winkle," relied on commodities to create both identity and status (the automobile in "Gasoline Alley" or fashions in "Winnie Winkle").

But it was the introduction of the comic book superhero, Superman and Batman, that eventually sold the virtues of comic books themselves. And these virtues increasingly became synonymous with American democracy. By World War 11, Superman and Batman became identified with the war effort and were read widely by servicemen. Gordon deftly shows how writers for "Superman" and "Batman" used consumption as the social backdrop for stories (contrasted with the vivid war themes on the covers). These tales mirrored the rhetoric of corporate advertisers who equated "the American way" with a wise consumer, a citizen-- consumer democracy.

Gordon has a convincing argument. Perhaps some readers will criticize the emphasis on corporate advertisers as cultural managers and on consumption as the major determinant of modern society. But Gordon has done historians a service by recognizing the importance of popular visual sources as important clues to undemanding American culture. And the book is not only informative but fim to read.

Mary W. Blanchard

Rutgers University

New Brunswick, New Jersey