If Not Superheroes, What? Part XI - Adventure Comics

If one looks to the culture of the first half of the twentieth century, the period which spawned the modern comic book as we understand it, and looks for references to comics, we tend to find much less recognition of the comic book (a creation of the mid-30s in its practical form) and more for newspaper strips. The newspaper, after all, penetrated into places where budget or taste would have forbidden the intrusion of the comic book, yet it brought with it a payload of daily comics in such a way that the line-art concepts appearing in daily journals came to have a great deal of name recognition.

The modern comics fan (or, if we may use the pejorative term, "fanboy") may dedicate much of his polemical power to proving whether Superman could clobber Thor, or vice versa, but the same argument between the players in an "Our Gang" film would involve, more likely, whether Flash Gordon could prevail over Tarzan. Adventure strips reached into homes in ways we do not expect the modern comic book to do, owing to a diametrically opposed theory of distribution; they attached to a product consumed by almost every household (newspapers).

As a result, a familiarity with the newspaper comics, back in the heyday of the daily adventure strip, did not so much carry with it the onus of cultism. To sit on a public bench reading adventure strips out of the newspaper did not impugn the reader as part of some obscure, disconnected, and hopeless sub-culture. Even today, a bank president could allow others to see him perusing the day's "Beetle Bailey" strip without undermining his own authority; however, should he try a similar experiment with a stack of "Youngblood," he might well keep an eye and ear open to the prospect of developing a reputation as a crank.

The newspaper strips provided a forum and a body of concepts that, into the 1990s, still could provide material for movies owing to their cultural penetration. When blessed with talents of demonstrated excellence, they advanced the standards of art and writing in the comics medium in general. As such, they provided the laboratory in which derivative genres of comics would come to maturity; they trained the talents who would develop the comic book; and they made lasting contributions to culture in the imprint of various fictional creations to first see the light on folded pages of newsprint.

The Beginnings of the Form

Comics, as understood today, originated as a by-product of a circulation war between Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers attempting to move copy via various types of features that would draw the eye of consumers. Originally designed as humor features, and usually delivered in their infancy as one-panel pieces depicted in a woodcut style and elucidated by typeset captions. With comics providing a recognized spike to sales, publishers solicited more of the same; and, at the dawn of the 1900s, newspaper comics became a competitive form, prone to much experimentation. From such variation the seeds of a number of comics genres originated.

The twenties saw a rapid and creative burst of daily adventure strips, perhaps beginning around 1925. Newspapers erupted with "Orphan Annie" (1925), "Terry and the Pirates," "Thimble Theater" (a piece bordering both on humor and adventure), "Wash Tubbs" (1925), "Tarzan" (1930, after Burroughs' prose pulp works), "Buck Rogers" (1930), "Tailspin Tommy" (1930), "Out Our Way" (1925), and "Brick Bradford." Nor does the previous list attempt to list everything that appeared in the genre from the late 1920s to the beginning of the 1930s.

Owing to the penetration of newspapers into so many homes, newspaper strips could deliver adventure strips to homes in such a way that a number of the earlier creations became well-recognized cultural referents before too much time had passed, and such creations would go on to spawn derivative works in other media including radio programs, movie serials, movies, cartoons, and, occasionally, musicals.

More directly in terms of lineages, though, newspaper comics - of whatever genre - sired the mid-thirties invention we recognize today as the modern comic book. Initially the comic book anthologized newspaper comics, which, when laid out four dailies to a page created an aspect ratio typical of the format that still survives. But the material available for reprint did not match the demand, once the new comic books took off, and publishers created new material, either using the newspaper strip concepts or creating new ones.

Cross fertilize the newspaper adventure strip, in comic-book form, with the material of pulps, and, perhaps, enhance it a bit to capitalize on the opportunities of the drawn rather than the prose medium, and one has what became the first superheroes. However, the adventure strip genre had more to offer than just that particular form, which erupted after a decade of proliferation; the settings could vary to include urban settings, historical settings, improbable African settings, or whatever creators could mine from the atlas or history book. Thus, in a real sense the first superhero comics represented little more than a specialization of the adventure strip that absorbed its salient features and added to it a stronger dose of the impossible.

The Formats

After the adventure daily strip had passed not too many months reaching out to a mass market, the planners of the various newspaper comics syndicates (for example, King Features) came to a consensus about formats. For the adventure strip, they decided, a run of three months suitably covered a subject without driving it to tedium.

Having encountered this figure a few times before, particularly in comics-essay books like All in Color for a Dime and The Comic Book Book, it struck me that this figure had meaning. Three months, if you subtract Sundays, has something like 78 days. Take this number and divide by the four daily strips that can fit on a page of a conventional comic book (as did the material that comprised Superman's first appearance in 1938), and you arrive at a magic figure very similar to the current canonical length of comics, 20 to 22 pages. The imprint of the story cycle of the daily adventure strip, then, remains firmly imprinted on the modern monthly comic format, even if the producers and distributors of the material never read a specimen of a daily adventure strip in their lives.

In more than one way, we might conclude, the adventure strip imprinted subsequent comics, both by setting standards of storytelling, dealing with the problems of an ongoing story told only three or four panels at a time, and providing one of the parents of the superhero material that would, at various moments of the medium, dominate the printed comics form.

The Classics

For those of us too young to have appreciated the adventure strip in its heyday, in the original newspaper format, publishers like Fantagraphics have done comics culture historians (particular we amateurs) a great service in their attempts to anthologize and market pieces like their Prince Valiant album collections. While not limiting this study to frequently-anthologized pieces, we can nonetheless note that some of the enduring pieces did take well to collection in book form. "Dick Tracy," "Terry and the Pirates," "Buck Rogers," and "Orphan Annie" do not strike the ear as completely unheard-of titles when spoken aloud. "The Phantom" and "Mandrake the Magician," similarly, enjoy a familiar ring.

Creations of the twenties and thirties seem somewhat to dominate a canon, even where runs from later decades provide excellent additions to the catalog of classic material. For instance, the interpretations of Tarzan in comic strip form include works already receiving reprint treatments in comic-book form by 1929; talents like Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth would create enduring runs in newspapers.

Herge's "Tintin" frequently makes it into a canon of the great adventure strips, in spite of belonging to a more recent and thoroughly European school of cartooning and having an all-ages appeal of a sort that often offends against those who judge comics' quality by the presence of lurid content or contentious points of politics.

The Talent

One could list names and creations ad nauseam. Roy Crane made the history of comics with "Wash Tubbs;" J. R. Williams with "Out Our Way;" Clarence Gray with "Brick Bradford;" Harold Gray, in 1925, began "Little Orphan Annie," a piece that would itself become a cultural icon. Chester Gould became a celebrity through his creation of "Dick Tracy," a piece iconic enough to outlive him and spawn movies, movie serials, radio shows, cartoons, and various other typical vectors of popular-culture delivery.

For every adventure strip from the heyday of the form which has still left traces in the collective memory of popular culture, however, some indefinite number - possibly in the dozens - appeared and expired without achieving a similar immortality. A catalog of names here would mean less than a thorough study of the form, and for this purpose I much recommend various books on the subject by Ron Goulart, but particularly The Funnies: 100 Years of American Comic Strips (find more complete bibliographical detail here).

Note, though, that formats and methods of distribution exacerbate the problems that comics collectors encounter in trying to locate specific pieces. If the newspaper had greater penetration, this matters little since people throw them out frequently, and, furthermore, if the odd soul stacks up heaps of daily journals in his garage, we do not expect these to remain in a readable condition in the long term. This means that one generally can't find back issues except such as exist on microfiche or similar archive formats in a library. And, for the greater part, the works from the period we could call the Era of Adventure Strips did not receive anthologization except where very widely known, carefully archived by distributors or syndicates, and kept somehow in the public demand, often through multimedia tie-ins.

This digression about the difficulties imposed by the ravages of time on newspaper comics returns us to a point: If we consider the lore of comic books an obscure discipline pursued by a tiny yet obsessed subset of humanity, in some ways the lore of the comic strip belongs in a territory arcane even to those who dabble or delve in depth to the study of comics. Thus, I leave it to professionals to unearth the names of those deserving credit and mention. Research through bookstores and the Internet does not really allow one to do justice to the form (hence the deferral to the Goulart work).

The End?

Adventure strips have not completely vanished, though their presence among today's daily strips represents an occurrance uncommon enough that one might view it as anachronistic. For the daily strip has followed the path of the shortest attention span. However, even though today one tends to blame the penetration of television and video games for the ever-dwindling attention span, the syndicates themselves might have begun the process in the 1950s, when, at an early point in that decade, King Features began treating the adventure strip with disfavor, inclining more to the three-panel gag strip that almost monopolizes newspaper comics today. Television, perhaps, had truly begun its relentless assault on attention spans from its first days of invasion of living rooms.

In some ways, the newspaper had become redundant as a delivery system for adventure comics, since the comic book could include about three months' worth of similar material (the entire story arc as conventional treatments dictated), and, sometimes, with more room to carry the material into the domain of the impossible. Without any such intention, though, this decision by comic-strip syndicate heads committed the adventure strip to a medium that would eventually crowd it out for other material. Individual strips, however, would outlive this decision, and, indeed, their original creators. Pieces like "Dick Tracy" and "Little Orphan Annie," for example, easily passed the half-century mark even if their creators passed on or passed the mantle of creation to other talents after twenty, thirty, and forty years at the task. Nonetheless, one by one, these features would yield to the three- (or four-)panel gag strip, which required much less of the reader to consume. The gag strip exists in its own right, and not as a bad thing; but it does not, as a rule, stimulate the imagination or goad the adrenal gland in the way that adventure strips can.

As another blow, the comic book increasingly presented audiences with content that made adventure strips redundant. Even the superhero material, in its earliest form, offered considerable overlap with adventure strip material (consider, for example, Eisner's Spirit stories, which, had the main character dispensed with the domino mask and called himself Denny Colt, would fit neatly into the adventure strip genre). The superhero comic would almost, not quite, expire after World War II, and a proliferation of genres in the 1950s would attempt to fill the hole in the market this left, somewhat allowing for the reintroduction of material like the strips; however, with the coming of the Silver Age, a monoculture of superhero books would slowly develop, essentially locking other genres out of the medium until the rise of independent publishers and several comics-market crashes would invite experimentation that allowed other genres and approaches to appear again. Some of this material fits an adventure-comics model even if distanced by some seventy years from its roots in adventure strips.

The adventure strip, in some ways, plays the role of a parent that raised an ungrateful child in the form of modern comics. Providing the storytelling conventions, the styles of art, the linear sequencing, the story length, and other features recognizable in the child in its youth, the modern comic books seems sometimes to disdain or ignore its origins. Nor does the reprint market, populated by consumers more open to works that did not appear a month ago, a year ago, or only ten years ago, seem to favor seminal works that originated between the first two World Wars. One may find it telling, in a depressive way, that Fantagraphics, the publisher that dared to reprint works of recognized excellence by creators like Foster and Caniff, now deals increasingly in erotica and political works - moving into realms not just outside of the classics but outside of comics altogether.

Cartoonists like Bill Watterson have much to say about the decline of daily newspaper strips, citing forces such as ever-decreasing panel size (which forces out graphic detail and constrains dialogue). The commitment required by a daily strip - to catch each installment and recall it as part of a connected linear piece - seems like another force, but driven more by editors considering the frequently-reported decline in American literacy. Indeed, the strips of today seem almost exclusively to feature three-panel explorations of a formula 1) remark, 2) response, 3) punchline. The pejorative label "Xeroxed talking heads" describes this approach neatly, since the format allows abuses like repeating the art for two panels with different word balloons during the conversation. And, with rare exceptions, in such strips nothing much ever happens. Meaning, in brief, that the medium spawning adventure strips, and descendants like the comic book, no longer provides a welcome soil for such a development.

Survivals

Even as we may mourn the heyday of the adventure strip, however, occasional specimens persist, even in their native format. For instance, "Flash Gordon" persists in some newspaper pages literally generations after that feature's inception in the early Depression; it might, given not too many more years of life, make the century mark, rendering it one of a special set of features to achieve that honor.

As another interesting footnote on the family tree of the superhero comic, we can note that the child stock has managed to feed back to the medium that spawned it. Though early DC superheroes like Superman and Batman spawned strips roughly contemporary with their comic-book debuts, one can argue "chicken or egg" here, for, as in the case of Superman, one can note the daily strip format in Action Comics when Superman first appeared there. But one feature that began in the 1970s and survives (or has reappeared within recent memory) owed its origins entirely to the Marvel Comics reinvention of superheroes in the dawn of the 1960s. The daily feature "Amazing Spider-Man" owes, obviously enough, to the comic of the same name; and, furthermore, boasts credits soundly rooting it to one of that concept's creators, Stan Lee, who appears as writer (with his sibling Larry Lieber on art).

That something so contrary to the state of the medium can persist bodes well, in a limited way, for the vitality of the adventure strip in particular and for the comics medium in general. Nothing, as existing survivals suggest, in the developments of the generations after the penetration of television changed the world by contracting attention spans makes the appearance of new adventure strips impossible, notwithstanding a standard for the medium that does not favor such an approach. And so, perhaps, if the comic book someday fails to offer a viable venue for exploration of the broader world of adventure stories (beyond the microcosm of superheroic convention), perhaps again new daily features in the spirit of the best of the 1920s and 1930s can see light again, whether on newsprint or on the computer screen.

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Column 285. Completed 02-DEC-2001.

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