| When Comics Weren't for
Kids The
mantra of the last decade or so has been dinned into our heads: "Comics
aren't for kids anymore." Every newspaper article is headlined
with it. And we rejoice. Jubilation has been running rampant. It has
been a long time coming, this bruited about maturity in the medium.
In the 1970s, when comics fandom was beginning to flex its muscle, the
fan press wept and wrung its hands and hoped for a day when the purchasing
public at large would recognize that some comics weren't just for kids.
But only "some" comics were for adults. The rest were still,
as always, for juvenile readers. But that's only partly true. The "as
always" part is not true. Comics weren't always for youngsters.
Newspaper comics, for instance—the forcing bed for comic books—were
aimed at adult readers from the very start. And a little mining of the
history of the medium will unearth its truths. Newspaper comics are called "comics"
because of a heritage that is too often overlooked. The newspaper Sunday
supplement in which newspaper comics first appeared in the 1890s was
planned, initially, as an imitation of such weekly humor magazines as Puck, Judge, Life, and their ilk. These
magazines were popularly called "comic weeklies" or "comics."
So when newspapers began producing their imitation humor magazines every
Sunday, these productions, like their inspirational predecessors, were
called "comic weeklies" or "comics." Like
Puck, Judge, and Life, the newspaper "comics"
consisted, at first, of drawings (sometimes with humorous captions below
them, usually in the form of a conversational exchange between two or
more of the persons depicted in the picture), short funny poems and
paragraphs, and a few somewhat longer comical essays. While the creators
and editors of these publications surely imagined that children might
enjoy parts of the Sunday supplement, the supplement as a whole was
not created expressly for the entertainment of children alone. In fact,
the supplement was doubtless aimed at the same audience as the paper
itself targeted—purchasing adults (probably male) who might take the
paper home for the rest of the family to read but who enjoyed it themselves,
too. The newspaper Sunday "comics,"
then, were intended chiefly for family consumption. And while families
include of children, so did they also include adults, and it was to
adults that most of the content was addressed. Most but not all. Because the supplement contemplated
that some of its readers would be the younger members of the family,
a few of its features were tailored for children. A few but not all. As a general rule, however, the early
Sunday comic supplement had an adult audience in mind. The same audience
that bought Puck, Judge, and
Life. Not just kids. As the 1890s drew to a close and the
new century dawned, the newspaper "comics" focused more upon
pictorial comedy than prose humor. Before long, it would be difficult
to find a "comics" supplement that included any typeset text
at all. And the pictures were more likely to be strips of pictures in
narrative sequence rather than single drawings. The era of the true
newspaper comic strip had arrived. The earliest performers in the "comics"
were rather indecorous creations—the Yellow Kid and the rest of the
unruly urchin population of the slums of New York, the Katzenjammer
Kids and their scapegrace (not-to-say outright criminal) pranks, Happy
Hooligan whose every effort at doing good was brutally punished by cops
or landladies who beat him on the head or kicked him in the britches.
Racial and ethnic stereotypes abounded, and much of the comedy was unabashedly
physical. Crude stuff. Vaudevillian slapstick with a heavy hand. The content of the newspaper comics
pretty soon attracted criticism by Concerned Citizens who decried the
medium's presumed deleterious influence upon the youngest members of
the families to which the comics were addressed. The crude comedy was
too vulgar for kiddie consumption, said the critics. The emergence of
this criticism was partly a consequence of a growing sophistication
among a population that had begun to see children differently than their
Victorian antecedents had. Kids weren't just small versions of adults;
they had child psyches that needed careful nurturing. A fairly vocal and organized opposition
to the Sunday comics managed to force the Boston Herald to discontinue its comic supplement altogether in 1908.
Said the editors: "Comic supplements have ceased to be comic. They
have become as vulgar in design as they are tawdry in color. There is
no longer any semblance of art in them, and if there are any ideals
they are low and descending lower." At other newspapers, however, editors
defended the comics as entertainment while at the same time acknowledging
that they were not aesthetic achievements. At the New York World, Albert Payson Terhune wrote:
"Nobody contends that the colored comic supplement is artistic.
It isn't. It isn't for you and it isn't for me. It is for the people
who don't care for fine shades of humor because they can't appreciate
them. The man who finds Mark Twain, for instance, too subtle for his
understanding has no difficulty in laughing at the right moment when
he reads the adventures of Little Nemo." In the same editorial, Terhune contended
that the comics were intended for "the most primitive people on
earth—the children." This was undoubtedly but a rhetorical maneuver
intended, in a backhanded way, to justify the crudeness of the comics.
It was a maneuver which others adopted and would eventually change the
public perception of the comics. But Terhune also recognized that many
of the readers of the comics were clearly adults—somewhat unsophisticated
adults but adults, "the man" (an adult, mark you) who doesn't
understand Mark Twain. Probably Terhune was thinking of the huge immigrant
population of New York to which the World
had always appealed. But that included adults, mostly adults: they
were the ones whose coins purchased papers. Still, newspaper editors did not altogether
discount the criticisms of the Concerned Citizenry. Over time, the Sunday
comics developed some morally uplifting features—like Richard Outcault's Buster Brown, whose misbehavior was always
punished, resulting in a moral lesson for the day; and Carl "Bunny"
Schultze's Foxy Grandpa, whose
outwitting of mischievous boys likewise proffered a cautionary tale.
And so began the most intricate of
dance steps. Editors knew that adults read the comics. They knew the
Sunday comic supplement increased sales of newspapers. In an effort
to appease the critics while continuing to publish the supplements,
they claimed that the Sunday comics taught morality to the children
who read them. And they also sought out or developed some wholesome
comics that were intended chiefly for juvenile consumption—Little
Nemo in Slumberland, Billy Bounce, The Upside-Downs, The
Teenie Weenies, Mama's Little Angel Child, the comic strip version
of Baum's Oz stories, and, later, of Peter Rabbit and Uncle Wiggily.
But the more exuberant creations (Happy Hooligan, the Katzenjammers,
and others) continued in the same pages, side-by-side with their more
righteous brethren—albeit toned down somewhat. The comics supplement as a whole was
now suitable for juvenile readers. But "suitable" for children
is not the same as "tailored specifically" for children. Features
tailored expressly for children are, in effect, for
children only. Features "suitable" for children are those
that children can read and
perhaps enjoy, but they're not intended for children only. Still, the
effect of making comics suitable for the whole family—for children as
well as adults—was the same upon the understanding of the general public
as if comics had been concocted just for kids. Whether you make comics expressly and
exclusively for children or merely make them suitable for children,
you are thinking about children as you make the comics. In effect, then,
comics were being manufactured "for" children. Thus, by this
rhetorical sleight of hand (or mind), the Sunday funnies as comprehended
in the popular consciousness were for children. And by the same token,
they were no longer for adults. Not exclusively. Or so it would seem. But adults continued to read the comics.
And cartoonists continued to produce comics aimed at adult sensibilities.
That never changed. Bringing Up
Father and Polly and Her Pals
dealt in concepts that children could not fully comprehend; they may
enjoy the pictures and even understand the jokes in some rudimentary
way, but the satire implicit in the battle between Jiggs and Maggie
over her social pretensions was undoubtedly beyond childish ken. Ditto
the satire of the generational conflict that animated the comedy in
encounters between Polly and her Paw and Maw. Still, everyone quietly acquiesced
to the pretense that the funnies were "for the children." Meanwhile, the daily comic strip got
underway in 1907 with Bud Fisher's A.
Mutt (the forerunner of Mutt
and Jeff), a comedy about a compulsive gambler the humor of which
would be more appreciated by adults than by children, however tenuously
they may have grasped its implications. And when Fisher started poking
fun at San Francisco politicos in the spring of 1908, only adults could
see and appreciate the allusions. Newspaper comics, by straddling the
gulf between childhood and adulthood with one foot in both, managed
to survive as adult entertainment while also appealing to kids. The
industry even developed a formulaic approach to the situation: the Sunday
funnies were for the whole family (i.e., the kids as well as their parents),
but the daily comic strips were for adults. And comic strip cartoonists
were, for a time, advised to tailor their product accordingly. Comic books, which were to pass through
a similar crucible in the 1930s, did not manage the same trick of retaining
both audiences simultaneously even though they began with the same expectations
as newspaper funnies. Comic books started out as publications for general,
all-ages audiences. Adults as well as children. The earliest comic books reprinted
newspaper comics and were, therefore, aimed at adult as well as juvenile
readers—families, in other words, exactly the newspaper reading audience.
No surprise: these books were, after all, reprinting a newspaper product.
But the earliest comic books offering original material created expressly
for comic books were also aimed at a general audience, an audience that
conspicuously included adults. The first such production was New Fun, and it arrived on the stands
in early 1935. It was the concoction of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson,
onetime cavalry officer who had launched a newspaper feature syndicate
in the 1920s, selling serialized illustrated fiction. (In form, these
serials were prototypical comic strips—sequences of pictures with narrative
typeset text beneath them but no speech balloons. It was the same form
that Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan
took when illustrated by Harold Foster in 1929.) New
Fun was published as a 10x15-inch tabloid and offered some material
much the same as Wheeler-Nicholson had syndicated. In other words, it
was aimed at a general audience. In content, New
Fun offered both humor and adventure comics. Each title was presented
in the format of a Sunday strip—a single page with logo in a panel at
the top. Just like the newspaper Sunday funnies and aimed at exactly
the same audience: men and women as well as children. That Wheeler-Nicholson had adults as
well as children in mind as readers can be verified by looking at the
advertisements in New Fun
No. 1. In addition to ads for model airplanes, he published ads for
razor blades, weight reduction, coin and stamp collecting (illustrated
with a picture of an adult woman), and music lessons (with a woman illustration
again). These sorts of products, as Ron Goulart points out in his 50
Years of American Comic Books (now available in an updated edition
as 60 Years of American Comic Books), were
staples in the ads of the pulp magazines of the day. And Wheeler-Nicholson
pursued the pulp tradition even more assiduously thereafter in manufacturing
other comic books with pulp-sounding titles: New Adventure Comics (which eventually became simply Adventure), Detective Comics, and, in the summer of 1938, Action Comics. Although the pulps were often bought and read by young
people, they were envisioned as adult entertainment. In fact, publishers
of pulps often claimed their magazines wouldn't be read by youngsters
because the vocabulary in the text was too mature for youthful readers
to understand and would, therefore, act as a deterrent to purchasing
by young people. Wheeler-Nicholson's comic books followed
in these pulp footsteps. While the stories in the comic books had a
pulpy flavor, the accompanying pictures made them attractive to youngsters,
too. Again, the evidence suggests that these early comic books were
geared to a general, all-ages readership. Two other evidences of the original
marketing intent of comic book publishers lurk in the medium's early
years. First, the ten-cent price during the early years of the Depression
was not an amount that many (if not most) youngsters would be likely
to afford. So publishers clearly expected comic books to be purchased
by adults. A dime became more readily available late in the thirties
as the Depression eased; and by then, comic book publishers had begun
to target young buyers. A second indicator of the publishers' initial
hope for an adult audience for comic books can be found in the history
of Superman. Jerry Siegel and his artist partner
Joe Shuster had invented Superman as a comic book character, but the
comic book publisher they sold the idea to gave up his comic book plan.
And so Siegel and Shuster tried, starting in about 1933, to sell Superman as a comic strip to newspaper syndicates. Among the objections
we've heard in the traditional accounts of this futile effort is that
the concept was simply too outlandish. Readers wouldn't believe that
Superman was possible. Newspaper comics were for adult readers, remember.
Families. Children, too, of course; but adults were seen as the chief
audience. So the objection to the Superman notion was that adults wouldn't
believe it. It wasn't realistic. The passion for realism in the funnies
was evident in the emergence just then, during the mid-thirties, of
the realistically illustrated comic strip: Alex Raymond's creations (Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, Secret Agent X-9),
Hal Foster's (Tarzan then
Prince Valiant), and Milton Caniff's (Terry and the Pirates)—all drawn as realistically
as possible in order to support the illusion of reality that the otherwise
exotic adventure stories must convey. Superman simply wasn't in step
with this trend. Not because of the artwork so much as because of the
very concept of a super-powered flying man. And comic book publishers
apparently felt the same way. If we are to judge from the reasons many
gave for rejecting Superman: they rejected him because they didn't think
readers would accept the concept. Too unrealistic. For whom? For children? Not likely. Children were expert at
believing in outlandish concepts. They believed in talking animals (Uncle
Wiggily, Peter Rabbit), sentient dolls (Raggedy Ann and Andy), and the
like. Children believed that Dorothy could transport herself back to
Kansas by clicking her heels together, so why wouldn't they believe
Superman could fly unaided? No, it was adults who were imagined
as unlikely to believe in Superman. And since adults were the presumed
buyers of comic books at that early stage, no comic book publisher was
about to take a chance on Superman. Until Siegel and Shuster took their
creation to McClure Syndicate. There, their creation fell under the
gaze of a teenager named Sheldon Mayer, who, not being entirely an adult,
believed in the concept at once. Mayer couldn't persuade McClure officials
to take the feature on, however. But he persuaded his boss, Max Gaines,
to offer it to Harry Donenfeld, who had inherited Wheeler-Nicholson's
comic book empire. And Donenfeld's editor, Vincent Sullivan—another
teenager—was then assembling content for the first issue of Action
Comics, and he believed in Superman, too. The rest, as they say, is history.
But the history usually overlooks another seldom explored fact: at some
point, comic book publishers began manufacturing comic books more for
children than for adults. Probably, it started with Superman. The success of Superman, as we all
know, resulted in a host of imitators flooding the newsstands. And it
was with this development that comic book publishers began to tailor
their product for a juvenile buyer. The superheroes in long underwear
were like circus performers—strong men and trapeze artists. And circuses
were for kids. Comic book publishers became ring masters in the newest
show in town, a show for kids. And once the show was seen as unabashedly
aimed at youngsters, the usual carping began, the traditional chorus
of objection to comics—the same objectors with the same objections that
had pestered newspaper publishers about newspaper comics. The Ever-vigilant
Concerned Citizens who maintained that comic books (like the Sunday
funnies) were garishly colored. They would corrupt incipient artistic
appreciation in the youth of America. And the action adventure stories
in comic books (which partook, remember, of the sleazy pulp adventure
tradition) were vulgar and constituted a bad influence on the children
who were members of families whose parental figures purchased comic
books for family consumption. Once again, publishers undertook to make
their product "suitable" for children. But this time, they
would almost entirely forsake adult readers. The idea that comic books were for
children was first voiced by the critics of comic books; but it was
quickly embraced by the publishers. Once Donenfeld realized that Action Comics was selling chiefly because of Superman, he also realized
that juvenile readers, who could believe in such outlandish beings,
promised a better audience for exploitation than adults. And his fellow
publishers—all stampeding to cash in on the popularity of Superman with
their own longjohn legions—snatched at the same idea. Adults still read comic books. And
the soaring sales figures during World War II when comics provided reading
material for American servicemen around the globe attest to this phenomenon.
But editorial direction at publishing houses urged writers to write
or juveniles. And when comic strip and comic book characters made it
into radio, their programs were usually sponsored by products kids would
be interested in. (Although at first, as Jerry Bails remembered on an
Internet list discussion I started on this topic, one program was sponsored
by motor oil. It is to Bails, by the way, that I am indebted for several
of the nuances in this speculative argument.) And with the advent of such comic book
titles as Walt Disney's Comics
and Stories, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Funny Animals, Our Gang,
and the like, the transformation was complete. Even if all comics were
not geared to young readers (and certainly the Lev Gleason comics— Boy, Crime Does Not Pay, Daredevil —were too packed with verbiage
to appeal much to youth), the rhetorical posture of the industry tilted
to the young. And public perception inclined in the same direction. And it has ever since. I won't, here, rehearse the threadbare
tale of how comic book censorship was inflicted on the industry by itself.
All I wanted to point out this time was that comics, in newspapers and
in books, started as adult, not juvenile, reading matter. Newspaper
comics never surrendered their all-ages turf. But in comic books, it's
taken us over sixty years to reclaim the territory that comic books
first staked out in the mid-thirties.
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