La Guardia Reads the Sunday Funnies
Tomorrow marks the birthday of Fiorello La Guardia, 99th mayor of New York City.
In the opening monologue of his 1958 play Comic Strip, George Panetta turns almost immediately to one of the most powerful cultural memories of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia:
Now, I was a kid in the days of Fiorello LaGuardia-- remember him, LaGuardia? The Little Flower? Maybe he's one of the reasons I grew up. He loved all us kids in New York City, used to read the comic strips to us on Sundays-- worried and looked after us all the time.
On June 30, 1945, New York's newspaper delivery drivers began a strike that would last 17 days, refusing to distribute any paper in the city except for the leftist (and highly pro-labor) PM... a paper that might be best remembered by comics lovers for publishing the wartime political cartoons of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel.
For those who don't mind reading between the lines, there's an excellent contemporary account of the strike from the newspaper publishers' perspective that can be found in the Prelinger Archives collection at The Internet Archive. Obviously very biased, but an interesting account of how a city dealt with a major media shutdown.
On July 1, La Guardia was scheduled for his regular Sunday broadcast of Talk to the People, a weekly radio show he held on WNYC. At one point in the show, he encouraged his listeners to gather their children around the radio, and commenced to reading that day's "Dick Tracy" comic from the Sunday Daily News. With obvious relish, the mayor described the action in the panels, impersonated the voices of various characters, and reminded listeners of the plot that had led up to that moment. At the end of each strip, he would explicate the moral of that week's adventure to his young listeners.
(In the above clip from the next week, the moral is described in no uncertain terms: "Say children, what does it all mean? It means that dirty money never brings any luck! No, dirty money always brings sorrow and sadness and misery and disgrace.")
He also promised that he would read the Sunday comics on the air every Sunday as long as the strike continued, and that someone from WNYC would read the dailies every day. The next Sunday, when he came in to broadcast, there were camera crews there to record his reading. The story took on a life nationally. And it became one of the things La Guardia was best remembered for.
Such a move by a major politician today would smack of a paternalism and pandering that would make cynical observers tear him apart. But in 1945, La Guardia reading the comics over the radio really seems to have been seen fondly by a great number of people.
Part of this was likely La Guardia's personality-- he possessed a gentleness, kindness, and an air of genuine benevolence that was a huge change from the last multiple-term mayor in New York, the slick and corrupt "Beau James" Walker. He was a genuine uniter, running in opposition to machine party politics, and seemed to many to have the commonwheal of the city in mind.
He didn't lash out against the strikers or against the newspapers-- he just expressed a concern that the children shouldn't have to go without their comics just because of "a squabble among grown-ups."
I genuinely do believe that La Guardia thought that this might just be a nice thing to do-- I don't believe it was necessarily a cynical or calculated move. But I do think that there is one part of this story that needs to be read with a skeptical eye.
I don't think he was doing this simply "for the children." I think that reading the comics was targeted at adults as well.
By all accounts, La Guardia read and enjoyed the comics himself. Born in New York in 1882, he was a member of the first generation to grow up with comics in the newspaper. (Although he was old enough to be working by the time comics started appearing in New York papers, in his early teens.)
While the reputation of comics as a medium for children had fully developed by midcentury, adults actively read and discussed the events in the daily comics page. Based on research conducted around the same time, sociologist and media theorist Leo Bogart argued that newspaper comics were important to working-class urban readers because they provided noncontroversial (but still debatable) subjects of conversation in situations of urban semi-anonymity. You might not want to talk to the guy on the bar stool next to you about religion or politics, but you could debate Dick Tracy with him.
By reading the comics, he was actually not just providing entertainment for the children of his constituents. La Guardia was finding a way to insert himself into the everyday street-corner conversations of millions of New Yorkers. I would argue that this, just as much as appealing to the children, was key to why this was such a defining moment for the memory of La Guardia's career. He had understood the social function of comics to its adult readers, and had joined in that discussion. It's the mark of a true populist-- to actually understand what's important to people, even the stuff they wouldn't normally admit to.
Interestingly, while this event has faded somewhat from the public memory, and more people know La Guardia as an airport than as a politician, the recording of La Guardia reading the comics has taken on a strange and wonderful second life: the "what does it all mean?" that can be found at approximately 1:27 in the video above has become one of the most widely-used and best-known non-musical samples in hip-hop.
Another Example of Crowdsourcing Memory…
In a recent blog post, I talked about using the internet as a tool to "crowdsource memory." A day or two later, I came across a perfect example of what I was trying to express, and it made me want to refine the notion a bit.
"Crowdsourcing," for any reader lucky enough to not be thouroughly immersed in the world of New Media buzzwords, is something we all instinctively understand these days as web users: it's aggregating the "wisdom of crowds," using the knowledge of many and putting it into one centralized repository. It's why Amazon has more reviews of a given book than anywhere else, and why Wikipedia has an entry on everything.
Anyone who keeps up at all with Digital History can name a few projects that attempt to crowdsource Historical Memory. CHNM's September 11 Digital Archive or the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank are two great examples, projects that seek not to create consensus about Historical Memory, but to serve as repositories, places where those who have witnessed history can contribute their memories, their voices, to the historical record in a way that might serve to enrich the scholarship of future historians.
Which is a great and admirable mission. But while they are very different in impact and gravity, both 9/11 and Mozilla's rising from the ashes of the browser wars as a viable Open Source alternative to Internet Explorer are Big Events, events that warrant the time, money, and effort that building an online database represents.
But one of the really great things about the internet is its ability, in its near-infinite expandability, to meet niche demands, to offer up a space for any topic under the sun. There's no topic too obscure to find a home in some far corner of the World Wide Web.
This means that the internet presents an opportunity for groups of loosely affiliated people to navigate common memories. We can crowdsource the details of even small, personal memories.
I came across a really great example of this phenomenon when the multi-talented cartoonist Dave Sherrill recently posted a comic strip that loosely recreated the plot of a fondly-- but vaguely-- remembered children's book from his youth in a LiveJournal community that helps people find the titles of half-remembered books.
Within a couple hours, a community member had recognized the description and pointed Sherrill in the right direction. The book was Grandpas Ghost Stories
The book seems to be out of print, but there is an animated version of the story on YouTube:
Sherrill's description of the book seems to be decent but spotty. The comic is awesome, but I doubt Sherrill would have found the title if he had simply went to Google, or even to a children's librarian, with the vague description he was able to produce from memory. But given the ability to access a large enough aggregate of people with disparate memories, he was able to quickly (if you don't count the time taken to draw or color the comic) find someone else who was able to help fill in the gaps in his own personal childhood memory.
With the very deeply personal way we connect with our favorite books as children, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a small revelation to Dave, something that set him off even further into other memories he had not accessed in years.
Without having to even exchange introductions and niceties, Sherrill was able to harness the collective memory of a group of people in order to supplement and enhance his own, personal memories. That's something you'd very seldom get from old-tech systems like the reference section of a library or calling friends to see if anyone happened to recall it. It's certainly more efficient, and less place-dependent.
To anyone who enjoyed Dave's comic, I would encourage you to click through to his LiveJournal account-- I'm a big fan of his art. And check out his band, 100 Damned Guns, as well-- they're one of the rockin'est roots-country bands out there today.
Continuity is a Double-Edged Sword…
I was actually looking for information on the scuff-up-cum-verbal-slapfight between Tim O'Reilly and John C. Dvorak today when I stumbled upon this post by Brett McLaughlin on O'Reilly Radar. And as a person with both a personal and professional interest in comic books, I have to say:
Yes. The fans love continuity. But continuity is also one of the things that's killing the comic book market.
It's interesting to me that they're illustrating the beauty of continuity with a bunch of Chris Claremont comics, too. Claremont is an enjoyable comics read, and a pioneer of the modern superhero comic in a lot of ways, but at the same time, having the same writer on X-Men for over fifteen years also made those mutant books a nightmare for new readers. To say nothing of the irony that Claremont is now writing an out-of-continuity title, X-Men Forever, that essentially goes on the premise that anything that happened at Marvel Comics after Claremont's departure in 1991 never happened.
When I started reading comics in the early 1980s, the average comics reader was my age-- someone under twenty years old. The problem is, today, the average (non-manga) comics reader is still someone my age.
The ridiculous continuity shifting crossovers that started with (the brilliant and enjoyable) Crisis on Infinite Earths
The comics industry decided to stick with continuity coming out of the beginning of the silver age. That's longer than I've been alive, by a good bit. A ten year old with a small allowance is going to find catching up on almost fifty years of Spider-Man continuity a daunting task, if not downright impossible. Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited might make this concept at least possible for your average new reader, but it's still nearly fifty years of comics. (Not to mention that there's been several ongoing Spider-Man titles at any given moment since almost the beginning, to say nothing of the crossovers...) You're not going to try to understand what was cannon and what wasn't since they suddenly undid Peter Parker's twenty or so years of marriage. You're not going to get current, and you're just going to spend the money on a Naruto OVA, or whatever the kids are into these days.
What the comics industry ought to be doing is learning from what Horror and Sci-Fi movie franchises have been doing for the last few years-- reboots. If you want to bring new audience into the fold, the best way to do it is to start over from time to time, to let new members on board with a new continuity, in a way that will still be enjoyable for the majority of your previous fanbase. The way you got that fanbase is with a certain seminal story or set of stories. They won't mind seeing it retold with a new slant and higher production values. And newcomers won't be scared away by the need to catch up on all the continuity to enjoy the story.
DC does this slightly better than Marvel. With their two flagship characters, Batman and Superman, we get these stories on a regular basis, we get stories that are in continuity along with stories that are out of continuity, and every time the characters jump into a new medium or new title, there's an opportunity for a partial or complete reboot. And these characters remain strong as brands, even when their comics are experiencing bad runs. Because-- in part-- there are so many opportunities for new audiences to get onboard with these characters, without having to make a running start.
Reboots and retellings need to force their way to primacy rather than giant mega-crossovers. Whenever you have a new creative team on a title, why should the editors shackle them into years and years of continuity for the book, if that's not the best thing for the characters, the title, or the artists? Becoming more casual about cannon and continuity is the only way that Marvel and DC are going to have a shot at attracting readers who don't already shave.
I know that this is a lot more aimed at the comics industry than McLaughlin's article. He was talking about technical/instructional publishing. But if you were in that industry, why would you endorse mirroring one of the key mistakes of the only portion of the publishing industry that seems bound and determined to fail before the newspaper industry?
It strikes me as a patently bad idea.
The Early Comic Strip Archive, Part Two: Why a Database?
In my last post about building a digital comic strip archive, I tried to sketch out why I thought early comic strips would make a good subject for an Omeka-based archive. (I could have gone on for ages, but I'm trying to keep this brief-- also the reason for breaking it up into installments...) This post is dedicated to looking at why a digital archive using Omeka would be an optimal format to explore the topic.
The best online projects are the ones that don't try to mimic the functionality of any other medium-- if your website could just as easily have been a book, you're not adding much value by putting it online. I think an online database collecting early comic strips would be the optimal medium for such a project.
The primary advantage of an online database would be the ability to use multiple categories or tags as organizational tools. A single strip could be included in multiple categories. To take one example, a single strip from Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent, a strip about a European Jewish immigrant, a car salesman who was also vehemently and vocally opposed American involvement in what he described as "that Europel war." One strip from this comic could be categorized according to the various newspapers that included it (it was notably more popular in urban costal cities, and not distributed to many middle-American small town newspapers), under King Features Syndicate, which distributed the strip, under the strip's title, the cartoonist's name, under "automobiles," "Jewish characters," "WWI"... the list goes on.
The ability to sort by a variety of means brings together the collection as a dynamic thing, a research tool in and of itself.
Omeka has two primary functions: collections management and exhibition. So far I've just been discussing the former. Now a few thoughts on the latter:
Once the collection has a substantial number of item/strips within it, I think it would be a great thing to have thematic essay/exhibits. An essay on the debate over neutrality during the Great War, accompanied by strips that reflect the debate. Another on issues of race and ethnicity in early comics. Another on the formal evolution of the medium, the gradual conventionalizing of things like word balloons, thought balloons, elements of visual storytelling, etc.
What makes these comics an invaluable tool for historical research is the multitude of voices, perspectives, and themes that they encompass. An online collection could highlight a variety of issues within this multitude, allowing visitors to follow their interests, rather than making some hierarchical linear narrative.
Comics history is an under-researched topic. Aside from the ghettoization of the medium itself, it's commonly being assigned to the dustbin of kiddie fare and ephemera, what little attention the topic does receive is divided into several niche markets of interest. There's the Nostalgists, the people who want to look at the history of comics fondly and rather uncritically. Then there's the Cultural Historians, who want to look at the medium simply as a lens to broader social and cultural trends within society. Finally, you have the Artistic Formalists, who-- inspired by the seminal works of Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, or Matt Madden, want to look at comics as an artistic medium, and to look at older comics as a window into the evolution of a symbolic system, an artistic code, a mechanism for storytelling.
All three approaches have merit.
All three approaches, however, also have pitfalls, blind spots, and difficulties. This fracturing of the already-small number of those interested in looking at this topic is a perpetual frustration to those of us who want to look at something approaching the bigger picture.
I think that an Early Comic Strip Archive could attract attention and use from all three groups, and that moreover, because the database format is well suited to multiple approaches, it could serve the additional function of bringing these three tribes closer together. Beyond this audience of enthusiasts, as I mentioned earlier, I think that an archive like this could be an invaluable resource to educators trying to make history more interesting to resistant or reluctant students. Comics have humor, visual appeal, and an ever-present iconoclasm that can make history more appealing to the same student who get bored with slogging through dry textbooks and memorizing dates and names.
Next: Potential Pitfalls and Possible Partners
The Early Comic Strip Archive: Part One
I've been trying to come up with a project that would be well-suited to Omeka. I want to learn to use it, want to give myself practice with it, play with the insides, see what I can do with it. I think I've come up with a decent idea.
I'm thinking about creating a digital archive of early newspaper comic strips.
Why Comic Strips?
A personal anecdote, before you dismiss the concept as purely self-indulgent: comics were what made me interested in history in the first place. I was a very visual kid. I loved drawing. And my hometown library had a decent collection of comics. But not too many of my favorites. After reading all the Garfield and Peanuts books in their collection, I started branching out. The library had a lot of "The year's best editorial cartoons" collections. I started picking them up for the art. I kept reading them for the history. It was a unique window into times and topics I didn't know too much about. The editorial cartoons led me to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury and Walt Kelly's Pogo. To this day, my view of the political history of the twentieth century is shaped, in part, by political cartoons.
Comics are a fascinating cultural artifact. They can give a lot of insight into a time. And they're a good inroad into history for students who may otherwise be resistant. They add a visual element, humor, and a window into how ideas and events were being received within popular culture. They don't give a single view-- reading a comics page from, say, 1911 can give you a great insight into the debates of the time.
Because of my lifelong interest in comics, I decided to do a seminar paper a few years back on the ethnic and racial images in early Hearst newspapers' comics pages. I found a surprising heterogeneity of topics, portrayals, and ideas. In the years leading into the US's involvement in WWI, I found that while Hearst demanded his editors toe a party line of German sympathy and non-intervention, the comics page of the New York Journal was actually the site of a rather lively debate. Some strips came down firmly for intervention, and mocked neutrality. Others were firmly opposed to American involvement in a European war, strongly advocating isolationism. While Hearst is famous for supporting his cartoonists, he apparently also felt they were unimportant enough to be allowed a greater degree of freedom than many of his prose journalists.
Whether you trace ethnic images, political debates, class sympathies-- the early comics page was one of the most multivocal sites in the newspaper business. And they drew readers. People sometimes picked their newspaper based on the inclusion of their favorite comic, just as others might choose to read a paper because it sympathized with their political beliefs.
And best of all, these early strips, from 1895-1932, are in the public domain.
