Rising from the Gutter

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

The Black Comic Sensibility

African Americans, by and large, were largely excluded from the empowering forms of the comic sensibility. Yet the works of George Herriman and James “Jimmy” Swinnerton display a distinctly black comic sensibility that drew on visual and literary conventions originating in the minstrel tradition and further developed and replicated in burlesque and vaudeville. Focusing on Swinnerton’s Sam and His Laugh (1905—1906) and Herriman’s strips depicting black boxers Jack Johnson and Sam Langford, this chapter shows how these two artists multiplied irony through a sensitive awareness and exploitation of DuBoisian double-consciousness, making their readers laugh even as they deftly undercut white supremacist attitudes.

The Comic Grotesque

A particularly grotesque form of the comic sensibility emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the works of George Luks. Luks was called on to take over Richard Outcault’s phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1896; he soon made the Yellow Kid his own. As Outcault’s duplicate or twin, Luks capitalized on the grotesque potential of twinning, doubling, and replication to question the social order from below, laying bare—and then savagely mocking—fears of the rapidly growing immigrant and ethnic populations in the United States. In subsequent strips, including The Little Nippers and Mose’s Incubator, his representations of polyglot America become positively fantastical, even monstrous, reflecting the interchangeability and reproducibility of ethnic identity that formed the logical basis of the “melting pot.”

Coda

The comic sensibility can ultimately be described as a way to make sense of trauma through collective feeling. This chapter offers avenues to explore further, especially the comic sensibility as expressed by women on stage, in comic strips, in fiction, and in art. Initial readings of strips by Grace Gebbie Wiederseim (later Grace Drayton, creator of the Campbell’s Soup Kids), Katherine P. Rice, and Marjorie Organ show that women comic strip artists presented a singularly grotesque vision of American domestic life and the courtship rituals of the New Woman. Paintings of Edith Dimock Glackens, wife of William Glackens, also display the comic sensibility through a visceral engagement with color and the grotesque possibilities of the human form.

Illustration and the Narrative Quality of Appeal

Illustrators of popular magazine fiction struggled to reconcile the distortions of caricature with realistic modes of representation. William Glackens was one who succeeded. Combining close attention to narrative with a style of sketch-drawing that neither promised absolute fidelity to reality nor resorted to caricature, Glackens also used perspective and composition to connect readers to the story on the page. This chapter focuses on Irish-Jewish writer Edward Raphael Lipsett’s “Denny the Jew” stories, which depict a young Irish immigrant to New York who decides to pass as Jewish. Through masterful deployment of dialect, Lipsett heightens rather than erases individual identity in his immigrant fiction. Glackens’ illustrations, meanwhile, use a sketched-from-life technique rather than caricature to depict closely observed individuals rather than types. These stories exemplify how textual and visual strategies worked together to convey the comic sensibility in illustrated magazine fiction.

The Comic Sensibility

In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis sentimentalized the urban poor, a familiar rhetorical and representational strategy used to elicit righteous outrage that would propel social reform. Others took a different approach. Based in bodily forms of humor in all its crass vulgarity, the comic sensibility cultivated camaraderie and solidarity among members of the Other Half, rather than uniting the elite on their behalf. The multivalent, public laughter effected by the comic sensibility enabled its audience to laugh on their own terms, and thus become co-creators of meaning. As we see in examples including Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids comic strip and the story “Ingratitude of Rosenfeld” by Bruno Lessing, illustrated by William Glackens, the comic sensibility provided an alternative to realist approaches like that used by Riis, which depicted the Other Half as sentimentalized objects of pity, as faceless hordes, or both.