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Comics and Popular Culture: Not Just Kid's Stuff
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17595 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
5,177 Words |
| Author
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Arthur Asa Berger
Arthur Asa Berger is professor of broadcast communication
arts at San Francisco State University. He is the author of
numerous books and articles on popular culture and the mass
media. His most recent book is Reading Matter:
Multidisciplinary Perspective on Material Culture,
(Transaction Books). |
Ignatz Mouse, the brick-throwing hero of Krazy Kat, is in jail, having creased Krazy's noggin with his brick; and Offissa Pupp has put him there. Pupp spent more than thirty years trying to prevent Ignatz from throwing a brick at Krazy in one of the great existential epics of early twentieth-century American popular culture. From 1913 until 1944, when he died, George Herriman drew Krazy Kat. Herriman's language was so remarkable, his art style so distinctive, and his sense of humor so original that the strip, unlike a number of others, could not be continued after his death.
Krazy Kat, considered by many comics fans to be the greatest strip created in America, is only one of the countless comic strips that have appeared from the late 1890s to the present. American comic strip and comic book artists have created a vast mythology of characters that have amused and entertained us. And without being aware of it, these artists have provided a valuable resource for historians, sociologists, and others interested in the way popular culture both reflects and affects American society.
In the case of Krazy Kat, for instance, two themes tend to pervade the strip: first, a tendency to value illusion over reality, and second, a sense of rebelliousness and unwillingness to accept authority. Krazy takes her numerous beanings by Ignatz as signs of love. This is because in ancient days, another cat named Krazy, the daughter of Kleopatra Kat, was beaned with a brick (carrying a declaration of love) thrown by a mouse who adored her. This experience of bricks as signifiers of love lingers in Krazy Kat's feline memory. Ignatz doesn't know this; he is a willful, mischievous mouse who hurls bricks because he want to hurt Krazy, but, ironically, each "creasing" only reinforces Krazy's romantic illusions.
Ignatz spends a great deal of time in jail, but he never learns his lesson, never stops throwing bricks. He is a rebellious soul who refuses to submit to authority. This antiauthoritarianism, this feeling that authority, somehow, is not valid, is a common trait of many of our classis comics - from Maude the Mule to Beetle Bailey. In most battles between "inferiors" and "superiors," it is the inferiors who win, whether it be mules making fools of humans or privates making fools of gluttonous sergeants and wacky generals.
The antiauthoritarianism reflected in American strips is not universal. It is quite different, for example, from the attitudes reflected in classic Italian comics of the thirties to the fifties, which tend to value
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