Trash or literature? Comic strips have long been the target for both adulation and criticism. In this analysis, the author argues that comics appeal to young and old alike because of the earthiness and the very excesses that some highbrows deplore.
TWO-DIMENSIONAL WORLD OF
History was made on October 18,1896. when a stickfigure cartoon called "'The Yellow Kid" came strutting across the pages of the Sunday supplement, The American Humorist, sporting a bright yellow suit and promising S2 Sundays' worth of fun every year for the readers of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. It was the first time color was used in a newspaper. But.. more important for American pop culture, it was the occasion for the first comic strip to join jazz and the movies as a truly American invention. Telling a story by means of pictures in a sequence is as old as the human race and is a technique that has been used for centuries by all cultures. But "'The Yellow Kid" was something else. Hearst had directed staff artist, Richard Felton Outcault, to draw a series of comic pictures telling a story with a main character. Whether he knew it or not. Outcault was putting it all together when he sat down to work: the 15thcentury German picture stories called
"broadsheets" that were hand-printed from wooden blocks or copper sheets; the 18th-century English caricatures with their "'talk balloons"; and the popular graphic cartoon drawings that appeared during the 19th century. WhatOutcault came up with amounted to a completely new medium-one around which a passionate controversy has raged since the very beginning. Intellectuals and literati attacked the comic strip as vicious and crude. Applying bookish standards to this new phenomenon, they found it gross and illiterate. Even worse in their eyes was the fact that it first appeared in the sensational press. The tag, "yellow journal," in fact, originated with the color of the Kid's costume and is still used to label any publication that indulges in melodramatic overstatement associated with Hearst's style. About the only point everybody is agreed upon is that comics are popular, a truth deplored by many. What is it about comics that has gripped the masses-especially the young-from the beginning? It is esti-
mated that 90 percent of American children between the ages of 7 and 14 read them. During a recent year, over 80 million comic books were sold on U.S. newsstands. An even wider audience exists for the strips that appear in newspapers and magazines all over the world. The reason for their universal appeal amongst the young may well lie in those very features of the medium that have always generated hostility in the adult intellectual minority. Paradoxically, neither comic strip buffs nor their detractors are generally aware of these features. The former happily follow the adventures of their favorites without bothering to wonder why they enjoy them; the latter attack comics on various grounds: they glorify violence, they waste children's time, they deal in trivialities, they are escapist. Media specialists like Marshall McLuhan see deeper seated reasons for all the antagonism. For one thing, comics demand a special kind of literacy that has little to do with the verbal variety learnt in school. Like television, which provokes similar attacks for similar