Doubling Over: Anarchic American Comics, 1895-1967

Abstract

Comics have drawn increasing interest from academics in recent years due to the critical and commercial success of certain ambitious, literary-minded graphic novels. Little of this scholarly attention has been paid to the subject of humour in comics. This is because, on one hand, a study of humorous comics could be considered counter-productive to the medium’s newfound maturity, and on the other hand because humour is already notoriously difficult to analyse without the added complications of comics. To circumvent these obstacles, my thesis takes a pluralistic and fragmentary approach, in keeping with its subject. I will argue that the ‘comics’ label is in fact accurate, given that the medium, on a purely formal level, shares certain qualities and techniques with comedy. To illustrate this, I will focus on cartoonists whose work highlights these parallels, such as R.F. Outcault, George Luks, Rube Goldberg, E.C. Segar, George Carlson, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and Ogden Whitney. As these cartoonists all belong to a wider tradition of comedy that has been described as, among other things, anarchic and anarchistic, I will also examine to what extent they play to the cultural role delineated by the comics label – that of an anarchic trickster medium – by foregrounding the formal playfulness inherent to their medium, and, being aimed primarily at young readers, function as a form of anarchistic pedagogy. The point of this is not to pose comics as having an obligation to be comical or explicitly anarchistic, but to show how the relevant works, in lieu of cultural legitimacy for much of comics’ history, generate their own critique of both their medium and the popular culture of which they have always been emblematic.