POLITICAL SATIRE IN THE FUNNIES: PART ONE

Once upon a time — in fact, for almost all of the time of their existence — comic strips were vanilla confections. Not at first, but eventually with the advent of national distribution by feature syndicates. Syndication unhorsed political content. The whole idea behind syndication was to achieve great circulation, to appear in, and collect fees from, as many newspapers as possible. Expressing a political point-of-view might interfere with this objective: if a comic strip leaned Left, say, it would not be popular with newspaper editors who veered off Rightward. And vice versa. An editor might very well drop a comic strip that expressed a political view he didn’t agree with. So if a syndicated cartoonist wanted to keep his subscribers happy — and attract new subscribers, too — he avoided politics. And for the most part, this practice still prevails: most syndicated cartoonists keep their political opinions to themselves. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury is the defiant exception rather than the unrepentant rule.

But Trudeau is standing on the shoulders of some distinguished predecessors. Harold Gray is generally regarded as the first widely syndicated cartoonist to express a political point-of-view in his strip, Little Orphan Annie. Gray espoused self-reliance in his wandering waif: anything short of self-sufficiency for Annie would make it impossible for Gray to tell the kinds of stories he told; and self-reliance seemed in increasingly short supply during the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt wanted government to relieve the burdens of existence for vast numbers of citizens who were out of work through no fault of their own. Gray’s narrative tendency in opposition to the New Deal eventually emerged as a full-fledged political stance. Daddy Warbucks even died rather than live under the regime of FDR; he came back to life after Roosevelt died.

Al Capp was next to jump the non-partisan ship: Li’l Abner seemed liberal because Capp’s satiric targets were institutions of the Establishment, malefactors of wealth and power, and the Establishment, then and now, is usually seen as conservative. But the political postures of Little Orphan Annie and Li’l Abner were determined more by the circumstances of their characters and the sorts of adventures they had than by the political views of their creators. Gray and Capp told stories first; if their tales seemed to acquire a political tinge, that was secondary to the chief function — to entertain with gripping narratives. But Walt Kelly’s Pogo was different: by the time the strip was ten years old, Kelly was producing strips the purpose of which was political satire not storytelling. And Trudeau would follow in Kelly’s footsteps.

Thanks to Trudeau, we can find a good deal more political comment in comic strips these days than ever before in the medium’s history. There’s still more Hi and Lois in the funnies than Candorville: the guiding principle is still to gain and keep subscribing newspapers. But the atmosphere is changing somewhat. More and more these days, thanks to Jay Leno and David Letterman among others, “entertainment” includes political commentary. Sometimes the comments are fairly bland. But they’re there. And they became even more evident in this Election Year.