January 12, 2015 • 44 mins
In 1896, Truth magazine published the first comic strip drawn by a woman. In the first half of a two-part podcast, Cristen and Caroline trace the early history of women in comics from the origin of the newspaper comic strip to the Golden Age of Comic Books.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told You. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline. And this episode on women in cartooning
initially started off as just a run of the mill
(00:24):
podcast episode. We ran across a fantastic article by Lisa
Hicks over at Collector's Weekly, which is mostly an interview
with Trina Robbins, who is a cartoon historian and has
written a number of books specifically focusing on women in cartoons,
most recently Pretty and Ink. And we started reading the
(00:46):
article and we quickly realized, oh, this is not just
one podcast. No, I mean it's It would be impossible
to condense cartooning and comic and comic book history, especially
in regards to women in into just one episode, especially
when you, guys, there's an entire Golden era of comics
(01:07):
that we have to tell you about, not to mention
all of the interesting stuff going on today in the industry.
So for part one of our look at women in
Cartooning and comics, we're going to go back in history
and sort of lay the groundwork leading up to and
through the Golden Era of comics. And yeah, we are
(01:29):
combining like cartoon strips with actual comic books. And for comics,
just one note on that we're really focusing on the creators.
We're not looking so much at the characters in them.
But of course the creator's influence the kinds of characters
that even see reflected in strips and books. So pardon
(01:51):
is though for purists out there, for us condensing both
of them together. But first of all, let's talk about
quite possibly the very first published female cartoonist in the
United States. Yeah, Rose O'Neill might be best known for
her CuPy drawings that she made, those little cherub cheeked
(02:13):
children that actually, my mother finds incredibly creepy. She can't
even say the word quepi without making a face. Unfortunately,
you're kind of making a face too, well, I know,
I just yeah, I don't understand all the time my
mother thinking things that are are weird. But anyway, so
let's get back to Rose O'Neil and get off of
Sally So At thirteen, at the tender age of thirteen,
(02:35):
Rose O'Neill won an art contest prize for her drawings,
and when the judges realized that the winner of the
prize was a girl. They made her sit down and
reproduce the drawing in front of them, because surely a
girl would not be talented enough. But she proved those
people wrong. Yeah, and she was highly successful as an
illustrator from a young age. So when she was twenty
(03:00):
years old, Truth Magazine bought and published or comic strip,
the Old Subscriber Calls, which is possibly the first published
comic strip by a woman, and The Old Subscriber Calls
is essentially a quick strip about an old magazine subscriber
coming to the magazine office and he's not very happy
(03:23):
about it, and there's this tidal wave that also comes in,
and then he leaves, and the publishers like, well, I'm
glad we survived that one. Well, the joke, which I
love so much and appreciate having worked at a newspaper
for four years, is that the whole punch line is
that when the subscriber comes in and he's so angry
(03:43):
and he beats at the editor, the editor doesn't care
that he just got himself beaten up. He's just glad
the subscriber didn't cancel his subscription and they didn't lose
that revenue. And the fact that I chuckled out loud
at that that cartoon from I love that. It's still
it's still totally relevant because I feel like people in
newspapers today are still like, just don't unsubscribe, please, You're
(04:07):
an old soul, Caroline. I guess so Caroline loves those
nineteenth century punch line exactly, I really do. Uh so.
But before this, O'Neill had already been selling her illustrations
to other magazines and newspapers, so she was at twenties
sort of an old hand at this. But we do
(04:29):
have to look at the context of the time also
in which this is going on. For instance, you have R.
F outcos Hogan's Alley, better known as The Yellow Kid,
which was published in Joseph Pullitzer, Yes that Pulleitzer, his
New York World newspaper, and The Yellow Kid was the
first commercially successful comic strip published in a newspaper, which
(04:50):
was quickly followed up by strips like Little Nemo in Slumberland,
Crazy Cat, et cetera. And these newspaper comic strips would
remain the predominant form of comics until the nineteen thirties,
when comic books would slowly come around even though of
course in the newspapers you would still have cartoon strips.
(05:12):
But while all of this is happening at the close
of the nineteenth century, plenty of other women in addition
to Rose O'Neill, we're getting in on the comic strip
game as well. Because you have to keep in mind
too that with Pulitzer and Hurst and all these big
names in publishing rising up, and you have these newspaper
wars going on in print journalism or if you could
(05:35):
call it journalism really at the time, but print publishing
was so huge, and there were so many different outlets
for people to get their cartoons published. So you have
people like Grace Gebby and her cartoon Naughty Tootles. Trina Robbins,
the comic historian, attributes quote setting the tone for comic
(05:59):
strip for the next thirty years. And so she says
that because a lot of the early comic strips that
you see heavily feature these chubby cheeked babies and kids
just goofing around, and Caroline, while you were busy chuckling
at the old subscriber calls, I was juggling at Naughty
(06:19):
Tootles strips, which is essentially about this naughty toddler girl
who always disobeys her mom and miss pronounces woods, so
she's naughty Tootles and she like sprays her mom with
a hose and it's always getting into all sorts of twubble.
I hate when toddlers spraying me with hoses. Yeah, who doesn't,
(06:43):
Caroline um? Because of this, this Grace gave me character.
She used went by a pen named Grace Drayton, which
I believe was her married name. She also went on
to create Bobby Blake and Dolly Drake, Dottie Dimple, Captain Kiddo,
which I would like to add as a forced nickname
that other people must call me. And that's Captain with
(07:03):
a K mind you, of course it is, and of
course Dottie Dingle. But she also drew the Campbell soup kids,
and this style actually inspired Rose O'Neill and her CuPy dolls.
And QP is short for Cupid, but that's also CUPI
with a K, And I like how she said that
these Cubi dolls came to her one night in a dream.
(07:28):
But there is one thing worth noting about all these
chubby cheeked kids in these early comic strips. Uh, there's
a paper that Trina Robbins wrote examining the different styles
of male and female characters in comic strips and cartoons,
sort of sexual dimorphism, and how how that has been
(07:48):
depicted in illustration. And she talks about how during this
era it wasn't just women drawing these chubby cheeked kids either.
It was just kind of the thing. Everybody thought they
were adorable. So you also had guys too, who were
drawing their own dotty dingles. And by nineteen hundred there
are a number of women drawn comics in the Sunday newspapers.
(08:11):
You've got Louise Corals as buns puns, Grace Casson's Tin
Tin Tales for Children, and Agnes Reply as the Philip Busters. Oh,
I just would like to imagine that that's still the
chevy cheeked children, but they're dressed like as as politicians.
Oh yeah, like wigs and robes and things. Yeah like,
(08:32):
I like that. Um. And talking about the influence of
these women, Trina Robbins told Lisa Hicks, quote, everyone read
newspapers and magazines. The women who drew cartoons were nationally
famous superstars. People would cut off their strips and save them.
You can find scrap books with these women's cartoons pasted
into them, sometimes colored in by a young girl. Nobody
(08:56):
thought it was unusual for a woman to do comics,
because it wasn't unusual for women and girls to read comics.
That's so key that you have girls identifying with the
artists and or the the artist creations, and that there
was nothing weird about it in the same way that
it's nothing there's nothing weird about girls and boys coloring
(09:16):
and coloring books forever for generations. There's there was nothing
weird or unusual at the time about girls collecting and
enjoying comic strips. But oh, how that would change, I know.
But but luckily, and what I love the imagery from
this time because luckily a lot of these cartoonists were
(09:36):
staunch suffragists as well, and they used their creations to
fight for women's rights. Yeah. Rose O'Neil in particular, as
well as her sister Callista were known in New York
City circles for their suffrage activism. And O'Neill would draw
these suffrage postcards that were really widely circulated at the time,
(09:59):
and they and you oft and featured her cubie dolls.
I guess they were dolls at the time, quepies in
her cartoons promoting women's rights, which I mean talk about
catching What is this saying catching a fly with honey?
I think, so okay, I gotta get it. Stretching a
bee with honey a fly probably a fly because of
(10:20):
makes the honey. Okay, So glad we got that worked out. Yeah,
So all of that to say, she would use these adorable,
chevy cheek little characters to be like I would like
mommy to be able to vote to well, for those
of you who follow us on Pinterest, and I know
that's all of you because you love us. Um, we
(10:40):
actually do have a suffrage board, a suffrage board on
our Pinterest account, and I pinned a whole bunch of
cartoons from this era, one of which is one of
the QUI characters holding a sign that says votes for women,
and sadly would still probably think that was creepy, but
I like it. That sounds adorable. That's not adorable, but
I all so pinned a picture. There was a cartoon
(11:02):
at the time, uh, in the humor magazine Puck that
features a woman sitting on top of a stove wearing
a crown, and the caption is woman queen of the home,
said the anti suffragists, Yes, queen of a cook stove throne.
So it's it's humorous, but it's also kind of sad.
(11:23):
And that was from Well and Puck two featured a
lot of pro suffrage cartoons and also anti suffrage cartoons.
And when you look at the anti suffrage illustrations, usually,
and not surprisingly, the suffragists are always depicted as buck
(11:44):
tooth ugly, they're smoking cigarettes, and the captions are always
about how women just want to oppress men, and it
usually shows men then in domestic roles, perhaps wearing aprons,
are caring for the babies or and the their wife
nowhere to be found because she's gotten the vote, and
she is then never home. I guess because she's just
(12:05):
voting all the time. I guess lots are so long. Well,
don't you know, Kristen, that a hundred years ago elections
were held once a week, so women were just constantly
out of the home voting. But now there were a
lot of cartoons at the time to showing these men
who had been abandoned by their wives, who dared to
fight for equal rights, uh, you know, with the halo
around their head, and it was often paired with the
(12:27):
words suffragette Madonna that apparently when women are out voting
and earning rights, that that apparently somehow took rights away
from men. Now, this is just one example of the
political cartoons from the day, but a really fascinating intersection
of women in cartooning and the social movements at the
(12:48):
time and women's rights all coming together in this very
specific subset of suffrage cartoons and postcards and illustrations that
were really every you were at the time. I mean,
these were really powerful drawings. Yeah. I mean if you
think about it, like the imagery that they readers are
(13:09):
presented with, it's not like they're getting it that many
other places that they don't have TV, they don't have Pinterest,
they don't have the giant time stuck that is Pinterest
that we have today. But I mean, yeah, when you
when you're sharing these cartoons, of course they're going to
pack a punch because you're not seeing imagery like this
just anywhere. Well, and it's funny that you say they
didn't have Pinterest back then and talking about the Internet. Actually,
(13:30):
a couple of years ago, there was an anti suffrage
cartoon to go off on a Tangent for a Second
that went viral online. It was also published in the
magazine Puck and it was by Harry Grant Dart and
it was from and the drawing is of a woman's
bar where all of the women are smoking and doing
(13:51):
all sorts of manly things. And they're like women huddled
around a stock ticker and like a sad baby looking
up at his mom's not paying attention because she's smoking
and gambling. And it was just fascinating. And the title
of it is why not go the Limit, basically saying like, well,
if we give them the vote, then they'll get all
(14:11):
these other things, these manly bourbon infused cigars, smoke smelling
kinds of things. Well, no, I immediately upon seeing this
image immediately made at my Facebook cover photo. It's a
good one because I love it. I love that women
who smoke and hang out in bars are considered like
dangerous to society. Well, I mean, and it just again,
(14:34):
it's so it's so interesting in today's context to think
about the power of this imagery, especially as we move
into the World War One era. UM one name that
I hadn't heard of before researching for this podcast. Whom
I was surprised I hadn't run across before was Nell
Brinkley and her Brinkley Girls, because we've talked a lot
(14:56):
in the podcast about Charles Dana Gibson and the Gibson
Girls and how the Gibson Girl at the turn of
the century really established the beauty ideal for the time,
down to her silhouette, the hourglass silhouette, and we talked
about her in our Cankles and Ankles podcast. While following
(15:16):
on the heels of the Gibson Girls, you have Nell
Brinkley and her ladies. Yeah. Nell Brinkley created these beautiful
drawings and beautiful works of art, and her women certainly
were more active. One was in a canoe paddling along
with the man sitting behind her, and uh, she enjoyed
(15:38):
and her characters enjoyed so much popularity at the time,
um that the zig Feld girls in the famous they
were famous performers were actually dressed as Brinkley girls. There
was even one act where a zig Feld girl was
dressed as the girl in the canoe with a man
behind her. And you could even buy Nell Brinkley curlers
to get your hair to curl, just like that of
(16:00):
her characters. Yeah, unlike the Gibson girls, whose hair was
usually in an up to and you know, pinned up,
Brinkley girls had big, curly hair. They were often more
working class. And it was also notable to see how
quickly Brinkley's career took off because she came to New
York in to draw for the Hearst Syndicate, and by
(16:24):
she was on her way to becoming a household name.
And during World War One she created this series called
Golden Eyes and Her Hero Bill, which was published in
the magazine American Weekly, and it was sort of a
proto comic style of a serialized story, but it didn't
have speech bubbles or panels. It would be one full
(16:46):
page gorgeous art nouveau illustration of this leading lady, Golden Eyes,
and then it would have the captions detailed captions underneath.
And Golden Eyes and Her Hero Bill are all about
how while Bill goes off to war during World War One,
Golden Eyes goes on adventures with Bill's collie, whose name
(17:09):
is Uncle Sam right precursor to Lassie Um and Golden
Eyes is allowed to be an amazing character and it's
so exciting. She ultimately saves Bill from death by the Germans,
and Brinkley follows Golden Eyes up in nineteen with Kathleen
and the Great Secret, another strip in which the heroine
(17:31):
saves the hero and Trina Robbins, the historian that we mentioned,
calls Kathleen another amazingly feminist cliffhanger. Yeah, and after World
War One you have the rise of flapper comics, and
Nel Brinkley is sort of credited with inventing this type
of comic strip, even though obviously she didn't invent the flapper,
(17:54):
but sort of playing on this new type of woman,
and her contemporaries as well had a feature flapper characters
that weren't so overtly feminist necessarily, but they were significantly
different from say, the women depicted in those anti suffrage
cartoons that were, you know, painting the terrifying portrait of
(18:19):
what would happen if women got some freedom. Well, it
turns out they are just well flappers. Yeah. So, for instance,
you have artist Ethel Hayes, who created strips like Ethel Flapper,
Fannie Says and Maryanne and Flapper Fanny was very much
like sort of portraying this emerging teen life, this young
(18:40):
woman life, and what that entailed. Um, and this is
coming from Hogan's alley, but I thought that Ethel Hayes
was such an interesting character, was such a great story.
She actually, instead of going to finishing school, went to
the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. She convinced
her parents to sender there. After that, she won a
scholarship to New York's Art Students League, then to the
(19:01):
Julian Academy in Paris, then joined up with the Red
Cross during World War One, where she helped rehab soldiers
through art classes, and when the soldiers weren't super excited
about learning the type of art that she was teaching
and they wanted to learn how to draw cartoons, she
ended up enrolling herself in a cartooning correspondence course to
(19:23):
help teach them, and the head of that school was
so impressed with her abilities that he passes her stuff
along to the Cleveland Press, which offered her a job
in ninete and now hey is getting this job. She
assumed that her duties would just end up being stuff
like touch up and layout work, kind of like the
Women of Disney that Kristen and I talked about last year,
(19:45):
but instead when she showed up, she had the job
of illustrating stories a colleague, stories of a Flappers hijinks,
and so she actually had a lot of control over
what she created. Yeah, and after Ethel Hayes, Gladys park
Or took over Flapper Fanny, and she also created the
strip Mopsie. And then during World War Two she created
(20:08):
Betty g I, which I mean it's a very World
War two sounding comic strip. And speaking of World War two,
though around that time, obviously flapper cartoons had become passe,
and as that happened, they were replaced largely by Team
girl characters because this is when being a teenager and
(20:30):
that whole culture really emerges in the US as well.
So that's reflected in the cartoon strips of Virginia Huge
a who that is her her pen name? It's a
pen name? Do you have a is it? A drawing name?
Is the same thing for a cartoonist as it is
for a writer a lettering name and inc name. Um. Regardless,
Huge created campus Capers and Babs in Society, and those
(20:54):
were a couple of Trina Robbins is a favorite women
drawn cartoons for that time. Now, one woman from the
pre World War Two era who we definitely need to
highlight before we move on is Jackie ORMs. He was
the first female African American career cartoonist who in nineteen
thirty seven first published Dixie to Harlem, which featured the
(21:17):
character Torchy Brown, and it was published in the African
American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier. And then in ninety five
she created the short lived cartoon Candy, which was published
in the Chicago Defender, also an African American newspaper, and
it was about a housemaid who essentially tells it like
it is on social issues. And she'll use a similar
(21:39):
kind of format in terms of using cartoons to talk
about and tell it how it is when it comes
to social issues in the strip that she's best known for,
which is Patty Joe and Ginger. And this is a
single panel series that was also published in the Pittsburgh Courier,
which ran weekly for a eleven straight years starting in
(22:02):
nineteen and it's all about, as you would guess, Patty
Joe and Ginger and Patty Joe is a little sister,
and Ginger is the older, fashionable sister, and Patty Joe essentially,
I mean she she's a very like straight talking it's
almost like the out of the mouth of babes, you know.
She's the straight talking character who always has these very
(22:27):
sage of funny observations about life, about society, about racism,
about politics. And it was so popular and influential in
its depiction of black girls. In particular, the Patty Joe doll,
which was sold in the late nineteen forties, is considered
one of the first positive black dolls ever sold in
(22:51):
the United States, and then from nineteen fifty to nineteen
fifty four, Rams is last comic strip Torchy and Heartbeats
featured a mature black woman and activist looking for love.
So it's interesting you have this more mature activists coming
up right as the civil rights movement starts to get underway. Yeah,
And Nancy Goldstein actually wrote an entire book about Jackie
(23:13):
ORMs called Jackie ORMs the first African American woman cartoonist,
And she talks a lot about how her lead characters,
often women obviously have Patti Joe, Ginger, Torchi Candy, they
usually broke out of the racially stereotyped roles for black people,
showing them doing things like shopping, going to concerts, taking
(23:34):
music lessons, going on road trips, et cetera, rather than
being pigeonholed in these subservient or racist kinds of roles
that they had been previously cast in in white pop culture.
And they also hit on serious issues including racism, taxes,
labor strikes, McCarthy ism, foreign policy, the Cold War, education
(23:58):
and jobs. And Nancy Goldstein told Marketplace that ORMs was
the first cartoonist of any kind to bring out environmental pollution.
I mean she covered really everything and a lot of times,
especially in Patty Joe and Ginger. It's Patty Joe who
is making the observations about all these different things, and
(24:19):
it plays off of Ginger, who was very attractive and
sort of going about her business, and Patty Joe would,
which is kind of call out certain things as she
saw it. And I mean, she was quite a woman.
And in a review in American Studies of Goldstein's book
About Worms, they point out that her characters articulated self, pride,
(24:42):
and modernity and that they were everyday people going through
circumstances that her readers recognized again, you know, going back
to the fact that she had them doing just normal
people activities that they weren't relying on any you know,
racist stereotypes or racist imagery. So it's yet another example
(25:03):
of the powerful influence of cartoons and comics. And that's
something that gets talked about a lot today when it
comes to analyzing comics and appreciating the history of comics,
because it's sort of a new kind of thing because
for a long time, people are more serious artists might
(25:23):
have brushed off comics as just childish or worthless. They're
just they're just cartoons. What does it matter? But clearly
in examples like Jackie ormss work, it matters a great
deal because you're able to say things probably that you
couldn't otherwise say through this gentler sometimes medium, right, and
(25:47):
using worms as an example, I mean, when you bring
people in with different perspectives, it only serves to enrich
the whole medium. Because consider for a second, how revolution
knowing that must have been in nineteen to not only
have a comic, a single panel comic series penned by
(26:10):
a black woman, but it's also featuring almost exclusively black women.
There was nothing else like it at the time, and
featuring black women as human people and not just caricatures.
So now we're going to move away from the newspaper
cartoons though, and look more into comic books, because as
(26:31):
we have gotten into the World War two era in
our timeline, this is also approaching the golden era of
comic books. We've been discussing comic strips and single panel
comics as they appeared in newspapers, but you're probably wondering
what we have to say about comic books. And the
first regular comic book actually appears way before World War Two,
(26:55):
back in nineteen two, and comic books actually got a
jolt of popularity when gas stations began offering them in
the early to mid thirties. And then the golden age
of comic books begins with Action Comics publication of Action
Comics number one, debuting a fellow you've probably heard of
(27:17):
named Superman John's Superman uh, and then Detective Comics or
DC would go on to publish Batman or Batman, and
after this, comic book sales shoot up during World War
Two because they featured themes of good triumphing over evil
pro American characters and superheroes, and of course the first
(27:39):
Captain America cover features him battling Hitler. So it's it's
really satisfying good versus evil, black and white clear stuff.
And it's super satisfying for this industry because by October
nineteen fifty four, the comics industry would be selling fifty
million copies per month of six fifty different titles, reaping
(28:04):
ninety million dollars per year. And I believe that was
ninety million dollars in nineteen fifty four money, So they're
doing pretty good. Yeah, well, so what about the women.
Where are the women in this era? Oh? There are
there are a few women of the Golden Age. So
the first one we need to talk about really emerged
in ninety nine. Her name was June Mills, but she
(28:25):
went under the pseudonym Tarpei Mills to sort of conceal
her gender because that was the environment at the time.
And she got her start in comic books with Daredevil
Berry Finn All about a Dada devil named Barry Thin
who had a plan to thwart Hitler and Mussolini, and
(28:46):
then she would go on to create Purple Zombie, Devil's
Dust and the Catman, which is not the same as
Crazy Cat Lady, although I wonder if perhaps I was
a love interest at one one point. Probably also not
to be confused with us cat Man. Oh so, and
I like the straightforwardness of Purple Zombie. That title, Yeah,
just you know what you're getting straightforward? Well so, then
(29:09):
a couple of years later, Mills creates the first major
female action hero, so from we get Miss Fury. Of
course she her real identity is socialite Marla Drake, who
inherits a magical suit of panther skin that she carries
around in her purse. Pretty sure she got the panther
(29:30):
suit willed to her by her uncle, but the suit
was supposed to be worn by a witch doctor. But
you know, you can't stop a good costume, I understand. Well,
she had gone to a party and someone else was
wearing the same outfit she was, And even worse than
wearing something only a witch doctor is supposed to wear
would be another woman wearing the same outfit as you
(29:52):
at the same party. So Marla was like, you know what,
I'll just wear this panther skin. It's no big deal.
And even though her friend Albino Joe actual character name
was like, I don't think you should do that. She did,
and lo and behold it had magical powers that turned
her into a superhero. But the cool thing about Miss
Fury was that the panther skin suit did not get
(30:14):
worn all that often. She kind of referred to do
her crime fighting in her normal socialite clothes. She was
very smartly dressed. Who and she happened to fight Nazis,
so yeah, just just happened to But yeah, Miss Fury
wasn't actually a comic book. She was a Sunday serial.
Oh yeah, this is This is a good point, but
(30:35):
still important as a major female action hero. And remember
this is new territory for women getting into action comics
and cartoons, right, And she did definitely pave the way
for a bunch of future female superhero characters often drawn
(30:56):
by men, including Phantom Lady, Miss Mask, Red, torn A
Know Lady Luck, Spider Widow, and wonder Woman, who came
around in nineteen forty one thanks to William Marshton, who
we've done a podcast about. Yeah, and around the same
time that all this is happening in nineteen forty Dale Messic,
who changed her name like Tarpe Mills from Dahlia to
(31:19):
Dale to make it sound more masculine. She created the
action adventure strip Brenda Star Reporter, and she was influenced
by none other than Nell Brinkley. I actually, for a while,
Kristen in middle school really kept up with Brenda Starr,
like every day ran for the paper to go to
the comics section to read Brenda Star. Yeah. I read
(31:40):
her in the Sunday Funnies. And you know what, that
takes a lot of patients. There's a lot of dialogue.
I think I would have rather just had a comic
book as a child, which I never had to read
it all at once. But yeah, that's that's fine. That's fine. Um.
But so with this whole trend that we're starting to
see with women artists creating female action here is in comics,
(32:05):
they are, like Kristen said, sort of entering a dude territory.
It was all fun in games when women were creating
the more domestic scenes, the teen girl comics, the comics
for children and featuring animals and things like that, that
was all fine. But when you start sort of treading
into the action genre, that's when guys basically started turning
(32:27):
their backs on some of these female artists. Well, and
I wonder too if it had to do with just
how successful this new Ish comic book industry was, you know,
and it seemed like women were kind of creeping in
on that. And Trina Robbins told Lisa hicks Um for
Collectors Weekly quote, up until then, nobody had resented the
(32:47):
other women cartoonist, but she was getting into men's territory.
The action strip before Dale messic women cartoonists all stuck
with domestic situations, pretty girls, cute kids, that kind of thing.
She was intruding and they resented it. As a result,
men in the industry were not particularly complimentary about her art,
and she felt very neglected by them. And this would
(33:08):
last well into her career. Even though she was wildly
successful within the car to within the comic industry, I
should say, she often felt like an outsider. Well. Yeah,
and then once we get back to World War Two,
as with so many industries in the United States, women
(33:31):
sort of filled a void. The comic book industry became
slightly friendlier to women while the guys were off overseas fighting. Yeah,
this is the same kind of thing that we talked
about in our Women of Disney podcast um in that
during World War One, you have more women being employed,
not necessarily to create these comic heroes, but a lot
of them were employed as pencilers and inkers, sometimes as letterers,
(33:56):
because they're I mean, they're all these different layers involved
in creating a comic. It's not just one person doing
all of the work. And Wesley Channel talks about this
a lot in his thesis, Working the Margins Women in
the Comic book Industry, and I mean, he gets very
granular about women during the Golden Era and during World
(34:20):
War Two, and he says that Fiction House Publishing Company
hired the most women, including Frand Hopper and Lily Renee,
who created Mist of the Moon, which was all about
this moon woman who had a robot dog who has
the superpower of possessing all the knowledge of the universe.
That would be so handy. I could finally fly a helicopter, yeah,
(34:41):
and you'd have a robot dog dog. It wouldn't shed.
But DC fans out there, raise yourselves, because during World
War two, oh, I'm sorry, during the entire nineteen forties,
Elizabeth Burnley. Bentley was the only known female artist to
have worked at what was then National periodicals which would
(35:03):
then be rolled into d C. And she did lettering
and penciling of backgrounds uncredited for both Batman and Superman. Yeah,
Marvel and DC definitely have both had the worst record
of female artist employment compared with their contemporaries, but writers
fared a little bit better. And now that's kind of
across the board. I would say that writers and editors
(35:24):
tend to fare better, um than the artists. So what
happens then after World War Two? Well, after World War two,
superhero comics decline in popularity. I mean, you have soldiers
coming home, so that puts a dent in sales to
begin with, just because I mean soldiers abroad in foxholes,
(35:47):
you know, at camps overseas, gobbled up comic books to
keep them entertained. And then on top of that too,
once you don't have say, Hitler and Mussolini for Captain
America to fight, I mean, the entire landscape is changing.
And what's interesting to see is how, in an attempt
to attract new readership you do have more female characters emerge,
(36:11):
but it's all focused around romance and domesticity, with maybe
a little bit of crime fighting here and there. Yeah,
and we also see the renewed interest in teen comic
strips because you know, Archie had launched, which was the
same year as Hill to Terry's influential strip Tina, And
I mean, we've talked on the podcast before about post
(36:32):
war social anxieties and the need to sort of reassert
a traditional masculinity and a traditional femininity, women leaving the workplace,
going back home to take care of the men who
have returned well. And as we talked about in our
podcast on whether World War two was all that great
for Rosie the Riveters, and basically how after they come home,
the women were expected to leave the jobs that so
(36:56):
that men could have jobs to take back up. And
the same thing happened in the comic industry. After World
War Two, women's employment in the comic industry dropped by
about two thirds, and the women who stayed were usually
kicked out of action adventure titles and then redirected to
teen and romance serials, or some of them just moved
(37:19):
into children's illustration. We're like, I'm just getting out of
this industry altogether. And so it's right after the war
in ninety six that we get the National Cartoonists society
that forms. That sounds cool, right, Oh well, it's open
to you if you're a man. And in nineteen forty nine,
Hilda Terry puts up a fight. She called for the
(37:40):
inclusion of women, or told them, if you're not going
to include us, maybe you should just change your name
to the National Men Cartoonist Society. Yeah, hild Terry was
not pleased. Um, but the good news is in nineteen
fifty al Cap who created a Little Abner as well
as as other obviously male because they were all male,
(38:02):
members of the National Cartoonist Society, came to bat for
women's inclusion, and so the society finally had to open
up its stores to let some women. And although there
weren't that many. Yeah, well, so we've already seen, you know,
Kristen mentioned the declining numbers that we see by nineteen
fifty that more women are just going into other arenas.
(38:28):
But four something happens that makes things even more difficult
for really everybody, not just women. But in nineteen fifty
four we get the publication of Frederick Wortham's Seduction of
the Innocent, which blamed comic books for corrupting young minds,
and that leads to the Comics Code, which basically sanitized
(38:49):
mainstream comics. It wanted to get root out any sex,
any violence, any anything that could potentially poison young minds.
So this is not unlike every fight we have ever had,
every generation of forever, whether it's about music or video games,
but in this particular instance, it was all about what
comics were doing to young children. And we talked in
(39:10):
our podcast while back on Wonder Woman about how Wortham
and the Comics Code was responsible for also sanitizing Wonder Woman.
You see her shift even more to romantic storylines. And
they were concerned in Wonder Woman in particular about overtones
of lesbianism and bondage, and so, of course, with the
(39:35):
Comics Code in the sixth sees, all of a sudden,
Wonder Woman is all about her boyfriend and clothes. And
it's really with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent,
which I mean this book. I mean it wasn't just
a book that a lot of parents read and they
freaked out about. I mean there were senate meetings about
comic books. Um. So, heading into the nineteen sixt is
(40:00):
the golden age is over. Mainstream comics are getting a
lot more sanitized. They're rather boring comparatively, and this is
ushering in an underground comics with an ex revolution, and
that comics with an ex revolution is something that krist
and I will delve into in our next episode, So
stay tuned. Yeah, but now we want to hear from
(40:23):
classic cartoon and comics fans and cartoonists listening. Moms Stuff
at House of Works dot com is our email address.
You can tweet us at mom Stuff Podcast. Let us
know your favorite cartoonists, your comic books. Where there classic
era women that we didn't talk about but we should
(40:44):
let us know. You can email us, you can tweet us.
You can also message us on Facebook. And we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now.
So I've gotta let her hear from Eleanor about our
two partner on Lady Detectives. She writes, I just finished
listening to part two of Murder she watched. She said,
(41:08):
I love a good detective mystery, especially when the main
character is a woman. I loved Jessica Fletcher and how
she made the local sheriff eat his words every week.
I know it's difficult to fit all shows into an episode,
but I wanted to mention a few of my favorites
that I feel are definitely worth watching. The first is
Hetty Wainthrop Mysteries. It's a British show that starts Patricia
(41:30):
Routledge as Hetty Wainthrop, a private detective. You may remember
her in her iconic role as Hyacinth Bouquet in Keeping
Up Appearances. I do remember her in that role because
of her work on that show. She's seen mainly as
a comedic actress, but her range of talent is huge
and her versatility is definitely displayed in this show. She
has a male sidekick, the teenage Jeffrey, played by the
(41:51):
also teenage Dominic Monaghan. If memory serves, it was his
first role. The series is from the mid nineties. The
other one worth a watch is simply called Vera. It's
also a British show and you may be able to
watch it on your local PBS station. Vera is about
a head detective, Vera Stanhope. She's in her sixties and
unlike most women detectives, she does not wear fashionable clothes,
(42:13):
says not have her hair done at a salon, and
wear sensible shoes. She's witty and funny and grumpy and
generous and very intelligent. Of all women detectives, she's the
one that feels like a real person. The episodes are
entertaining and well written. That's it, I guess. I love
the podcast. Thank you for covering a subject so close
to my heart, and thanks for the recommendations. Eleanor and
(42:35):
I have a letter here from Ashley. She says, growing up,
I wanted to be a detective. I loved Charlie's Angels
when I was in elementary school, Kate Jackson Sabrina was
my favorite. I was in her fan club and the
autograph photo I received was my prized possession. Then along
came Cagney and Lacy, and I had new role models
during my middle and high school years. But I grew
(42:57):
up in a conservative environment where I was expect did
to pursue a white collar career suitable for a woman,
so I followed a different career path. Part of me
still regrets that I didn't become a police officer, which
is probably why I can't get enough of watching cops
shows on TV. I watched many of the shows you
mentioned and thought you made a lot of good points
about the characters and storylines. I also hope to see
(43:19):
more not so feminine characters in this genre in the future.
I watched The Closer but always thought Brenda Lee was
too syrapy, not to mention the overly Southern accent. I
much prefer Captain Sharon Rader on Major Crimes and think
Mary McDonald at age sixty two, is fantastic in that role.
Major Crimes also includes Kieren Giovanni as Detective Amy Sykes.
(43:39):
It's nice that her character is a military veteran, but
of course she looks like a model. I consider Risolian
Aisles to be mindless fun rather than a serious cop drama.
I think the producers purposely allow viewers to entertain hope
of a romantic relationship between the two, and beautiful Angie
Harmon as the butch character makes me laugh. She put
butching quotes. By the way, I'm looking forward to watching
(44:00):
some of the other shows you mentioned that we're not
on my radar. In conclusion, I loved these two episodes
and really enjoy your podcast. Keep up the good work,
and thank you Ashley. We appreciate the letter, and thanks
to everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff at how
Stuff Works Dot com is our email address and for
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources
(44:23):
so you can follow along with us. Head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told You. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline. And this episode on women in cartooning
initially started off as just a run of the mill
(00:24):
podcast episode. We ran across a fantastic article by Lisa
Hicks over at Collector's Weekly, which is mostly an interview
with Trina Robbins, who is a cartoon historian and has
written a number of books specifically focusing on women in cartoons,
most recently Pretty and Ink. And we started reading the
(00:46):
article and we quickly realized, oh, this is not just
one podcast. No, I mean it's It would be impossible
to condense cartooning and comic and comic book history, especially
in regards to women in into just one episode, especially
when you, guys, there's an entire Golden era of comics
(01:07):
that we have to tell you about, not to mention
all of the interesting stuff going on today in the industry.
So for part one of our look at women in
Cartooning and comics, we're going to go back in history
and sort of lay the groundwork leading up to and
through the Golden Era of comics. And yeah, we are
(01:29):
combining like cartoon strips with actual comic books. And for comics,
just one note on that we're really focusing on the creators.
We're not looking so much at the characters in them.
But of course the creator's influence the kinds of characters
that even see reflected in strips and books. So pardon
(01:51):
is though for purists out there, for us condensing both
of them together. But first of all, let's talk about
quite possibly the very first published female cartoonist in the
United States. Yeah, Rose O'Neill might be best known for
her CuPy drawings that she made, those little cherub cheeked
(02:13):
children that actually, my mother finds incredibly creepy. She can't
even say the word quepi without making a face. Unfortunately,
you're kind of making a face too, well, I know,
I just yeah, I don't understand all the time my
mother thinking things that are are weird. But anyway, so
let's get back to Rose O'Neil and get off of
Sally So At thirteen, at the tender age of thirteen,
(02:35):
Rose O'Neill won an art contest prize for her drawings,
and when the judges realized that the winner of the
prize was a girl. They made her sit down and
reproduce the drawing in front of them, because surely a
girl would not be talented enough. But she proved those
people wrong. Yeah, and she was highly successful as an
illustrator from a young age. So when she was twenty
(03:00):
years old, Truth Magazine bought and published or comic strip,
the Old Subscriber Calls, which is possibly the first published
comic strip by a woman, and The Old Subscriber Calls
is essentially a quick strip about an old magazine subscriber
coming to the magazine office and he's not very happy
(03:23):
about it, and there's this tidal wave that also comes in,
and then he leaves, and the publishers like, well, I'm
glad we survived that one. Well, the joke, which I
love so much and appreciate having worked at a newspaper
for four years, is that the whole punch line is
that when the subscriber comes in and he's so angry
(03:43):
and he beats at the editor, the editor doesn't care
that he just got himself beaten up. He's just glad
the subscriber didn't cancel his subscription and they didn't lose
that revenue. And the fact that I chuckled out loud
at that that cartoon from I love that. It's still
it's still totally relevant because I feel like people in
newspapers today are still like, just don't unsubscribe, please, You're
(04:07):
an old soul, Caroline. I guess so Caroline loves those
nineteenth century punch line exactly, I really do. Uh so.
But before this, O'Neill had already been selling her illustrations
to other magazines and newspapers, so she was at twenties
sort of an old hand at this. But we do
(04:29):
have to look at the context of the time also
in which this is going on. For instance, you have R.
F outcos Hogan's Alley, better known as The Yellow Kid,
which was published in Joseph Pullitzer, Yes that Pulleitzer, his
New York World newspaper, and The Yellow Kid was the
first commercially successful comic strip published in a newspaper, which
(04:50):
was quickly followed up by strips like Little Nemo in Slumberland,
Crazy Cat, et cetera. And these newspaper comic strips would
remain the predominant form of comics until the nineteen thirties,
when comic books would slowly come around even though of
course in the newspapers you would still have cartoon strips.
(05:12):
But while all of this is happening at the close
of the nineteenth century, plenty of other women in addition
to Rose O'Neill, we're getting in on the comic strip
game as well. Because you have to keep in mind
too that with Pulitzer and Hurst and all these big
names in publishing rising up, and you have these newspaper
wars going on in print journalism or if you could
(05:35):
call it journalism really at the time, but print publishing
was so huge, and there were so many different outlets
for people to get their cartoons published. So you have
people like Grace Gebby and her cartoon Naughty Tootles. Trina Robbins,
the comic historian, attributes quote setting the tone for comic
(05:59):
strip for the next thirty years. And so she says
that because a lot of the early comic strips that
you see heavily feature these chubby cheeked babies and kids
just goofing around, and Caroline, while you were busy chuckling
at the old subscriber calls, I was juggling at Naughty
(06:19):
Tootles strips, which is essentially about this naughty toddler girl
who always disobeys her mom and miss pronounces woods, so
she's naughty Tootles and she like sprays her mom with
a hose and it's always getting into all sorts of twubble.
I hate when toddlers spraying me with hoses. Yeah, who doesn't,
(06:43):
Caroline um? Because of this, this Grace gave me character.
She used went by a pen named Grace Drayton, which
I believe was her married name. She also went on
to create Bobby Blake and Dolly Drake, Dottie Dimple, Captain Kiddo,
which I would like to add as a forced nickname
that other people must call me. And that's Captain with
(07:03):
a K mind you, of course it is, and of
course Dottie Dingle. But she also drew the Campbell soup kids,
and this style actually inspired Rose O'Neill and her CuPy dolls.
And QP is short for Cupid, but that's also CUPI
with a K, And I like how she said that
these Cubi dolls came to her one night in a dream.
(07:28):
But there is one thing worth noting about all these
chubby cheeked kids in these early comic strips. Uh, there's
a paper that Trina Robbins wrote examining the different styles
of male and female characters in comic strips and cartoons,
sort of sexual dimorphism, and how how that has been
(07:48):
depicted in illustration. And she talks about how during this
era it wasn't just women drawing these chubby cheeked kids either.
It was just kind of the thing. Everybody thought they
were adorable. So you also had guys too, who were
drawing their own dotty dingles. And by nineteen hundred there
are a number of women drawn comics in the Sunday newspapers.
(08:11):
You've got Louise Corals as buns puns, Grace Casson's Tin
Tin Tales for Children, and Agnes Reply as the Philip Busters. Oh,
I just would like to imagine that that's still the
chevy cheeked children, but they're dressed like as as politicians.
Oh yeah, like wigs and robes and things. Yeah like,
(08:32):
I like that. Um. And talking about the influence of
these women, Trina Robbins told Lisa Hicks, quote, everyone read
newspapers and magazines. The women who drew cartoons were nationally
famous superstars. People would cut off their strips and save them.
You can find scrap books with these women's cartoons pasted
into them, sometimes colored in by a young girl. Nobody
(08:56):
thought it was unusual for a woman to do comics,
because it wasn't unusual for women and girls to read comics.
That's so key that you have girls identifying with the
artists and or the the artist creations, and that there
was nothing weird about it in the same way that
it's nothing there's nothing weird about girls and boys coloring
(09:16):
and coloring books forever for generations. There's there was nothing
weird or unusual at the time about girls collecting and
enjoying comic strips. But oh, how that would change, I know.
But but luckily, and what I love the imagery from
this time because luckily a lot of these cartoonists were
(09:36):
staunch suffragists as well, and they used their creations to
fight for women's rights. Yeah. Rose O'Neil in particular, as
well as her sister Callista were known in New York
City circles for their suffrage activism. And O'Neill would draw
these suffrage postcards that were really widely circulated at the time,
(09:59):
and they and you oft and featured her cubie dolls.
I guess they were dolls at the time, quepies in
her cartoons promoting women's rights, which I mean talk about
catching What is this saying catching a fly with honey?
I think, so okay, I gotta get it. Stretching a
bee with honey a fly probably a fly because of
(10:20):
makes the honey. Okay, So glad we got that worked out. Yeah,
So all of that to say, she would use these adorable,
chevy cheek little characters to be like I would like
mommy to be able to vote to well, for those
of you who follow us on Pinterest, and I know
that's all of you because you love us. Um, we
(10:40):
actually do have a suffrage board, a suffrage board on
our Pinterest account, and I pinned a whole bunch of
cartoons from this era, one of which is one of
the QUI characters holding a sign that says votes for women,
and sadly would still probably think that was creepy, but
I like it. That sounds adorable. That's not adorable, but
I all so pinned a picture. There was a cartoon
(11:02):
at the time, uh, in the humor magazine Puck that
features a woman sitting on top of a stove wearing
a crown, and the caption is woman queen of the home,
said the anti suffragists, Yes, queen of a cook stove throne.
So it's it's humorous, but it's also kind of sad.
(11:23):
And that was from Well and Puck two featured a
lot of pro suffrage cartoons and also anti suffrage cartoons.
And when you look at the anti suffrage illustrations, usually,
and not surprisingly, the suffragists are always depicted as buck
(11:44):
tooth ugly, they're smoking cigarettes, and the captions are always
about how women just want to oppress men, and it
usually shows men then in domestic roles, perhaps wearing aprons,
are caring for the babies or and the their wife
nowhere to be found because she's gotten the vote, and
she is then never home. I guess because she's just
(12:05):
voting all the time. I guess lots are so long. Well,
don't you know, Kristen, that a hundred years ago elections
were held once a week, so women were just constantly
out of the home voting. But now there were a
lot of cartoons at the time to showing these men
who had been abandoned by their wives, who dared to
fight for equal rights, uh, you know, with the halo
around their head, and it was often paired with the
(12:27):
words suffragette Madonna that apparently when women are out voting
and earning rights, that that apparently somehow took rights away
from men. Now, this is just one example of the
political cartoons from the day, but a really fascinating intersection
of women in cartooning and the social movements at the
(12:48):
time and women's rights all coming together in this very
specific subset of suffrage cartoons and postcards and illustrations that
were really every you were at the time. I mean,
these were really powerful drawings. Yeah. I mean if you
think about it, like the imagery that they readers are
(13:09):
presented with, it's not like they're getting it that many
other places that they don't have TV, they don't have Pinterest,
they don't have the giant time stuck that is Pinterest
that we have today. But I mean, yeah, when you
when you're sharing these cartoons, of course they're going to
pack a punch because you're not seeing imagery like this
just anywhere. Well, and it's funny that you say they
didn't have Pinterest back then and talking about the Internet. Actually,
(13:30):
a couple of years ago, there was an anti suffrage
cartoon to go off on a Tangent for a Second
that went viral online. It was also published in the
magazine Puck and it was by Harry Grant Dart and
it was from and the drawing is of a woman's
bar where all of the women are smoking and doing
(13:51):
all sorts of manly things. And they're like women huddled
around a stock ticker and like a sad baby looking
up at his mom's not paying attention because she's smoking
and gambling. And it was just fascinating. And the title
of it is why not go the Limit, basically saying like, well,
if we give them the vote, then they'll get all
(14:11):
these other things, these manly bourbon infused cigars, smoke smelling
kinds of things. Well, no, I immediately upon seeing this
image immediately made at my Facebook cover photo. It's a
good one because I love it. I love that women
who smoke and hang out in bars are considered like
dangerous to society. Well, I mean, and it just again,
(14:34):
it's so it's so interesting in today's context to think
about the power of this imagery, especially as we move
into the World War One era. UM one name that
I hadn't heard of before researching for this podcast. Whom
I was surprised I hadn't run across before was Nell
Brinkley and her Brinkley Girls, because we've talked a lot
(14:56):
in the podcast about Charles Dana Gibson and the Gibson
Girls and how the Gibson Girl at the turn of
the century really established the beauty ideal for the time,
down to her silhouette, the hourglass silhouette, and we talked
about her in our Cankles and Ankles podcast. While following
(15:16):
on the heels of the Gibson Girls, you have Nell
Brinkley and her ladies. Yeah. Nell Brinkley created these beautiful
drawings and beautiful works of art, and her women certainly
were more active. One was in a canoe paddling along
with the man sitting behind her, and uh, she enjoyed
(15:38):
and her characters enjoyed so much popularity at the time,
um that the zig Feld girls in the famous they
were famous performers were actually dressed as Brinkley girls. There
was even one act where a zig Feld girl was
dressed as the girl in the canoe with a man
behind her. And you could even buy Nell Brinkley curlers
to get your hair to curl, just like that of
(16:00):
her characters. Yeah, unlike the Gibson girls, whose hair was
usually in an up to and you know, pinned up,
Brinkley girls had big, curly hair. They were often more
working class. And it was also notable to see how
quickly Brinkley's career took off because she came to New
York in to draw for the Hearst Syndicate, and by
(16:24):
she was on her way to becoming a household name.
And during World War One she created this series called
Golden Eyes and Her Hero Bill, which was published in
the magazine American Weekly, and it was sort of a
proto comic style of a serialized story, but it didn't
have speech bubbles or panels. It would be one full
(16:46):
page gorgeous art nouveau illustration of this leading lady, Golden Eyes,
and then it would have the captions detailed captions underneath.
And Golden Eyes and Her Hero Bill are all about
how while Bill goes off to war during World War One,
Golden Eyes goes on adventures with Bill's collie, whose name
(17:09):
is Uncle Sam right precursor to Lassie Um and Golden
Eyes is allowed to be an amazing character and it's
so exciting. She ultimately saves Bill from death by the Germans,
and Brinkley follows Golden Eyes up in nineteen with Kathleen
and the Great Secret, another strip in which the heroine
(17:31):
saves the hero and Trina Robbins, the historian that we mentioned,
calls Kathleen another amazingly feminist cliffhanger. Yeah, and after World
War One you have the rise of flapper comics, and
Nel Brinkley is sort of credited with inventing this type
of comic strip, even though obviously she didn't invent the flapper,
(17:54):
but sort of playing on this new type of woman,
and her contemporaries as well had a feature flapper characters
that weren't so overtly feminist necessarily, but they were significantly
different from say, the women depicted in those anti suffrage
cartoons that were, you know, painting the terrifying portrait of
(18:19):
what would happen if women got some freedom. Well, it
turns out they are just well flappers. Yeah. So, for instance,
you have artist Ethel Hayes, who created strips like Ethel Flapper,
Fannie Says and Maryanne and Flapper Fanny was very much
like sort of portraying this emerging teen life, this young
(18:40):
woman life, and what that entailed. Um, and this is
coming from Hogan's alley, but I thought that Ethel Hayes
was such an interesting character, was such a great story.
She actually, instead of going to finishing school, went to
the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. She convinced
her parents to sender there. After that, she won a
scholarship to New York's Art Students League, then to the
(19:01):
Julian Academy in Paris, then joined up with the Red
Cross during World War One, where she helped rehab soldiers
through art classes, and when the soldiers weren't super excited
about learning the type of art that she was teaching
and they wanted to learn how to draw cartoons, she
ended up enrolling herself in a cartooning correspondence course to
(19:23):
help teach them, and the head of that school was
so impressed with her abilities that he passes her stuff
along to the Cleveland Press, which offered her a job
in ninete and now hey is getting this job. She
assumed that her duties would just end up being stuff
like touch up and layout work, kind of like the
Women of Disney that Kristen and I talked about last year,
(19:45):
but instead when she showed up, she had the job
of illustrating stories a colleague, stories of a Flappers hijinks,
and so she actually had a lot of control over
what she created. Yeah, and after Ethel Hayes, Gladys park
Or took over Flapper Fanny, and she also created the
strip Mopsie. And then during World War Two she created
(20:08):
Betty g I, which I mean it's a very World
War two sounding comic strip. And speaking of World War two,
though around that time, obviously flapper cartoons had become passe,
and as that happened, they were replaced largely by Team
girl characters because this is when being a teenager and
(20:30):
that whole culture really emerges in the US as well.
So that's reflected in the cartoon strips of Virginia Huge
a who that is her her pen name? It's a
pen name? Do you have a is it? A drawing name?
Is the same thing for a cartoonist as it is
for a writer a lettering name and inc name. Um. Regardless,
Huge created campus Capers and Babs in Society, and those
(20:54):
were a couple of Trina Robbins is a favorite women
drawn cartoons for that time. Now, one woman from the
pre World War Two era who we definitely need to
highlight before we move on is Jackie ORMs. He was
the first female African American career cartoonist who in nineteen
thirty seven first published Dixie to Harlem, which featured the
(21:17):
character Torchy Brown, and it was published in the African
American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier. And then in ninety five
she created the short lived cartoon Candy, which was published
in the Chicago Defender, also an African American newspaper, and
it was about a housemaid who essentially tells it like
it is on social issues. And she'll use a similar
(21:39):
kind of format in terms of using cartoons to talk
about and tell it how it is when it comes
to social issues in the strip that she's best known for,
which is Patty Joe and Ginger. And this is a
single panel series that was also published in the Pittsburgh Courier,
which ran weekly for a eleven straight years starting in
(22:02):
nineteen and it's all about, as you would guess, Patty
Joe and Ginger and Patty Joe is a little sister,
and Ginger is the older, fashionable sister, and Patty Joe essentially,
I mean she she's a very like straight talking it's
almost like the out of the mouth of babes, you know.
She's the straight talking character who always has these very
(22:27):
sage of funny observations about life, about society, about racism,
about politics. And it was so popular and influential in
its depiction of black girls. In particular, the Patty Joe doll,
which was sold in the late nineteen forties, is considered
one of the first positive black dolls ever sold in
(22:51):
the United States, and then from nineteen fifty to nineteen
fifty four, Rams is last comic strip Torchy and Heartbeats
featured a mature black woman and activist looking for love.
So it's interesting you have this more mature activists coming
up right as the civil rights movement starts to get underway. Yeah,
And Nancy Goldstein actually wrote an entire book about Jackie
(23:13):
ORMs called Jackie ORMs the first African American woman cartoonist,
And she talks a lot about how her lead characters,
often women obviously have Patti Joe, Ginger, Torchi Candy, they
usually broke out of the racially stereotyped roles for black people,
showing them doing things like shopping, going to concerts, taking
(23:34):
music lessons, going on road trips, et cetera, rather than
being pigeonholed in these subservient or racist kinds of roles
that they had been previously cast in in white pop culture.
And they also hit on serious issues including racism, taxes,
labor strikes, McCarthy ism, foreign policy, the Cold War, education
(23:58):
and jobs. And Nancy Goldstein told Marketplace that ORMs was
the first cartoonist of any kind to bring out environmental pollution.
I mean she covered really everything and a lot of times,
especially in Patty Joe and Ginger. It's Patty Joe who
is making the observations about all these different things, and
(24:19):
it plays off of Ginger, who was very attractive and
sort of going about her business, and Patty Joe would,
which is kind of call out certain things as she
saw it. And I mean, she was quite a woman.
And in a review in American Studies of Goldstein's book
About Worms, they point out that her characters articulated self, pride,
(24:42):
and modernity and that they were everyday people going through
circumstances that her readers recognized again, you know, going back
to the fact that she had them doing just normal
people activities that they weren't relying on any you know,
racist stereotypes or racist imagery. So it's yet another example
(25:03):
of the powerful influence of cartoons and comics. And that's
something that gets talked about a lot today when it
comes to analyzing comics and appreciating the history of comics,
because it's sort of a new kind of thing because
for a long time, people are more serious artists might
(25:23):
have brushed off comics as just childish or worthless. They're
just they're just cartoons. What does it matter? But clearly
in examples like Jackie ormss work, it matters a great
deal because you're able to say things probably that you
couldn't otherwise say through this gentler sometimes medium, right, and
(25:47):
using worms as an example, I mean, when you bring
people in with different perspectives, it only serves to enrich
the whole medium. Because consider for a second, how revolution
knowing that must have been in nineteen to not only
have a comic, a single panel comic series penned by
(26:10):
a black woman, but it's also featuring almost exclusively black women.
There was nothing else like it at the time, and
featuring black women as human people and not just caricatures.
So now we're going to move away from the newspaper
cartoons though, and look more into comic books, because as
(26:31):
we have gotten into the World War two era in
our timeline, this is also approaching the golden era of
comic books. We've been discussing comic strips and single panel
comics as they appeared in newspapers, but you're probably wondering
what we have to say about comic books. And the
first regular comic book actually appears way before World War Two,
(26:55):
back in nineteen two, and comic books actually got a
jolt of popularity when gas stations began offering them in
the early to mid thirties. And then the golden age
of comic books begins with Action Comics publication of Action
Comics number one, debuting a fellow you've probably heard of
(27:17):
named Superman John's Superman uh, and then Detective Comics or
DC would go on to publish Batman or Batman, and
after this, comic book sales shoot up during World War
Two because they featured themes of good triumphing over evil
pro American characters and superheroes, and of course the first
(27:39):
Captain America cover features him battling Hitler. So it's it's
really satisfying good versus evil, black and white clear stuff.
And it's super satisfying for this industry because by October
nineteen fifty four, the comics industry would be selling fifty
million copies per month of six fifty different titles, reaping
(28:04):
ninety million dollars per year. And I believe that was
ninety million dollars in nineteen fifty four money, So they're
doing pretty good. Yeah, well, so what about the women.
Where are the women in this era? Oh? There are
there are a few women of the Golden Age. So
the first one we need to talk about really emerged
in ninety nine. Her name was June Mills, but she
(28:25):
went under the pseudonym Tarpei Mills to sort of conceal
her gender because that was the environment at the time.
And she got her start in comic books with Daredevil
Berry Finn All about a Dada devil named Barry Thin
who had a plan to thwart Hitler and Mussolini, and
(28:46):
then she would go on to create Purple Zombie, Devil's
Dust and the Catman, which is not the same as
Crazy Cat Lady, although I wonder if perhaps I was
a love interest at one one point. Probably also not
to be confused with us cat Man. Oh so, and
I like the straightforwardness of Purple Zombie. That title, Yeah,
just you know what you're getting straightforward? Well so, then
(29:09):
a couple of years later, Mills creates the first major
female action hero, so from we get Miss Fury. Of
course she her real identity is socialite Marla Drake, who
inherits a magical suit of panther skin that she carries
around in her purse. Pretty sure she got the panther
(29:30):
suit willed to her by her uncle, but the suit
was supposed to be worn by a witch doctor. But
you know, you can't stop a good costume, I understand. Well,
she had gone to a party and someone else was
wearing the same outfit she was, And even worse than
wearing something only a witch doctor is supposed to wear
would be another woman wearing the same outfit as you
(29:52):
at the same party. So Marla was like, you know what,
I'll just wear this panther skin. It's no big deal.
And even though her friend Albino Joe actual character name
was like, I don't think you should do that. She did,
and lo and behold it had magical powers that turned
her into a superhero. But the cool thing about Miss
Fury was that the panther skin suit did not get
(30:14):
worn all that often. She kind of referred to do
her crime fighting in her normal socialite clothes. She was
very smartly dressed. Who and she happened to fight Nazis,
so yeah, just just happened to But yeah, Miss Fury
wasn't actually a comic book. She was a Sunday serial.
Oh yeah, this is This is a good point, but
(30:35):
still important as a major female action hero. And remember
this is new territory for women getting into action comics
and cartoons, right, And she did definitely pave the way
for a bunch of future female superhero characters often drawn
(30:56):
by men, including Phantom Lady, Miss Mask, Red, torn A
Know Lady Luck, Spider Widow, and wonder Woman, who came
around in nineteen forty one thanks to William Marshton, who
we've done a podcast about. Yeah, and around the same
time that all this is happening in nineteen forty Dale Messic,
who changed her name like Tarpe Mills from Dahlia to
(31:19):
Dale to make it sound more masculine. She created the
action adventure strip Brenda Star Reporter, and she was influenced
by none other than Nell Brinkley. I actually, for a while,
Kristen in middle school really kept up with Brenda Starr,
like every day ran for the paper to go to
the comics section to read Brenda Star. Yeah. I read
(31:40):
her in the Sunday Funnies. And you know what, that
takes a lot of patients. There's a lot of dialogue.
I think I would have rather just had a comic
book as a child, which I never had to read
it all at once. But yeah, that's that's fine. That's fine. Um.
But so with this whole trend that we're starting to
see with women artists creating female action here is in comics,
(32:05):
they are, like Kristen said, sort of entering a dude territory.
It was all fun in games when women were creating
the more domestic scenes, the teen girl comics, the comics
for children and featuring animals and things like that, that
was all fine. But when you start sort of treading
into the action genre, that's when guys basically started turning
(32:27):
their backs on some of these female artists. Well, and
I wonder too if it had to do with just
how successful this new Ish comic book industry was, you know,
and it seemed like women were kind of creeping in
on that. And Trina Robbins told Lisa hicks Um for
Collectors Weekly quote, up until then, nobody had resented the
(32:47):
other women cartoonist, but she was getting into men's territory.
The action strip before Dale messic women cartoonists all stuck
with domestic situations, pretty girls, cute kids, that kind of thing.
She was intruding and they resented it. As a result,
men in the industry were not particularly complimentary about her art,
and she felt very neglected by them. And this would
(33:08):
last well into her career. Even though she was wildly
successful within the car to within the comic industry, I
should say, she often felt like an outsider. Well. Yeah,
and then once we get back to World War Two,
as with so many industries in the United States, women
(33:31):
sort of filled a void. The comic book industry became
slightly friendlier to women while the guys were off overseas fighting. Yeah,
this is the same kind of thing that we talked
about in our Women of Disney podcast um in that
during World War One, you have more women being employed,
not necessarily to create these comic heroes, but a lot
of them were employed as pencilers and inkers, sometimes as letterers,
(33:56):
because they're I mean, they're all these different layers involved
in creating a comic. It's not just one person doing
all of the work. And Wesley Channel talks about this
a lot in his thesis, Working the Margins Women in
the Comic book Industry, and I mean, he gets very
granular about women during the Golden Era and during World
(34:20):
War Two, and he says that Fiction House Publishing Company
hired the most women, including Frand Hopper and Lily Renee,
who created Mist of the Moon, which was all about
this moon woman who had a robot dog who has
the superpower of possessing all the knowledge of the universe.
That would be so handy. I could finally fly a helicopter, yeah,
(34:41):
and you'd have a robot dog dog. It wouldn't shed.
But DC fans out there, raise yourselves, because during World
War two, oh, I'm sorry, during the entire nineteen forties,
Elizabeth Burnley. Bentley was the only known female artist to
have worked at what was then National periodicals which would
(35:03):
then be rolled into d C. And she did lettering
and penciling of backgrounds uncredited for both Batman and Superman. Yeah,
Marvel and DC definitely have both had the worst record
of female artist employment compared with their contemporaries, but writers
fared a little bit better. And now that's kind of
across the board. I would say that writers and editors
(35:24):
tend to fare better, um than the artists. So what
happens then after World War Two? Well, after World War two,
superhero comics decline in popularity. I mean, you have soldiers
coming home, so that puts a dent in sales to
begin with, just because I mean soldiers abroad in foxholes,
(35:47):
you know, at camps overseas, gobbled up comic books to
keep them entertained. And then on top of that too,
once you don't have say, Hitler and Mussolini for Captain
America to fight, I mean, the entire landscape is changing.
And what's interesting to see is how, in an attempt
to attract new readership you do have more female characters emerge,
(36:11):
but it's all focused around romance and domesticity, with maybe
a little bit of crime fighting here and there. Yeah,
and we also see the renewed interest in teen comic
strips because you know, Archie had launched, which was the
same year as Hill to Terry's influential strip Tina, And
I mean, we've talked on the podcast before about post
(36:32):
war social anxieties and the need to sort of reassert
a traditional masculinity and a traditional femininity, women leaving the workplace,
going back home to take care of the men who
have returned well. And as we talked about in our
podcast on whether World War two was all that great
for Rosie the Riveters, and basically how after they come home,
the women were expected to leave the jobs that so
(36:56):
that men could have jobs to take back up. And
the same thing happened in the comic industry. After World
War Two, women's employment in the comic industry dropped by
about two thirds, and the women who stayed were usually
kicked out of action adventure titles and then redirected to
teen and romance serials, or some of them just moved
(37:19):
into children's illustration. We're like, I'm just getting out of
this industry altogether. And so it's right after the war
in ninety six that we get the National Cartoonists society
that forms. That sounds cool, right, Oh well, it's open
to you if you're a man. And in nineteen forty nine,
Hilda Terry puts up a fight. She called for the
(37:40):
inclusion of women, or told them, if you're not going
to include us, maybe you should just change your name
to the National Men Cartoonist Society. Yeah, hild Terry was
not pleased. Um, but the good news is in nineteen
fifty al Cap who created a Little Abner as well
as as other obviously male because they were all male,
(38:02):
members of the National Cartoonist Society, came to bat for
women's inclusion, and so the society finally had to open
up its stores to let some women. And although there
weren't that many. Yeah, well, so we've already seen, you know,
Kristen mentioned the declining numbers that we see by nineteen
fifty that more women are just going into other arenas.
(38:28):
But four something happens that makes things even more difficult
for really everybody, not just women. But in nineteen fifty
four we get the publication of Frederick Wortham's Seduction of
the Innocent, which blamed comic books for corrupting young minds,
and that leads to the Comics Code, which basically sanitized
(38:49):
mainstream comics. It wanted to get root out any sex,
any violence, any anything that could potentially poison young minds.
So this is not unlike every fight we have ever had,
every generation of forever, whether it's about music or video games,
but in this particular instance, it was all about what
comics were doing to young children. And we talked in
(39:10):
our podcast while back on Wonder Woman about how Wortham
and the Comics Code was responsible for also sanitizing Wonder Woman.
You see her shift even more to romantic storylines. And
they were concerned in Wonder Woman in particular about overtones
of lesbianism and bondage, and so, of course, with the
(39:35):
Comics Code in the sixth sees, all of a sudden,
Wonder Woman is all about her boyfriend and clothes. And
it's really with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent,
which I mean this book. I mean it wasn't just
a book that a lot of parents read and they
freaked out about. I mean there were senate meetings about
comic books. Um. So, heading into the nineteen sixt is
(40:00):
the golden age is over. Mainstream comics are getting a
lot more sanitized. They're rather boring comparatively, and this is
ushering in an underground comics with an ex revolution, and
that comics with an ex revolution is something that krist
and I will delve into in our next episode, So
stay tuned. Yeah, but now we want to hear from
(40:23):
classic cartoon and comics fans and cartoonists listening. Moms Stuff
at House of Works dot com is our email address.
You can tweet us at mom Stuff Podcast. Let us
know your favorite cartoonists, your comic books. Where there classic
era women that we didn't talk about but we should
(40:44):
let us know. You can email us, you can tweet us.
You can also message us on Facebook. And we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now.
So I've gotta let her hear from Eleanor about our
two partner on Lady Detectives. She writes, I just finished
listening to part two of Murder she watched. She said,
(41:08):
I love a good detective mystery, especially when the main
character is a woman. I loved Jessica Fletcher and how
she made the local sheriff eat his words every week.
I know it's difficult to fit all shows into an episode,
but I wanted to mention a few of my favorites
that I feel are definitely worth watching. The first is
Hetty Wainthrop Mysteries. It's a British show that starts Patricia
(41:30):
Routledge as Hetty Wainthrop, a private detective. You may remember
her in her iconic role as Hyacinth Bouquet in Keeping
Up Appearances. I do remember her in that role because
of her work on that show. She's seen mainly as
a comedic actress, but her range of talent is huge
and her versatility is definitely displayed in this show. She
has a male sidekick, the teenage Jeffrey, played by the
(41:51):
also teenage Dominic Monaghan. If memory serves, it was his
first role. The series is from the mid nineties. The
other one worth a watch is simply called Vera. It's
also a British show and you may be able to
watch it on your local PBS station. Vera is about
a head detective, Vera Stanhope. She's in her sixties and
unlike most women detectives, she does not wear fashionable clothes,
(42:13):
says not have her hair done at a salon, and
wear sensible shoes. She's witty and funny and grumpy and
generous and very intelligent. Of all women detectives, she's the
one that feels like a real person. The episodes are
entertaining and well written. That's it, I guess. I love
the podcast. Thank you for covering a subject so close
to my heart, and thanks for the recommendations. Eleanor and
(42:35):
I have a letter here from Ashley. She says, growing up,
I wanted to be a detective. I loved Charlie's Angels
when I was in elementary school, Kate Jackson Sabrina was
my favorite. I was in her fan club and the
autograph photo I received was my prized possession. Then along
came Cagney and Lacy, and I had new role models
during my middle and high school years. But I grew
(42:57):
up in a conservative environment where I was expect did
to pursue a white collar career suitable for a woman,
so I followed a different career path. Part of me
still regrets that I didn't become a police officer, which
is probably why I can't get enough of watching cops
shows on TV. I watched many of the shows you
mentioned and thought you made a lot of good points
about the characters and storylines. I also hope to see
(43:19):
more not so feminine characters in this genre in the future.
I watched The Closer but always thought Brenda Lee was
too syrapy, not to mention the overly Southern accent. I
much prefer Captain Sharon Rader on Major Crimes and think
Mary McDonald at age sixty two, is fantastic in that role.
Major Crimes also includes Kieren Giovanni as Detective Amy Sykes.
(43:39):
It's nice that her character is a military veteran, but
of course she looks like a model. I consider Risolian
Aisles to be mindless fun rather than a serious cop drama.
I think the producers purposely allow viewers to entertain hope
of a romantic relationship between the two, and beautiful Angie
Harmon as the butch character makes me laugh. She put
butching quotes. By the way, I'm looking forward to watching
(44:00):
some of the other shows you mentioned that we're not
on my radar. In conclusion, I loved these two episodes
and really enjoy your podcast. Keep up the good work,
and thank you Ashley. We appreciate the letter, and thanks
to everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff at how
Stuff Works Dot com is our email address and for
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources
(44:23):
so you can follow along with us. Head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff Works dot com
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