I speak here only of newspaper comic strips, not of comic books or animated cartoons, each of which has distinct generic characteristics. I am afraid that the copies here of The Squirrel Cage and Count Screwloose are too small to be legible and I don’t know how to make them larger. The reader might copy and enlarge these images or locate them on the web which is what I did at http://screwballcomics.blogspot.com/2013/08/tis-art-milt-gross-count-screwloose.html and http://screwballcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/nov-shmoz-ka-pop-gene-aherns-mysterious.html both on Paul C. Tumey’s excellent screwball comics blog. See also Art Spiegelman’s “Foolish Questions,” a review of Tumey’s Screwball!: The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny in the New York Review of Books, or at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/screwball-rube-goldberg-foolish-questions/. The two of them are experts; I am simply a reader. My observations, I hope, would have meaning even without the strips.
The status of comic strips, considered by most (until the recent vogue for graphic novels) to be beneath the consideration of critics long meant that, while comic artists were bound by the commercial necessity to turn a profit, they were free to do most anything if they maintained a sufficient readership. Comic strips, meant to be rapidly and casually consumed, typically are built of stereotyped images and received opinions, but they have proved to be quite capable to ironic interrogation of their own conventions. Self-reflective themes, like that in this Nancy strip by Ernie Bushmiller, though often associated with sophisticated and avant-garde art, are featured in many of the very earliest newspaper strips.
Like other genres of art, comic strips offer a variety of rewards to readers. Some strips such as Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant have strong narratives while others such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo rely on verbal play. Winsor McCay created lush and dazzling visual fields in Little Nemo, while George McManus’ Bringing Up Father satisfied readers with the same reliable stereotype-based gags day after day.
In spite of this range of possibilities it is surely true in general that comic strips have a natural affinity for the absurd. McCay’s motive in using dreams in Nemo and Rarebit Fiend and Kelly’s in making animals talk in a remote swamp is in part the same as Foster’s or McManus’ in using clichés so tired they invite play. Even more than in films anything can happen in the comics. The genre therefore offers an arena for questioning quotidian experience with imaginative leaps and fanciful non sequiturs. Such maneuvers belong to the medium as montage does to film or cadence to poetry.
Within the category of the absurd artists have developed a broad inventory of possibilities. In the last sixty years the underground comics provided rich veins of nonsense, some of which were published like earlier newspaper comics strips, though they found a more congenial home in comic books. R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman and others have paid homage to the cartoonists of the past from whom they took inspiration, at times amounting to imitation. Much of what looked like sixties revolutionary weirdness in Zap was in large part hommage to past masters, an acknowledgement of tradition. Here I wish only to point out a couple of these early practitioners of the comic strip absurd who, though well-known to other cartoon artists and to specialists have faded from the public view: Gene Ahearn and Milt Gross.
Though I relished the character Major Hoople in Gene Ahearn’s in Our Boarding House, I only recently came to read his The Squirrel Cage. An acorn in the title panel explains the strip’s name. The squirrel cage is where one would find nuts. Hence everything that happens in Foozland is crazy. Here is the April 22, 1945 strip.
The first two panels contain a more or less conventional gag despite the nutty landscape and garb. The great wizard in his first appearance uses his supernatural gifts as a child might, to create an ice cream soda, numinous and suspended, for his enjoyment while strolling. Juvenile appetite has free rein here, inviting the reader to regress. The magic man then descends into the underworld through a trapdoor only to resurface in the guise of a refrigerator, still something of a novelty to many when the strip appeared. (It is called in fact an icebox.) Topping this absurdity, a small figure clad in warm furs then emerges. Next, Hearn’s Little Hitchhiker, widely regarded as the inspiration for R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, with appears like an apparition, his thumb out inviting the unknown and, on his lips, the enigmatic mantra “Nov shmoz ka pop!” He stands next to a butcher block topped with ham and cleaver (itself utterly out of context) which, with the toss of the wizard’s spell, becomes a small-eared elephant with a brush tail. The license of magic and madness allows Hearn to slide from ice cream soda to a subterranean land and then, in quick succession, refrigerator, Eskimo-like figure, butcher’s block with ham and elephant of a sort never before seen. The reader can only gaze on astonished. Surely here are moves comparable to Lautréamont’s formulation "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." The Little Hitchhiker and the anonymous character with the smaller beard and hat signify their amazement at the spectacle that passes before them with question marks and radiating lines of amazement.
Madness also enables Milt Gross to untether the story from observed reality. His strip Count Screwloose of Tooloose always begins and ends in a mental hospital, but the premise is that the Count regularly finds the outside world madder than the institution.
In this February 22, 1931 strip the count is propelled over the walls of his institution by a fellow patient who believes himself to be the cow that jumped over the moon. The diminutive aristocrat notices a hobo who attempts to collect tips by reciting “Abou ben Adhem” in a rough pool hall only to be knocked in the head by a pool table hurled by those intolerant of poetry. He dashes from the hospital to which he has been taken wearing a sheet with his head bandaged as though he were wearing a turban. With the count observing from the rear, he follows a crowd of wealthy sophisticates where he repeats his recitation, this time to great applause. This is enough for the count who returns to the relative sanity of the Nuttycrest Asylum and the dependable company of his dog Iggy.
The lower-class pool players are violent, demolishing culture in their refusal to hear the poem, practically the only work of Leigh Hunt to find readers from the time of its composition to the present. (It was included in the 1887 book meant for parlor reading out loud, Popular Poetic Pearls and is featured in a current internet list of “poems every child should know.”) Great though its middle-brow prestige may be, it would find little sympathy from real littérateurs. Yet the presumably superior judgement of the cultivated crew that applauds the bum in a hospital sheet is swayed purely by the attraction of the exotic, in essence by their own vanity.
Gross suggests that both rich and poor have equally blind responses to the poem. Since Hunt’s all-too-simple theme, which no one ever hears, is the common humanity of all, the hostility of the ruffians and the rapture of the upper crust equally miss the point. The madman is the only one to see clearly, and he is driven back to the security of his pet’s affection beneath a painted moon. It is surely accidental that the strip appeared less than a year before the popularity of E. Y. (Yip) Harburg and Billy Rose’s song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” which says 'It's a Barnum and Bailey world / Just as phony as it can be.”
Ahearn’s The Squirrel Cage takes place in a realm freed from ordinary reductive systems of logic and cause-and-effect. The phenomena in its world always elicit a puzzled fascination from the observer who need not even attempt to make sense of the scene. In fact the refusal to rationalize, the suspension of analysis with its attempt to seize control, has surely a liberating effect on the reader’s mind not wholly unlike the suspension of judgement (or ἐποχή) described by the ancient skeptics.
Gross’s Count Screwloose of Tooloose portrays a world in which the sanest resident is a mental patient and the safest place to situate oneself is next to a loyal friend behind a high wall. The count might adopt Dalí’s oft-quoted bon mot, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”
Absurdity has countless other forms. I have always enjoyed the metaphysical desolation of George Herriman’s renderings of Krazy Kat’s Coconino County, the flabbergasted expressions in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, the elaborate inventions of Rube Goldberg, and the mute eloquence of Carl Thomas Anderson’s Henry.
Mary Worth (created by writer Allen Saunders and artist Dale Connor) managed to survive for generations with soap opera and William Donahey’s single panel Teenie Weenies was visually ingenious while Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates made its appeal with action and adventure stories. Still, were my mood to build a comics pantheon, I would place at its height the artists of inspired absurdity who brought the imaginations of their readers to soar like their own in the moments it takes to scan a newspaper comic strip.
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