Newspaper Strips Research Articles

That's enough, folks: black images in animated cartoons, 1900-1960

An authoritative and valuable resource for students and scholars of film animation and African-American history, film buffs, and casual readers. It is the first and only book to detail the history of black images in animated cartoons. Using advertisements, quotes from producers, newspaper reviews, and other sources, Sampson traces stereotypical black images through their transition from the first newspaper comic strips in the late 1890s, to their inclusion in the first silent theatrical cartoons, through the peak of their popularity in 1930s musical cartoons, to their gradual decline in the 1960s. He provides detailed storylines with dialogue, revealing the extensive use of negative caricatures of African Americans. Sampson devotes chapters to cartoon series starring black characters; cartoons burlesquing life on the old slave plantation with happy slaves Uncle Tom and Topsy; depictions of the African safari that include the white hunter, his devoted servant, and bloodthirsty black cannibals; and cartoons featuring the music and the widely popular entertainment style of famous 1930s black stars including Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller. That's Enough Folks includes many rare, previously unpublished illustrations and original animation stills and an appendix listing cartoon titles with black characters along with brief descriptions of gags in these cartoons.

"Fuku-chan" Goes to Java: Images of Indonesia in a Japanese Wartime Newspaper Comic Strip

AbstractThis article will discuss how a wartime Japanese comic strip portrayed Japan's war against the Allied troops, the natural settings, customs and cultural forms of Java, and the relationship of the Japanese and the Javanese. The discussion is based on a textual analysis of a popular newspaper comic strip, "Fuku-chan" (Little Fuku), during the three-month period in 1942 when Java was the focus of the strip. A close analysis of this widely read newspaper strip reveals how images of Indonesia - a newly occupied, unknown place - were introduced to the Japanese audience at the early stages of World War II (1941-1945).

Publicizing, Politicizing, and Neutralizing Homelessness

Comparing newspaper comic strips to editorial cartoons can uncover differences between public opinion manifested in popular culture and views held by local and national power groups. This study analyzes 231 comic strips and 126 editorial cartoons featuring homelessness published in two major San Francisco newspapers from April 1, 1989, to March 31, 1992. Using theoretical categories based on Peter Marcuse's policy responses to homelessness (publicizing, politicizing, and neutralizing), the authors found that 57% of comic strips and 30% of editorial cartoons are neutralizing, either by using the homeless as “props” for other stories or issues or by belittling their plight. All but one of the strips are nationally syndicated. Thus these data are probably representative of U.S. public opinion; however, editorial cartoons are selected by newspaper editors and may not be generalizable to other communities.

Astrid Lindgren's The Robber's Daughter : A Twentieth-Century Fairy Tale

Astrid Lindgren's The Robber's Daughter:A Twentieth-Century Fairy Tale Eva-Maria Metcalf (bio) When Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart appeared in Swedish in 1973, critic Alf Thoor referred to it as an extraordinary fairy tale.1 The same can be said about Lindgren's more recent novel, The Robber's Daughter, which appeared in Sweden in 1981.2 In what way is The Robber's Daughter an extraordinary fairy tale? What is so special about it? How does it fit into the fairy-tale tradition we are accustomed to, that is, the tradition that emerged in late seventeenth-century France and reached its peak in the early part of the nineteenth century in the Kinder-und Hausmärchen collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm? How does it break with that tradition? These are the main questions I would like to examine more closely in this paper. If The Robber's Daughter is a fairy tale which is outside of the ordinary, why do I insist on calling it a fairy tale? Why not call it a children's novel with fantastic elements, a romance, or a robber's story as Vivi Edström does in a recent article?3 I have chosen this approach to The Robber's Daughter because I find in this novel many motifs and structural elements reminiscent of folk and fairy tales. Lindgren herself has repeatedly pointed to the formative power which the folk and fairy tales she read as a child have had on her literary production (in Törnqvist, 17). And, finally, I want to explore, from the perspective of children's literature, whether and how the fairy tale has survived in modern day typographic and electronic culture. I believe that the fairy tale is very much alive in the form of children's novels by such writers as Michael Ende, Janosch, and Astrid Lindgren. The Robber's Daughter is a fairy tale which has been adapted, transformed and altered to meet the demands and reflect the conceptual horizon of a child growing up in twentieth-century Western society, and it has enough complexity to satisfy the adult reader, as well. Along with major shifts in means of production and communication, narrative patterns also change, retaining only traces of their former manifestations. Walter Ong has expressed this paradox of change for the sake of continuity, which I find manifested in The Robber's Daughter, by saying: "We have to die to continue living." The acknowledgement of [End Page 151] the historicity of the fairy tale is fairly recent and has led to its demystification. In the late nineteen sixties and in the seventies, the underlying authoritarian and sexist attitudes of fairy tales were revealed through "alternative" renditions of the classical fairy tales guided by new value systems. Parodies of Mother Goose and Grimms' fairy tales are now staple entertainment for young and old in newspaper comic strips, as well as on Sesame Street and other children's television programs. Caught in the flood of cheap reproductions to satisfy the steadily growing market for children's books and entertainment, the fairy tale has slowly lost the aura with which it had been endowed in the Romantic age. The search for identity engendered by the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism fostered the collection of national cultural treasures everywhere in Europe and led to the collection of remnants of oral culture—among them fairy tales—and to the formation of a fairy tale canon. As Rudolf Schenda points out, the fairy tale was as much invented as it was discovered, and it was overrepresented at the expense of other varieties of folkloric narrative.4 One of the manifold reasons for the formation of the fairy tale canon was the longing for the naive and direct enjoyment of just hearing or reading a tale. In the estimation of the Grimms, the treasures of folklore were collected at the eleventh hour, for the culture of the text was infringing upon the culture of the spoken word.5 The formulaic, participatory, situational forms of narrative organization were replaced by analytic, distanced, and abstract forms. The Brothers Grimm, along with other Romantic intellectuals, wanted to preserve the...

The effects of rearing environment on pup development.

Norway rats were reared either in a standard laboratory cage or in a nest constructed by the dam from newspaper strips. Growth, thermoregulatory ability, and adrenal, gonad, adipose tissue, and brain weights were measured at weaning on Day 21 postpartum. While there was no difference in growth, nest-reared animals had lower body temperatures, but could thermoregulate as well as cage-reared animals. Nest-reared animals also had relatively smaller adrenals and less brown adipose tissue. Gonad and brain weights were similar. An interesting finding was that males and females were differentially affected by the nest-rearing. Differences between cage- and nest-reared animals were more evident in females, and thermoregulatory ability was more closely associated with the quality of the nest during the first 10 days than body weight in females. For males, body weight was more important. These latter data are discussed in relation to differential interaction between the dam and male and female pups.

The Comics Alternative

Soon after the first regularly published newsstand comic book went on sale in 1934, and especially by 1938 with the arrival of Superman in Action Comics #1, comic books were established as a distinctly separate entertainment medium from newspaper comic strips. To boost circulation, some titles introduced liberal amounts of sex and gore, and this caught the eye of parents, teachers, and librarians. Comic books were widely disapproved of for many years, and any library actively collecting them would have had angry parents to deal with. Possibly as a result of this general disapproval, New Serial Titles excluded comic books by policy from the beginning, a policy not reversed until 1979. In addition, the Library of Congress has never provided cataloging for comic books, which may have discouraged librarians from keeping what they had acquired. To make a sad story even longer, comic‐book distribution was almost entirely on the newsstand and not through subscription nor the book‐trade channels that librarians n...

Perceptions of female and male comic strip characters II: Favorability and identification are different dimensions

Identification ratings of 20 daily newspaper comic strip characters replicated a prediction that male characters would elicit greater identification than female characters, even though previous research had reported the favorability of Adjective Generation Technique (AGT) descriptions for female characters to be equivalent to or greater than that for male characters depending upon primary or secondary familiarity. Significant interaction findings affirming greater same-sex identification by both male and female subjects occurred within a context of significantly greater same-sex and lesser cross-sex identifications on the part of male subjects.

Perceptions of male and female comic strip characters using the Adjective Generation Technique (AGT)

Adjective descriptions of daily newspaper comic strip characters resulted in an unexpected pattern of equivalent or greater favorability for female characters than for male characters, depending upon primary or secondary familiarity. Exceptions to the pattern were Lucy Van Pelt and Mammy Yocum, nontraditional female characters who showed low favorability and femininity. Comic strips included Nancy, Peanuts, L'il Abner, Blondie, and Beetle Bailey, with Wonder Woman and Superman studied independently. The Adjective Generation Technique (AGT) allowed freely generated adjective descriptions to be quantified. Discussion integrated recent sex-role research findings (52 references). Attitudes may be changing in positive directions; however, sex-role biases continue to operate, perhaps in underground ways that will become more difficult to measure, identify, and evaluate empirically.

Comic strips: A rhetorical perspective

Growing from the speech communication field's increasing interest in the persuasive potential of popular art forms, this essay proposes a rhetorical perspective of the newspaper comic strip. The essay explicates the reciprocal influence of comics and society through two major sections: the first offers a theoretical exploration of the rhetorical dimensions of the comic strip medium, with special attention to Bormann's concept of fantasy themes, while the second is an historical analysis of the function of these dimensions in conveying images of women in American society.

Reflections in a Dark Mirror: Comic Strips in Black Newspapers

Reflections in a Dark Mirror: Comic Strips in Black Newspapers

The Citizens' Committee and Comic-Book Control: A Study of Extragovernmental Restraint

No other medium of American popular culture has been subjected to such widespread, vehement, and continuing attack as the so-called comic-books. While controversies about the relationship between juvenile delinquency and crime themes in movies and radio have raged and subsided, the public outcry against crime and horror comic-books has persisted and now seems to have assumed the character of a permanent, grass-roots, citizens' crusade. Reflecting and perhaps reinforcing this unique development is the fact that these comic-books have, in recent years, been investigated by three congressional committees;' they have been made the subject of a provocative and widely publicized book;2 as a product of American culture, they have become notorious and have caused embarrassment abroad; 3 and lastly, their elimination has become the cause c6lebre of women's clubs,4 church groups,5 and community action organizations. It is with a study of the organization and dynamics of one of these last-mentioned groups, the Citizens' Committee for Better Juvenile Literature of Chicago, Illinois, that this paper is concerned. Requisite to a full understanding of the Committee is an appreciation of the history of the comic-book in American culture.6 The prototype of the modern comicbook was the six by sixteen inch booklet of Mutt and Jeff daily newspaper strips, issued by the Chicago American in 1911 as a premium to increase circulation. Evolution was slow, however, and the next step did not come until 1929, when a tabloidsized booklet called The Funnies was published, marking the first time that comics

The English of the Comic Cartoons

'THEN we Americans are through V with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy,' was once the prediction of Mr. Dooley. The chorus of such a speech-transforming troupe must certainly be made up of the professional humorists, and the tap dancers are the 'funsters' of the daily newspaper comic strips and the colored comic Sunday supplements. To these artists the language is simply a tool of their trade. If it does not fit their needs, they alter it until it brings about the desired effect. They are no respecters of linguistic tradition. They almost completely discard the standard speech for the more colorful, salty language of the common people. Above all they are mighty coiners of words. In this respect they are but making use of a legitimate source of humor, as there is often something inherently funny about a fabricated word. Since the appearance, twenty-eight years ago, of the first comic strip, that of 'A. Mutt' drawn by Bud Fisher and published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the popularity of the comics has steadily increased. The 'Funnies' have long since become an institution of American life. They are read by all classes from garbage collectors to clergymen and college professors, but they probably draw the largest number of devotees from people of limited education and from children. The following specimens of the language of newspaper syndicated comic cartoons were collected during an examination of one hundred twenty-two series., They show one of the 'musical comedy' influences on American English.