Coulton Waugh primarily focuses on comic strips, tracing their evolution and development from the time of the Yellow Kid. Waugh writes of Little Nemo in Slumberland, “McCay’s pages, although paced with imagination and excitement, never dealt in horror or crime, and it was the rash of comic books of the horror type which prompted Mendelsohn to engineer a revival of the old comic he had loved for many years” (pg. 20). Discussing the style of Buck Rogers, Waugh writes, “An interesting point about ‘Buck Rogers’ is that, while all the characters flirt constantly with death, no death is shown in the strip. Dille, Calkins, and company have an honest scruple about this; they do not wish their strip to have a brutalizing effect” (pg. 251). Waugh thereby demonstrates an early awareness of concerns for comics’ impact on children. Describing the creation of Wonder Woman, Waugh writes,
A psychologist, William Moulton Marston, was retained by the Superman-D.C. group of comics publishers to determine, if he could ways of improving the quality of the comics then being circulated. He decided that the comics’ worst offense was their bloodcurdling quality; that a woman – since her body contains more love-generating organs and endocrine mechanisms than the male – would make the ideal protagonist for the strip of the future. However, the strong qualities should be brought out, too, and so arrived a new creation, a super-she, something wonderful, “Wonder Woman!” (pg. 261).
Though Waugh addresses Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, he does so in terms of their newspaper strips, only briefly addressing the fact that all three first appeared in comic books. Waugh addresses the comic book itself in his final chapter. Waugh begins his discussion with reluctance, writing,
We had better add comic books to the list of important discoveries made in the world in the last ten years. This hurts many people; it doesn’t even seem possible that anything so raw, so purely ugly, should be so important. Comic books are ugly; it is hard to find anything to admire about their appearance. The paper – it’s like using sand in cooking. And the drawing: it’s true that these artists are capable in a certain sense; the figures are usually well located in depth, they get across action…But there is a soulless emptiness to them, an outrageous vulgarity; and if you do find some that seem, at least, funny and gay, there’s the color. Ouch! It seems to be an axiom in the comic-book world that color which screams, shrieks with the strongest possible discord, is good. Even these aspects of comic-book art are mild and dull when contrasted with the essence of it: the layout, the arrangement of ideas; and that goes, too, for the ideas themselves. (333).
Clearly, Waugh considers comic books a bastardization of the art of the strip. He suggests that part of their appeal to children is the price. They were, at the time, one of the few books a child could easily purchase with their own saved up money. Waugh writes of the comic books’ subject matter, “It was quite natural that educators, clergymen, thinkers, parents, should resent the comic book’s violent challenge to the quieter reading matter to which they were accustomed” (344). Waugh then discusses Sterling North’s article against comic books from the Chicago Daily News. He then applauds those who were attempting to use the comic book format for educational purposes. Besides a discussion of the development of comic books, in which Waugh traces them from the reprint books of newspaper strips to Superman, the majority of his discussion on comic book deals with their form and the controversy over the books’ content. He describes the tone of the pushback as “a happy and cheerful one” (350). Waugh even goes so far as to suggest that heroes wearing masks and hoods evoke the Ku Klux Klan rather than any democratic understanding of justice. In sum, Waugh demonstrates a high culture/low culture divide in the comic industry, in which newspaper strips held the moral and cultural high ground.
This volume is particularly impressive due to the number of comics images Waugh licensed for his book and the information he provides on the early comic strip, his opinion of comic books notwithstanding. ( )