In the past ninety years the comics have gone from a gimmick to boost newspaper circulation to a cultural institution read daily by millions. Once dismissed as vulgar doodles for children they are now appreciated as an indigenous American art form. In the process these daily offerings of sight gags, one-liners, and ongoing sagas have offered a fascinating index of changing American notions about ethnicity, class, and gender.

Though with antecedents in both the European tradition of picture stories and American graphic humor, the American comic strip proper grew out of a newspaper war in the closing decades of the 19th century (when the large urban daily papers were fighting to increase their circulations.) The immediate genesis was the competition between William Randolph Hearst's New York Journaland Joseph Pulitzer's New York Worldin the 1890's. The modern newspaper strip is often dated symbolically from the appearance of R.F. Outcault's "The Yellow Kid" in the New York Worldon October 18, 1896.

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The Yellow Kid (fig. 1) was a bald, flap eared, one-toothed street urchin who acted as the commentator on life in Hogan's Alley. Located in New York City's slums, the alley was filled with assorted animals, ethnically mixed ragamuffins, and a host of rough looking characters and visiting dignitaries. The tremendous success of "Yellow Kid", in whose honor the term yellow journalism was coined, brought forth a host of competitors. The products of big city papers, this first generation of strips reflected both the ethnic diversity and toughness of urban America. Addressed to "the immature and to those of immature culture," as one comic historian has put it, the comics were a democratic art form, filled with rough, slapstick humor with a grotesque and sadistic edge to it. The early comics also had the greatest ethnic diversity in the history of the medium. There was "Happy Hooligan," the simpleton Irish tramp with a small tin hat who, despite all of his attempts to do the right thing, always ended up in trouble; the German-inspired "Katzenjammer Kids" who spoke in a pidgin German dialect while carrying out an endless series of fiendish pranks; and "Alphonse and Gaston," the obsequious, fawningly polite Frenchmen who bowed and curtsied their way through life. Beneath this top echelon existed a whole world of strips with names like "Little Ah Sid the Chinese Kid," and "Yanitor Yens Yenson."

America's rise as an urban-industrial society was accompanied by the growth of a new mass culture more concerned with consumption than moral uplift; an urban, popular culture that challenged the values of genteel society and small town America. It was a rebellious, exuberant, and commercial new culture that appealed to city dwellers and immigrants, and which found expression in the movies, radio, amusement parks, jazz, and in the comic strips.

The growing success of the funnies quickly attracted the censorious attention of critics concerned about the influence of these boisterous, vulgar entertainments on their readers. This, coupled with their increasing popularity among adult readers, led to the appearance of new strips such as "Buster Brown" (1902) and Windsor McCay's beautifully drawn "Little Nemo in Slumberland" (1905) which brought a new gentility to the funnies and which better reflected the petty-bourgeois, suburban world and social concerns of the growing body of middle-class adult readers.

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In 1914 two classic strips appear in which new Americans saw comic renderings of their own strivings for respectability and social mobility. Harry Hershfield's "Abie the Agent," (1914-1940) has been called the first "adult" comic strip due to its sympathetic and realistic rendering of the exploits of Jewish Abie Kabibble. George McManus's "Bringing Up Father" (fig. 2), one of the most popular strips of all time, began as a grand comedy of manners revolving around the contrasting reactions to new found wealth of an Irish bricklayer, Jiggs, winner of a million dollar sweepstakes, and Maggie, his washerwoman wife. While Maggie devoted herself to social climbing and fruitless attempts to remake her husband into a man of society, Jiggs desired only to escape to Dinty Moore's saloon for the companionship of his old friends, some poker, beer, and his corned beef and cabbage. >

The early era of Sunday "funnies" and sporting page strips was soon supplanted by an art with formalized conventions and regular features. During the 1920's the world of the comics was transformed by the growth of national syndicates which marketed strips to newspapers in every small town, hamlet, and burg in the country. With syndication the comics became a big business. The need to appeal to a broad and amorphous national audience led inevitably to de-emphasis of an urban focus and the curtailment of controversial topics; including religion, occupations, trade unions, politics, and, of course, ethnicity. In their place, the basic subject matter of the comic strips became the family, supplemented by romance, children, and animals. In 1922 the first outright family strip, "The Gumps," won its creator, Sidney Smith, the comic industry's first million dollar contract: $100,000 a year for ten years.

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While in the 1920's the world of comics saw the rise of domestic and pretty girl strips, the 1930's were invigorated with illustrated adventure stories, pioneered in 1929 with the appearance of "Tarzan" (fig. 3) and "Buck Rogers." Modeled after movie serials, these new strips were episodic and, influenced by contemporary advertising art and traditional illustration, were drawn with greater realism than the older gag strips. Soon endless Westerns, science fiction fantasies, melodramas, and action adventures set in exotic locales appeared side by side with the traditional funnies. Many of the new action adventure strips carried what in retrospect appears a naively ethnocentric American image of the world. In strips ranging from "Jungle Jim" and "The Phantom" to "Smilin' Jack," and "Terry and the Pirates,"--the strip credited with pioneering "social usefulness"--the lone American hero matched his wits and muscle against a host of jungle dwelling African savages and sinister, scheming Orientals. In strip after strip, derogatory racial stereotypes of the world's peoples were positioned against mythical images of American physical, moral, and intellectual superiority.

In the decades following the end of the Second World War the naive worldview of the 1930's action-adventure comics, increasingly distant and archaic, came under attack. "Tarzan" would be criticized by African delegations at the United Nations for presenting an image of Africa as a continent consisting solely of jungles and uneducated natives while at home the NAACP would protest the continuing racist humor of certain strips.

Racial humor had never been controversial enough to undergo the sanitization that swept the social universe of the comics after syndication in the 1920's, as can be witnessed by its enduring popularly throughout the first half of the century. In the early 20th century many leading artists had tried their hands at drawing strips featuring Black characters. After abandoning "Hogan's Alley," Outcault created the first strip with a Black protagonist, "Li'l Mose" in 1901. In the ensuing decades countless maids, menservants, pickaninnies, and loafers appeared in dozens of strips. There was Mushmouth in "Moon Mullins," Asbestos, the stableboy in "Joe and Asbestos," and Joe Palooka's valet, Smokey.

By the mid-1940's even Blacks were disappearing from the pages of the nation's comic strips. A 1962 study of comics, sampling the years between 1943 and 1958, provides telling evidence of American attitudes towards ethnicity during this period. Of the 532 characters identified, there was one Afro-American and no Jews. Eighty percent were "100% Americans," and thirteen percent of the rest came from the preferred Anglo-Saxon and Nordic racial stock. While comic strip characters were found to be predominantly middle class, minorities and foreigners were less likely to be employed than all-Americans, and when employed, were most often in labor or service positions. They were more often portrayed in villainous roles and lower-status social positions, expressed a greater desire for power and revenge, a lower interest in material success, and a lower desire for love and affection.

Newspaper comics, like the other mass media, portrayed a homogenous world of white Americans in which the great cultural myth of an equal chance for all Americans, regardless of race, color, place of origin, or social class could be played out without disturbing anomalies or contradictions. The promise of America during this middle period might well be represented by Joe Palooka, a working-class hero of indeterminate ethnicity and saint-like simplicity and goodness. Joe's romance and eventual marriage to socialite Ann Howe aptly represented the thoroughly Anglicized vision of the social mobility theoretically available to all Americans. But then the funnies were in the business of entertainment and could ill afford to offend their audiences. At the 1962 meeting of the National Cartoonists Society, Hal Foster, creator of "Prince Valiant," told delegates of the furious letters he had received because of his inclusion of Nubian slaves, a Jewish merchant, and Irishmen into the medieval world of Prince Valiant.

In the 1960's and early 1970's the national struggle over civil rights was also played out on the comic pages of the nation's newspapers. In 1961 when "On Stage" featured a Black music coach, four papers immediately canceled the strip. The inclusion by creator Dale Messick in 1965 of a Black girl in "Brenda Starr" caused its temporary removal from circulation, in order not to offend readers in the Southern states. In 1970 when Lieutenant Flap joined the gang at Camp Swampee, "Beetle Bailey" was dropped not only by a number of Southern papers but also, for a short while, by Stars and Stripes!

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Gradually Blacks made their appearance in more and more strips. Black officers showed up in Steven Canyon's Air Force and Kerry Drake's police department. In 1968 Franklin first appeared in Charles Schulz's "Peanuts." Blacks already in strips underwent a change in roles, as Mandrake's companion, Lothar, became more of a partner and peer. In 1965 Black artist Morrie Turner's strip "Wee Pals" became the first kid strip with Blacks as social equals to go into syndication. (This was followed by a number of other kid strips including Brumsic Brandon's "Luther" (1968) and Ted Shearer's "Quincy" (1970).) The first integrated adventure strip, "Dateline: Danger," appeared in 1968, soon followed by "Friday Foster," (fig. 4), which featured a Black heroine, of the same name.

While today's comics do reflect the integration of middle-class Blacks into the suburban landscape and the changing roles of women, a quick perusal of the comic pages will, with few exceptions, reveal few distinctly ethnic characters. While images of the "older" immigrant groups surface on occasion, representatives of the newest immigrants, such as Hispanics, Vietnamese, or West Indians are practically non-existent. Even strips like "Hagar the Horrible" are basically domestic comedies in costume. Comic books have taken a far more progressive stance towards race and ethnicity.

With astonishing regularity Americans indulge in a daily ritual of reading the comics, dip into a fantastical world of talking ducks, doltish husbands, and children smart beyond their years. Though the social relations and ethnic composition of this cultural dreamscape have undergone some radical changes in the past ninety years, today, American cartoon characters rarely venture abroad. They still don't talk much about politics, religion, social class, or jobs. Nonetheless, the comics remain a remarkably sensitive barometer of American popular culture, not only in what they have shown, but also in what they leave out. The comics remain a grand compendium of collective reflections; a daily dreamscape that provides an ongoing record of Americans' evolving attitudes towards ethnic class, and gender.

Charles Hardy is an independent radio producer and historical consultant. He was the producer of "The Popular Culture Show, " a series of programs broadcast on WHYY radio in Philadelphia.