History is catching up with you

I bought a wonderful book today at New York's Housing Works Cafe. It's a used bookstore that offers pretty good prices for a charitable cause. And hey, a spiral staircase to one of those cool upper level hallways without a second floor that only bookstores seem to have. And, apparently, cute bag-check lasses who will flirt with you unprovoked. Hooray for charity!

Actually, it was several good books, including David Celsi's Welcome to the Zone, which I'd been looking for forever, and recently canceled an order with Amazon because even they couldn't fill it. They even had Grant Morrison's take on The Avengers (the spies, not the superheroes). They also had a number of innovative Wildstorm titles from the last few years, which I've noticed nobody besides Steven Grant has mentioned are the best damn superhero comics in memory.

But the book in question is Coulton Waugh's The Comics, a historical critique of comic strips and books in America. The trick is, Waugh wrote it in 1947, when American comics were hardly considered worthy of a 350-page historical account. Even though at the time, comics were charging strong. The books had just come off a titanic swell in World War II, and strips still ruled the pages. Plus, he was a cartoonist himself, so he had some background information.

Here, I says to meself, is a handy research tool for a couple of projects I'm writing, steeped in the Golden Age. And it is. But I thought this passage might be worth sharing in these times of Grand Theft Auto and hysterical crybabies like John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly fictionalizing a culture war. (As Hearst said, You furnish the pictures...):

Looking over the color section of the New York Herald in 1906, we find little that could irritate parents, whose angry protests had already killed "The Yellow Kid," and whose voices, aided by pulpit and the conservative press, were to attempt a vain crusade against comic art in general, about the year 1910.

It was a time of worried parents, cynical politicians seeking popular gains, and hollow journalists pushing unprovoked wars. Nearly a century later, plus ce meme chose.

Waugh's book has its prejudices toward the strip format and humor over what he considers to be less human work, but he put an incredible amount of his life into this book, at a time when there was no guaranteed audience. Twenty pages in, it's already a fantastic source of information and exposition. Do look for a copy if you care at all about secret histories or the origins of our art form. Keep making art, and even better, keep making pop that someone will later call art. Don't sweat the moaners and groaners.