Comics: Good Grief

(8 of 10)

Analyzing the Alienated. As the comics have grown up, people have begun to take them more seriously. In 1963, Rome's Communist newspaper L'Unita ran a ponderous analysis of Peanuts in which it concluded that Lucy is a Fascist and all the Peanuts are sad little "alienated" Americans. "It is true," concedes Communist Critic Gianni Toti, "that the comics have their own particular visible universality and are therefore democratic. It is true that during the war Tarzan left to fight Hitler, the Phantom was mobilized to fight the Japanese, and Mandrake engaged in counterespionage. It is true that Goebbels, when he found out that Superman had destroyed the Atlantic Wall with one of his krypto-rays, wrote: This Superman is a Jew!' " But Toti concludes on a properly proletarian note: "The great majority of the comics are in the hands of the monopolistic culture industry and are an integral part of a great machinery of profits."

As in the case of jazz and Faulkner, Europeans pride themselves on having discovered an American art form long before Americans got around to recognizing it. At comics clubs, which have sprung up in France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland, zealous members pore over antique editions of American comics (old strips now fetch about $50 each), discuss by the hour the imperialism of The Phantom or the anarchism of Li'I Abner.

Europeans generally read American strips, but they have produced a couple of sophisticated versions of their own. England's Andy Capp (which also runs in U.S. papers) is a rude little cockney runt who breaks all the comics' rules of decency: he's unable to hold a job, boozes it up, beats his wife. "Andy sets an appalling example for the youth of England," says the London Mirror Group's Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp, "but he is irresistible." France's Barbarella, an unmistakable likeness of Brigitte Bardot, is an oversexed, underdressed space girl who beds down with some fantastic creatures, including a gigantic blind angel and a gentlemanly robot. Sprawled nude in bed with the robot, Barbarella praises his masterful technique. "Ah, madame," replies the self-deprecating robot, "my impulses are rather mechanical."

Breathtaking Censorship. For all the seriousness of European commentators and for all the new approach of style and subject matter, the comics are still regarded by their U.S. creators as largely a pleasant, well-paying business, in which salaries of successful cartoonists run to six figures. Handling this $100 million-a-year business are a dozen powerful syndicates and some 240 smaller ones—many of which handle only a single strip. The syndicates sign up the artist, sell his strip to the newspapers, and then try to convince the papers to keep running it in what Milt Caniff calls a "murderous business."