Funnies
by
For most of the twentieth century, readers in the United States associated comics not only with the comic book and the graphic novel but also with the comic strips in the “funnies” section of their daily newspaper. The funny pages were an essential aspect of twentieth-century US popular culture, serving as the home for many of the most famous fictional Americans: they were where the Yellow Kid explored Hogan’s Alley and the Katzenjammer Kids got into trouble, where Nemo dreamed his little dreams and Krazy Kat fell in love with Ignatz Mouse, where Walt found Skeezix on his doorstep and Blondie married Bumstead, where Nancy and Sluggo got into trouble and Lucy van Pelt pulled the football away from Charlie Brown, where Calvin and Hobbes rode their wagon down the hill and Huey and Riley Freeman fought suburban complacency. Although they have been marginalized by academic comics studies’ project of redeeming the form by elevating it through the superhero comic book and the graphic novel, the funnies represented comics’ dominant distribution strategy for the medium’s first decades and retained significant cultural currency until the turn of the twenty-first century. They are an essential but underexplored dimension of comics history and...
This essay may be found on page 107 of the printed volume.