Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 3

September 12, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: The Boondocks

[150 yearsago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debutedthe first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So inhonor of that anniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four otherexamples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend posthighlighting other ComicsStudiers!]

On two contrastingbut complementary ways the turn of the 21C strip broke new ground.

Firstthings first: Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks (1996-2006) was by no meansthe first syndicated daily comic strip to focus on African American characters.From what I can tell, that honor goes in part to John Saunders and AlMcWilliams’s relatively short-lived Dateline:Danger! (1968-1974), which was inspired by the TV show I Spy and sofeatured one Black spy and one white spy as its main characters; that strip wasfollowed closely by two longer-running daily strips that more fully focused onBlack protagonists, BrumsicBrandon Jr.’s Luther (1968-1986) and TedShearer’s Quincy (1970-1986). Each of those examples is uniqueand interesting and worth its own extended analysis beyond these brief mentions—especiallyLuther and Quincy, which were at least as groundbreaking in theirfocus on African American children within a long-established genre and mediumas was Ezra JackKeats’s The Snowy Day (1963), and of course did so across many,many more pages than could a short children’s book—and I hope to have thechance to revisit them for future posts in this space.

While TheBoondocks—which was initially publishedonline in 1996, then in the hip hop magazine TheSource beginning in 1997, and then nationally syndicated beginning in April 1999—thuswasn’t the first syndicated comic strip to focus on African American characters,it still featured a groundbreaking variety and depth of community. Thoseearlier strips had largely featured young Black characters living in the innercity, while McGruder took his two young protagonists, brothers Huey and RileyFreeman, out to a predominantly white suburb, allowing for multilayeredexaminations of race, childhood, education, community, and more. And McGruderalso included a much broader range of Black characters, including the boys’grandfather and caretaker Robert (a WWII veteran with a decidedly moreconservative point of view than Huey), Huey’s best friend Caesar, hismixed-race young neighbor Jazmine, and many more, which allowed the strip toexplore those same themes within the African American community in depth. Touse literary critical terms, The Boondocks offered a level of socialrealism that I don’t know if any of these earlier strips could match.

At the sametime, this was a comic strip; while that doesn’t always or necessarily equateto humor as a primary goal, there’s a reason they call them the funny pages. Andwhen it came to the strip’s more comedic elements, McGruder often veered awayfrom the purely realistic and toward the satirical with a heavy dose of the absurd.To name two distinct but equally telling examples: there was the series of strips“Condi Needs a Man,”where Huey and Caesar create a personal ad for then-Secretary of StateCondoleeza Rice, describingher as a “female Darth Vader type that seeks loving male to torture”; or,to connect this week’s series to the historic anniversary we’ve just passed,there was the post-9/11series of strips where McGruder featured a talking yellow ribbon (Ribbon) andAmerican flag (Flagee) to challenge the moment’s embrace of blind patriotism.In many ways these satirical absurdities reflected Huey’s own perspective,making it a level of psychological realism to complement the social realism;but they also made sure this comic strip was as engaged with its historical andsocial contexts as Doonesbury or any strip, and even stronger for thatextra layer.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?

September 11, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: Doonesbury

[150 yearsago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debutedthe first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So inhonor of that anniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four otherexamples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend posthighlighting other ComicsStudiers!]

On threeinteresting evolutions of one of our longest-running and mostinfluential comic strips.

Doonesbury debutedas a daily strip almost 55 years ago, but it actually goes back evenfurther than that. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau createdit while he was an undergraduate at Yale, and the comic, then known as Bull Tales,appeared from 1968 to 1970 in the Yale Daily News. That strip focused onvery specific events and figures from the Yale community, though, and so when thenow-graduated Trudeau landed his renamed strip in syndication with the brand-newUniversal Press Syndicatein October 1970, he revised a number of elements, including the setting (now thefictional Walden College) and the primary situation (with the two maincharacters, Mike and B.D., now roommates at that college). But it was stillfocused on that college setting and stage of life, and would remain so until Trudeautook an extendedhiatus in 1983-1984. It’s interesting to think that such a politically-mindedcomic (which was the case from the jump, as I’ll discuss further in a moment)spent its first 15 years using college students and conversations as a framefor those political debates.

In 1975,less than five years after the publication of that debut strip, Doonesburywon the Pulitzer Prizefor Editorial Cartooning, becoming the first daily comic to win a Pulitzer. Alsoin 1975, President GeraldFord tellingly joked, at the Radio and Television Correspondents’Association dinner, that “There are only three major vehicles to keep usinformed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the printmedia, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order.” There were lotsof reasons for the strip’s very quick and impressive ascent to such heights ofprominence and acclaim, including of course Trudeau’s own unique talent for combininghumor, humanity, and biting political commentary. But if timing isn’t everything,it’s a darn important thing, and I’m sure Trudeau would agree that the toweringpresence of Watergate in those early years was instrumental in establishing hisstrip as a must-read, inside Washington and far beyond the capital. To cite onetelling example, the Pulitzer committee explicitly pointed to the August1974 “Stonewall” strip as an illustration of Doonesbury’s exemplary EditorialCartooning.

The 50years since the Pulitzer have seen various, not surprising evolutions in boththe content and contexts for Trudeau’s comic: the original characters have agedalongside the cartoonist, and their children and other new characters have beencreated to extend the stories; Trudeau has gradually moved to a model where thedaily strips are reruns and only Sundays are new strips; and so on. But he’salso been willing to evolve in more unexpected ways, and to my mind the moststriking was a2004 plotline in which original character B.D. (aVietnam veteran from the strip’s early years) served in the Iraq War, losta leg in combat, and became both a representation of veterans’ experiences and anadvocate for their rights upon his return home. So striking and successful wasthis thread that when Trudeau published and expanded those strips in book form,as TheLong Road Home: One Step at a Time (2005), longtime Doonesburycritic John McCain wrotethe foreword. Any strip that can stay so timely and relevant after decadesdeserves all the longevity and accolades it wants!

Last striptomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?

September 10, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: Dennis the Menace

[150 yearsago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted thefirst comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of thatanniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of howthe medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting otherComicsStudiers!]

On three tellingaspects of a longstanding, troublemakingpresence on the funny pages.

1)     Autobiographical origins: Cartoonist HankKetcham’s four year old son Dennis was such a youthful troublemaker thatHank’s wife Alice was known to exclaim, “Your son is a menace!” Shortlythereafter, on March12th, 1951, Hank debuteda comic strip entitled Dennis theMenace, featuring the Mitchell family: father Henry/Hank, mother Alice, andson Dennis. I don’t mean to suggest that every comic strip is based on the lifeand identity of the cartoonist, necessarily—but I’m willing to bet that quiteoften, even when he or she changes certain elements, there’s at least anautobiographical core (ie, DikBrowne didn’t live in Viking times, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t agood deal of Hagar the Horriblein Dik nonetheless). In any case, Dennis’s mischievous exploits are portrayedwith such precision and begrudging love that it’s no surprise to learn thatthere was a real-life kid behind the freckles and overalls.

2)     Multicultural misstep: Every comic strip that’saround for decades must evolve over that time (although they don’t always—I’mlooking at you, Garfield), and notall of those changes are going to work out, particularly when they engage withcomplex cultural issues in periods of social shifts. In the late 1960s, Kethamintroduced Jackson, an African-American neighbor of Dennis’ drawn very overtlyin the stereotypical(and by this time quite outdated) “pickaninny” style. I’m not sure I canany more concisely sum up the problems with this character, both in image andin how Ketcham used him for humor, than does this May1970 strip. There’s not really ever a good time to introduce such a racistcharacter, but the late 1960s was a particularly bad time, and as might beexpected protestserupted at newspaper offices in Detroit, Little Rock, and St. Louis, amongothers. Ketcham agreed to shelve Jackson, although the quotes of his in thatlast hyperlinked story indicate that he never quite understood why such aracist depiction wouldn’t be the best way to add a new culture into his strip’sworld.

3)     Still serialized: Ketcham retired in 1994 andpassed away in 2001, but Denniscontinues to this day: drawn by his former assistants MarcusHamilton and RonFerdinand, and serialized in at least 1000 newspapers in nearly 50countries. That the strip is still going strong more than 70 years after itsdebut certainly reflects the universal appeal of a mischievous but lovableyoung boy and of family and neighborhood life. But at the same time, I wouldargue that the longstanding presence of so many decades-old strips—my hometownpaper, the Charlottesville (VA) DailyProgress, features asignificant percentage of the same strips I grew up reading a few decadesago—reflects a genre that is somewhat slower to adapt than the culture andsociety around it. Am I suggesting that Dennis, Hagar, Dagwood and Blondie,Garfield, and their venerable peers aren’t always the most engaged with life in2025 America? Yes, yes I am—and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing(timelessness isn’t necessarily less desirable than timeliness), it needs atleast to be balanced by newer and more 21st century strips.

Next striptomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?

September 9, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: The Yellow Kid

[150 yearsago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted thefirst comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of thatanniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of howthe medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting otherComicsStudiers!]

Two waysin which a very short-lived comic strip character has lived on for well morethan a century.

I hope it’sobvious how much I’m constantly learning from researching and writing this blog,but just in case not—in case, that is, these posts could be read as if I knewall these things all along, which is only very very rarely the case—I’ll giveyou a telling example: when I put “The Yellow Kid” on the list of topics forthis week’s blog series, I was under the impression that he was a long-runningcharacter (possibly Asian American, although of that I was decidedly unsurefrom the jump) who appeared in a comic strip named after him for decades aroundthe turn of the 20th century. Whereas it turns out only “the turn ofthe 20th century” part is at all accurate: the character named Mickey Dugan, whocame to be known as “TheYellow Kid” due to his strikingly large and colorful shirt on which variousmessages would be featured, appeared in a supporting role in a different strip,RichardOutcault’s Hogan’s Alley; and, despite the fact that he wouldeventually be drawn by both Outcault and rival cartoonist George Luks for twodifferent papers (more on that in the third paragraph), he was only really presentat all for about four total years, between 1895 and 1898. See, I’m alwayslearning over here!

In thatbrief time, The Yellow Kid—or, more exactly, the strips that featured him—did leavea couple significant and lasting cultural impressions, however. The first was aturning point in the medium of the comic strip itself: Outcault’sgroundbreaking use of word balloons to present character voices anddialogue. Ironically, the Kid himself was the one character to whom this generallydidn’t apply, as he mostly stayed silent (or rather typically spoke only throughthewords that appeared on his over-sized yellow shirt). But every other characterin these strips did consistently speak in word balloons,and this important innovation would become the norm in how comic stripcharacter speech (and eventually that of characters in comic books, graphicnovels, and related media) was represented. For those of us who grew up readingthe funny pages every morning with our honey nut cheerios and cinnamon raisintoast (or, y’know, insert your childhood favorite breakfast therein), it’simpossible to imagine deciphering what’s happening in those comic stripswithout the aid of word balloons (and their parallel, thought bubbles). Butthat was the case before Richard Outcault.

The YellowKid’s other lasting legacy is a much less purposeful—we might even say accidental—butjust as significant one. When Outcault was hired away from Joseph Pulitzer’s NewYork World by WilliamRandolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1896, he continued to drawhis comic strips at the new paper; but he was unable to successfully copyright TheYellow Kid, and so Pulitzer hiredGeorge Luks to draw his own Yellow Kid strips for the World. For ayear, these two competing papers and publishers featured likewise competingYellow Kids, and so the two publications began to be called “yellow kidpapers.” The phrase evolved into “yellow kid journalism” and then just “yellowjournalism,” and as a result of the shortening was applied to the style ofthe papers as a whole, not just their featured comic strip character. And sinceboth papers prioritized sensationalism and sales over factual accuracy or cautiousreporting, the phrase likewise evolved to characterize a particular brand of journalismthat endured and indeed spread long after this moment. So every time we use thephrase “yellow journalism,” we owe a debt to little Mickey Dugan and his greatbig shirt—and now we all know!

Next striptomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?

September 8, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: The First American Comic

[150 yearsago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted thefirst comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of thatanniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of howthe medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting otherComicsStudiers!]

On twopublications that can help contextualize the first American comic strip.

TheSeptember 11, 1875 edition of the DailyGraphic illustrated newspaperfeatured “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm,” a series of 17 images from theyoung cartoonist Livingston “Hop”Hopkins (1846-1927) that constitute the first newspaper comic strip inAmerican history. I haven’t been able to find a complete digitization of thestrip online, but I trust the description in this excellent 2017 Truthdigarticle that traces the history of political cartoons (in response to a newpublication entitled TheRealist Cartoons). As described there by the journalist and formerTruthdig cartoonist Mr. Fish(Dwayne Booth), Hopkins’s strip depicts the titular professor (who wouldreturn in subsequent Hopkins comics such as “ProfessorTigwissel in the Adirondacks”) building an elaborate “burglar alarm” basedon firearms and weaponry, failing utterly to stop a burglary, and then declaringsuccess, “perpetuating a notion that we are best protected by the machinery ofour paranoia and a weaponized mistrust of the world rather than a less hystericaladherence to truth, justice, humanitarianism, and mutual cooperation.”

Amen! Hopkins’s1875 comic strip helped create a groundbreaking new media that has becomehugely popular in the 150 years since (as this week’s series will illustrate),but it was also very reflective of his own evolving career and perspective as apolitical cartoonist. Less than a year after that first “Professor Tigwissel”strip appeared, Hopkins would publish a book that really embodied his evolving artisticand political perspective and goals: AComic History of the United States, Copiously Illustrated by the Author fromSketches Taken at a Safe Distance (1876; it’s available in full at thatlink and I highly recommend checking it out!). By “Comic” in the title Hopkins meansfirst and foremost humorous, and the book is most definitely that, making it avery worthy predecessor to something like my childhood favorite Dave Barry SleptHere: A Sort of History of the United States (1989). But I really likethat the word is also a pun for the new medium that he was in the process ofhelping create, and while this book has a higher percentage of words and fewerillustrations than a typical comic strip, I would argue it nonetheless reflectsa parallel use of illustration to help tell a story.

Just sevenyears after publishing that book Hopkins moved to Australia, where he worked forthe Sydney Bulletin magazine for the rest of his career (and lived withhis family for the rest of his life). But before then he took another importantprofessional step, drawing for New York City’s Puck magazinebetween 1880 and 1883. Puck had been founded in 1876 as aGerman-language humor and satire magazine (its founder, JosephKeppler, was an Austrian immigrant and political cartoonist) and beganpublishing in English a year later, making it in the process the first Americanmagazine to focus on humor as its central goal. But it was also more specificthan that, focused especially on politicaland social writing, cartoons, caricatures,and the like. Hopkins continued to publish his comics and cartoons in multiple periodicalsduring these final years in the U.S., but I would argue that every one of them—suchas thiscartoon published in the Daily Graphic in 1882—reveals the talentsas a political cartoonist he was honing at Puck, skills that had been visiblefrom that first comic strip back in 1875.

Next striptomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?

September 6-7, 2025: A Preview of My Podcast’s 2nd Season

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’veoffered some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to this weekend updateon my plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

At thistime last September, I was about to drop theSecond Inning of my podcast The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball,Bigotry, and the Battle for America. As I highlighted throughout last year’sThanksgivingblog series, working on that podcast was one of my favorite scholarlyprojects across my career, and I’ve been thinking ever since about whether andhow I mightcreate a second season. I’m now definitely planning to do so (likely in my upcomingSpring semester sabbatical), and have decided to focus on a particularly uniqueand important baseball history—the stadiumbuilt at the World War II Japanese incarceration camp at Manzanar, and thegames that have been played there, both in the 1940s and at the rebuiltstadium last year. To say that these incarceration camps have become morerelevant in 2025 than I ever imagined possible is to understate the case, andthat makes this baseball stadium and its histories equally timely, both as areminder of the worst of what we’re capable of and as an inspiring glimpse intohow the best of America endures even at these lowest points. I’m excited todive into those histories and stories, and will keep you all posted as Season 2approaches!

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 5, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: The Boys in College!

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

Last Fall,I ended my Fall semester preview series with apost sharing my excitement about my older son Aidan’s first semester incollege. He had a great Fall, and a great first year overall, which makes methat much more excited for this Fall when we’re doubling up the excitement:Aidan will be starting his second year atVanderbilt; and my younger son Kyle will be starting his own first year atMichigan. In a very special SaturdayEvening Post Considering History columnthis past June, I reflected on just how much I’ve learned about Americanhistory and stories from the boys’ academic experiences, and I ended that post witha Native American poet and artist (Tommy Pico)about whom I learned from one of Aidan’s first-year classes. I’m sure therewill be a lot more such lessons across both boys’ semester and years, and Ilook forward to sharing some of them with y’all here!

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 4, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II Online

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

When itcomes an online-only section of American Lit II, I’m not able to do the kindsof community-building conversations that are part of the in-person sections andabout one of which I wrote in yesterday’s post. Even after more than a decadeteaching these online courses, I can’t pretend that I’ve fully figured out howto build community in this alternate space, and I don’t imagine I will ever getto the point where it feels like the equivalent of an in-person classroom(which is why I am committed to only teaching these online courses as a smallpart of my overall workload). But one thing I greatly respect about the FSUstudents who take these online classes is that they take very seriously my requirementthat they respond to one of their classmate’s Blackboard posts each week. Iknow that requirement can seem like busy work and lead to very boilerplateresponses (“Good points, I agree,” that sort of thing), but across the boardour FSU students push past that default and offer much more thoughtfulengagement with each other’s work. As a result, I really look forward toreading their responses each week, making for a continuing positive moment allsemester!

Lastsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 3, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II in Person

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

I’mteaching sections of my American Literature II survey class both in-person andonline this semester, and so for these next two posts wanted to highlight aspecific type of moment that is unique to each of those particular settings.For the in-person section, one thing I have kept consistent across my 20 yearsof teaching this course at FSU has been how we end the semester: with a coupledays where the students share their own chosen authors/artists, people andworks that have been important to their identities and perspectives. We do thisin part because we’ve gotten up to the present moment in our readings, and ofcourse all of us are also part of this present moment; and in part because it’sa great way to learn a bit more about each of us before we end our time andwork together. But a very nice ancillary benefit is that I also tend to learnabout at least a couple authors/artists I hadn’t heard of before, and that’s agreat reminder of how much I still have to learn, here in year 21 andthroughout my career!

Nextsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 2, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

At a lotof colleges/universities, the more senior faculty members don’t tend to teachintroductory-level courses like First-Year Writing. But while this class doesbring with it a ton more papers and thus grading than upper-level lit courses orthe like, I am being 100% genuine when I tell you that I’m so, so glad I get toteach at least one first-year writing section every semester (and will have twothis Fall). For lots of reasons, including the chance to meet and work withsome of our new students every year (and, yes, possibly recruit some to beEnglish Majors and/or Minors!). But also because these classes bring with themsome of my favorite units and assignments—such as the third Unit and fourthPaper in my FYW I class, where students practice the skills of close reading byanalyzing a song of their choice. Every time I learnabout at least a couple artists I didn’t know previously, and as anancillary but not unimportant benefit I also get to help students realize thatthey do enjoy poetry, just in the form that the vast majority of us experiencein our lives.

Nextsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?