Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 6

September 18, 2025: Censorship Histories: Banning vs. Challenging Books

[On September19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept ofparental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate thatcomplex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leadingup to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]

On why theconcept of “banned books” isn’t quite as obviously wrong as we might think.

You’re not likelyto find a more lifelong opponent of banning books, and I do mean lifelong—as Inoted in the intro to this2019 series, one of my favorite sweatshirts in high school (what can I say,I was an uber-nerd) read “Celebrate Freedom, Read a Banned Book” and then listed a group of works that have been bannedat one time or another. So it wasn’t easy for me to write the teaser sentenceabove, believe me. But the truth is that in our conversations about banning andcensorship we tend to conflate a couple pretty different actions: attempting to remove books from schools and/or libraries (a practice that I thoroughly oppose); andadvocating that we not teach books in particular classes, for certain gradelevels, and so on. The latter, which is generally known instead as “challenging” those books, is certainly complicated and often problematic, but is not the same asbanning the book from those institutions.

For a case inpoint, we could go to the ur-source for such conversations: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Within a year of its 1885 American publication the novel was banned by the Concord Public Library, the first of many such bannings. But even if we agree with the premisethat the CPL and other banning institutions were mistaken (and I do), itdoesn’t necessarily follow that Huckis (for example) perfectly fine to teach in middle or high school Englishclassrooms (both places where it has been taught with some frequency). On that question I tend to agree with my late Dad, Stephen Railton, who argued that the book’s defenders have short-changed genuine questions about itslanguage and racial depictions, particularly when it comes to the challenges ofpresenting them to younger readers. Which is to say, challenges of Huck in the classroom not only aren’tthe same as banning or censorship—they also have, at least, a leg to stand on.

And then there’sthe case of Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993). Lowry’s award-winning novel is one of the most acclaimed young adult books of the last few decades,and so it stands to reason that it would be a good choice to teach in middleschool classrooms. But while the novel does not include unintentionallyproblematic or objectional material like Twain’s book, it does create anincredibly complex and dark dystopian world, one in which characters,situations, and themes are far more sophisticated and troubling than in manyother young adult works. There’s something—a great deal, in fact—to be said forteaching precisely such complex works, provided there is sufficient time andspace for the teacher and students to discuss and analyze and engage with thosecomplexities. But there’s also something to be said for parents andorganizations worrying that, in the absence of those resources, Lowry’s novelwill affect students more negatively than positively. I don’t agree with the challenges that Lowry’s novel has received, but I understand them—and they shouldn’t all be dismissed as simplecensorship.

Lastcensored history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?

September 17, 2025: Censorship Histories: The Sedition Act

[On September19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept ofparental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate thatcomplex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leadingup to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]

On three frustratingexamples of federal censorship under the aegis of the Sedition Act.

In 1918,Congress passed theSedition Act, a follow-up to the 1917 Espionage Act and a law which made itillegal to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous,or abusive language” about a wide range of topics including the government, theConstitution, the military, and the flag. In lieu of a full first paragraph, I’llask you to check out thisprior post where I discussed these two laws, and then come on back for a fewexamples of how the Sedition Act in particular was applied to censor Americans.

Welcomeback! In Chapter 5 of Of Thee I Sing, I write about a couple examples offederal censorship under these laws: “The PostmasterGeneral refused to mail copies of TheJeffersonian, a newsletter published by the Southern populist andanti-war activist Tom Watson; when Watson foughtback in court a federal judge called the publication and its pacifistsentiments “poison” … And eight members of the religious organization the WatchTower Bible and Tract Society were convictedunder the Espionage Act, based on charges stemming largely from thefollowing sentence in their anti-war book The Finished Mystery:‘And yet under the guise of patriotism civil governments of the earth demand ofpeace-loving men the sacrifice of themselves and their loved ones and thebutchery of their fellows, and hail it as a duty demanded by the laws ofheaven.’” Defining pacificism and critical patriotism as “sedition” and “espionage”are pitch-perfect examples of the kind of vague rationalizations for censorshipI discussed in yesterday’s post.

Even morevague and broad was the useof the law to charge and jail the prominent socialist leader Eugene Debs.Debs had pledged his support to three men imprisoned for violating the Espionageand Sedition Acts, and based only on those words of his he too was charged; as hewrote to a friend, “I am expecting nothing but conviction under a lawflagrantly unconstitutional and which was framed especially for the suppressionof free speech.” Not only was he frustratingly correct, but the Supreme Court wouldgo on to uphold his conviction in Debs v. United States (1919).When words of support can be legally censored—and indeed can lead to legalcharges and criminal convictions—we’re only a very short distance away from “thoughtpolice,” which is, I would argue, the ultimate goal of all forms of censorship.

Nextcensored history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?

September 16, 2025: Censorship Histories: The Comstock Act

[On September19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept ofparental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate thatcomplex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leadingup to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]

On onegenuinely important application of a controversial law, and a far moresignificant underlying problem.

In lieu ofa full first paragraph here, I’m going to ask you to check out a couple prior pieces.There’s this January2023 post of mine on 1873 anniversaries, where I say a bit about theComstock Act. And there’s this trio of pieces for thewonderful Nursing Clio blog that trace different histories and contemporary contextsfor the Act. Those should give a bit of helpful framing for this controversial andenduring 1873 law (as does that 19th News article), and thencome on back for a couple further thoughts.

Welcomeback! One of the key goals of the Comstock Act was to definefor the first time, at least in terms of legal debates in the UnitedStates, concepts like “obscenity” and “pornography.” I’ll get to the significantand evolving problems with that goal in a moment, but it’s important to notethat one consistent and entirely laudatory applicationof these elements of the Act over the last half-century has been toprosecute child pornographers. See for example this CatholicNews Agency interview with retired FBI agent Roger Young, who specializedin such cases and who argues that “when I first began working child pornographycases early in 1977, there were no child porn laws. We used obscenity laws toprosecute child porn.” As recently as 2021, ThomasAlan Arthur was, through the application of the Comstock Act, successfullyprosecuted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for running a website featuringchild pornography (a 21st century application of the law’s emphasison sending obscene materials throughthe mail).

Child pornographyis, I hope we can all agree, obscene and worth stopping by any legal means possible.But the problem with the Comstock Act is that its definition of obscenity is purposefullyand strikingly vague, and as a result it can, has been, and is continuingto be applied far more broadly and troublingly. That has most consistently beenthe case when it comes to reproductive rights—Comstockwas famously draconian when it came to sex and sexuality, and so the law andits terms were both initially designed to challenge things like birthcontrol and abortionand have been used as such frequently (applications which are seeing a resurgencein 2025). But, as we’ll see again tomorrow with the use of “sedition” as a legalconcept in the early 20th century, censorship and those who seek topractice it depend on precisely this kind of vague, broad language. If we wantto ban child pornography, as we should and must, then the relevant laws shouldstate that goal specifically and clearly; if we seek to ban all that’s “obscene,”we are inevitably going to find ourselves at the mercy of how our leaders (and,often, our most extremist leaders at that) define that concept.  

Nextcensored history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?

September 15, 2025: Censorship Histories: The Zenger Case

[On September19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept ofparental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate thatcomplex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leadingup to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]

On twodistinct but interconnected lessons from a groundbreaking censorship trial.

In 1733,the German American immigrant, printer, and journalist John Peter Zenger(1697-1746) began publishingstrident critiques of New York’s colonial governor William Cosby in Zenger’snewspaper The NewYork Weekly Journal. Cosby had been abusing his power since his appointmentto the post, and Zenger used his paper to call out these abuses, sharing hisown arguments as well as those of others in the state’s Popular Party. The enragedCosby issueda proclamation condemning the paper as “scandalous, virulent, false, andseditious,” and when that did not stop its publication he had Zenger arrestedand charged with libel in 1734. After nearly a year in prison, Zenger’s casewas brought totrial in August 1735; although the Judge James DeLancey was a hand-pickedfavorite of Cosby’s, Zenger’s lawyer Andrew Hamilton argued his case directly to thejury, and after only ten minutes of deliberation they returneda verdict of not guilty (in opposition to the judge’s instructions to focusonly on the question of whether Zenger had in fact published the articles inquestion, not their veracity, making this an early example of jury nullification).

Inreturning that groundbreaking verdict, the Zenger jury were also helpingadvance an important idea about the freedom of the press: namely, that truth isan absolute defense against libel. Ironically, that same idea had been thesubject of a February1733 opinion piece in The New York Weekly Journal, authored by “Cato”(a pen name shared by the journalists John Trenchardand Thomas Gordon). In that op ed, which closely parallels Gordon’s earlierpiece “ReflectionsUpon Libelling,” Cato makes the case that even though “a libel is not lessthe libel for being true,” it remains vital to highlight “when the crimes ofmen come to affect the public…states have suffered or perished for not having,or for neglecting, the power to accuse great men who were criminals, or thoughtto be so…surely it cannot be more pernicious to calumniate even good men, than notto be able to accuse ill ones.” When Judge DeLancey instructed the jury only toconsider whether Zenger had published his critiques of Cosby, he was trying to instituteprecisely the opposite idea in law; and when the jury rejected those instructionsand ruled that Zenger was not guilty because his articles were true, they werestriking a vital blow for the future of a free press in the colonies.

Thatprinciple is, or at least should be, universal to every era and everycommunity. But I would nonetheless note that Zenger’s own identity andcommunity, his status as a German immigrant (from the region known as the German Palatinate)to New York and the colonies, adds important layers to these histories. Partlythat’s because after Zenger’s family immigrated to New York when he was ateeanger, he was apprenticedto a local printer (WilliamBradford), as a result of a policy through which all immigrant childrenfrom that German region would be apprenticed out. But I would also argue thatthis community as a whole not only reflects the significant diversityfound in 18th century New York, but also and especially remindsus that it is precisely this foundational diversity which has so oftencontributed to our shared national ideals (including the freedoms of the press,speech, religion,and more). That is, while Zenger’s heritage had nothing to do with the truth ofhis accusations against Governor Cosby, it nonetheless represents another vitaltruth about 18th century America—and its legacies to this day.

Nextcensored history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?

September 13-14, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: Fellow ComicsStudiers

[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’ve blogged about that strip and fourother examples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to this specialweekend post highlighting other ComicsStudiers!]

A handfulof the many awesome folks we should all be reading to learn more aboutComicsStudying.

I have tostart by sharing a vital resource that also features a wealth of citations offellow ComicsStudiers: this excellent ReviewRoulette newsletter from Vaughn Joy, where she shared an early publicationof hers that both models and teaches analyzing comics and engages and cites aton of great scholars as well. Make sure to read the whole thing and my workhere will be done!

One of themost important individual scholars of all things comics is IanGordon, as illustrated by his book ComicStrips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 (1998), edited collections like Comics and Ideology(2001), and much more.

Ian also editedacollection on Charles Schultz, and for a recent public scholarlypublication focused on all things Peanuts, check out Blake Scott Ball’s CharlieBrown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts(2021).

One of the best current ComicsStudiers is my friend Matthew Teutsch, as illustrated by this recent post of his on using comics in the Comp/Rhet classroom.

Muchcomics studying has focused on male cartoonists, so for an important correctiveto that trend check out Trina Robbins’s book A Century of WomenCartoonists (1993).

Similarly, I love the revisionist use of comics and graphic images in Walter Greason & Tim Fielder's The Graphic History of Hip Hop (2024).

Finally, I’dbe remiss if I didn’t include the single most famous work of comics studying,Scott McCloud’s graphic book UnderstandingComics: The Invisible Art (1993).

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Comics scholars or strips you’d highlight?

PPS. I also have to highlight here the responses to Tuesday's post that the great historian J.L. Bell shared on Bluesky, in response to this post in particular.

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?