Comic Strips & Racial Caricature

As has been established by comics historians, early American comic strips would often make use of broad racial caricatures as the subject of specific punchlines, entire comedic premises or even iconic characters. #ComicStrips #ComicsStudies 1/8

Wildly popular figures such as Happy Hooligan (1900-1930) and Abie the Agent (1914-1940) were premised on racial caricature of Irish and Jewish people, respectively, finding a large audience with the potential to mass-disseminate and normalize grotesque portrayals. 2/8

This is something that comics guru Scott McCloud speaks to in Reinventing Comics: “For all the ongoing oppression and biases against women, it’s a rare man who doesn’t interact with the opposite sex on a daily–if not hourly–basis.” 3/8

“But in parts of North America, as elsewhere, it is possible for members of the majority to go for months or even years, without engaging persons of color in conversation. Thus the cultural isolation of minorities can be an order of magnitude greater.” 4/8

In McCloud’s eyes, comics representations of race have a greater capacity to perpetuate and entrench racial rather than gender stereotypes, particularly amongst racially segregated populations. For a mass medium, this is obviously problematic. 5/9

Furthermore, the modern visual lexicon of the cartoon style can be seen to evolve from certain racist caricatures. Homer Simpson, for example, is illustrated with a “Simian Shelf” on his face, a signifier of being unevolved that was used to represent the Irish in the past. 6/8

Thus the legacy of early racial caricatures show its entrenchment as difficult to escape. As Guardian-winning cartoonist Chris Ware notes: I realized a great part of the “visual rush” of comics is at least partially, if not almost entirely, founded in racial caricature.” 7/8

The point, then, is just that the racial grotesques of early comics depictions of race are not so easily dismissed as artifacts of a distant past, that there is still work to be done on this subject and that it isn’t going to be easy. 8/8