Tooth, Nail and Tiger-Skin
Britain’s traditional cultural intercourse with Europe has in the past hundred years been supplemented—and possibly, to some extent, supplanted—by a transatlantic inter-traffic. Having no barrier of language to surmount, the exchange between Britain and America has included popular as well as academic culture; aided by radio, talking pictures and, most recently, the long residence of thousands of American servicemen in Britain, the features of everyday life in America have impinged more and more upon British custom.
National culture in America has no long history preceding the mechanization of work and leisure, and so the slick, trashy product is more easily accepted there, while its importation into Britain has frequently caused concern to those who stand as guardians of public taste and morality. The adjective “American,” is often one of disapproval; and never has the disapproval been stronger than for a contemporary art-form which, hard as the moralists try, keeps on growing in popularity—American comics.
American comics are not comic. Their subject- matter is cowboys, crime, horror, adventure, sex and space-travel. Something over fifty million copies are sold every month in the United States, and since the war there has been a growing readership in this country. They are marketed by syndicates which operate on both sides of the Atlantic, and are produced by artists working in assembly-line fashion—one drawing the figures, another doing the lettering, and so on. America calls them “squinkies,” and their stock-in-trade is beatings, bludgeonings and fee faw fums.
The beginnings of strip drawings are ancient Egyptian rock tombs have sets of pictures recording the phases of wrestling bouts and acrobatic feats. The modern comic strip began in the American popular press near the end of the nineteenth century and, until recent years, drew its material almost wholely from workaday and domestic life; the awful child, the henpecked husband and the pert stenographer were its dramatis personae. With humour as the chief intention, the technique and conventions of the strip were perfected.
It was during the great depression that humour gave way to adventure, suspense and muscle-parade; possibly everyday life was too grim to be funny any longer. Tarzan and Superman took over, and the comics turned to worlds where nobody asked: “Brother, can you spare a dime?” The squinkies were born. Their theme was action, and they were uninhibited in portraying it; the war stimulated them to greater extravagances.
The aim of the squinkie artist is to create arresting, vigorous movement and easily recognizable character-types; the limitation of the small squares—and part of them is taken up by the speech “balloons”—prohibits fastidiousness or subtlety. Technical quality varies considerably, from slick, stylish work to that of talentless amateurs. All characters are clearly labelled. Villains have black hair and thin moustaches, scientists are lean and bespectacled, and heroes have a superabundance of muscle (Ka’anga, Lord of the Jungle, has calf muscles slightly larger than his head). Heroines are wasp-waisted, but otherwise pneumatic.
Musical comedy costume is everyday wear in the squinkie world. Janga, Flower of the Wilds, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and Tiger Girl all appear in chic animal-skin swimsuits, while Dara of the Vikings prefers a two-piece, with helmet. The jungle men keep to trunks, of course, and the skymen—Superman, Captain Marvel and the rest—go about in long red underwear. There are rigid conventions of speech, too. In the jungle and other far away places, including outer space, they use archaic English, while all spies talk with strong foreign accents. Girls in danger have to scream “Eeek!” and villains coming to their inevitable sticky ends are obliged to shout “Aarghhh!”
These are the superficial conventions of the American comics. They present, for the most part, fantasy worlds. Into these, however, they project beliefs and customs of the actual world; thus their real content is not in their local colour but in their themes, and carries a much more significant set of conventions.
The simplest, broadest and most obvious of these conventions is that good—which is equated with law and patriotism—must always triumph over its opposite. The squinkies are as determined about this as all other juvenile literature, but infinitely more ruthless; when Captain Thunder or Tiger Girl grapples with evil, the end justifies any means. In the crime strips, the violences of the gangsters and killers are exceeded by those of the police, while the various jungle lords and space conquerors manhandle wrongdoers in ways which make all-in wrestling look soft stuff.
The only circumstances in which good does not always win by a knock-out are those in which unearthly powers are involved. The squinkies have great respect for the supernatural, and make it score freely off the lay population. “The Monster from the Pit,” for example, a shaggy, shark-toothed immortal from Transylvania who changes into a New York policeman by day and goes out for blood at night, is last seen taking a large bite at his would-be slayer’s throat after a graveyard fracas. The postscript asks: “How many more lives will be snuffed out by the evil Grakhu . . . before he is once more sent to the pit of evil which spawned him? None can tell.” The moral clearly is that witches, warlocks, boggarts and long-leggity beasties are a different thing altogether.
If supernatural beings are the highest class of villains, foreigners are the lowest. To be foreign in the squinkies is to be a suspicious character. Spies and saboteurs are easy game, while the perversity of murderers, mad doctors and jungle marauders is explained from their lack of fluent English. Easterners are horrific unless they are the faithful servants of jungle princesses, in which case they are simpletons, or unless they are young women, in which case they are exotic but sinister. The credulous reader can hardly avoid being persuaded that the English-speaking nations breed the best types.
Love is virtually taboo in the squinkies, but they have a high sex content The exploits of the heroines lead them into comprehensive displays of their startling universal physique. Senorita Rio, a Government counter-spy, spends much of her working time being up-ended. Most of the jungle nobility have mates, whom they continually rescue and occasionally call “my love.” Much of the paraphernalia of perversion—inter-woman fights, whips and so on—finds places in the comics, and brings to mind that their era of popularity has also been that of the Hadley Chase school of novelists.
Since their introduction to this country, squinkies have been continually under fire. Educationalists, clergy and the press have united to denounce them as a danger to morals, an incentive to mental laziness, and a cause of delinquency. As has been remarked, that has not reduced their circulation and may even have increased it. Obviously, there is something about American comics. What cultural and social significance have they? And are the charges against them true?
In the hands of accomplished or thoughtful writers and artists, the least agreeable subject-matter can be presented to some value. That cannot be said for the comics. Their situations, dialogue and characterization are crude; their drawing is never better, and usually worse, than competent; they are badly printed in gaudy colours on the cheapest paper. On their intrinsic merits, they could be written off as contemptible or laughable, or—more correctly—classified with lavatory-wall graffiti. Their paramount element, however, is one to which the lavatory wall never pretends: they present ideals and patterns of behaviour.
The principal ideals promoted by the comics have already been noted. Summarized, they are that good always wins in the end, the end justifies any means, being good means being strong, foreigners are nearly always bad, the supernatural is to be respected, and women are to be judged in terms of physical desirability. None of these is a new or unconventional proposition, though the loudest cry against the comics is that they are subversive to morality. These are, in fact, the commonly accepted standards of our society at the present time; it is significant that the last war, which established in public consciousness that ends justify means, also brought forth the squinkies. The ethics of the strip are the ethics of dropping atom-bombs on Japanese cities. It is not a case of saying that the brutalities of the comics are insignificant compared with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though that is true; the important point is that the morality which accepted the atom-bombs as regrettable but necessary means for a “good” cause to subdue an “evil” one is precisely the same as that of the comic, down to the inclusion of such details as the anthropologists’ explanation that the Japanese are not quite the same as other people—scarcely human, in fact.
The behaviour-pattern of the comics, therefore, is an effect primarily and not a cause of modifications in morality, and—more important still—the modifications themselves are produced by the ever-changing stream of social necessity. Morality is the scheme of behaviour needed to safeguard the institutions of a social group; our society, in which the nation-state is constantly preoccupied with war and its preoccupations, has had to modify its scheme to meet the needs of increased belligerency.
The question of sexual morality is not distinct from that of morality generally. The family, the institution which it protects in our society, has in recent years weakened as a coherent and durable group; the result has been a sharp slackening in the formerly rigid code of sexual morals. The carnality of the comics mirrors rather than promotes this trend; in fact, there are few popular papers and magazines which do not deem it necessary for their circulations’ sake to titillate their readers’ sexual imaginations. The juxtaposition of venery and violence in the comics has additional significance. Popular fiction and the films show an increasing addiction to this sort of subject-matter; its emergence as a dominant theme in the past has preceded the ends of social epochs—the decline of Rome, the seventeenth century in England, and the years before the revolution in Russia.
The anger against American comics, then, is anger against the changing conventions of our time—in some cases, perhaps, the rage of Caliban at seeing his face in the glass. It remains to consider the other charge against them, that they are encouragements to mental laziness. If this were true, it would apply also to the popular press and most of the agencies for supplying information and entertainment. The publishers of comics, like the press and the entertainment industries, give the public what the public can cope with. The truth is that the education given to a great number of working people provides them with neither the verbal skill nor the critical outlook necessary to serious reading. They are equipped to read comics, tabloid newspapers, simple-phrased stories, and very little else. A great deal is heard about the near-illiteracy of Army recruits (one hears nothing, however, of illiteracy among young women—presumably because they are not conscripted for anything); their lack of simple verbal mechanics being known, it seems hardly consistent to accuse them of mental laziness because they like comics.
The squinkies, then, are part of the cultural pattern of our time, and reflect its consciousness just as the popular domestic novel reflected that of Victorian England. Their simple function is to provide escape, but their illusory or distant worlds form backgrounds against which the modern morality play is acted; that the morality is brutal and prurient is a comment upon our society, not upon the passing phenomena which mirror it. The exclusion of American comics from this country would mean no loss. Neither, however, would it contribute to the re-establishment of moral standards which are no longer compatible with the driving forces of society, or to an improvement in the literacy of Army recruits. The sincere, worried people who want the comics banned have failed to understand the relationship between a popular art-form and its irreversible social environment; if they could do so, there would be less concern with the rash on the face and more with the organic causes of the malaise of our society.
R.COSTER