About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (April 20, 2011)
HECK IN THE PACIFIC This week we're talking about the funny pages, so before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to weigh in on one of this paper's perennial hot-button issues, Missy Kulik's Tofu Baby. It's a brilliant strip, a wonderful exercise in minimalism and the artist's ability to take a single premise and run with it in an endless number of ways. And it really pisses people off, which means it must be doing something right. As I've said here before, bad art com forts and good art picks a fight. So bwavo. Tofu Baby. You wule. Now to the main point. Many of you may not realize this, but once upon a time, before the Internet, before 24-hour cable news, before the nightly network broadcast, before television, the American people got the bulk of their information on global events from the daily newspaper. Major cities would have more than one paper and the competition to attract readers had more to do with depth of coverage than the pop of infographics. It seems crazy, but back then, people took time to read. An integral part of the daily paper was the funny pages, so called because the com ics section occupied more than one page, necessary because comic-strip panels were larger than a postage stamp. The comics were an enter tainment rather than a momentary distrac tion. That's hard to believe in these post- Bill Watterson days, I know, but the comics used to be more than just a speed bump. The one-off humorous strips were actually funny, and the daily serials were followed with the fervor we now devote to all matters Kardashian. The undisputed king of the adventure comic strip was Roy Crane. In the 1930s Crane created one of the first and gener ally considered best adventure strips, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, which began life as a humor strip but evolved into a daily exercise in adventure and derring-do as his fortune-hunter heroes fought and loved their way through exotic lands between the wars. Crane's style and storytelling were impeccable, and his imitators, notably Milton (Terry and the Pirates) Caniff, were legion. Although Crane had a successful strip ‘ going, however, he was signed with a comics syndicate with inferior distribution. Small town folks in the heartland thrilled to Captain Easy, but the major markets eluded Crane, as did major-market money. Enter publish ing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who poached Caniff, Hal Foster (Prince Valiant) and Crane for his King Features Syndicate in the early '40s. Suddenly faced with a whole new audience and a world newly at war, Crane created a new strip for Hearst, the exploits of a daring Navy pilot named Buz Sawyer, begin ning in 1943. The result was one of the great est adventure strips ever, the first two years of which have been collected in Buz Savryer. The War in the Pacific (Fantagraphic Books, 2011). John Singer "Buz" Sawyer is an all-Ameri can boy from the tiny town of Willow Springs, TX, who puts his career as a college football hero aside when World War II breaks out. Now a bomber pilot stationed in the Pacific the ater, Buz flies mission after mission accompa nied by his loyal air crewman Roscoe Sweeney, a big lovable lug in the Ernest Borgnine mold. Of course, being a comic-strip hero, Buz goes on the occasional spy mission, gets shot down and captured by the enemy a lot, and finds romance with pneumatic femmes fatales wherever he goes. But the selling points of the series are the aerial battles, which Crane depicts with a kinetic immediacy that's just beautiful to read. The widespread popularity of Buz Sawyer was not lost on the Navy, who granted Crane access to its facilities, bases and carriers to keep him up-to-date on advances in its tech nology and to give him a grunt's-eye view of daily life in the service. Crane's strip, there fore, is packed with verisimilitude, and Crane was an eager propagandist for the Navy. The comic is chock-full of gee-whiz of the kind we haven't seen since the United States decided that everyone else's wars were our business and turned us all into cynics. The bright-eyed, steely resolve of Crane's generation shines in every panel, making it a refreshing bit . of nostalgia as well as an exemplar of sequential art. For all his heroic posturing, Crane does keep his war in its proper perspective. Men are wounded; men die. Planes crash, and often because their pilots make stu pid mistakes. There is collateral damage aplenty, and no death is treated glamor ously. Crane's fighting men are full of bravado, but they'd all rather be home. There are some sour notes in the strip, of course. Typically for comics of the period, the Japanese are depicted as caricatures—buck toothed, pidgin-speaking, and thoroughly without redeeming qualities of any kind, straw people easy to kill. And when the atom bomb arrives, boy are we ever happy about it. It's pointless, however, to judge the strip through the filter of modern political correctness, so just be aware that Buz Sawyer is completely a reflection of its time. That is, after all, what makes the strip so worthy of revisiting and makes a collection like this one such a great investment, this glimpse into a time when America was united in fighting the good fight, from the front lines to the funny pages. For history buffs and comic fans alike, Roy Crane's flyboy provides a great escape from 21st-century cynicism. Local Literary News: Mandala Journal is an annual online student-run multicultural jour nal for poets, writers, artists and thinkers published under the guidance of the Institute for African-American Studies at U6A. The new issue will be launched on Thursday, Apr. 21, and its overarching theme—which guides this year's content—is "reconciliation.'' Featured contributors include writers Sonia Sanchez, LeAnne Howe and Dahlma Llanos-Figuero and artists Kara Walker and Bettye Saar. Visit www. mandala.uga.edu to learn more. JohnG. Netties SAWYER feA. 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