By Dennis Drabelle
                  Special to The Washington Post
                  Sunday, July 26, 1998; Page X01

                  COMIC STRIPS AND CONSUMER CULTURE: 1890-1945
                  By Ian Gordon
                  Smithsonian. 233 pp. $29.95

                  COMMIES, COWBOYS, AND JUNGLE QUEENS
                  Comic Books and America, 1945-1954
                  By William W. Savage Jr.
                  Wesleyan. 151 pp. $14.95 paperback
 

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, who writes frequently about comics.

"We have met the enemy," Pogo once famously said, "and he is us." You could sum up these two studies with a paraphrase: "We have read the comics, and they are us, too."

In Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens, William Savage, a history
professor at the University of Oklahoma, argues that, in the decade
between the end of World War II and the comic book industry's adoption
of a prissy code at the height of the McCarthy era, the comics presented a
distorted but recognizable image of American mores. As a thesis, this may
be a non-startler, but Savage fleshes it out in interesting detail and
accessible prose, embellished with well-chosen (if dingy and cramped)
 reproductions of period strips.

Comic books were once a big business. According to Savage, "there
 were, in the postwar decade, between 500 and 650 comic-book titles
appearing monthly, representing a total production, some have claimed, of
60 million copies a month." To this Ian Gordon adds, in Comic Strips and
Consumer Culture, that while "only 30.4 percent of U.S. adults regularly
read a [newspaper] columnist . . . 51.4 percent had a favorite comic strip."
(To clarify a point: The earliest comic books, in the early '30s, consisted of
reprinted newspaper strips. "Superman" in 1938 was the first strip to
originate in book form. But soon the process began working the other way
around, as "Superman" and other book-born strips infiltrated the
newspapers. During the Golden Age of comic books, from 1938 to 1954,
 the newsstand and drugstore racks bulged with both crossovers and
 originals.)

At the same time, of course, nearly every kid had not one or two but more
like two dozen favorites. It's no secret why kids loved the comics so. I, for
 one, first learned to read in that postwar time -- before television and the
 great flowering of children's literature and during a nadir in the quality of
school reading texts. For a good two or three years when I was raring to
 get reading, comic books provided far more gripping and sophisticated
material than the vapid primers featuring David and Ann (the
parochial-school cousins of Dick and Jane) that we wallowed through in
class.

Although I can't speak for those comic-reading adults, they undoubtedly
perused the funnies for the same reason we do today -- in search of a
morning or late-afternoon chuckle. What was markedly different about
newspaper comic pages in the old days was the greater number of
adventure strips, and I remember feeling grown-up when I discovered that
my mother and I both liked "Buzz Sawyer." Since she was also a voracious
reader of adult books, I can only surmise that pre-TV America was
suffering from a melodrama gap that adventure strips helped fill.

Meanwhile, says Ian Gordon, who teaches visual communications at an
Australian college and writes prose as jargon-free as Savage's, the comics
 were becoming henchmen to the American ad industry. As early as 1902,
 Richard Outcault -- creator of the primordial American comic strip
character, the Yellow Kid -- was licensing his new character, Buster
 Brown, "to the manufacturers of a wide variety of products . . . The
importance of Buster Brown's marketing is that it predated, and presaged,
a wholesale shift from text-based to visual, image-centered advertising."

If this was a profane co-optation, readers didn't seem to mind. The brains
behind Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, may have protested the
commodification of their superhero in a story from a November 1938
comic book, in which a fast-buck artist passed himself off as Superman's
rep and authorized endorsements of everything from breakfast cereals to
bathing suits. But there was an ulterior motive at play. At the time, Gordon
points out, the creative duo was being paid only $10 a comic book page
by the publisher. By January 1941, Siegel and Shuster had wrested better
terms: $20 a page and 5 percent of all Superman licensing royalties. No
more punctilios about crassness now -- in the issue published that month,
Gordon reports, "Superman invented a krypto-ray gun that developed
pictures in the camera and projected them on a wall. The story was little
more than an advertisement for a new toy ray gun manufactured by Daisy."

Speaking of the man of steel, Gordon throws in a zowie aside about the
limitations of superheroism. Superman couldn't very well embroil himself in
World War II because, well, what would have stopped a quasi-human
superpower from just ending the consarned thing in a few BIFF-POW
panels? So what to do? DC Comics kept the great one on the sidelines by
having Clark Kent "fail his physical by accidentally using his X-ray vision to
read the eye chart in the next office."

Gordon also tosses in the irresistible tidbit that early pitchmen in the annals
of printed advertising included Henry Ward Beecher pictured in Pears'
soap ads and Emile Zola plugging Vin Mariani brandy (What do you
suppose the creator of the Rougon-Macquart series said? -- J'accuse all
brandies but Vin Mariani?). But then one would expect no less from a
scholar who attests that "for this study I read every 'Gasoline Alley' strip
from 1918 to 1960 and every 'Winnie Winkle' strip from 1920 to 1961."
Gordon's homework pays off in more sober moments, too, as when he
detects residues of African-American dialect humor in, first, the peerless
"Krazy Kat," then in the "derivative Mickey Mouse," and later in other
funny-animal strips.

Despite the commercial use to which comics characters have been put,
Gordon concludes with a tentative claim that they have a kind of demotic
"authenticity lacking in characters developed in other media." This may not
hold up under scrutiny -- do Batman and Little Lulu really reveal the
American pop psyche more accurately than the Thin Man movies or "The
Jack Benny Show"? But if believing it is what enabled Ian Gordon to write
such an engaging little book, who are we to quibble?

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