Observed from a distance, the prevalence of ethnic stereotyping in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cartooning in the United States is disturbing. All one can see, initially, is that turn-of-the-century readers seemed to enjoy seeing blacks, Native Americans, and non-Anglo immigrants reduced to simplistic caricatures and made to say and do outrageously stupid things. The Distorted Image, the Balch Institute's exposé on the evils of ethnic caricature, agrees with this assessment, suggesting that “the strips from the early years of this century [the twentieth] are inevitably suffused with crude, even gross stereotypes” in which blacks and ethnic immigrants are “maligned and mistreated with blithe insouciance.” However, a closer inspection of particular characters, mediums, and creators, reveals that there was greater complexity to these “crude” images – a rich history, in fact, of shifting meanings and uses. There were, of course, some blatantly racist depictions of ethnic minorities in cartoons and comic strips during this period, but there was also a complex spectrum of ethnic characters who played out shifting comedic and social roles. By properly contextualizing some of these cartoons – considering how meanings and uses changed according to where the cartoons appeared, who created them, and who read them – many images that initially seem just like more entries in a long line of gross stereotypes begin to reveal layered, ambivalent, and even sympathetic codings.
Many fans and scholars of newspaper comics have observed that an excellent way to chart a social history of American culture in the twentieth century is to look at the mainstream comic strip page. This may be especially true of the first half of the twentieth century when comic strips were avidly followed by readers from almost all age, class, and ethnic demographics. Because of this breadth of popularity, the comics page was a fairly accurate reflector (and occasionally, shaper) of fashions, fads, humor, politics, and racial prejudices. Early cartoonists' ability to place their fingers on the American pulse can largely be attributed to the industry's eagerness to please readers: as a lowbrow entertainment that targeted broad audiences through street corner sales, and later, national syndication, it tried to anticipate the characters, comedy, and ideological content that would attract and retain devoted readers. A few iconoclastic cartoonists such as Al Capp (Li'l Abner) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) challenged readers with topical satire or appealed to niche audiences with quirky humor and aesthetics; but even the most innovative work in the medium relied on a sort of call and response between core readers, syndicates, editors, and artists—a back and forth that insured that the cartoonist's work resonated with, or spoke for, its fans.
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