Lara Saguisag
Forfatter af Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics
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Discussing comics focusing on immigrant children, Saguisag writes, “The popularity of the immigrant child motif can be understood as a response to European and East Asian immigration; Progressive Era cartoonists, it seems, found the image of the child to be useful shorthand for communicating the perceived inferiority and physical, mental, and emotional underdevelopment of the nation’s new arrivals” (pg. 25). Of stereotyped portrayals of African Americans, Saguisag writes, “Widespread discriminatory and exclusionary practices were symptoms of Progressive Era obsession with race. In the newspaper comic supplement, the marginal yet persistent presence of black caricatures signaled such white preoccupation with the subject of blackness” (pg. 55). Saguisag’s examination of the mischievous boy demonstrates early moral entrepreneurs like those who would instigate the creation of the Comics Code Authority. She writes, “Many Progressive Era commentators were alarmed by the proliferation of naughty kids in the pages of newspaper comic supplements. Fearful that children would imitate these fictional pranksters, parents, educators, and reformers launched campaigns that called for the regulation and sometimes the outright elimination of the supplement. Percival Chubb emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the naughty kid comics” (pg. 86). According to Saguisag, “Chubb… expressed the assumption that children are impressionable and that the strips could easily prod them to become troublemakers. For Chubb, young readers of the supplements were a potential threat to familiar and social order, just like the mischief-making characters they encountered in their reading” (pg. 87).
Turning to fantasy strips, Saguisag writes, “These strips perpetuated the image of the highly imaginative child and insisted that his perception and experience of the world was shaped by an ‘intrinsic’ proclivity for fantasy” (pg. 115). She continues, “These fantasy comic strips also offered a visual theory of childhood, in the sense that they presented pictorial representations of the contents of children’s dreams and processes of children’s imagination and perception… they made tangible and accessible the parts of the child that were not readily visible and available to the adult” (pg. 119). Of the way comic strips expressed the gender values of the Progressive Era, Saguisag writes, “The antiauthoritarianism embodied by the comic strip’s naughty boy was deeply intertwined with the national values of freedom and equality. However, girl-centered comics, whether intentionally or inadvertently, exposed how some cultural groups were excluded from such visions of independence and egalitarianism” (pg. 173). Finally, “[these comics] called attention to the tensions that marked Progressive Era girlhood and the strains placed on girls and women who were pulled in oppositional directions as they confronted the demands of domestic duties and recognized the possibilities of public participation. The strips narrativized the ways girls and women faced restrictions and experienced freedoms” (pg. 173-174).
While previous historians have written about the key comic strips and characters from this period, such as Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Yellow Kid, Saguisag identifies a key gap in the historiography and corrects it with her focus on Progressive understandings of childhood and how the comics reinforced and subverted them, sometimes simultaneously. In taking the time to focus on different experiences of childhood, from the European immigrants in New York City to African Americans in the South and early-Great Migration North, to the different gendered expectations, Saguisag puts these comics back in their historical context with new ideas of social uplift, eugenics, and the American empire. A must read for comics history scholars.… (mere)