Jungle Jim Is A Ramblin' Man...And Quite the Charmer

No one could mistake master artist Alex Raymond for a photo-feminist. In his and scribe Don Moore’s dual successes of the 1930s, Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, barely-clad distressed damsels abounded. To be sure, Raymond understood better than any comic strip artist the erotic potential of the formal, His male and female bodies were delicious. But it also goes almost without saying that the…

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A Tale of Two Comics: Gibson vs. The Comic Strip

Charles Dana Gibson was the grandmaster of magazine illustration by the time the first wave of Pulitzer and Hearst’s cartoonists disrupted the media universe after 1895. And from the beginning, it was clear that newspaper artists, even those that migrated from the humor weeklies, were stretching both the form and subject matter of caricature beyond the genteel sensibilities of Puck and Life. The…

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Mad Men Angst: Dedini and Shulman

You may not think you know Max Shulman and Eldon Dedini, but you probably do. Shulman was a comic novelist of the 1950s whose most famous, enduring creation was The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a short story collection that became an MGM musical in 1953 and a genuinely witty sitcom (1959-1963). But throughout the 1940s and 50s, Shulman was a bestselling satirist of mid-Century suburbia. His 1943…

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Books That Made Me: A Panels & Prose Journey

Panels and Prose began in September 2019 with a modest post about R.F. Outcault’s mentor in urban urchin cartooning, Michael Angelo Woolf. After a series of shorter posts and book reviews, I started writing in earnest the following March a series of deeper long and short essays (that now number over 150) on the comic strip and American culture. This seems a good moment to reassess what this site…

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Charles Dana Gibson Educates Mr. Pipp

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In the Big House With Ella Cinders

The more I read of Bill Conselman and Charlie Plumb’s Ella Cinders strip, it is clear this spunkiest of comic strip heroines has been woefully underrepresented in pop culture history. She was at once big-hearted and hard boiled. She rode the roller coaster of 20s and 30s boom and bust, passing through pop culture fads and economic trends. And this girl took no shit. She was aiming withering barbs…

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(via More Holiday '23 Books for Comics Nerds)

More Holiday '23 Books for Comics Nerds

In the two months since my last roundup of 2023 books, publishers have unleashed a torrent of books aimed at holiday gift giving. So let’s catch up with capsule takes on the more notable releases in this last quarter. The Set-Up by Joseph Moncure March, with illustrations by Erik Kriek (Korero). Probably my favorite holiday book surprise is this heavily illustrated reprint of Joseph March’s 1928…

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(via Prehistoric Nazis: Alley Oop Knows a Fascist When He Sees One)

Prehistoric Nazis: Alley Oop Knows a Fascist When He Sees One

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Ella Cinders Deserves Her Moment

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Not-So-Silly Symphonies: Disney Meets the Depression

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Book Review: From Distressed Damsels to Dauntless Dames

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