Comics, Daily Newspaper

Children, teens, and youth cultures have been central preoccupations of comic strips and their critics since the development of the medium at the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century, there were debates as to whether the stories and images depicted—many of them featuring children—were an antidote or a symptom of a decline in cultural standards and moral values in the wake of a new era of mass culture. By the end of the 20th century, these concerns were replaced by a growing lament that the American comic strip had stagnated and no longer held the American public's attention the way it once had. As in the previous century, there are complaints that the comics have become more commodity than art form. Such arguments fail to take into account the subtle shifts that have been infused into comic strips, particularly those featuring children, over the past few decades, nor do they recognize the continued popularity of many comic strips in other media, sustained through increasingly synergistic cross-promotional and intertextual marketing strategies in an age of media conglomeration.

Predecessors of the comic strip date back as far as the 13th century. They include 17th- and 18th-century printed broadsheets featuring both religious and profane images and 19th-century humor magazines such as Puck (1876) and Judge (1887), which printed several political and social cartoons in each issue. However, the recognizable elements of the modern comic strip did not fully emerge until the 1890s and were fueled by the newspaper syndication wars fought by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Recognizable elements included recurring characters, dialogue balloons, and sequential art. Earlier comic illustrations typically were only one panel, with an accompanying script below or adjacent to the image, [Page 192][Page 193]and rarely featured the same cast of characters from one issue to the next.

This 12-frame comic strip shows Buster Brown and his dog Tige inspired by the sight of a group of Boy Scouts drilling with rifles and flags. Buster and Tige sign up with a recruiter, who gives Buster a list of rules—in particular, the command, “Always respect your elders.” That night, Buster is awakened by a man wearing a false beard and carrying a pistol, who tells Buster to show him where the valuables are kept. In line with his resolution to respect elders, Buster shows him the safe. Later, his horrified mother informs him that the man was a burglar. Buster reflects that, after all, “Soldiers are not kind to their elders.” The strip concludes with a long “resolution” in which Buster resolves to do what he can to show his devotion to his country. Richard F. Outcault originated the Buster Brown strip in the New York Herald in 1902, but in 1905, he was lured away by William Randolph Hearst and moved the strip to the New York American. The Boy Scouts in this sequence are probably members of one of the rival, more militaristic groups of Boy Scouts that flourished briefly in the second decade of the 20th century.

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