C'mon, when was the last time I yammered on ceaselessly about comics?
As you may know, I don't read very many modern comics these days, preferring instead to comb the Half Price Books for long out-of-print collections of cartoons that might have been popular once but are now mostly forgotten. Part of what's interesting to me about these old cartoons is what they say about the people who were reading them at the time. I only buy ones I think are actually funny, insightful, or well-drawn, so it's not just any old thing goes. Recently I ran across a volume of the early years of Mutt & Jeff. I was mostly familiar with this in the context of "famous strip from the past that gets namechecked in all the histories," but I hadn't really read it, and figured I might as well find out what's up with this thing.

I'm about halfway through the book now (there are approximately 375 strips in there) and I've actually been finding it a bit of a chore, much moreso than I would have expected. Part of it is the repetitive nature of the humor - it's very much based in a vaudeville mindset, so you have the standard setup: slightly smarter shyster has slightly dumber lackey that he takes advantage of, and they hit each other periodically. (Mutt & Jeff got its start in 1905 or so, and the strips in this collection are culled from, I'm guessing, the first 10 years; maddeningly, the publisher didn't include dates for the strips.)

You could say more or less the same thing about Krazy Kat: that you have a vaudeville setup of one guy hits the other, repeat. The difference is in the execution. KK creator George Herriman obviously got bored with the vaudeville formula early on, and while the core of the strip was always mouse hits cat with brick, the event was surrounded by poetic writing, a rich landscape, a large dose of Mexican heritage (Herriman fell in love with Arizona and the ethnic mix of the people there), and a love triangle that caused periodic trouble for having all of the characters go by male pronouns most of the time (Krazy is most often male, sometimes female, and sometimes not specified).

Krazy Kat was never wildly popular, and mostly exists because William Randolph Hearst loved it and bullied his editors into running it (which would be like Rupert Murdoch insisting that the page 3 girl is followed by Chris Ware's latest Acme Novelty Library strip - not even remotely the right target audience). Mutt & Jeff, meanwhile, was one of the most popular comic strips of its day, and creator Bud Fisher managed to snag his own copyright, thereby making himself a millionaire on merchandising - an unheard or arrangement for the time.

The racism on display in many of the strips, while not surprising or out-of-line for the times, is nevertheless stomach-churning. It's so egregious I'm frankly annoyed with the collection's editors for utterly failing to mention it in the introduction (this volume, while undated, was clearly published within the last 10 years). There are, for example, several strips written at the time of "Great White Hope" James Jeffries' boxing comeback against black boxer Jack Johnson, and feature that fight prominently. Jeffries explicitly went into the fight "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro." Well, Jeffries lost (hello, schadenfreude!), much to the deep embarrassment of his white supporters, including Bud Fisher. I do not understand how you can leave that kind of historical information out of a volume collecting these strips, especially when the only "joke" in some of them is that one of the main characters is sitting in the "colored" section of the fight audience (because, ha ha, a white guy sitting with a bunch of nigras, ha ha, what could be funnier).

The main thing this collection has going for it, at least from my perspective, is the rich catalogue of early 20th century New York slang (Fisher was based in NYC). Some of the passages are almost impenetrable and take a few moments to figure out. If I wind up keeping this book it will as a dictionary. Some favorites: gink = guy, sky-piece = hat, behave foundry = jail, the real noise = where it's at, this is poor = this is awesome. But the strip itself? Mostly the bunk.