Defender Cartoons

2008 November 7
tags: , , ,
by Josh Brown

The Stripper’s Guide blog sounds a lot more provocative and salacious than this archival comic strip website actually is. But, thanks to Allan Holtz’s passion for documentation, it is always interesting, often surprising, and regularly useful in reminding us how commercial culture in the past harbored a much greater range of diversity and expression than conventional wisdom about and conventional archives of ephemera indicate. The blog’s two most recent postings are a case in point, displaying a number of strips and cartoons published during the mid-twentieth century in the Chicago Defender. While long-running strips such as Bungleton Green have been previously chronicled–albeit with very little detail or analysis–check out the one installment of The Notorious Mr. Jim Crow, which ran in the Defender from 1946 to 1951. The strip is a fascinating example of oppositional expression in a popular format.

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from → General Social History

1 Comment
2008 November 7
Ellen Noonan permalink

“Mr. Jim Crow” is fascinating; I hope he puts up more examples. I find the use of the dialect particularly interesting–it reads exactly like the way that black dialect was usually rendered in popular culture at that time, suggesting/reminding that the use of dialect was as much a regional as a racial characterization.

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