The comic strip made its first appearance in Hearst’s New York Journal during the circulation war he and Pulitzer conducted in the 1890’s; and it has developed since then into one of the staples of mass media entertainment. Although the typical comic strip mixes slapstick comedy with popular fiction, some cartoonists have managed to use its pictorial shorthand of abstraction and exaggeration to create a fully imagined world that also satirizes our own. George Herriman with his “Krazy Kat” and Al Capp with “Li’l Abner” are two well-known examples, and one of the latest strips to follow in this tradition is Walt Kelly’s “Pogo.” More recently, there have also appeared on the cartooning scene several younger men who have given the satirical tradition a slightly new twist. They do not draw strips as such but employ comic strip techniques in panel cartoons which are complete in themselves. I am thinking particularly of Jules Feiffer and Shel Silverstein.

The ordinary comic strip is like an illustrated serialized novel, and partly for this reason Walt Kelly’s pictures are considerably more detailed than either Feiffer’s or Silverstein’s. The characters in “Pogo” live in a province of the imagination that excludes genuine harshness. This world is a solid one, not only in its drawing, but in its depiction of character and of social relations. It presents a society of children—in the guise of animals—in which Pogo, a possum, acts as everyone’s older brother. While Pogo’s companions worry about lunch, he worries about them. But of course these characters are not simply—or simple—children; in their behavior they imitate the political and social trappings and contradictions of the adult world, and carry them out, ad absurdum.

The nearest thing to “actual” adults in “Pogo” are the caricatured political figures who frequently invade its setting, Okefenokee swamp. But they are like characters who have been imagined in the mind of a wise child. Some years ago when Bulganin and Khrushchev were traveling around Europe, Kelly depicted them in his strip as a parrot—whose only words were “Me, too”—sitting perched on the shoulder of a talkative and contradictory bear. Even the character modeled on the late Senator Joseph McCarthy—Kelly’s most scathing portrait—however deceitful or intent on destruction, was not significantly dangerous. Like children, the animals in “Pogo” find it hard to concentrate for any length of time, and so, inadvertently, they reduce politicians to impotence by not paying enough attention to them.

Kelly’s latest collection, Pogo Extra,¹ concerns the effort to get a bug named Fremount elected President. Fremount has recently learned to sit down and to say, “Jes’ fine”—attributes which his mother believes sufficient to qualify him for the Presidency. She takes a straw vote among Fremount, his aunt, and herself; Fremount wins unanimously. Porkypine says, “A sure sign . . . 100 per cent of the straw vote is perty sheer stuff”—to which Pogo responds, “S’pose they was to sample a little more?” Porky replies: “What a waste that would be . . . the point to stop a poll is when its results match your preconceived conclusions.”

Because of a rumor that Fremount is an Ant Lion, and therefore a cannibal, the attempt to nominate him is dropped. (This is wholly false, however: he is a Rose Chafer by trade.) An effort is made to nominate Pogo, but he is reluctant to accept the responsibility. “It’s your patriotic duty to run,” Churchy La Femme tells him, “you didn’t get elected either time before, did you? . . . With that kind of luck you can do it again.” But the reluctant candidate remains reluctant, and eventually his friends turn their attention to fishing and other important occupations. As the book ends, Pogo says: “One thing fills me with confidence for the country’s future. None of us will get elected.”

But Kelly’s finest achievement in “Pogo” is neither his gentle, though penetrating, political satire nor his creative and brashly entertaining way of playing with language. What he has done is to create a group of characters, deriving more from imagination than observation, who have their own independent source of vitality and appeal. We don’t read Kelly for his general statements about life or society; we read him because he is funny and because he has made us care about the particular animals inhabiting Okefenokee swamp.

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On the other hand, Jules Feiffer’s wit has managed to burn most of the humanity out of his characters. Though his work has the look of a comic strip, it substitutes psychological types for characters, and turns of mind for turns of plot. He began printing these comic nightmares some years ago in the Village Voice, the iconoclastic Greenwich Village weekly, but the appearance of three paperback collections² extended his audience widely, and he is now published in such diverse newspapers as the New York Post and the London Observer. The individuality of his work lies not in the people he draws, nor in the bars and parties which they go to, but in the spate of language behind which they hide. He finds his subjects in the current engagements of the war between men and women, the obsessive rationalizations of the world’s losers, the hypocrisy and muddleheadedness of businessmen and government authorities, the search for socially approved nonconformity. These and other facts of contemporary life are seen under two great shadows: individual anxiety caused by a sense of deeply felt inferiority and public anxiety caused by the Bomb. Ultimately Feiffer may do more to popularize anxiety than Norman Vincent Peale has done to popularize tranquility.

The people in Feiffer’s cartoons spend their time explaining and justifying themselves—not only to others but to themselves. One of their central principles—though they often do not recognize it—was articulated in Groucho Marx’s famous line: “I wouldn’t join a club that would have me for a member.” Yet if these men and women are capable of being bugged by almost anything, they still have an inexhaustible ability to rationalize today’s defeat in preparation for tomorrow’s disaster. A typical character is Bernard—who can’t identify with his name: “I know I would be different if people only called me by my inside name—‘Spike.’” In another panel, a man is pictured lying rigidly on his back, trying to decide if he wants to get up; his decision, after much painful introspection, is to decide to decide if he really wants to rise: “Pretty soon I’ll have to start probing. I’ll count to three.”

The characters drink, of course. “Sometimes I feel small, sometimes I feel larger than life . . . but most of the time I feel just like me—so I drink.” When they are not alone, regrouping their forces, they are out in the world dissipating them. “He: ‘I love you, Dorothy.’ She: ‘What terribly poor judgment.’” The heart of the problem in this and other “lovelorn” panels is that she wants not to be loved but to be taken en passant, while the only way he can think of gaining her love is by convincing her of the strength of his own. Here, far from being the clever strategist of masterful aloofness, the loser loses by explaining the extent of his need.

Feiffer’s victims—however much they are their own worst enemies—must also contend with the man in control, the kind of person who, when asked for a raise, can maneuver his response from, “I like a man who knows his own worth,” to, “A man who strides in here, and demands more money—well, that’s not a happy man, Howard. Now, perhaps you would be happier somewhere else.” Such sophistical villains are the men who win in Feiffer’s world. It is they who organize a “‘fallout is good for you’ saturation campaign” complete with a “‘Mr. and Mrs. Mutation’ contest,” or who happily announce a bomb “so big it will blow up everything! And it’s 100 per cent clean!”

The world as seen by Feiffer is an intellectual and moral slum for which the “big clean bomb” is both a representative symbol and an appalling apotheosis. As his bartending lecturer on the virtue of corruption puts it, we are in a time which “publicly deplores what it privately owes its existence to.” The dwellers in this slum are surrounded by a din of inverted logic and inverted morality. But they are encapsulated by their own personalities, and speak and act primarily to prove something to themselves: that they are different, that they matter, that they are capable of being loved. But they prove nothing: they are so self-absorbed that they are incapable of communication; they have parallel monologues, not conversations. Feiffer’s strength is that in these characters, he has caught quite precisely the distinctive verbal and physical gestures of their prototypes—the people who, of course, compose his audience.

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While Feiffer’s figures crouch behind a screen of words, wondering where everyone has gone, Shel Silverstein’s characters are grimly wordless, trying to duck the one blow that words cannot cushion: mutability. The battle is of man against process, and takes place not in a bar or at a party, but, literally, up and down and back across a double spread of white page. Silverstein’s book “Now here’s my plan” is subtitled “A Book of Futilities.”³ Thus a golfer keeps hitting under his ball. The hole gradually becomes a pit, the pit a crevice. The golfer, at the bottom of the crevice, hacks away through the bottom of the hole. And so out of the bottom of the cartoon slides the golfer. Or, again, “the weakling” has his girl taken away by the beach bully. By extraordinary diligence he builds himself up to double-bully size. Returning to the beach blanket, he bullies the bully. But out of nowhere the latter pulls a pistol, and the ex-weakling backs off as beaten as before. These people do not lose because of their personalities, they lose because life offers no alternative.

Silverstein’s best work is done in either one of two dramatic forms. The first is a story in which the last picture is pretty much the same as the first. A man is sitting in his underwear, drinking beer, when a genie swells from his bottle and makes a bowing gesture implying, “Command me.” The man commands him right back into the bottle; he wants beer, not genie. Since all change leads to greater defeat, the nearest thing to victory is to maintain the status quo. The second form is a complex design which ends simply in a dwindling away. The character in “The Quiet Man” spends his life being yelled at; in his crib by his family, in his youth by his friends and his girl, later by his sergeant, boss, and wife. Even his analyst and parrot yell at him. He slowly begins to grow smaller. A bartender, policeman, judge, and jail-guard yell; he takes on the appearance of a wizened child. Finally, a street dog barks at him, and the man shrinks and shrinks till there is nothing left lying on the ground but a coat and hat. If, in Feiffer, the Bomb shadows all events, in Silverstein, the shadow is cast by the certain facts of futility and of inevitable attrition.

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Recently, both Feiffer and Silverstein have said that the cartoonist they most admire is Saul Steinberg. It is worth comparing their work (as well as Kelly’s) with Steinberg’s, even though the latter’s stems more from modern painting than from the tradition of comic strips. I would suppose that Feiffer and Silverstein hold Steinberg in such high regard at least partially because he has extended the possibilities of the cartoon. Unlike these other men, Steinberg does not communicate his ideas through either stories or conversation, but purely in visual terms. In his hands a few common (or uncommon) shapes become the sole objects of interest, and the result is a non-Euclidean geometry composed of wit and thought. Steinberg’s newest book, The Labyrinth⁴ for example, presents several encounters between Steinberg and the cube. In one drawing a formally dressed, stocky man stands within a transparent cube that is neatly lettered at each corner; the man looks out at a romantic landscape, with moon, fleecy clouds, and delicately drawn vegetation. This is the entire cartoon: it would seem to be Steinberg’s comment on the way civilized man relates to the natural world. In another cartoon, a stately and sensuous shape glides toward a cube and enters it; but the cube manages to digest the shape, and, triumphant, remains alone. A few pages later a solid cube is being attacked by a highly irregular curved line; it enters the cube and comes out the other side rationalized into a complex, geometric design. To consider Feiffer and Steinberg together is to realize that Feiffer is primarily a writer who illustrates his work. Steinberg’s drawing is his idea; words would be as superfluous to his work as, say, to Paul Klee’s. One should be wary of anthropomorphic interpretation of his work; Walt Kelly’s animals are imaginary children, but when Steinberg draws a cube, it is a cube—not a square. Yet it seems to me that his visual brooding over the cube (The Labyrinth has a number of others) has more to say about conformity and nonconformity, and about reason and imagination than do Feiffer’s more explicit satires.

In the first seven pages of the book, Steinberg comes to grips with illusion, and so with the nature of cartooning and art, by examining the possibilities inherent in being a straight line. The sequence starts out with a line drawn by an artist (who himself is drawn with lines) and in successive translations the line becomes part of a geometrical design, part of the ground under a dragon, then the horizon of a wild Egyptian scene reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, then the dividing line between a fairy-tale palace and its reflection in a body of water, then a washline, the top of a table, the bottom and then the top of a wall, the connection between a wall and a ceiling and then a wall and a floor. Finally it moves up the page, becomes a doodle, moves below its original level, becomes an angular maze, returns to its first position where it continues for a few inches as a line—and stops.

Those of Steinberg’s cartoons which contain people make them look like mechanical objects, or predatory birds, or as if they were part of the angular modern furniture in which they sit. (Steinberg’s line is most venomous in his drawings of women; the book swarms with women who wear grotesque faces as if they were the scars of old victories.) His clotted cities (someone has called them “motorarchies”) and arid towns are appropriate settings for such misshapen humans. Steinberg obviously is not a satirist in the same sense that Kelly, Feiffer, or Silverstein are. His visual play is more profound than theirs (or any other cartoonist’s), and his pictures are so aesthetically satisfying that the malice which infuses many of them delights as well as cuts.

Walt Kelly is hobbled by a pervasive compassion (which sometimes falls into sentimentality) that deprives his work of a final muscular strength, even though the strip communicates by its characterizations, plots, and language a wonderfully human delight. With Feiffer and Silverstein the humor is often so implacably cruel and pessimistic that one must look outside of it to explain its popularity entirely. Both men seem to provide a kind of masochistic pleasure that derives from seeing one’s private estimate of oneself and one’s own world printed for all the rest of the world to see. Their audience, conditioned by the ethos of psychoanalysis, does not miss the lack of personal compassion in Feiffer and Silverstein, but finds the most dour interpretation of personal and social behavior to be the most congenial.

Yet all four men have one thing in common: they all criticized America deeply enough to draw blood in media aimed at a widely diversified audience at a time when such criticism was remarkably rare. During the 50’s when one listened to the “sick” comedians, or looked at these cartoonists, one had the feeling that one was not isolated, that there was a widespread underground recognition that things were not “jes’ fine.” It seems apparent now that this “underground” will continue its work in the America of the New Frontier.

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¹ Simon and Schuster, 144 pp., $1.25.

² Sick, Sick, Sick, 96 pp., $1.50; Passionella, 80 pp., $1.75; The Explainers, 128 pp., $1.50: McGraw-Hill.

³ Simon and Schuster, unpaginated, $1.50.

⁴ Harper & Brothers, 256 pp., $7.50.