A cartoonist discusses his new show about the development of an American art form.
By Chris Ware August 28, 2021 The New Yorker

I'm not sure what it is about a pandemic that makes people want to see comic strips on the walls of an art museum. Here in Chicago, there are currently five exhibitions covering this American mon= grel art form, from its early days to the present. Among them is the Chicago Cultural Center's "Chicago: Where the Comics Came to Life," which I designed and curated, with the help of my friend, the historian Tim Samuelson, and others. In it, we tried to piece together the story of comics from about 1880 through the nineteen-sixties. (A sister exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art's excellent "Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now" takes up where we leave off.)

In the eighteen-eighties, William Schmedtgen, a Chicago-based engraver, introduced a way to quickly etch images and set them into the columns of a newspaper. This innovation allowed for the development of America's first= color comics, in 1893, and its first daily comic strip, in 1903. For many years, the pages of the ChicagoTribune contained some of the strangest and most progressive popular art this country had yet produced: 'Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye" (1905), which may be the first comic strip about a same-sex couple; Lyonel Feininger's "Kin-der-Kids" (1906); and the long-running graphic novel "Gasoline Alley" (1918), which was based on the artist-author Frank King's own family and showed its characters aging at the same rate as its readers.

In 1906, an editor at the Chicago Tribune travelled to Germany to invite four artists to liven up and elevate its flagging comic section. One of them was the New York City-born Lyonel Feininger, an important member of the Bauhaus, who created "The Kin-der-Kids." Chicago never had it so good.

Caitlin McGurk, a research librarian at Ohio State University, unearthed this edition of 'Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye,' which was published on August 27, 1905, in the Chicago Tribune. This anonymous strip ran for close to eight months, and it always pictured its two protagonists furtively kissing for as long as they could before something swept them apart.

'Gasoline Alley,' November 4, 1928. Frank King created this strip, which began as a side panel about the then-new fad of automobiles, after the Chicago Tribune editor James Patterson suggested he introduce a baby into the strip. This graphic masterpiece, under King, focussed on a father-son relationship based loosely, and sometimes painfully, on details from his own life. (It continues to appear to this day under its fourth cartoonist,, Jim Scancarelli.

'Crazy Quilt,' May 17, 1914. The Chicago Tribune allowed artists to experiment in its pages well into the nineteen-tens. This is probably the first example of an improvisatory comics 'jam': Charles Lederer, then in his twilight years, contributed to the collaborative project, along with his young contemporaries Frank King ('Gasoline Alley') and Sidney Smith ('The Gumps').

Bungleton Green,' the Chicago Defender, June 30, 1928. Leslie Rogers created the strip for what was the most widely circulated Black newspaper in America at the time, and he was probably the best known Black comic-strip artist of his day.

'Home Folks,' by Jay Jackson, nineteen-fifties. Jackson was an African American cartoonist who worked for a variety of publications, including the Defender. His depictions of quotidian Black experience captured a warmth and humanity of African American life seldom, if ever, seen in the white press.
Comics are often seen as a gateway to 'real reading' by those who don't understand the difference between reading pictures and just looking at them; comics are no more words with pictures than singing is just words with yelling. The artists I got to know as I worked on this exhibit worked tirelessly to develop a language th= at has spread into the American vernacular, inspiring serialized storytelling = via radio plays, television sitcoms, and, these days, many of the Netflix serie= s that got some of us through the past year. So they're at least worth a look.

All visitors to to the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center receive a sixteen-page, full-color lithographed comic section, reproduced at the original large size of early comics in the medium (ink on newsprint) for which they were intended=97along with a special sixteen-page collection of a then-teenaged Daniel Day's earliest cartoons for the Chicago Defender (Day was said to be the newspaper's youngest hire).

Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life (1880-1960), curated by Chris Ware with Tim Samuelson, is on display at the Chicago Cultural Center, Sidney Yates Gallery, from now through January 9, 2022.