Kate Farrell, Storyteller

Why I Love Comic Strips: Back to the ‘50s

By

YellowstoneStIt was another lazy summer afternoon on the south side of San Antonio, Texas, probably 1951. My brother and I were huddled on the cement steps of our small house on Yellowstone Street, waiting for the paperboy to ride down our one-block street and deliver the afternoon paper. Why? We were anxious to read the next installment of our favorite comic strips.

For me, it was Prince Valiant, an amazing hero who had death defying adventures, part of King Arthur’s court. I found his blue-black bobbed hair and striking features alluring, his feats fascinating. His Sunday comics in full color were even more wonderful—with complete episodes.

VAL_Ensemble1But of equal interest were the exploits of Dick Tracy, detective, and others who fought against crime, like Super Man. The vivid graphics of each strip were stimulating, bigger than life.

It was worth our wait in the fierce heat, anticipation heightened by the sound of a bicycle bell. We observed the wobbly bike approach, as each rolled paper was thrown, house-by-house, ever nearer to our dried lawn of crab grass.

A newfangled television set was an unheard of luxury for most of us in our lower class, south side neighborhood. In our minds, newspaper comics arriving by bicycle everyday were just too good to be true—an awesome event.

Little did we know that these very comics were helping us develop literacy skills and build our reading comprehension. We were “reading between the lines,” making inferences, using graphic clues to interpret emotional reactions.

No matter that the newsprint smeared our fingers and elbows, that the newspaper became lining for our garbage cans. We had tasted a world of imagination, courage, and intrigue, far, far away—only to wait for the next day’s installment.

 (Note: This is a recent photo of our house from a real estate site. When we lived there, the front porch was screened and there were no bars on the windows or fences along the front yard. The simple cement steps and path are the same.)

Secret History of Wonder Woman

By

Hist-WonderWomanNot until I read the national bestseller, The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, did I have any inkling that the comic book series was based on first-wave feminist sensibilities. The origins of Wonder Woman began on New York’s Lower East Side within a radical group that included Margaret Sanger and the founding of Planned Parenthood.

Lepore writes, “Wonder Woman isn’t only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman.”

The actual creator of the iconic super heroine, William Moulton Marston, was a bohemian scholar and offbeat psychologist who invented the lie detector test. During the time between the two 20th-century world wars, when social mores relaxed, Marston experimented with science and learned feminism from the women he loved.

His creation of Wonder Woman became the perfect storm for so many cultural, scientific, and political upheavals that a reasonable argument can be made: Had the Amazonian Princess never been born, America would be a different place. An ardent feminist, Marston developed the concepts and plots for the first comic strips of Wonder Woman with the clear intention of influencing the direction of popular culture.

It’s interesting to me (of course) that Wonder Woman was first released as a comic strip character in 1941, the year I was born. She was an influence on my own girlhood identity, shaped by the comic books that proliferated throughout the ‘40s.

m_ms_w_womanWhen Wonder Woman faded from popularity in the ‘50s with the advent of television, I didn’t realize how much she still meant until she reappeared out of the blue on the first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1972. Not knowing her secret history, Wonder Woman was to me the perfect icon for second-wave feminism. Now I understand: that was the point all along.

 

 

 

Kahili: The Quest

By

Kahili-iceThe ancient goddess of snow and ice, Poliahu, long content to live in the icy regions of the world, resting in the snows of high mountains and in the great ice masses of the North and South Poles, awoke. She felt the heat of a warming Earth. Angry that her ice kingdom was melting, her glaciers breaking up and icebergs drifting away to the great salt seas, she blamed her archenemy and rival, Pele, goddess of volcanic fire, and vowed revenge.

Poliahu was mistaken; Pele was not to blame for the ice melt, but there was no one to tell Poliahu otherwise. She came on Pele unaware and attacked her with a full strength of ice and snow, covering the mythic volcano on Kahili, the land beyond the horizon where Pele dwelled—a place of spirit and primal power. Poliahu plugged up the volcano’s fiery, steaming cone with a dense glacier. Soon the land around the mountain became a frozen wasteland. Poliahu remained on Kahili, among the folds of her glacier, watching and waiting. At the first puff of smoke, she swore to strike again.

Pele, taken by surprise, was now captive under layers of ice and snow. Barely breathing, she warmed herself with the glow from the earth’s core. Volcanoes around the world cooled and the earth tentcity-flickr-glasto_2009_606surrounding them froze, burying towns and villages in a blanket of ice. Pele struggled to fight her way out of her prison and as she did, the earth trembled, oceans rose, earthquakes toppled buildings, while millions fled to open fields. Tent cities sprang up around the globe—everyone became a refugee with nowhere to turn.