Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Millionaire in Chains. The Waldorf-Astoria luncheon celebrated a comic-strip milestone: McManus had started Bringing Up Father in the old New York American exactly a third of a century ago. Its durability was a monument to the public's tolerance of a stereotype endlessly repeated, and to Publisher Hearst's taste in comics. Most readers were under the impression that Jiggs had never changed in all the years they had read it. But it wasn't so: the women's dress styles in Jiggs had advanced to circa 1928, and Jiggs himself looked quite different...
Oscar Wilde was the epitome of the fin de siecle spirit and "The Importance of Being Earnest," first produced in 1895, is the epitome of Oscar Wilde. The pose of jaded cynicism and brittle sophistication thinly covers a high-spirited appreciation of the comic, and his wit, compounded of epigrammatic form and paradoxical and unconventional sentiments is, if less "shocking" today, still distinctive and sparkling...
Just what do you critics expect from a generation that has been brought up on comic books, flabby popular music, motion pictures that are hag-ridden by the Hays office and the Legion of so-called Decency, and the unending flood of nauseating pap that drools from our shiny little radios? Who is responsible for the fact that our young men now helling about Europe and lousing up the reputation of the U.S. have their heads stuffed with nonsense...
...take his comic book or his radio away from him now because he's used to them and he might cry, but you can work for, fight for a decent, liberal educational system, for better pay for teachers so that better teachers will come to nourish the minds of the next generation. You can stop patronizing the stupidest 90% of Hollywood's products until they stop making them and are forced to use talent, intelligence and new ideas. You can demand that your radio station devote more time to adult entertainment. You can club together...
Only a few, like Webster, still try to stick to the comic strip's old and worthy function: holding a mirror to a recognizable U.S. life. The late Clare Briggs's Mr. and Mrs., as an appreciation of marriage, made books like Cass Timberlane .look as naive as Daisy Ashford. Harry J. Tuthill's remarkable Bungle Family, almost alone among comics, dared to gaze steadily at the plain, awful ugliness and clumsiness to which the domesticated human animal is liable. When you have counted these -and Frank King's mild, wholesome Gasoline Alley, Chic Young...