Abstract
This chapter compares and contrasts the way artists James Bancks and Percy Crosbie used similar humor tropes, such as broken window gags, in their respective comic strips Ginger Meggs and Skippy. It also examines the different styles needed in a daily and a Sunday comic strip. The two strips shared much and yet each had a distinctive type of humor that requires some familiarity with the culture of origin to fully comprehend.
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Notes
- 1.
New York, 1870, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab10.txt; New York, 1900, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab13.txt; Sydney: Norman Abjorensen, and James C. Docherty, Historical Dictionary of Australia (Lantham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 432.
- 2.
Ian Gordon, “The Symbol of a Nation: Ginger Meggs and Australian National Identity,” Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 34 (September 1992): 1–14.
- 3.
Jared Gardner, “Introduction,” Skippy Volume 1: Complete Dailies 1925–1927 (San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2012), 7–58.
- 4.
Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood (New York: Free Press, 2001), 376.
- 5.
James Bancks, More Adventures of Ginger Meggs (Sydney: Associated Newspapers, 1939). Unfortunately I was unable to date this strip during research at the State Library of NSW in 1987 and again in 2015.
- 6.
The 1938 strip “Bang Goes a Cigar,” was reprinted in James Bancks, More Adventures of Ginger Meggs (Sydney: Associated Newspapers, 1939). Unfortunately I was unable to date this strip during research at the State Library of NSW in 1987 and again in 2015.
- 7.
I made this point in Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 18–20.
- 8.
Ian Gordon, “The Symbol of a Nation.”
- 9.
In 1987 the late James Kemsley, then the artist producing Ginger Meggs, drew my attention to this shared tossing the coin gag. Kemsley and Jim Russell, the longtime artist on the other outstanding Australian comic strip The Potts, suggested that Skippy was a source of inspiration for Bancks. Just what they meant by inspiration was unclear, but Russell did point out that another Australian artist, Syd Nicholls, directly based the look of Sease, one of the supporting characters in his Fatty Finn comic strip, on Skippy using the beat up derby and a similar tie. This conversation took place in the Sutton Grove Hotel May 20, 1987, and as with any story told in an Australian pub should be treated with some caution. But the Fatty Finn strip of February 14, 1932 (yet another broken window gag) clearly shows Sease is based on Skippy.
- 10.
Stefanie Affeldt, Consuming Whiteness: Australian Racism and the “White Sugar” Campaign (Berlin: Lit, 2014), 214. On The Bulletin see Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship (Ringwood, VIC: Allen Lane, 1983).
- 11.
For the development of Chinese laundries in the USA and the resulting popular stereotype, see John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the shaping of American culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
- 12.
Michael Williams, Chinese Settlement in NSW: A Thematic History (Sydney: NSW Office of the Environment and Heritage, 1999), 20, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/…/chinesehistory.pdf
- 13.
Richard Waterhouse, “The Minstrel Show and Australian Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 24 (Winter 1990): 147–166.
- 14.
At least three Sunday strips by Crosby used tar as a gag. Crosby did not attempt a race joke in any of these strips, which appeared April 13 and June 29, 1930, and April 17, 1932. Given that tar was so often used to make racial jokes, and given the absence of any other race jokes in the strips I have reviewed, Crosby might have had a change of mindset. But just as a single racist joke doesn’t make someone a virulent racist, nor does the absence of such jokes make them not a racist, or indeed antiracist.
- 15.
As a primary school student in Sydney, my neighbor built a cart from old vegetable crates for me to drive in my school’s billy cart derby.
- 16.
Barbara Postema, Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments (Rochester, NY: RIT Press, 2013); Neil Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Nick Sousanis, Unflattening (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007) and Comics and Narration (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015).
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Gordon, I. (2016). America and Australia: Skippy and Ginger Meggs. In: Kid Comic Strips. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55580-9_2
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