CARTOONS AGAINST THE AXIS

by Art Spiegelman

Pop quiz: Name the bloody attack on American soil that finally woke us up to the forces of Evil that threatened Democracy and Freedom, rallying the nation to join forces with an international Coalition to battle for the ideals of Western Civilization. Sorry class, if you said “September 11” you’re doomed to repeat the history course… but this time as farce!

Remember Pearl Harbor? Our “leaders” did when they tried to muster support for their current oil war by conjoining Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil.” Tiptoeing past the theologically charged word “Evil” for the moment, I feel compelled to point out that the German, Italian and Japanese powers in 1941 actually met the dictionary definition of “Axis” as “an alliance of powers promoting mutual interests and policies” and—oh, never mind! %@#&!!!! I’ll try not to get lost parsing our evil administration’s endless dissembling and disassembling, but will leave it at saying that, unlike our current debacle, the forces aligned against America in the 1940s could only be beaten back by a war. Most Americans were tangibly inspired to join together and patriotically “Do Our Part”… and that even included cartoonists. This brings us to today’s history lesson in the form of a gloriously motley collection of “Cartoons Against the Axis.”

A traveling exhibition of original drawings mounted shortly after Pearl Harbor to promote the sale of War Bonds, “Cartoons Against the Axis” was conceived and organized by magazine cartoonist Gregory D’Alessio. It was first launched at The Art Students League in New York where D’Alessio was an instructor; and the drawings were returned there by the end of the war to gather dust for over fifty years until Hilda Terry, the creator of the newspaper strip Teena and D’Alessio’s widow, offered them for exhibition to MOCCA as a tribute to her husband and as a means of providing a revealing glimpse into who we once were and where we came from.

Culled from the over 200 cartoons in the 1942 exhibit, the current show has tried to retain some of the xenophobic—even racist—anti-Japanese images, as well as some of the embarrassingly blunt propaganda and even some rather clunky drawings in order to offer a genuinely fair sample of what cartooning and our nation were like in their glory days.

After all, D’Alessio’s original “Cartoons Against the Axis” exhibit grew out of an extended circle of artists who rose to the occasion of promoting the war effort. It certainly didn’t set out specifically to curate the international pinnacle of an art form. George Grosz, John Heartfield and David Low were not part of this mix. Still, through luck-of-the-draw, their equal as an anti-Fascist cartoonist, Arthur Szyk, was represented by a half-dozen acidic and potent ink drawings. Many minor or obscure cartoonists (like Henry Boltinoff, who drew Casey the Cop “filler” pages in old Superman comics and Jay Jackson, a Black cartoonist for the Chicago Defender) share the walls with such recognized masters as Peter Arno and Charles Addams. Some pieces were made specifically as exhortations to buy Liberty Bonds; others were first published as editorial page cartoons. Some of these editorial cartoons made points that have faded like the newsprint that they were printed on. Some—like William Gropper’s and Daniel Fitzpatrick’s—attest to the staying power of political cartoons from the period when the form still had fangs. A number of the pieces were by D’Alessio’s fellow magazine gag cartoonists, and while several of the gags may now seem fatuous when seen through the smug lenses of hindsight (and several others may have lost at least half their point since the captions themselves have gotten lost over the years) many still remain amusing, barbed and/or beautifully drawn.

Among my favorite pieces is a slyly gentle watercolor by Crockett Johnson (creator the sophisticated Barnaby strip of the 40s and of the children’s classic, “Harold and the Purple Crayon”). It shows a rear view of a vaguely simian and dwarf-like Japanese boy offering a Nazi salute to a painting of his “Honorable Ancestor:” Hitler dressed in Ukiyo-e era robes. Another highlight is William Cotton’s lush color caricature of Hitler casually choking Mussolini with one hand while displaying a toy-soldier Hirohito with the other. But it is a gouache painting by Saul Steinberg, in a style unfamiliar to most who know him from his New Yorker covers, that best evokes the odd place between Propaganda and Art where most of these works reside. It shows Der Fuhrer as an unprepossessing Teutonic knight with a small Mussolini strapped to a shield pierced with arrows. Hitler is mounted on a horse that wears a Nazi Helmet and a swastika-patterned blindfold. One of its legs is raised in the Nazi salute while the other, bandaged, is chained to a lit bomb. The damned horse has some of the pathos of Spark Plug (the horse in Billy DeBeck’s 1920s Barney Google strip) but also somehow echoes the tortured equine in the world’s most memorable anti-axis cartoon: Picasso’s Guernica.

As a group these drawings offer a complex and unsanitized range of cartoon art: cartoon as propaganda, as joke, as graphic design, as witness, as howl of anger, and sometimes even as Art. The exhibit functions as a time machine that effectively brings back an earlier, more unified and more admirable America.


©art spiegelman 2005