Of all the giants of comics art, Lyonel Feininger had the shortest career, lasting a mere 10 months at the dawn of the 20th century. Yet his relative handful of Sunday strips has become legendary, and they return to print in April in The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger from Fantagraphics Books.
This is a new edition of a collection originally published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1994, using strips preserved by the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, whose founder, Bill Blackbeard, wrote the book's thought-provoking introduction.
A major reason for Feininger's fame in comics history is that he was the first crossover artist between comics and the world of high art. His paintings and drawings have entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other museums in America and Europe.
That is appropriate, inasmuch as Feininger was himself both American and European. He was born in New York City in 1871 to German-Jewish immigrant parents, but moved to Europe in 1887 and studied art in Berlin, Hamburg and Paris. Feininger had become one of Germany's leading cartoonists when the Chicago Tribune invited him to contribute to its new Sunday comics section in 1906.
Many comics aficionados are aware of the accusations in the 1950s that comic books caused juvenile delinquency. In his introduction, Blackbeard shows that half a century before, early American newspaper comic strips, like Happy Hooligan and The Katzenjammer Kids, with their violent slapstick comedy, were accused of corrupting children's morals.
As a result, Blackbeard argues, the New York Herald sought to run a Sunday comic strip that would strive for artistic heights rather than lowbrow vulgarity (not unlike the New York Times Magazine's "The Funny Pages" nowadays). The result was Winsor McCay's famed Little Nemo in Slumberland. Then the Chicago Tribune commissioned a similarly ambitious comic art section, which would also specifically appeal to the Chicago area's large German population. Its showpiece was Feininger's new comic strip, The Kin-der-Kids, which debuted in April 1906. Feininger introduced his second strip, Wee Willie Winkie's World, that August. In other words, Nemo and Feininger's strips were the alternative comics of their day.
The Kin-der-Kids are a trio of unusual children who set sail in their bathtub on a round-the-world trip, pursued by their Aunt Jim-Jam, who is intent on dosing them with castor oil, and observed by the supernatural entity aptly named Mysterious Pete. This thin, nonsensical story line served to provide Feininger with opportunities to dazzle the reader with amazing sights, such as the Statue of Liberty waving a huge hanky to bid the Kids farewell. Two Sundays later, a harpooned whale leaped out of the sea, voicing his astonishment at his own death: "Who would have thunk it?" Anticipating his later modernist artwork, Feininger emphasized semiabstract shapes such as Aunt Jim-Jam's triangular body; a swirling, serpentine waterspout; Hokusai-like waves; and a conical steeple suspended in midair by a spherical balloon.
In Wee Willie Winkie's World, the narrator, "Your Uncle Feininger," depicted how the title character, a small boy, perceived the world as a place where anything can be alive. Here Feininger set himself the challenge of visualizing things that simultaneously had two distinct identities: for example, a tree trunk that is also an elephant, sheaves of wheat that resemble old women and a red brick house that resembles Santa Claus. ("Your Uncle Feininger" also appears in his familiar self-portrait on the book's cover, as a puppeteer manipulating the Kin-der-Kids cast on strings.)
Feininger's great experiment in comics was a commercial failure. Kin-der-Kids was abruptly canceled in November and Wee Willie Winkie's World came to an end in February 1907, finishing Feininger's career in comics.
Blackbeard blames the vulgar tastes of the masses and the highbrows' prejudice against the comics medium. Yet surely Feininger's writing was also to blame. The Kin-der-Kids had drab one-note personalities, such as Piemouth's gluttony, comparing poorly with the vivid characters of the Katzenjammers. In this world where anything can happen, Feininger never created a sense that anything, including the dangers that the kids face, had any dramatic meaning.
Similarly, though "Uncle Feininger" tells us about Willie's reactions to his world, he never dramatized them. In contrast, consider how McCay enabled his readers to sense Nemo's sense of wonder at Slumberland, and his terror when those wonders turn nightmarish.
In the book, Blackbeard intriguingly compares Richard Outcault's introduction of word balloons into his Yellow Kid strip to the addition of sound to the movies. But Feininger's dialogue for Kin-der-Kids was banal and usually nonessential. Oddly, Blackbeard contends that Wee Willie is a "non-strip," apparently since Feininger uses captions rather than dialogue; it's still a combination of words and pictures. Let the reader beware: since the pages in this collection are reduced from their original Sunday section size, you may need a magnifying glass to read some of the lettering.
However, it is the writing that made Feininger's comic strips enduring classics, but the handsomeness, imaginativeness and charm of his artwork.
As for Feininger, the Chicago Tribune debacle may have served as an early midlife crisis. In 1907, at the age of 36, he turned to painting, absorbing the influences of cubism and expressionism. In 1919 he became a teacher at the Bauhaus, Germany's innovative school of modernist art, architecture and design. With the Nazis' rise to power, Feininger returned to the United States in 1937, where he died in 1956.
Art Spiegelman reprinted a Kin-der-Kids page in his recent book In the Shadow of No Towers, and Feininger was one of the 13 "Masters of American Comics" celebrated in the recent touring museum show by that name. As comics gain cultural respectability, perhaps Feininger will eventually become as famous for his work in cartoon art as for his "serious" paintings—or even more so.
