THE COMIC STRIP

One after another of the Things People Look Down On have, so to speak, been officially blessed by people who ought to know what they are talking about, until all rules of classification have been badly shaken, if not wholly destroyed. Jazz and moving pictures were brought into the fold by Gilbert Seldes, in his book "The Seven Lively Arts," and Mr. Seldes has now stretched an arm into limbo and brought back the comic strip, which has long been devoured avidly by children, and surreptitiously by grown-ups. It seems that comic strips, when done by such competent artists as Webster, Briggs, and Rube Goldberg give a more realistic picture of bits of American life than any of the modern novels of unromantic detail have done.

In his article in the current New Republic Mr. Seldes calls these purveyors of amusement "sour commentators," and of the work of Goldberg, for example, says: "It is extraordinarily unkind, yet without rancor, and is almost dispassionate in its cruelty." One can agree heartily with Mr. Seldes when he praises the writers of comic strips because they never verge into the nauseating sentimentality of most magazines and moving pictures. Yet they are, in his phrase, "male and ugly," with negligible plots, formed of cruelty and violence. His reason, however, as to why the comic strip is read so widely by the very people who are so savagely satirized in it does not appear to lie in a "tough-minded population not among the intellectuals, but among the very draymen, shop clerks, and bond salesmen who are the raw material." Like the readers of "Babbitt," the members of this tough-minded population never remotely imagine that they may be exactly like the people at whom they are laughing so uproariously.