Sorry I haven't updated the blog for a while: I've been busy. (Writing the final draft of a new novel entirely unconnected to anything else you've read—space opera, new setting, longest thing I've written aside from the big Merchant Princes doorsteps. Now in my agent's inbox while I make notes towards a sequel, if requested.)
Over the past few years I've been naively assuming that while we're ruled by a ruthless kleptocracy, they're not completely evil: aristocracies tend to run on self-interest and try to leave a legacy to their children, which usually means leaving enough peasants around to mow the lawn, wash the dishes, and work the fields.
But my faith in the sanity of the evil overlords has been badly shaken in the past couple of months by the steady drip of WTFery coming out of the USA in general and the Epstein Files in particular, and now there's this somewhat obscure aside, that rips the mask off entirely (Original email on DoJ website ) ...
A document released by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the Epstein files contains a quote attributed to correspondence involving Jeffrey Epstein that references Bill Gates and a controversial question about "how do we get rid of poor people as a whole."
The passage appears in a written communication included in the DOJ document trove and reads, in part: "I've been thinking a lot about that question that you asked Bill Gates, 'how do we get rid of poor people as a whole,' and I have an answer/comment regarding that for you." The writer then asks to schedule a phone call to discuss the matter further.
As an editor of mine once observed, America is ruled by two political parties: the party of the evil billionaires, and the party of the sane (so slightly less evil) billionaires. Evil billionaires: "let's kill the poor and take all their stuff." Sane billionaires: "hang on, if we kill them all who's going to cook dinner and clean the pool?"
And this seemed plausible ... before it turned out that the CEO class as a whole believe entirely in AI (which, to be clear, is just another marketing grift in the same spirit as cryptocurrencies/blockchain, next-generation nuclear power, real estate backed credit default options, and Dutch tulip bulbs). AI is being sold on the promise of increasing workforce efficiency. And in a world which has been studiously ignoring John Maynard Keynes' 1930 prediction that by 2030 we would only need to work a 15 hour work week, they've drawn an inevitable unwelcome conclusion from this axiom: that there are too many of us. For the past 75 years they've been so focussed on optimizing for efficiency that they no longer understand that efficiency and resilience are inversely related: in order to survive collectively through an energy transition and a time of climate destabilization we need extra capacity, not "right-sized" capacity.
Raise the death rate by removing herd immunity to childhood diseases? That's entirely consistent with "kill the poor". Mass deportation of anyone with the wrong skin colour? The white supremacists will join in enthusiastically, and meanwhile: the deported can die out of sight. Turn disused data centres or amazon warehouses into concentration camps (which are notorious disease breeding grounds)? It's a no-brainer. Start lots of small overseas brushfire wars, escalating to the sort of genocide now being piloted in Gaza by Trump's ally Netanyahu (to emphasize: his strain of Judaism can only be understood as a Jewish expression of white nationalism, throwing off its polite political mask to reveal the death's head of totalitarianism underneath)? It's all part of the program.
Our rulers have gone collectively insane (over a period of decades) and they want to kill us.
The class war has turned hot. And we're all on the losing side.
Snow coming. I'm tuned into the local 24 hour slop weather stream. AI
generated, narrated, up to the minute radar and forecast graphics. People
popping up on the live weather map with questions "snow soon?" (They pay
for the privilege.) LLM generating reply that riffs on their name. Tuned to
keep the urgency up, something is always happening somewhere, scanners are
pulling the police reports, live webcam description models add
verisimilitude to the description of the morning commute. Weather is
happening.
In the subtext, climate change is happening. Weather is a growth industry.
The guy up in Kentucky coal country who put this thing together is building
an empire. He started as just another local news greenscreener. Dropped out
and went twitch weather stream. Hyping up tornado days and dicy snow
forecasts. Nowcasting, hyper individualized, interacting with chat.
Now he's automated it all. On big days when he's getting real views,
the bot breaks into his live streams, gives him a break.
Only a few thousand watching this morning yet. Perfect 2026 grade slop.
Details never quite right, but close enough to keep on in the background
all day. Nobody expects a perfect forecast after all, and it's fed from the
National Weather Center discussion too. We still fund those guys? Why
bother when a bot can do it?
He knows why he's big in these states, these rural areas. Understands
the target audience. Airbrushed AI aesthetics are ok with them, receive no
pushback. Flying more under the radar coastally, but weather is big there
and getting bigger. The local weather will come for us all.
A WWII veteran amputee who doesn’t want to journey (or save) the world. Just a grease monkey who yearns to get back to the garage, marry his sweetheart, and figure out what he and his pals’ great sacrifice really meant. That was Hank Hannigan, the titular, unlikely hero of the short-lived 1945 comic strip Hank, which creator Coulton Waugh conceived as an answer to traditional adventures. “To get a new character I go into the subways and actually draw them,” he told Editor and Publisher before Hank’s April launch. “I want the people of America to stream into the strip.”
Waugh knew well the familiar notes of adventure strips. Since 1934, he had written and drawn Dickie Dare, after Milton Caniff left that strip to launch Terry and the Pirates. But Hank, was “a deliberate attempt to work in the field of social usefulness,” he said, and to incorporate an expressive design sense that he admired in the late George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. The editors at the strip’s host newspaper, New York’s populist/progressive PM, promised that “The new strip works out interpretive techniques that are as new and different in comic strips as some of those developed by Crockett Johnson in Barnaby,” which PM had launched two years before. For only eight months, Waugh succeeded in giving readers something that looked and sounded unmistakably different from the norm. Hank was packed with firsts. No comic had ever featured a character with a major physical disability. The strip included a regular Black character without whiff of minstrelsy. Its unvarnished view of combat veterans returning to civilian life also took an unabashed pluralist, progressive stand on what those soldiers fought to preserve. Despite its innovations, Hank is a forgotten strip that has been mentioned by historians more than actually seen or explored. And yet the time seems right to resuscitate a lost anti-fascist warrior.
Hank has never been reprinted, and only stray panels and strips appear online. An unevenly scanned PDF of one of Waugh’s scrapbooks does include a patchwork of clippings and syndication proofs including most of the full run. Here are the first 8 days of the strip.
Starting in the Pacific theater late in the war, we meet Corporal Hank Hannigan in battle. In the course of things, he rescues a fallen flyer (the legendary Capt. “Link” Kollwitz), shows his native genius by outsmarting a Japanese sniper and gets blown up salvaging his squad. The strip pulls few punches. At the army hospital, Hank loses the lower half of his leg and Kollwitz dies. Depressed at the prospect of life with a prosthetic leg, Hank finds inspiration in a peg legged entertainer who turned his disability into a successful act.1
Hank was at its most didactic during the inaugural months when Waugh eagerly signaled the strip’s left/populist alignment with PM’s mission. At Hank’s launch, both war fronts approached Allied victory, and Waugh frames the effort as a war for pluralist democracy. Despite casual hatred for “Jap” and “Nip” foes, Hank’s heterogeneous squad is a roll-call of ethnic names and regional roots. Their rescuer is the “well-trained Negro” grunt Jerry Green, who becomes the first recurring Black character in a non-Black newspaper comic to avoid ethnic stereotyping. Even the late Capt. Killowitz was a German emigree who embraced Allied ideals. In sum, Waugh frames American democracy and identity are grounded in shared ideas and ideals, not ethnic or blood origins. And Hank himself emerges as a natural democrat. Even while claiming to be a grease monkey who lets “others do the thinking” Hank jerry-rigs a grenade throwing slingshot to neutralize a sniper. “That wuzn’t thinkin’. That was just my reg’ler stuff like fixin’ cars back home,” a knack for “doping things out,” he tells Kollwitz.
Hank will need that native ability to “dope things out” soon enough. The departed Killwitz left behind a diary with thoughts about how “everyone should dope things out, that fascism could even happen at home,” Hank recalls. Soon enough, a “Veterans Forward” league of nationalists tries to co-opt Hank into being their spokesman. Ultimately, Hank and a journalist pal infiltrate and expose the conspiracy as well as its racist nativism. “One day, we’ll take the Negroes and Jews and Communists and RUN ‘EM OUT!” one rally speaker barks out from a panel. Waugh was fictionalizing a storyline that PM’s own journalists reported at the time about secret connections between European fascism and American political and industrial factions.
The strip took on racism a bit more obliquely. The heroic savior of Hank’s squad, Jerry Green, returns with college ambitions. A rich landowner offers him a job as handman for his estate. When Jerry politely declines, the cigar-chomping white man grumbles, “Well, well, think of that. A perfectly good Negro wanting to ‘go to school.’ I’m afraid this war has put a lot of ideas into people’s heads.”
While Waugh lathers on the populist didacticism pretty thick in Hank’s first months, he leavens it with genuine intrigue and action. Woven into the anti-fascist conspiracy is a wonderfully drawn femme fatale who falls for Hank and a flurry of romantic missteps with girlfriend Rosalie. More impressive was the artist’s graphic experimentation. Waugh had a clean thick-lined style and use of deep shadows that seemed to channel the WPA poster art of the 1930s. He used light dabs of shadow to define face and clothing. His cityscapes were minimalist but precisely outlined, again, more by shadows than detail. Individual panels often carried a poster-like punch. His characters might speak directly to the reader with fist-pounding certainty and Soviet poster-art vibes. And Waugh loved playing with patterns – stripes, mottling, polka dots – with some eye-popping spotting around his panels. He even played with typography and speech balloons. His sculpted lower-case lettering often went white against a black balloon. Overall, he achieved an adventure strip style that stood apart from Roy Crane’s cartoony approach in Buz Sawyer, Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby photo-realism and blotchy chiaroscuro of Caniff’s Steve Canyon.
About halfway through Hank’s short run, both Waugh’s ideological flexes and design flourishes settle down along with the storyline. A series of familiar miscommunications, missing communications and misinterpretations send Hank and Rosalie on a twisty journey towards the marriage that ends the strip at the end of December 1945. Believing mistakenly that Rosalie has fallen for a rich rival, Hank takes to sea as a tug boat mate. The ship gets swamped; Hank jumps overboard to save his unconscious Captain; then he himself gets saved from the storm, leading to a romantic reunion and Hank and Rosalie’s hometown marriage in Trueburg, N.J. (Yes, Trueburg). The sequence allows Waugh to exercise an uncharacteristic but beautiful naturalism in rendering the storm. Waugh’s father was a noted marine artist.
Waugh closed the strip at the end of 1945 with Hanks’s marriage and settling into a new home. For a strip that began so self-consciously contrary to comic convention, the ending was remarkably prescient of the domestication about to overwhelm adventure comics after the war. Waugh withdrew Hank, reportedly because of eyestrain, and he seems to have intended to wrap his story neatly in a bow. But for all of its novelty, the Hank strip did not have a clear path forward. Waugh was not a strong storyteller. None of his characters are engaging or well differentiated. The dialogue is hackneyed, the politics two-dimensional. The art, however, could be quite striking.
Screenshot
Hank was an interesting experiment both in design and messaging that recalls a moment of “Popular Front” coalition that may be relevant today. Its politics, and even its aesthetics, extended a partnership among the radical left and liberalism against the common enemy of fascism in the late 1930s. While often intellectual in leadership and tone, the Popular Front tried to appeal to working class Americans in its support of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Stylistically, it is often embodied by the art of WPA posters and regionalist painting that celebrated labor, the wisdom of the common man, ethnic diversity and abstract appeals to a collective democratic identity.
The PM newspaper, founded by TIME editor Robert Ingersoll in 1940, worked in that spirit until closing in 1948. It rejected the advertising model to remain independent of corporate interests, although its beneficiaries included Marshall Fields III and others. PM took a strong anti-fascist line, opposed Jim Crow measures like Poll Taxes, and was often accused by the right of being a “Communist front.” PM called itself a “picture magazine” and featured hundreds of editorial cartoons by Dr. Seuss as well as photography by Weegee and Margaret Bourke White. Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammet and Dorothy Parker were among many contributors. And, of course, it was also the original home of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby. Coulton Waugh’s Hank fit right in. The strip embodied an enduring left/liberal idealism about finding in the American common man a native democratic impulse that can be married to more highbrow social justice ideologies. At the same time, Waugh and others in this Popular Front were looking for artistic styles that infused those ideals in everyday popular culture.
As the panel suggests, the amputee entertainer was based on a Broadway headliner, Peg Leg Bates. The son of a sharecropper, Bates lost his leg in his adolescence from a cotton gin accident. He turned the handicap into feature act. Waugh’s panels depict the reported climax of Bates’ routine – a flying leap that lands and then spins upon his reinforced peg leg. ︎
“A hundred yard jump! And a girl soldier, too! Say, sister, need help?
The first thing Buck Rogers sees when he wakes from his 500 year slumber is a flying bare-legged woman…with a gun. That Jan. 7, 1929 strip launched American newspaper comics into a new age of heroic continuity strips, which historians have dubbed “The Adventurous Decade.”1 And across Buck, Flash (Gordon), Dick (Tracy), Pat (Ryan), the Prince (Valiant) and of course Tarzan, this decade in the newspaper back pages became famous for a pulpy hyper-masculinity that culminated in the rise of the superhero in the late 30s. And yet, as Buck’s premiere strip suggests, it would also be one of the weirdest stretches in the depiction of powerful women in popular culture. This would play out especially in adventure comics’ curious fixation with putting women in charge during the Depression years. Amazon tribes, criminal gal gangs, and futuristic matriarchies peppered adventure strips. We are all familiar with the creation of Wonder Woman in 1941 and her origin on the ladies-only Paradise Island.2 But this trope started in comics more than a decade earlier, first with Buck but then resurfacing in The Phantom, Tarzan, Alley Oop, and Frank Godwin’s Connie. Fantasizing about matriarchal societies within the adventure genre was not just a clever escapist plot device. Each of these Amazon worlds imagined different alternative societies where women called the shots and shaped the culture. Taken as a while, this pop culture trope suggested a deep ambivalence about the changing roles and independence of women. Putting women in charge was a kind of gender lab that played with ideas of feminine power under the stress of both Depression and modernization.
“Are You Married?”: Buck Rogers’ Girl Scouts
Among all of the Amazon realms of the 1930s, Buck Rogers’ 25th Century America had the most organic and broadly liberal approach. In the daily strips, Buck’s sidekick in both love and war, Wilma Deering, packs a ray gun and looks good doing it. Throughout the adventures she leads both men and women into battle. Meanwhile in the Sunday continuity, Wilma’s kid brother Buddy forms a galaxy trotting power couple with Alura Princess of Mars.3 Putting women both in power and in battle was no problem for creator Phil Nowlan and artists Jack Caulkins, Russell Keaton and Rick Yager. Nowlan seemed to regard genders as equal-but-different in his future Earth. One Venusian tribe, the Aromaks (1931) assign their troops into women sailors and male infantry. On Mars, Alura’s King has a male guard, while hers are women-only, and females are removed from hand-to-hand combat by their special skill as sharpshooters. Nowlan is finding ways to envision women in power without erasing gender, sometimes in weird contortions. In one of the first panels of the strip (see above), Wilma is hoisting the helpless Buck to safety as she says, “My name’s Wilma. are you married?”
ScreenshotScreenshotScreenshotScreenshot
And beyond the overall gender-neutrality of the Buck Rogers future, this strip explored more matriarchal queedoms in more ways than any other adventure. In 1933, the all-female “Amazons of Venus” abduct Buddy during one of their regular sweeps for male breeding stock.4 These Amazons are resentful exiles who were beat back and hid underground centuries ago after their failed attempt to conquer Venus. In a kind of retributive humiliation, they see all men simply as breeders and kidnap them from the surface to perpetrate their matriarchy. To rescue Buddy, Princess Alura takes a pneumatic ship through Venus’s core only to get stranded at the center with her nemesis, the Amazon Queen Gulia. The two warring royals team up to save themselves and to put down a rebellion from within the Amazon ranks. In a pattern we will see repeated in other Amazon dreams, women in power are as adept at forming sisterhoods as they are at conniving against one another. In a strange twist ending, And somehow, erotic allusions are always nearby. Alura and Guilia ally with the Birdmen of Venus, who use a massive vibrator device to dislodge the Amazon rebels from their stronghold. At the edges of most Amazon fantasies in the comics of the 1930s lurks a vague fetishism.
Screenshot
But even within the feminine-friendly fiction of Buck’s 25th Century, depicting women in charge took wildly different forms. In a 1937 daily story arc Wilma recruits an army of “Scout Girls” to fight a Venusian invasion.5 In the trenches, the scouts boast about their grit and war experience. They are officious and professional in a way that foreshadows the professionalization of many women during WWII. Wilma even adopts the tone of the badgering drill Sargent, taunting her troops for preferring face powder over gun powder. And yet, they prove susceptible the enemy’s “psycho-attractor ray” that compels them to desert. Several years later, and in stark contrast to Wilma’s professionalized Scout Girls, Buck and his then-sidekick Beanie happen upon the helpless and hapless “Golden People.” Their men have been enslaved by the Tiger Men, and the remaining women become literal tree-huggers, masquerading as trees to avoid capture.6 The episode drips with sexist derision, from Buck’s relentless doubts about organizing these “tree babes” as a battle force to their cluelessness around the weapons their men left behind. The radical change in attitude towards women in the strip likely reflects the retreat from scripting duties of the Buck Roger creator, Phil Nowlan and artist Dick Calkins stepping into both story and art roles.7
Connie’s Fem-topia: “Are Those Men Over There?”
Like Phil Nowlan in Buck Rogers, Frank Godwin’s Connie adventure strip (scripted by brother Harold) envisioned a future earth where women ascended to political leadership. Male-dominated comics history tends to overlook Connie (1927-1941) as a heroine who starred in an adventure continuity years before Buck. She was also one of the first comic strip time travelers. An extended episode in the 1936 Sundays found her transported to Earth 2941, where the “Woman’s Party” fully controlled the political realm. “Are those men over there?” asks Connie. “They are the first I’ve seen.” In this techno-utopian future most of the world seems to have eliminated national boundaries and formed a woman-led “United Nations.” Men, while not subordinate, appear to have been channeled into special technical and manufacturing roles. But the Godwins’ future seems to enjoy a kind of feminized pacifism.
Under women’s leadership, the United Nations of 2936 has enjoyed world peace for so long they have forgotten how to defend themselves. So, when long-vanquished Asiatic barbarians, The Yellow Combine, attacks, the women leaders ask Connie to teach them the ways of war. She explains that the women of her time had no battle experience. But luckily, the fem-topia of the future can rely on old fashioned men of the past. Connie’s adventure sidekick pal Jack and Dr. Chrono (the inventor of the time machine) have followed her into the future and provide the strategy and new technology that ultimately beat back the Yellow Combine. Like Phil Nowlan, the Godwins envision gender equality that preserves difference, a narrative that may suggest the kinds of social anxieties that lay beneath political progress.
Alley Oop: Designing Women and Neanderthal Men
Whether projected into the distant future or the ancient past, the Amazon motif allowed cartoonists to burlesque common stereotypes of feminine traits and create revealing reversals. When the gruff caveman everyman character Alley Oop and his rhyming pal Foozy get kidnapped and enslaved by the “Wild Women” of AMA (1934-35), he gets schooled by a fellow male slave about the benefits of a life of housework.8 “Well, y’aint got much t’do – an’ you git plenty t’eat without havin’ t’risk gittin et up by sumpin — or havin’ t’go t’war an gittin’ bonged on the bean —.”
Alley Oop creator V.T. Hamlin often used his prehistoric setting to satirize contemporary tribal politics and social dynamics. In 1938, for example, he had Oop take on stone-age Nazis. In his land of Moo, battle-axe wives outsmart, browbeat and toss stone dinnerware at hapless husbands who are, well, Neathderthals. When Alley wins his freedom from AMA and their Queen Eodora, the other Moovian males get wind of this village of wild “dames” and head out for a prehistoric booty call. The AMA quickly enslave them to housework, leaving it to Moo’s Queen Umpateedle and the other wives to declare war and charge into AMA. The two Queens, however, become fast friends, as Eodora has domesticated these, well, Neanderthals into, well, servile domestics. The AMA leader Eodora is modeling for the sitcom wife new ways to control the family breadwinner. “I took the liberty of keeping them well occupied to keep them out of further mischief!” Eodora explains. “I’ve never before seen these lazy loafers do anything but beller for someone to wait on’em” Queen Umpateedle chortles. Upending and inverting a host of sitcom tropes, Hamlin uses the Amazon motif to craft a light satire of modern domestic gender politics. The Amazon conceit playfully pushes the sitcom types – hapless hubristic hubbies and overbearing, conniving and colluding wives to their comic extremes.
Amazons were put to a range of uses in American comics across the Great Depression and into WWII. In Nowlan’s Buck Rogers and the Godwins Earth of 2936, women-dominant cultures are just another part of the gallery of speculative sociology that science fiction explored in the 30s. When the wheels came off both international civility and industrial capitalism, when ambivalence over what modernity had wrought peaked in the 1930s, so did a pop culture fetish around exploring alternative social orders, both in the past and the future. Buck and Connie’s imagined future saw empowered women as an inevitable evolution from a modernizing America. And they constructed that vision in way that allayed fears about losing gender distinctions. But other aspects of the American Depression drove this imaginative energy around the amazon motif. In the next chapter we look at the ways in which pulp adventure like The Phantom, Tarzan pit the new hyper-masculinized adventure hero against Amazons and Queen Bees.
Ron Goulart, The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties. Neshannock, PA: Hermes, 2005 (reprint of 1975 edition] ︎
Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Vintage, 2015. ︎
The Sunday Buck Rogers continuity starring Buddy Deering launched on March 30, 1930, with Alura introduced in the first storyline. Under Russell Keaton and then Rick Yager’s drawing, it was notably more polished and visually imaginative than the dailies, although Buck’s creator Phil Nowlan probably wrote the stories until late in the 1930s. ︎
“Amazons of Venus” (12/17/33 to 5/6/34) (Series I, Strips 195 to 215). ︎
“Interplanetary War With Venus” (3/22/37 to 11/13/37) (Series III, Strips 1 to 204). ︎
“Goddess of Stygia” (3/25/41 to 10/11/41) (Series V, Strips 302 to 474). ︎
The built legacy of the Soviet Bloc is undergoing a dramatic reappraisal, from crumbling concrete brutalism to Instagrammable socmod chic. Hatherley’s critical survey of a growing body of work in this area—examining modernist constructions from Vilnius to Tashkent—asks the question the new studies largely avoid: what, if anything, makes this architecture socialist?
Log in
︎
