This has been sitting in my drafts folder for months, ever since I posted the last Toonerville cartoon. I never finished the essay I got a running start on below, because I ran out of the emotions that had prompted it. But having received another visitation of the spirits recently, I eventually made a landing of a kind. Sorry it took so long, Rob.
I know nothing more about Fontaine Fox than can be found in his Wikipedia profile. He was a relatively popular newspaper (and sometimes magazine) cartoonist with a scribbly, wandering line, a penchant for birds’-eye compositions that render his dashed-off characters as miniature figures in a loose, improvised landscape (every building in the strip looks like it could be picked up and carried away), and a strain of odball imagination that populated his invented rural American township, Toonerville, with a cast of eccentric characters, usually referred to with their full mock-heroic titles (the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bangs, the Powerful Katrinka, Mickey (Himself) McGuire), whose antics were frequently having to be explained to a series of anonymous, perpetually-astonished outsiders and town visitors.
The above (click to enlarge) is what I think of as the canonical “trolley” strip, because it’s in the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics. Like most nerds of my age and weight, I was introduced to nearly all of the classic early- and mid-twentieth century newspaper strips in the pages of that big, gorgeous volume, and it’s hard to shake a nagging feeling that if a strip wasn’t included there, it doesn’t really count.
I don’t quite know how to explain the importance that comic strips hold in my life, or in the history of my imagination. I’ve tried once or twice before, and I always fear I’m coming off like some kind of Warean man-child who never got over learning that Santa wasn’t real. Comics, after all, create little worlds, worlds which are self-evidently less filled-in, less functional, less emotionally complex than the real one. This is even more true the less realistic or detailed the art is: a doodled or scribbled world is one you can’t even escape into: it’s made to just be glanced at and forgotten. Everything’s a gesture towards the idea of something, a calligraphic scrawl towards an idea rather than a representation of an object in the world.
For reasons I can’t even guess at, Toonerville feels like home to me, a place to rest. Even the least generous jokes, the ones about people being fat or mentally deficient, are shot through for me with sympathy and an affectionate, if catastrophically exaggerated, humanism. Fox grew up in Kentucky, and his home state has claimed Toonerville for itself, but it was really a composite, a small town located only in the mythography of the ur-America, loosely defined and never quite managing to come into existence, equal parts a tall tale told by a master bulshitter and a Christmas card from the old homestead. I post Toonerville panels when I’m depressed because I don’t feel up to anything more complex. The old verities — most of us work around technology instead of with it, authority figures are foolish, children crave excitement, and people will surprise you — are about all I can handle.
