American Comics and Secret Pioneers: Frank Johnson’s Decades of Hidden Gags Strips

I used to struggle with discussing creative ambitions with my family. I still do—writing, especially of the creative variety, seems a trifle, an indulgence to be doled out unto oneself in secret, for only God and the cordoned-off internet to see; discussion is its own form of congratulation, and nobody needs that, not in "real life." But one thing remaining clear to me was that, just as much as I wanted to create, I wanted to be read; I don't subscribe to any lofty beliefs about Art (as calling, as work, as societal role), but I do think that at its core it fundamentally holds at least the desire for reciprocal communication, to bear witness and be borne witness to in kind. See Sufjan Stevens: “Once the myth has been told, the lens deforms it as lightning”—the reader is an integral part not only of the reading but also of the very work itself; the artist is only ever half of the equation. Even though this desire may be (and often is) frustrated, it is always, at the very least, present, playing its tricks underneath the surface.

This assertion is called into question by the recent 600-page tome Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics, Vol. 1: Wally's Gang Early Years (1928-1949) and The Bowser Boys (1946-1950), edited by Keith Mayerson and Chris Byrne—the first in a two-volume series from Fantagraphics, showcasing the titular cartoonist who toiled away at his comics in absolute secrecy for 51 years prior to his death in 1979, at the age of 67. Let's repeat that bit of information for a moment, because the book makes it a contextual priority: fifty-one years of work and even his family didn't know a thing until after he died! Those of us who are prone to storytelling are sure to appreciate this perhaps even more than the actual work at hand. This is the first time that full stories by Johnson appear in print, and it follows only a small amount of public discussion of his work in the past two decades;¹ he is, for all intents and purposes, a virtual unknown.

As an object, the volume asks the natural question of what an artist is without their audience. Holding this book in my hand, I can’t help but remember that even the lasting success of Kafka is predicated on the broken promise of Max Brod; the posthumous release is ever the ethically-tricky dragon,² especially in this case where so little is known about the artist. Even the story of Kafka and Brod is, at its heart, a story, a disambiguation—for Johnson, the distance of time and lack of familial knowledge leaves you with little more than a question mark. Discussion of the cartoonist comes with a common, even requisite refrain: "We don't know whether," "It's impossible to say for sure if…," "To the best of our knowledge…"—we are at once fortunate that neglect turned these notebooks into an artifact and unfortunate that discovery must by design be preceded by neglect.

But, though the book-qua-product bears this air of mystery and exploration, the book-qua-art is shockingly approachable. The feeling of transgression and encroachment that comes with fifty years of now-broken secrecy evaporates rather quickly, as you read these comics and understand that Johnson favored one supreme principle: legibility. Whether or not he was read by anyone did not make any difference; these were comics, gag comics, and, as we all know from Ernie Bushmiller, a gag had to be effective above all else. 

The idea of artistic indulgence emerges, fundamentally, from the overlap between the social and the economical: how will I be perceived, will this affect my following and therefore work viability, and, most importantly, do I care. In Johnson, the former two elements are removed from the equation entirely, yet the reader does not get the sense, really, that this matters to the cartoonist in any material way. Polish or lack thereof aside, it is likely that the comics he made would have remained identical in their fundament even if he was widely read.

Both Byrne and Mayerson, in their respective preface and introduction, invoke the works of Henry Darger and the broader context of Art Brut as a parallel to Johnson's endeavor, but in sheer artistic ethos the two are almost antipodean: where Darger operated on an aesthetic opacity, a layered détournement as a way of processing decades of mental anguish, Johnson's comics feel like an emulation—and a deft one at that, albeit in the manner of a reverse-engineering savant—of a prevalent mode. He had to be approachable, even if there was no one to approach him. 

Emulation here is a handy mode of operation, and our cartoonist does it well, though on occasion showing his hand. Throughout the book you get the sense that Johnson only had a broad understanding of the mechanics of his world; the idea of the social club seems largely to consume the lives of his cast, and it appears, almost by magic, to sustain them, but we as readers don't get to see much of the club's actual day-to-day operations. Johnson's grasp of this adult world appears almost to have formed very early on, childlike and largely external, and then remained more or less fixed, yet this lack of articulation never impedes the material because of the author's tonal charm. 

Perhaps naturally, for an autodidact who made comics purely for himself without any reader (that we know of) in mind, Johnson afforded himself a bit of comfort to lean on in his craft, most notably in his compositions; there's a sidescrolling quality to his layouts, a one-dimensionality only occasionally interrupted by a 16-bit-video-game-like diagonal skew to it, a hint at another dimension that nonetheless plays on familiar planarity (up-down, left-right)—only rarely do we get a head-on angle. Concrete spatiality appears largely tentative, or at least a low priority, which is made plain the spacious widescreen panels of the earlier books and of The Bowser Boys, in which backgrounds and set-pieces are often included only insofar as they are required to clearly indicate a location, and are often done away with entirely (again I think of theatrical set-pieces, invoking appearance more than function). Johnson clearly benefits from the fixed two-by-two grid in books #119 and #120, whose relative compression affords him a greater focus on characters and a tighter grasp on their surroundings.

The characters get the bulk of the cartoonist's focus, and in this element his artwork is immediately accessible, immediately comparable. His style of character drawing is in line with the big hitters of his time: depending on the panel, you may find common grounds with E.C. Segar, a little bit of Herriman, even some C. C. Beck. This is most evident in our Secret Pioneer's pencil-only work; his inking on The Bowser Boys is charmingly-messy enough to call Gary Panter to mind.  

When Johnson began working on this opus, in 1928, comics were as hegemonized a model as one could imagine: self-published print comics were functionally of in America, at least outside of the Tijuana bible, and it's unlikely that he knew of Japanese doujinshi. The nascency of comics as a long-form artform basically meant that the 'scene,' as a cohesive social-artistic construct, was nonexistent—either you were platformed or you didn't exist, in which case, well, get over it, kid. It was at the relative start of Johnson's artistic lifetime (one struggles to frame it as a 'career') that the longform, single-story comic book was created; it was later on that various longer-form works branded themselves as 'the first graphic novel'; and it was toward the end that an independent, alternative sphere of comics took publishing into its own hands. When Frank Johnson started out, the biggest names in contemporary cartooning were Frank King and George Herriman; by the time he concluded, Crumb and co. were ten issues, and ten years, deep into Zap Comix. 

To say nothing of the actual material at hand—in comics,³ the sitcomesque blankness of the premise (i.e. the antics of a group of friends not instigating much action but instead reacting to varying circumstance) was, by the time of Johnson's death, for the most part (though not entirely) outmoded in comics; for broader context, Frank King was by then 19 years retired from Gasoline Alley. In a publishing setting, Wally's Gang would have been a relic; in his own context, Johnson was a bubble out of time, existing with acknowledgement to his predecessors but without any regard, positive or negative, to changes around him.

In this context it's worth mentioning that the book opens not on the chronological starting point of Johnson's work, with book #91⁴ of Wally's Gang, dated 1928, but with a standalone 80-page project titled The Bowser Boys, written and drawn between '46 and '50, toward the mid-point of the author's corpus. These gags unfailingly focus on the antics of the eponymous gang of bums as they contrive pay-you-Tuesday-for-a-hamburger-today schemes in search of booze. Editors Mayerson and Byrne both make a point of offering Johnson’s alcoholism, which peaked in the ‘40s, as a key bit of context. Readers, especially one familiar with the autobio comix of the ‘70s–‘90s, might expect heavy caustic material, but any given handful of spreads in The Bowser Boys would be enough to disabuse you of the notion—to Johnson, the gang’s misadventures are infinitely more potent as comedic material than as authorial vulnerability; if this is how he viewed himself as an alcoholic, he certainly approached his affliction with a sense of humor.

It sounds funny to say, but I can't help but think that these comics by Johnson would fit well into Kramers Ergot 10, that book that aspired to rewrite the history of American comics-as-art in its own image—which is to say, Frank Johnson's work feels like such a seamless addition into the very historical genome of comics: its underpinnings are perfectly informed by its contemporary surroundings, yet its unregimented autodidactic awkwardness foreshadows the generations of self-effacing attempts at sincerity that followed him. Johnson's comics realize themselves breathlessly, headily, and where they falter they do so with an aesthetic rigor. 

This is one regard in which the chronology of Johnson’s work becomes particularly noteworthy: as he labored over these comics for 51 years, his saga parallels a crucial bit of comics history not just as an artform but as a business. The "democratization of art" is often invoked nowadays in discussion of art-as-work, and indeed there are far more grassroots opportunities today for the independent cartoonist to reach greater readership.⁵ Yet what comes to mind is the comics corpus of James/Jimmy Kugler: comics not meant to be read, at least not for entertainment; a one-sided, tree-falling-in-the-forest affair. Their aim is not to attain any sort of widespread cultural impact, but the very opposite—they are crucial as the affirmation of art as a behavior pattern, as a psychological/sociological impulse that exists outside of, and perhaps even in total defiance of, the broader 'culture' as a collectivist construct. They are informed by their context, to be sure, be that context intra-art or global, but they do not seek to inform in kind: an incubation of the artistic self for its own sake, as its own end and means. We know, in the abstract, that not all art is published—or, on the inverse, that published art is not all art—but these are tangible reminders of that. What comes to mind is the Crypt of Civilization, in its combination between the everyday and the accumulation of cultural knowledge—it is all too alluring to revise history and say that the category only encompasses work with sufficient reader-minded polish, yet at the end of the day Frank Johnson was no less a cartoonist than even Charles Schulz.

The book Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics, however, seems to struggle with these conclusions, emphasizing, as they do, the 'ordinary' nature of the craft. The editors express their wish that Johnson, now that his work is published for all to read, will not only inspire new generations of readers but enable a subtle rewrite of the very history of American comics. I'm admittedly more than a bit doubtful, given that a phrase as sweeping of 'history of comics' contains within it the implication of publication, of readership. There is a romance in the idea that a work heretofore undiscovered might sweepingly change all we know about the artform and its history, but the standard feels unfair to burden any artist with, let alone someone who was only making this thing for his own enjoyment (as valid a cause, to be sure, as revolution).

For better or worse, Secret Pioneer of American Comics is profoundly self-aware of its makings, of its context of secrecy within the artist's life. With photographs of weathered notebook covers and no attempt made to tamper with the artwork for enhanced legibility (while legible throughout, there are certainly smudges and fades that other publications might have used certain digital means to spackle over), this is a book that makes its views felt from the get-go: more than these comics are comics, i.e. reading material, they are an artifact. I don't necessarily mean this as a judgment, mind—the material, no matter how any publisher might approach it, was always going to be a curio perhaps more than anything. 

As an artifact, and rather completely inadvertently, these comics make for a product that begs for the contextualization, intertextualization, and post-textualization of curation. This book, then, is as actively curated an undertaking as they come: its marketing copy describes the cartoonist's oeuvre as a "proto-graphic novel," implying, if nothing else, the cohesion of a complete work; in truth Fantagraphics' two Frank Johnson books will come down to about 1,200 pages, roughly half of the totality of Johnson's surviving work. This, to be fair, works fine enough—for the most part, Johnson's work reads more like a collection than as the 'graphic novel' that implies a unitarian flow. In many cases, especially before Johnson switches to a two-by-two grid, comprising units are numbered not as single pages but as spreads, which makes perfect sense—a left- or right-hand-side page rarely functions on its own; at four to six panels, each spread operates, perfectly, as a slightly-prolonged gag-a-day comic strip

Byrne and Mayerson's cutting and editing become apparent fairly early on: the Wally's Gang portion of the book, showcasing the project that Johnson worked on for most of his cartooning life, takes the liberty of skipping from 1928's book #91 all the way to #110, dated 13 years later; it then skips a couple of books along the -teens before concluding on #120. Even within the books themselves, Johnson's hand-written numbering indicates certain skips and exclusion; #120 and The Bowser Boys are the only book to be reproduced in full. Never before published, Johnson's debut is already a best-of. 

It wasn't until I started reading this book and sat down to write this essay that I understood that I was, in my own way, impaired, like any critic would be: it is not that we, as critics, merely engage with the work at hand—in doing so, we also operate on the assumption that all art can broadly speaking be subjected to the same underlying metrics of engagement, which is to say, that all art exists for the purpose of our critical engagement. Frank Johnson is a particularly tricky one, his sensibilities existing squarely within what he must have perceived as the mainstream, yet his practice decidedly not so.

But I cannot help but feel, more than anything, that Johnson's work in itself is overpowered by the projection of his editors. Beyond the fact that his work feels eminently too immediately-familiar to prompt any proper revolutions-after-the-fact, the idea of the 'pioneer,' to me, inherently relies on impact in real time; I would venture so far as to say that the 'secret pioneer' is for the most part an oxymoron. Just as I thought an artist wants to be read, so does a pioneer need to be witnessed. We would be better off, I think, admitting a more anticlimactic truth: that Frank Johnson, while no revolutionary, is just plain fun to read, and that the existence of 'amateur' comics is its own blessing.

In his introduction to the volume, Mayerson quotes Joseph Campbell who writes that the role of the artist is "to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order for that culture to progress." Yet this doesn't seem entirely apt—man may not be an island, but our cartoonist certainly was. This volume, then, unusual though it may be, offers its own fundamental truth of art: perhaps an artist's job is not to be heard, to be seen; certainly not to move mountains with the mere tremor of their voice. No, the artist's job is far simpler than that: to Frank Johnson, at least, the purpose of the artist is simply to be alive and see where that carries you. And who among us can refuse such a noble edict?

 

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