Ready to get
your CRAZY on? Welcome to the wacky world of Elmo.
Comic strip
historian Frank M. Young has painstakingly restored this short-lived and long-forgotten
strip, sharing the madness with current and future generations of screwballs. Yeah,
that’s a mouthful, but there’s so much going in on this strip, it’s hard to
describe in short sentences.
Cecil Jensen’s
Elmo, which debuted in the funny papers in November 1946, appears to have
been directly inspired by Al Capp’s Little Abner. Like Abner, Elmo is a
cheerful idiot, but unlike Abner—he has no excuse. Elmo is no hillbilly, he’s
just naturally stupid. And while Abner does occasionally experience sadness,
worry, anger and regret, Elmo remains relentlessly upbeat—even as he falls
victim to some of the most venal behavior in the history of comic strips. He thinks
the best of everyone, and his sole desire is to make them happy.
Just about
everyone in Elmo’s world—with the exception of his wannabe girlfriend Emmaline
(and later Little Debbie, of whom I will speak anon)—is unabashedly out for themselves, usually at
Elmo’s expense.
Through the
first months of his adventures, he’s disrespected, insulted, swindled, tricked,
robbed, exploited, kidnapped, framed, imprisoned, swatted with a blackjack and
chased by a polar bear. The only time he’s seriously concerned is when a
starving man seriously considers eating him.
Through it
all, Elmo’s stupidity knows no bounds. When a stranger tells him he has to
commit suicide, he jumps off a bridge. In one sequence, he’s hypnotized into
believing he’s a skunk, and moves in with real skunks at the zoo. At another point
he believes he’s been beheaded.
For a humor
strip, there’s an amazing amount of violence. Elmo’s boss hands him a pistol
and tells him to shoot himself in the head. Another guy tries to squirt acid in
his face, and suffers that fate himself. And it’s all for laughs.
To keep
things even more interesting, Jensen populates the strip with a string of sultry
females (yeah, one of them is even named "Sultry"), some of whom might have stepped from the panels of Little Abner. All
of them are enamored of Elmo, while he remains blissfully immune to their
charms.
Six months
into the strip, another female is introduced as an incidental character—and finally
proves Elmo’s undoing. Over the next year Little Debbie, a precocious little
girl whom readers found all-too adorable, becomes a fixture in the strip, and
eventually shoves Elmo out. A second volume is promised, focusing on Elmo’s
limited appearances in the long-running “Little Debbie” strip.
Frank Young’s
Introduction provides an in-depth study of creator Cecil Jensen’s life and
career, zeroing in on the history of Elmo and Little Debbie. As
Mr. Young points out, Jensen made no serious attempt at social or political satire.
The Elmo strip is simply people behaving badly, and bouncing it off Elmo’s
indestructible optimism. Reading the strip, I was reminded of the screwball comedies
of the ‘30s and ‘40s—and of the characters bedeviling Popeye in E.C. Segar’s Thimble
Theater. So I was not surprised to see Mr. Young draw parallels to both.
Why such a wild,
crazy—and often dark—strip as Elmo was ever welcomed into the newspapers
remains a mystery. But I’m glad it was. As
Young says, “The early months of Elmo feel like the first recordings of
Elvis Presley: raw, awkward but possessed of an undeniable magic.” But, he
adds, “Unlike Elvis, Elmo heralded nothing.” Comic strip humor in general
moved into a kinder, gentler phase, and there’s been nothing quite like it
since. But—thanks to Frank Young—we have a chance to experience it now.
Elmo, An American Experiment is available HERE.
