Incorrigibles and Innocents

Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics

By Lara Saguisag

Rutgers University Press

Nominated for Eisner Award | Winner of the 2018 Ray and Pat Browne Award | Winner of the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the CSS

Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and alleviated. The proliferation of comic strip children—white and nonwhite, middle-class and lower class, male and female—suggests that childhood was a subject that fascinated and preoccupied Americans at the turn of the century. Many of these strips, including R.F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and Buster Brown, Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland were headlined by child characters. Yet no major study has explored the significance of these verbal-visual representations of childhood. Incorrigibles and Innocents addresses this gap in scholarship, examining the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. Drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Lara Saguisag demonstrates that child characters in comic strips expressed and complicated contemporary notions of who had a right to claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation.

This engaging and sophisticated book addresses how progressive-era comics used the figure of the child as a locus of debate about gender, race, class and citizenship. Saguisag's doing a great public service to comics history here! Philip Nel, author of Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need fo

Historians have too long ignored comic strips as source material. Lara Saguisag impeccably unpacks kid comic strips to reveal their complex discourse on childhood and citizenship in Progressive Era America. Ian Gordon, author of Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon

Amazing work—an invaluable contribution to scholarship at the crossroads of comics studies, childhood studies, children’s literature, and cultural and political history. I wish I had written Incorrigibles and Innocents myself—and it will definitely be in my classrooms going forward! Charles Hatfield, author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby

Chronicle of Higher Education new scholarly books weekly book list,' by Nina C. Ayoub Chronicle of Higher Education

Transitions: Georgia Institute of Technology Selects New Chief, CUNY York College President to Step Down,' compiled by Julia Piper Chronicle of Higher Education

Saguisag’s Incorrigibles offers both a welcome glimpse into the untapped potential of early newspaper comics and an invitation to keep reading more. Inks: Journal of the Comics Studies Society

Incorrigibles and Innocents provides an exciting model for many more reevaluations of familiar texts in comic studies. It also challenges scholars to read these popular texts in the context of the myriad other, and less known, newspaper strips or comic book series to get a true sense of the reach of the ideas and assumptions that shaped consumer and political cultures of the past. H-Net

Saguisag attends rigorously to the manifold cultural, political, and economic dimensions of Progressive Era America. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

Incorrigibles and Innocents is an original and welcome addition to both childhood studies and comics studies. Saguisag demonstrates that for these fields to reach their full potential, they must better account for each other. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

A model for how the careful and deliberate archival study of comics can shine new light both on well-worn received histories and on the literature of the present, precisely through an appropriately unshakeable commitment to being a very serious reader of the funny pages. American Literature

Gives a thought-provoking discussion of race, nation, gender, citizenship, and the child....Saguisag’s work in this monograph is salient and thorough. Not only this, but Saguisag’s writing is accessible, sharp, and engaging. She clearly charts the political lineages of these comics from the nineteenth century to today. In doing so, she opens avenues for scholars of many different areas within children’s literature or adjacent fields to engage with her research. Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

LARA SAGUISAG is an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island–City University of New York. She is the author of several children’s books, such as Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People.

Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Drawing the Lines