Portrait of an American Cartoonist, Jackie Ormes

Portrait of an American Cartoonist, Jackie Ormes By Meisha Rosenberg The artist Jackie Ormes A portrait of the young cartoonist Jackie Ormes (Courtesy of the University of Michigan Press.) The mid-1940s found African-American men and women returning home from war to unchanged discrimination at home. It was an era inhospitable to anyone who prized equality: The House Un-American Activities Committee condemned filmmakers and writers while segregation continued to make life hard for the nation’s black citizens. What little progress there was often left black women behind. Far from acting as a deterrent, this climate made compelling material for Jackie Ormes, the first African-American female cartoonist to achieve national renown. Nancy Goldstein’s Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist is a scholarly yet highly readable account of Ormes’ life and work. Born Zelda Mavin Jackson to a well-to-do family in Pittsburgh, Ormes, in Torchy Brown comics and the single-panel Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, created stylish black female characters who scrutinized Cold War policies, advocated for civil rights, and poked fun at human foibles. Her drawings found a grateful audience in black-owned newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier. Author and doll collector Goldstein discovered Ormes’ story while researching the Patty-Jo doll Ormes designed. It was the first high-quality dark-skinned doll for girls, meant to replace stereotyped mammy dolls. A treasure-trove for any reader interested in African American history or American popular culture, Jackie Ormes includes more than 125 of Ormes’ cartoons and color comics, reproduced for the first time since their debut. Many are annotated with explanations of current events. In 1948, little Patty-Jo urged, “How’s about gettin’ our rich Uncle Sam to put good public schools all over?” Her high-heeled big sister holds a pamphlet for the newly begun Negro College Fund. Way ahead of its time for showing how pollution unequally affects minorities, in 1954, Torchy in Heartbeats depicts a handsome black doctor who saves a black community from environmental poisoning masterminded by a bigoted industrialist. Naturally, Torchy, a nurse, falls in love with the doctor. The book captures the sophisticated whirl of Ormes’ social life, with photos of Ormes rubbing elbows with Eartha Kitt and Duke Ellington. Her life wasn’t without tragedy: her only child, a little girl, died at age three, and the FBI investigated her. Yet her talent, supportive husband, and convictions assured her successes. In her introduction, Goldstein lists other black cartoonists such as Bill Chase, writing: “An encyclopedic study of African American cartoonists needs to be undertaken.” Readers will hope that this is the first of many such studies. Excerpt From: “The First African American Woman Cartoonist—Jackie Ormes” We are in the midst of a significant revaluation of the importance of cartoons and comic strips to American commerce, culture, and politics. Ormes (1911–85) was the creator of four cartoon and comics series that ran in African American newspapers at various intervals from 1937 to 1956. Her single panel cartoon Patty-Jo ’n’ Ginger appeared in the weekly Pittsburgh Courier from 1945 to 1956 and led to the creation of the Patty-Jo doll, modeled after one of the cartoon’s characters and manufactured by the Terri Lee Company of Lincoln, Nebraska. In [Ormes’] cartoon series, cute five-year-old Patty-Jo and her beautiful older sister, Ginger, are depicted in upscale surroundings that at first might seem at odds with some of the provocative messages in the captions. Precocious Patty-Jo could be satiric and biting, ingenuously commenting on complex political and social events that affected the average person in mid-twentieth-century Chicago and America. Patty-Jo not only has the best lines, but she has the only lines. Ginger remains speechless as Patty-Jo expounds on a range of subjects, including racism, education, housing, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the atomic bomb, taxes, Truman, boyfriends, and modern art, to name only a few. The other pages in the Pittsburgh Courier offered exciting fare, including headlines of Jim Crow laws overturned or upheld, shocking stories of lynchings, articles on personalities like boxer Joe Louis and dancer Josephine Baker, passionate editorials, and society and fashion news, as well as other cartoons and comic strips. Close readings of the comic form are not altogether new. Over the years many book-length histories of comic strips and cartoons have appeared, documenting with gusto the characters, stories, and art from drawing boards of a legion of comic artists over several hundred years of the form. For years, mainstream American newspaper comics of the 1940s and 1950s, like Al Capp’s Li’l Abner and Walt Kelly’s Pogo, have been collected, reprinted, and examined by popular culture scholars, as well as by social scientists and psychologists. Mary Petty, Helen E. Hokinson, and other women cartoonists whose work appeared in magazines such as the New Yorker, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post have also been anthologized and made the subject of commentary. The life of at least one female newspaper cartoonist, Nell Brinkley, has stirred sufficient interest for a book. But largely missing from many of the scores of histories, retrospectives, and anthologies of comics and cartoons is work that documents and surveys the artistic production of African Americans. Once a week in the mid-twentieth century, African American families reading papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender to catch up on the news would find in the funny papers a special take on the human comedy. As Langston Hughes noted in his column Colored and Colorful in the Defender, people looked forward to their favorite funnies: “If I were marooned on a desert island, . . . I would miss . . . Jackie Ormes’s cute drawings. . . .” After scanning headlines that were often distressing, readers could turn to the funnies to savor the conflicts and triumphs depicted by the papers’ black cartoonists, well spiced with irony and sweetened with humor. Excerpted from Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein Copyright ©2008 by Nancy Goldstein. Excerpted by permission of the University of Michigan Press.

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