About a month ago, Garry Trudeau drew a strip about Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter as “X.” In the final panel, Alex Doonesbury, after pointing out to Toggle how the letter X had numerous negative associations – ranging from an unknown quantity, to error, to death – is rendered with her own eyes X-ed out. That image led some readers to wonder if GBT had killed off one of Doonesbury’s most sympathetic characters. In my look at that strip, I argued that reports of Alex Doonesbury’s death were exaggerated. The meaning of X in this case was purposefully ambiguous, shocking the reader with the idea of an unexpected tragedy as a way to present a symbolic commentary on the darkness looming beneath the phenomenon of sociopathic tech-bros like Elon Musk taking for themselves more and more control of our politics, society, and culture.
I’m pleased to report that, as predicted, Alex Doonesbury is (still) not dead. December 3 found Alex back to her normal routine, chasing down her “free range” kids, who had apparently wandered a little further afield than expected. Being neither a parent nor someone with informed opinions on parenting styles, I’ll leave it to someone invested in the debates over the practice of free-range parenting to comment on Trudeau’s take on the trend. Instead, I want to talk about another – decidedly local to me – use of a comic-strip character’s X-ed out eyes as social commentary.
In that post, I postulated that Trudeau’s ambiguous use of a dark staple of comic-strip iconography in the service of social commentary might be read as a nod to KAWS, otherwise known as Brian Donnelly, a former street artist and now a popular figure in the world of contemporary pop art and fashion design. KAWS is perhaps best known as the artist behind a line of apparel popular with the kids these days that features various renditions of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy with his eyes crossed out. What Snoopy’s eyes represent in the context of KAWS’s work is something of an open question. One critic argues that KAWS’s dark depictions of characters who are part of our cultural bedrock might prompt in observers “a range of emotions, from sadness to empathy to humor.” William S. Smith writes that while KAWS disavows any “critical intent” in his work, by playing with Snoopy’s inherent cuteness, KAWS evokes the “surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression,” that we feel towards the objects that in many ways define us.
Smith sees a productive tension in this ambiguity. KAWS’s work has a “maximum visual accessibility” that allows his mass consumers to embrace a subversive, “anti-elitist” vibe. At the same time, by producing pieces that are “unintimidating to viewers and flattering to institutions,” KAWS avoids “upsetting the actual economic and social hierarchies that fuel art collecting,” allowing him to address an important tension in the art world. That tension exists between the expectation that art is meant to engage in social critique and the fact that the people whose money supports artists and the institutions that make their work visible are often meant to be the target of that same critical urge. KAWS’s popularity fuels the idea that there’s a “democratic culture” at play, one ostensibly equally available to collectors who can fork out millions for an original or high-school kids who can buy a KAWS hoodie with their pocket money earned with a part-time gig at McDonald’s.
A few days after GBT revealed that Alex was still alive, as I was walking around Vancouver I noticed a piece of street art featuring an iconic comic-strip character with, you guessed it, the eyes X-ed out. Here, the meaning of the symbolic language is unambiguously political.
The character is the Yellow Kid, aka Micky Duggan, “a bald, jug-eared, buck-toothed Irish slum urchin” who was the central figure in Hogan’s Alley, a massively popular comic strip dating back to the 1890s, running first in the New York World and then the New York Journal. Hogan’s Alley, created by Richard Outcault, was the first newspaper comic printed in color; it focused on the lives of children in a working-class/immigrant American urban neighborhood. Each strip’s punchline was written on the Kid’s yellow shirt. While the strip was built on children’s hijinks, it also served as a forum for Outcault’s social commentary. John Cannemaker describes how Outcault, especially in his earlier work, depicted “slum urchins mocking or emulating high-society manners and events” with “a melancholy stillness” that acted as “an upfront protest against slum conditions.” Those messages would have found a receptive audience with the strip’s working-class readership, one made up in no small part by recent immigrants still learning to read English.
Hogan’s Alley lent its name to a historic Black neighborhood here in Vancouver, located not far from Vancouver’s train station (many Black Canadian men historically worked as railway porters). Perhaps the most famous resident of Hogan’s Alley was Nora Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother: Mrs. Hendrix co-founded the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, Vancouver’s first Black church, in 1918. In 1972 Hogan’s Alley was razed by the city of Vancouver to make room for the construction of a pair of viaducts. Like Africville in Halifax, Hogan’s Alley was a Black Canadian community that fell victim to the “urban renewal” craze of the postwar era, a way for city officials to “wipe out poorer, mostly-immigrant neighborhoods” in attempts to deal with “unwanted blight” and communities that they saw as having “little value.”
Activists have been working to raise Vancouver’s awareness of Hogan’s Alley’s place in our history, and thereby help restore the city’s memory of a community that was literally wiped off the map. Public art has been an important part of the process; there are a number of murals in the area where Hogan’s Alley stood paying homage to the neighborhood and its residents. The other day, as I walked underneath the Georgia Viaduct, one of the expressways that now stand where Hogan’s Alley once was, I encountered a mural which uses the image of the Yellow Kid with his eyes X’ed out as the starting point of an artistic exploration of a community that once thrived in that very spot.
Anthony Joseph is a Vancouver artist, animator and clothing designer. In 2020 he painted “Hope through Ashes: A Requiem for Hogan’s Alley,” a multipart mural painted on the base of “the very instrument that led to the destruction of Vancouver’s first concentrated Black community,” the Georgia Viaduct. Like a comic strip, the mural is made up of individual panels, each depicting someone who lived in the neighborhood and helped make it what it was.
In the first panel, Oucault’s Yellow Kid lies dead, his eyes X-ed out as he reaches for a rose growing out of the viaduct’s concrete. His trademark yellow jersey, where Hogan’s Alley’s punchlines were always found, reads: “Here Lies the Yellow Kid.” Against clouds of black dust that evoke the demolition of an entire section of a modern city, we see a number of remarkable people who called Hogan’s Alley home: Nora Hendrix; Ernie King, a musician who founded both the Harlem Nocturne, the city’s only Black-owned and operated nightclub and the Sepia Players, Vancouver’s first Black theater troupe; and Barbara Howard, a 1940s track star and the first person of color to become a Vancouver School Board teacher.
If KAWS’s use of the image of a dead comic-strip character is, at best, ambiguous in its purpose, Joseph attaches a pointed political meaning to the image of a dead Yellow Kid. He notes that the neighborhood’s nickname was not originally intended “with flattering intent”; rather, it was a sarcastic way of comparing Hogan’s Alley (the neighborhood) to the comically ramshackle setting of Hogan’s Alley (the comic strip). Joseph argues that there was a “minstrel show feel” inherent in naming a vibrant community after a work of popular culture that played on stereotypes of urban poverty.
While the satirical dynamic that Cannemaker highlights might complicate Joseph’s reading of the nature of the strip, the artist is unambiguous about the intent behind his depiction of the Yellow Kid’s demise, writing that it represents “the death of the tokenism of Hogan’s Alley, dissipating attempts at making a novelty out of the Black community that resided there.” By symbolically killing off a character who evokes the racism lurking at the core of a community’s nickname and percieved image among more elite quarters, Joseph can tell a different story about Hogan’s Alley and its people. From the rose (Vancouver’s official flower) growing just beyond the Yellow Kid’s deathly grasp emerge brilliant lines that run like thread through the dust clouds, a throughline reconnecting a community whose lives and stories were uprooted by City Hall’s inherently racist plan to change the face of the city. In the final panels Mrs. Hendrix wields a shield as she, as Joseph writes, “[absorbs] the impact” of the city’s assault on her neighborhood, resisting “the demolition of Hogan’s Alley, its history and her memory living on.”
Three different artists deploy the same symbolic concept, each with a particular intent. Garry Trudeau uses the inherent ambiguity of comics imagery as a way to generate a temporary shock in the service of ridiculing a boneheaded move by a man who trades on his reputation as an alleged genius. KAWS, perhaps, embraces that same ambiguity as part of a project that foregrounds mass commercial appeal while critiquing the unfulfilled democratic aspirations of a contemporary art world that still depends largely on the benevolence of rich patrons. For Joseph, the symbol of X-ed out eyes is unambiguous: it lets him set aside a mocking attitude that helped a city dismiss a community located right at its heart and instead tell a story of a vibrant neighborhood and its people.
Reading Doonesbury 