Lara Saguisag of Manila, Philippines has been awarded a Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation Fellowship for Caricature and Cartoon. The $7,500 stipend supports scholarly work from a graduate or doctoral student and seeks to increase awareness and extend documentation of Library of Congress collections by encouraging fellows to use its resources during required two-week residencies and share their findings during public lectures.
Saguisag, a noted author of five children’s books that reflect her Filipino culture, says this fellowship will allow her to research and draft three chapters of her book-length dissertation on the topic.
“While I’m still in the research stage and am largely focusing on Buster Brown and Little Nemo in Slumberland, my dissertation will examine other strips and aims to address how kids are depicted, what assumptions are made about children, and what child-rearing lessons are embedded in the strips,” says Saguisag, a graduate of the University of the Philippines, Hollins University, and the New School.
While there are numerous books published about comic books, few, she notes, exist solely about comic strips, which when originally compiled generated the first comic books. “But comic strips and comic books broke into two separate histories,” offers the Rutgers–Camden scholar, “with comic strips appearing in newspapers as a ‘joke a day’ medium for a larger, more general audience, and comic books, initially addressed young readers, and particularly appeared to adolescent boys.”
She also notes how the different formats influenced the kind of content each could offer. “Comic strips and comic books are read for two different purposes. In three or four panels, comic strips often offer some kind of brief editorial that ends with a punch line, while longer narratives are able to develop in comic books,” she adds.
One major observation Saguisag has been documenting is that the racial commentary at first noted through actual minority characters in early comic strips slowly became encoded through depictions of white children.
“There is this gradual process of minority characters being replaced by child characters; in a sense, childhood became a metaphor for race, class, and the other. But these child characters proved to be viable and effectively comic characters and they were used to offer a commentary about the American family.”
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