The wish by artists to illustrate the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen of the Brothers Grimm has a long tradition, starting with their own brother Ludwig Emil Grimm and Ludwig Richter in the 19th century, and the fascination continues today with such well‐known artists as Tomi Ungerer and Maurice Sendak. But while these illustrators in general recreated the world as it is described in the fairy tales, cartoonists approach specific episodes of the tales quite differently in their humorous or satirical drawings. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century and maintaining considerable popularity to this day, cartoonists have presented telling images which place the perfect world of the actual fairy tales in striking juxtaposition to harsh reality. They ignore the positive resolution of all problems at the end of the traditional tales and instead interpret certain scenes as reflections of a troubled society. The innovative drawings together with the revealing captions add up to meaningful communication in the mass media. These reinterpretations often deal with such problems as greed, insensitivity, deception, cruelty, vanity, selfishness, hate, power, irresponsibility, sexual politics, and sex.
Over the years the New Yorker magazine has published dozens of fairy‐tale cartoons. One of them can serve as a general statement of some of the grim variations of fairy‐tale motifs depicted in them. The cartoonist has simply drawn a car approaching a large road sign with the inscription: ‘You are now entering [the town of] Enchantment—“Gateway of Disenchantment”.’ One can well imagine a somewhat archaic town crier walking through the streets of this town lying ahead calling out the following news stories of the day, as was shown by another cartoon: ‘Snow White kidnapped. Prince released from spell. Tailor kills seven. These are the headlines. I'll be back in a moment with the details.’ Fairy‐tale violence appears to be making the big news, and thus a small boy comments quite critically to his mother reading him Grimms' tales for the umpteenth time: ‘Witches poisoning princesses, giants falling off beanstalks, wolves terrorizing pigs… and you complain about violence on TV!’ And to top things off, yet another New Yorker cartoon goes even so far as to accuse the Brothers Grimm of having concocted the tales without any belief in the authenticity of folk traditions: ‘All right, Wilhelm, we have the child walking through the woods.’ ‘Please, Jacob, don't you think we've been using the woods too much?’ ‘Woods are always good, Wilhelm. Now, who[m] does the child meet?’ ‘Perhaps a dwarf or two?’ ‘We did that, Wilhelm.’ ‘How about a wolf, Jacob?’
The disbelief in fairy‐tale existence goes so far as to put the formulaic beginning and end of many tales into question. Thus a schoolchild whispers impatiently to a friend as their teacher prepares to read one of the tales to them: ‘If it starts with “Once upon a time” I'm leaving.’ And then there is the divorced mother ending her reading of a fairy tale with the statement: ‘And they lived happily ever after—she in New York, he in L.A.’ The utopian world established at the end of fairy tales is questioned again and again in cartoons, especially as they comment on marriage and sex. The cartoonist Charles Addams drew a picture of a royal couple at a marriage counsellor's admitting, ‘We haven't lived happily and contentedly ever after for years.’ Another king is more explicit about his marriage problems, asking the counsellor, ‘How can we live happily ever after if she refuses to have oral sex?’ There is also the caption ‘You're not even trying to live happily ever after!’ Considering the psychological meanings of fairy tales, it should not be surprising that such interpersonal interpretations are prevalent in socially aware cartoons.
There is a definite predominance of sexually oriented cartoons in the modern mass media. Some of them in such mainstream magazines as the New Yorker, Better Homes and Gardens, and Good Housekeeping are usually in good taste, but some cartoonists have also published quite crude illustrations in such erotic magazines as Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. There is an entire industry of sexually oriented cartoons and comic strips of fairy tales which reaches from the merely suggestive to hard‐core pornography. In this regard cartoonists reflect the modern trend of a more outspoken approach to sexuality, where taboos must be broken and where the indirect language and metaphors of the fairy tales must be translated into crude reality.
This is not to say that there are not also many cartoons which react in a charmingly humorous fashion or in satirical ways to the world of fairy tales by placing them in opposition to the social and political life of the day. Such major satirical magazines as Simplicissimus, Kladderadatsch, Fliegende Blätter, Eulenspiegel (all from Germany), Nebelspalter (Switzerland), Krokodil (Russia), Punch, and Mad frequently contain fairy‐tale cartoons or comic strips. Usually they use only about half a dozen of the most popular fairy tales as their basis (for example, ‘The Frog King’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Briar Rose’, and ‘Rapunzel’; occasionally also Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’ and ‘The Princess and the Pea’), thus assuring meaningful communication. Hans Ritz has put together 100 cartoons and caricatures relating to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ alone in his book Bilder vom Rotkäppchen (1986), and Lutz Röhrich has done the same for ‘The Frog King’ in his study Wage es, den Frosch zu küssen! (1987). There are also entire books by individual cartoonists dealing with nothing but fairy tales, as for example Heinz Langer's Grimmige Märchen: Cartoons (1984) and Petra Kaster's Traumprinzen: Märchen‐Cartoons (1992). The well‐known cartoonist Gary Larsen could easily put together a similar book of his many ‘Far Side’ illustrations, and the same is true for the creators of such long‐standing cartoon and comic‐strip series as ‘The Family Circus’, ‘Dennis, the Menace’, ‘The Wizard of Id’, ‘Peanuts’, ‘Blondie’, ‘Short Ribs’, and ‘Garfield’. There is even a comic strip entitled ‘Mother Goose & Grimm’ which specializes in basing the individual frames on fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and other verbal folklore genres.
A final stomping ground for fairy tales in the mass media is found in social and political caricatures in which humour and irony are usually replaced by satire, sarcasm, and cynicism. When illustrators such as Olaf Gulbransson, Horst Haitzinger, Tony Auth, and Patrick Oliphant add faces and shapes of known politicians or celebrities to their caricatures, the step from indirect to direct confrontation and ridicule is quickly taken. Internationally recognized people like Richard Nixon, Indira Gandhi, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Mikhail Gorbachev, Elizabeth Taylor, Willy Brandt, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan have all been attacked or ridiculed in fairy‐tale caricatures. The most common motif is simply to place the person in question in front of a mirror and then in the caption asking that ultimate question ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’ with an appropriate alteration to the traditional ‘who is the fairest of them all?’ of the ‘Snow White’ fairy tale. Whether humorous or slanderous, such cartoons and caricatures reflect a basic dissatisfaction with reality by juxtaposing it to the perfect world of fairy tales. As long as these tales still belong to the cultural literacy of modern people, this interplay of tradition and innovation in the mass media will enrich communication through effective images and captions.
Bibliography
- Flanagan, John T., ‘Grim Stories: Folklore in Cartoons’,
Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore , 1 (1975). - Horn, Katalin, ‘Märchenmotive und gezeichneter Witz’,
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde , 37 (1983). - Mieder, Wolfgang (ed.), Grimms Märchen—modern: Prosa, Gedichte, Karikaturen (1979).Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature (1987).
- Röhrich, Lutz, “‘Wandlungen des Märchens in den modernen Bildmedien Comics und Cartoons’”, in Hans‐Jörg Uther (ed.), Märchen in unserer Zeit (1990).
- Smith, Grace Partridge, ‘The Plight of the Folktale in the Comics’,
Southern Folklore Quarterly , 16 (1952).
— Wolfgang Mieder
