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Comics and the TV Weather ReportTracing the Visual Style of Contemporary Science’s Most Popular Genre
Roger Turner, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Comic Art: America’sCommon Visual Culture
Beginning in the 1890s, newspapers introduced comic artto audiences across the United States. Americans of everyclass loved comic strips, which made them a naturalformat for advertising. Cheap comic books, developed inthe mid-1930s, became very popular with young readers.
Mobilizing the Comicsfor Technical Training
In the late 1930s, some illustrators began to use comic artin educational books. When World War II requiredmillions of draftees to learn novel technical tasks, the U.S.military drafted cartoonists to make lessons memorableand easier to understand. Illustrated manuals, posters andtextbooks significantly reduced training times.
Drawing the Weather on TVDuring the late 1940s, discharged military meteorologists inventedthe TV weather report. They developed a visual style thatcombined simplified maps with caricatures, pictographs, andanthropomorphic weather features. Station managers misread thiseducational strategy as entertainment, however, and began to hirecartoonists rather than meteorologists. While weather reports tookon a more serious tone in the 1960s, they still use the graphicallanguage of comic art.Eric Sloane’s comic book-style
manuals were widely used in pilottraining during World War II.Books like Clouds, Air and Wind(1941) and Your Body in Flight(1943) used the “Thought-PictureMethod” to help pilots rememberthe welter of information necessaryto fly and fight effectively. Largepictures were reproduced inminiature, then distributed to flyersas pocket-sized mnemonics.
After joining the Army, Will Eisner drew posters and comic strips featuringPrivate Joe Dope, whose continual screw-ups highlighted the virtues ofpreventative maintenance. Caricature creates emotional distance between thereader and the subject, here allowing readers to learn Dope’s lessons withoutimplying they might be “Dopey” themselves.
Assen Jordanoff’s popular aviationbooks featured illustrations bycomic strip artists like LarryWhittington (Fritzi Ritz) and FredMeagher (Tailspin Tommy) duringthe 1930s and 1940s. Someillustrations animated technicaldiagrams with comic conventionslike motion lines or stylized cloudsand rain, while others usedcaricature to satirize some pilots’attitudes towards hazards.
Aviation safety publications oftenpersonified storms as a powerfulboxer, a looming adversary thatneeded to be dodged andoutwitted, rather than foughtdirectly.
Introduced in 1934, comic books became a readingstaple for younger readers. Barely beyond his ownteenage years, Will Eisner drew The Spirit, a hit seriesthat tapped into burgeoning interest in superheroes.
Richard Outcault, creator of pioneering comicstrips like The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown,worked as a technical illustrator for ThomasEdison before becoming one of the world’sbest known cartoonists.
Comic strips became a regular feature of American newspapersduring the era of “yellow journalism.” The popularity of stripslike The Yellow Kid drove sales during the pitched circulationbattles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and WilliamRandolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the 1890s.
Popular strips were used to market other products. No stripwas attached to more products than Buster Brown, thoughOutcault maintained a sense of humor about hismerchandising.
Comics contributed to the emergence ofconsumer culture. Gasoline Alley depictedautomobiles as central to a modern middleclass lifestyle during the 1920s.
Adventure strips like Tailspin Tommy, begun in 1928, reflectedpopular interest in aviation in the decades after the Great War.Some artists strived to draw planes with technical accuracy.
A 1931 survey byGeorge Gallup helpedadvertisers recognizethat the comics were themost read part of thenewspaper, popular withdoctors and lawyers aswell as laborers andmechanics. Comic stripsenabled advertisers tointegrate dialogue,product information anda sequential narrativeinto static media likemagazines andnewspapers.
Beginning in 1948, former Army Air Force meteorologist Louis Allendrew simple weather maps live while broadcasting in Washington D.C.Interested in educational psychology, he sketched a “doodle” at the endof each show to represent tomorrow’s conditions. Hundreds of viewersasked the station for his pictures.
Other stations noticed Allen’s success, and hired comic weathermen oftheir own, like newspaper cartoonist Tex Antoine at WNBC in NewYork. Though he had no training in meteorology and considered theweather “a rather dull subject,” Antoine’s iconic sidekick “UncWethbee” allowed audiences to read the weather from his changingmustache, hair and hat.
Although the New York Times snarked about the profusion of doodlingweathercasters in 1952, station managers said the weather must beentertaining and required meteorologists to learn cartooning beforehiring them. Meteorologist Don Woods created “Gusty” during a two-week course on the comics, prelude to a fifty-year career on Tulsatelevision.
As the weather report became pureentertainment, many stations hired“Weather Girls,” like Tippy Stringer inWashington, D.C. By 1955, as many ashalf of all TV weather presenters wereactresses, models, and beauty queens withno meteorological training. The AmericanMeteorological Society responded with aprofessional certification program thataimed to gender weathercasting as a maleoccupation.Promotional materials reinforce the weather report’s visual style even
when the TV is off. This children’s play set enabled kids to re-enactthe presentations made by Chicago’s beloved puppeteeringweatherman P.J. Hoff.
The pictographs and simplified synoptic maps adapted fortelevision’s low-resolution screen in the late 1940s todayappear in newspapers and on the Internet. The visual styleof comic art permeates popular representations of theweather.
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