FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁ Joanna Pawlik, Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940-1978, 199, cited in Franklin Rosemont, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle (PM Press, 2025), 11.

₂ Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, eds., Dancin’ in the Streets! Anarchists, “The Rebel Worker” and “Heatwave”, 17, cited in Rosemont, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues, 11.

₃ Rosemont, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues, 124.

₄ Ibid., 122.

₅ Ibid., 107.

₆ Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 223.

₇ Dave Wagner, cited in Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (Pluto Press, 2018), 17.

₈ Rosemont, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues, 153.

₉ Ibid., 174.

₁₀ Ibid., 42.

₁₁ “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” are just a few.

When Franklin Rosemont died in 2009, he left behind an eclectic body of writing on a variety of topics of interest to the working-class movement today. The child of union militants, Rosemont was a poet, cartoonist, labor historian, and devoted analyst of American popular culture. A lifelong proponent of the “Chicago idea,” he participated in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Rosemont founded the Chicago Surrealist Group as an outgrowth of the IWW Solidarity Bookstore branch and Roosevelt University’s Anti-Poetry Club. Joanna Pawlik describes the group as attempting to “recover the latent Surrealist content in centuries of US culture.”¹ Exploring the “subversive possibilities of popular culture” in 1960s Chicago meant that Surrealism was interwoven with the liberatory aspects of artistic practices, of jazz and blues, poetry, and painting, and the desire – by no means unpopular – to radically transform society.² The Chicago Surrealist Group was a nucleus for like-minded groups in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Columbus. They helped set up sites and publications to promote and explore their ideas. Rosemont was central to all of this.

Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle have collected a representative sampling of his work in Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture. In the essays from this book, we can see Rosemont enlisting some unlikely allies in the Surrealist cause. One of them is Chester Gould, the auteur behind the wildly popular but rabidly pro-law-and-order comic strip Dick Tracy. In Tracy’s world, criminals are less like humans and more like escapees from Universal monster movies. And yet, audiences responded to these villains with more empathy than to the nominal hero: square, lantern-jawed detective Tracy. After the death of Tracy’s arch-foe – the mob boss, Flattop – mourners sent in cards to newspapers all over the country in protest. In Rosemont’s estimation, it is not the triumph of law that attracted readers to Tracy’s stories, but the “insuperable violence of the dramatic collisions and the dazzling profusion of obsessive detail” they represented, in spite of the author’s conscious commitments.³ It is “the latent content that commands our notice,” Rosemont argued.⁴

Two of the most illuminating essays in the collection are long surveys: “A Bomb Toting, Long-Haired, Wild-Eyed Fiend” and “A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons,” where Rosemont explores how the stereotype of the bearded, bomb-throwing anarchist emerged in popular fiction. Rosemont argues that pioneering cartoonist Thomas Nast’s representation of anarchists following the 1886 Haymarket riots set the standard for American political cartooning in many respects, and his stereotypical bomb throwers were no exception. The stereotype would persist in other mediums, like film and pulp novels, where often the anarchists would implausibly conspire with agents of the German Empire. Rosemont’s assessment differs greatly from this stereotype: he is witty where they were severe, open minded where they were rigid. As far as we know, he never collaborated with any German agents.

Rosemont wrote brief overviews of other popular comics characters like the Incredible Hulk and Donald Duck. He cited approvingly the Hulk’s enjoyment of “wrecking US missile bases and miscellaneous military installations, along with countless other outposts and dwelling-places of power and authority.”⁵ In doing so, Rosemont was reflecting mass sentiment: the Jade Giant and Spider-Man (a superhero with similar problems with law and authority) were praised in a 1965 Esquire survey of college radicals.⁶ While no creators are mentioned in Rosemont’s tribute to the Hulk, his discussion of Donald Duck focuses on Carl Barks, “the only exception to the uniform reactionary tendencies of the (postwar) Disney empire.”⁷ Unlike other Donald stories, Barks’s contained elements of social critique and protest. In spite of the constraints of a restrictive Disney content code, Barks mocked the incessant greed of Uncle Scrooge and the patronizing attitude that the residents of Duckberg had towards the indigenous tribes of foreign lands. Indeed, Barks’s labor was being exploited by his own Scrooge-like boss at Disney: as was common with comic creators of the time, he couldn’t sign his work. Fan mail asking after the “Good Artist” and “The Duck Man” was kept from him. He received a page rate of $11.50, while his comics sold millions of copies worldwide.

Rosemont’s trek through Wobbly cartoonists, “A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons,” will be of interest to those invested in histories of labor as well as cartooning. To Rosemont, the cartoons show that the IWW was “more than a union” that focused on political and economic change, but a cultural force too.⁸ The IWW produced a dazzling array of cartoonists who often parodied the patriotic iconography of their day. Ralph Chapin, composer of the lyrics to “Solidarity Forever,” also edited and drew for Solidarity. Songwriter and labor martyr Joe Hill caricatured capitalism for One Big Union Monthly. But many others, like Ernest Reibe, toiled away in near total obscurity, while their work was enjoyed by thousands of members of the industrial working class. Riebe’s character, Mr. Block – the perfect foil to the normative standard of a “class-conscious” worker – appeared in Solidarity and The Industrial Worker to great acclaim. Rosemont followed in this tradition with the cover illustration he selected for the first issue of the Rebel Worker in 1964. In Tor Faegre’s image, Uncle Sam points at the reader, but instead of asking them to join the US Army, he says, “I’m organized. Are you?”⁹ Rosemont notes that even artists outside of the IWW, like the Communist Party’s Syd Hoff (under the pseudonym A. Redfield) and the Socialist Party’s Art Young, contributed to Wobbly publications. A good sense of humor could cross the sectarian divide, and the short-lived United Cartoon Workers of America sought to pick up these threads, recasting them in the “underground comics” context of the New Left in the early 1970s. 

More troubling is Rosemont’s essay on H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on the Legacy of Cthulhu.” Like Chester Gould, Lovecraft – whom Rosemont casts as a surrealist ally – was also an arch reactionary. Nevertheless, the manifestation of Lovecraft’s beliefs in his cosmic horror stories go unaddressed. For instance, Rosemont writes that Lovecraft’s “intuitive insistence on the awesome, truly limitless possibilities opened in the epoch of workers’ councils gives his and his comrades’ works an implicitly revolutionary character forever unattainable by explicitly ‘socialist’ novels.”¹⁰ Given his popularity, Lovecraft’s work has had more endurance than the self-consciously proletarian literature of writers like Michael Gold. But the “latent content” often merges with form; many of Lovecraft’s works rely on fears of racial degeneration and civilizational decline.¹¹ In the edited collection, a footnote mentions another essay of Rosemont’s, “Lovecraft, Surrealism, and Revolution,” where Lovecraft’s shifting views are addressed: he ended his life identifying with the aristocratic socialism of Norman Thomas. The experience of reading “Notes on the Legacy of Cthulhu” is still jarring, however – like reading a biographical essay on Gore Vidal that doesn’t mention his bisexuality. 

In his afterword, Paul Buhle identifies Rosemont’s writings collected in Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues with a “popular culture from below.” As our contemporary cultural purveyors become subsumed into fewer and fewer multinational corporations, it is essential that working-class people take it upon themselves to critically analyze popular culture, retrieve and digest what is useful, and discard the rest. Rosemont embodied this method by contributing both his criticisms and his creative work to Radical America and Cultural Correspondence, and his founding of venues for critique like Rebel Worker and Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion. Hopefully, Long-Haul and similar journals can follow in this tradition.