Funnies Day

For today's funnies, we will go right back to the Genesis of the underground comix movement. Namely, we will present some Mr. Block cartoons distributed by the Industrial Workers of the World between 1912 and 1914.

As the Wikipaedia tells us: Mr. Block, who has no first name, was born 7 November 1912 to Ernest Riebe, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Block appeared that day in the Spokane newspaper Industrial Worker, smoking a cigar and wearing a checkered suit with top hat. Subsequently, Mr. Block lost the fancy clothes but always kept a hat, ten sizes too small, perched on one corner of his wooden blockhead. "Mr. Block is legion," wrote Walker C. Smith in 1913. "He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw .. [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him .. the personification of all that a worker should not be."

Unfortunately, these cartoons are still very topical almost 100 years later! Perhaps even more than they were in their native environment of lumberjacks and miners in Spokane, Washington. These radicalized, class-conscious workers wanted to destroy the capitalist system ("wage slavery") and replace it with a type of community-based anarchy that has nothing to do with anarchism as we know it today. They wanted to form one big industrial union, as opposed to craft-based unionism, and use the general strike as a weapon to bring society to its knees. Admirable sentiment! (click for full size image)