MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The early decades of the twentieth century saw rapid technological expansion that once again brought forth widespread fears of humans being replaced by machines in all facets of society. Creative artists anthropomorphized this threat in the shape of what we today call robots, then more commonly referred to as mechanical men and women. This paper, combined with a visual presentation, will examine newspaper comic strips from the beginning of the century through World War II to examine the messages conveyed by using robots as replacement machines for humans. The paper will argue that the image of robots changed over that period to correspond to changing public attitudes toward machinery and technology, both shaping and responding to those perceptions. Comic strips early in the century assuaged the workers’ fear of replacement by featuring individual humanoid machines which would fail in humorous ways, with human characters mocking them for the unacceptable havoc they wrought, leading to a national catchphrase, “Brains He Has Nix,” taken from the comic strip robot named Percy. By contrast, comic strips from the mid-thirties through the war had their heroes be vastly outnumbered by faceless armies of robots threatening widespread destruction, a societal-level replacement. The analysis concludes that through these depictions, robot characters did more than merely entertain: they generated public attention and commentary. Although newspaper comic strips were one of the predominant mediums in the first half of the twentieth century, the role of robots in them has seldom been closely scrutinized. This paper examines in greater depth an aspect of the history of robots that was presented in broad terms in the author’s recently published book, Robots in American Popular Culture.