The Kin-der-Kids by Lyonel Feininger (No. 40)

The Kin-der-Kids (1906)

by Lyonel Feininger

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

As a painter, Lyonel Feininger would eventually garner the aesthetic acclaim that in a better world would already have been his as a cartoonist. In each area of his creative endeavours, Feininger was attuned to the preoccupations of the fine arts of his day, so much so that biographer and critic Hans Hess noted that a single comic strip sequence "contains the problems of modern art in pure form" as well as Feininger's own solutions to the same.

What will strike contemporary readers of 1906's The Kin-der-Kids is a stunning burst of pictorial imagination informed by cultivated taste and executed with distinct flair. Today we get caught up by the colours and their bold combinations, the clever construction of panel and page, the expressive line work, the stylised design, the purposeful exaggerations and distortions, and we need never be the wiser for the international artistic movements they reflected. Instead we are carried away by the glorious full-page Sunday funnies with Feininger's remarkable crew of kids adventures, dashing across the globe in a bathtub, chased by Auntie Jim-Jams and her dreaded bottle of medicinal fish oil.

Despite its madcap nature, the strip radiates a gentleness and takes time to revel in wonder (commissioned, as it was, to serve as a commercial foil for the furious rough-and-tumble of the Hurst funny pages). In that better world, it would have lasted more than 29 episodes.

The Kin-der-Kids was survived by an even more gentle and wonder-filled strip by Feininger, Wee Willie Winkie's World. With its lyric and pervasive anthropomorphism, sheltered-hamlet sensibilities, quieted graphic idiosyncrasies, and close knit of muted, sympathetic colours, it endures as another all too short-lived fantasy land of the beatific.

FURTHER READING:

Lyonel Feininger at MOMA