SPAN: November/December 1998

LIGHTS ON! GOOD CORPORAT CITIZENSHIP

SPAN Lights On! Publisher Francis B. Ward

By Michael Michalko

Editor-in-Chief Donna J. Roginski

In Praise of Advertising

By John Hood

Editor Lea Terhune

How Advertising Informs to Our Benefit

Associate Editor Arun Bhanot

By John E. Calfee

Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

American Center Jazz Club

By Ian Zachariah

Research Services USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library

COMIC

Photographs: Front cover, bottom, second from leftR. Crumb (Zap Comix). 3-6----U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site, ew Jersey. 12-Hemant Bhatnagar. 17Brij Mohan Mahajan. 20--Ravi K. Singhania. 21 topCheryl Isaac; bottom courtesy-American Center Jazz Club, Calcutta. 22-King Features Syndicate. 23 topJules Feiffer; bottom----(:Iiff Sterrett/King Features Syndicate. 24 top--George Herriman. 25-Jules Feiffer.

26----Fred MacMurraylPhotofest, Winsor McCay. 27Rudolph Dirks. 28-© Tribune Media Services. AJI rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. 29-30--WiJl Eisner (The Spirit). 31-Archie Comic Publications. 32-Walt KeJly. 33 bottom-Art Spiegelman (MaliS). 34 top--G.B. Trudeau/Universal Press Syndicate; bottom--5cotl Adams, copyright © 1998 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. 35 left-courtesy Ambassador Richard F. Celeste; bottom-David Levine. 39-BiJl Watterson, copyright © WattersonlUniversal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 4D--drawing by Charles M. Schulz © United Feature Syndicate, Inc. 42-courtesy American Express. 43-Hemant Bhatnagar. 44-courtesy CargiJl India. 45--5unrider International/Advantage India. 46----courtesy Amway International. 49-Hemant Chawla. 48, 50-56----courtesy Associated Press. 57courtesy Bank of America.

Erratum: In the article, "Lee Waisler-Gravitating to India," on page 32 of the September/October 1998 SPAN, we mistakenly said that the Waisler exhibition wiJl be mounted at Art Konsult instead of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. The error is regretted.

By Jules Feiffer

Winsor McCoy-The Greotest

By Stefan

Kanfer

Milton Coniff ond Roy Crane-This Boy's Dragon Lody

By Pete Hamill

Will Eisner-Below

the Belt

By Kurt Vonnegut

Archie ond VeronicaAmerican Postoral

By RozChast

R. Crumb ond Art SpiegelmonLes Miserables

By Todd Gitlin

Comic PsychologyFunnies Are Good for Us

By Arthur

Asa Berger

How to Grow in a Slump Market

By Shantanu

Published by the United States Infonnation Service. American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi ) 10001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed at Ajanla Offset & Packaging LId., 95-8 Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110 052. The opinions expressed in (his magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.

No parr of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy. Rs. 30.

RELIEF

Drawing on Experience

Front cover: Pow' Boom' Splat' With such superheroes like Superman and Wonder Woman, among others, American comics and comic books have enthraJled generations of children and grown-ups. See story on page 22.

Guha Ray

Good Corporate Citizenship

By N. Habibulla

A LETTER

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FROM

he end of the year heralds holiday seasons in both the East and the West. This issue of SPA is offered in that festive spirit, with a liberal dose of "Comic Relief." Judging from letters received over the years, SPAN's cartoon page, "On the Lighter Side," is its bestbeloved feature. For the first time, SPAN devotes the greater part of an issue to the history of American cartoons, particularly the comics. The comics have been an important part of American life for generations. Sunday mornings always brought a big treat: on that day comic strips had an entire color section to themselves, the bright wrapping on every major Sunday newspaper. On weekdays, the "funnies" were a more sober black-and-white, buried somewhere in the back of the paper. With entrepreneurial vigor, some characters jumped out of the newspaper into comic books of their own, and a whole new genre was born, to the delight of kids who began to collect and trade comic books. Some characters will be familiar in India, some not, but we hope this lighthearted feature about a lively expression of American culturewill please you.

Another celebration talking place as the year winds down is the 150th anniversary of the Associated Press. To commemorate the occasion, theAP has released a book of historic photos, and has mounted a traveling exhibition of some of these images. The man who took the famous picture of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, Max Desfor, was in Delhi for the opening and talked to SPAN about what it was like 50 years ago, covering one of the most important political transitions in modern times.

The interview accompanies a selection of Associated Press photos.

Despite a downturn in the markets, American financial institutions are still betting on India. Shantanu Guha Ray writes about the expansion of American Express, Bank of America and Citibank in "How to Grow in a Slump Market: American Financial Companies Show the Way." Other multinational companies forging ahead with

THE

PUBLISHER

Jomt ventures in India are also trying to be good neighbors. "Good Corporate Citizenship," by N. Habibulla shows how companies are plowing funds back into charitable community projects in Indian villages and urban slums, reaching out with educational and health-care programs for the underprivileged.

We continue to explore aspects of consumer protection in two articles about advertising. Though it is often irritating and much-maligned, advertising is defended by the authors, John Hood and John E. Calfee as being in the consumer's interest. "In Praise of Advertising" examines the nature of brand loyalty and how advertising influences purchases and contributes to quality oflife. One expert says its real work "is not to manipulate the doltish public but to find out how people already live." The second article, "How Advertising Informs to Our Benefit," spotlights advertising as a tool for disseminating important information to the consumer.

We all may not be geniuses, but we can take pointers from one of the most productive minds of the century, Thomas Edison. The man who perfected the lightbulb, among many other things, is showcased in "Lights On!"

by Michael Michalko, who gives insights into how Edison worked. Some of Edison's methods can help those who want to generate good ideas or do just about anything better.

The issue is rounded out by Ian Zachariah's article from Calcutta, "American Center Jazz Club." A hot spot of sorts for nearly a quarter of a century, its story is told by the author, a longtime member and jazz commentator.

Whatever holidays you may be celebrating, we at SPAN send our warmest festival greetings.

It is not hard to figure out why the Iightbulb came to symbolize a new idea. It was perfected

by Thomas Alva Edison, the quintessential idea man. We can't all be Edisons, but this look at his methodical approach sheds light on what we can do to generate better ideas. anyAmericans have bought into the conventional wisdom that creativity is an innate gift, dividing us into two groups: "artistic" typespainters, musicians, directors, actors, writers, mimes, comedians-and those deemed not especially creative, who usually wind up in business, accounting, law or health care.

But the legendary career of inventor Thomas Alva Edison illustrates how creativity can be cultivated by anyone, in any industry. His work methods reveal that the true keys to unlocking creativity are learned

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Reprinted from Across The Conference Board.

the Board.

Copyright

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1998

traits-namely, perseverance and an openminded approach to learning. A shrewd businessman, Edison used his creativity not only in developing new inventions but also in bringing them to market and winning out financially over competitors.

Edison was granted 1,093 patents for inventions ranging from the lightbulb, typewriter and electric pen to the phonograph, motion-picture camera and alkaline storage battery-even a talking doll and a concrete house that could be built from a cast-iron mold in one day. When he died in 1931, he left 3,500 notebooks that are preserved in the temperature-controlled vaults of the West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory archives at the Edison National Historic Site.

The notebooks read like a turbulent brainstorm and present a verbal and visual biography of Edison's mind at work.

Spanning most of his six-decade career, they offer fresh clues as to how Edison, who had virtually no formal education, could achieve such an astounding, unrivaled record of invention. The notebooks illustrate how Edison conceived his ideas from their earliest inceptions and show in great detail how he developed and implemented them. Following are some of Edison's creative-thinking strategies, which you might bend to your own will.

Keep the lightbulb burning Edison believed that to discover one good idea, you had to generate many. Out of quantity comes quality. He set idea quotas for all his workers. His own quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. It took more than 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage-cell battery and as many as 9,000 to perfect the lightbulb.

Edison looked at creativity as simply good, honest, hard work. For every brilliant idea he had, there was a dud, like the horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it into blocks for use as a refrigerant in the summer, or the perpetual cigar that consisted of a hollow tube with a spring clip that moved tobacco forward as it burned. Although the cigar was a marketing failure, its companion product, the

cigar lighter, was a success.

Increasing your idea production requires conscious effort. Suppose I asked you to spend three minutes thinking of alternative uses for the common brick. No doubt, you would come up with some, but likely not very many. The average adult comes up with three to six ideas. However, if you were asked to list 40 uses for the brick as fast as you could, you would have quite a few in a short period of time.

A specific quota focuses your energy in a competitive way, guaranteeing fluency and flexibility of thought. To meet the quota, you find yourself listing all the usual uses for a brick (build a wall, fireplace, outdoor barbecue, and so on) as well as listing everything that comes to mind (anchor, projectile for riots, ballast, device to hold down newspaper, tool for leveling dirt, material for sculpture, doorstop, and so on) as you stretch your imagination to meet the quota. Exerting this effort allows you to generate more-imaginative alternatives than you would otherwise.

Initial ideas are usually poorer in quality than later ideas. Just as water must run from a faucet for a while to become crystal-clear, cool and free of particles, so must thought flow before it becomes creative. Early ideas are usually not true ideas. Exactly why this is so is not known, but one hypothesis is that familiar and safe responses lie closest to the surface of our consciousness and therefore are naturally thought of first. Creative thinking depends on continuing the flow of ideas long enough to purge common and habitual thoughts and produce unusual and imaginative ones.

To prove this to yourself, try the following exercise. Following is a list of five words.

Fish Military Government Ocean Automobile Write the first association that occurs to you for each word. Now do this five more times, and for each time write an association that is different from the association you gave the same word on the previous occasions.

You will note that the latter associations are much more original and unique than the earlier ones. The first responses are the common, dominant associations you have for that word. By forcing yourself to give responses that are not common or dominant, your originality and imaginativeness increase.

A way to guarantee productivity of your creative thought is to give yourself an idea quota-for example, a quota of 40 ideas if •••. you're looking for ideas alone, or 120 ideas if a group is brainstorming. By forcing yourself to come up with 40 ideas, you put your "internal critic" on hold and write everything down, including the obvious and weak. The first third will be the same old ideas you always get. The second third will be more interesting; the last third will show more insight, curiosity and complexity.

Challenge all assumptions Edison felt his lack of formal education was, in fact, a "blessing." This enabled him to approach his work with far fewer assumptions than his more-educated competitors, who included many theoretical scientists, renowned PhDs and engineers.

He approached any idea or experience with wild enthusiasm and would try anything out of the ordinary, including even making phonograph needles out of compressed rainforest nuts and clamping his teeth onto a phonograph horn to use as a hearing aid, feeling the sound vibrate through his jaw.

This enthusiasm inspired him to consistently challenge assumptions.

He felt that in some ways too much education corrupted people, prompting them to make so many assumptions that they were unable to see many of nature's great possibilities. When Edison created a system of practical lighting, he conceived of wiring his circuits in parallel and of using high-resistance filaments in his bulbs, two things that experts considered impossible. In fact, they weren't considered at all, because they were assumed to be totally incompatibleuntil Edison put them together.

Before Edison hired a research assistant, he would invite the candidate over

for a bowl of soup. If the person seasoned the soup before tasting it, he would not be hired: Edison did not want people who had so many built-in assumptions that they would presume the soup was improperly seasoned. He wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions and tried different things.

An easy way to challenge assumptions is to simply reverse them and try to make the reversal work. The guidelines are: • List your assumptions about a subject.

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• Write down the opposite of each assumption.

• Ask yourself how to accomplish each reversal. List as many useful viewpoints as you can.

Suppose, for example, you want to start a novel restaurant.

• You would begin by listing the assumptions you make about restaurants. One assumption might be: All restaurants have menus, either written or verbal.

• Next, you would reverse this to: I will start a restaurant that does not have a menu of any kind.

• Now, look for ways to make the reversal work, and list every idea you can: "How can I operate a viable restaurant that does not have a menu?"

• One idea would be to have the chef come to the table, displaying what he had bought that day at the meat, fish and vegetable markets. The customer checks off the ingredients she likes, and the chef prepares a special dish based on the selected ingredients. He might also name the dish after the customer and print out the recipe for her to take home.

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When Edison died in 1931, he left 3,500 notebooks that are preserved in archives at the Edison NationaL Historic Site in New Jersey. The notebooks iLLustrate the chronology of Edison ideas from their inception to their implementation.

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from his forehead, trying to will the physical movement of a pendulum.)

Once, when an assistant asked why he continued trying to discover a long-lasting filament for the lightbulb after failing thousands of times, Edison explained that, in his mind, he hadn't failed once.

Instead, he said, he'd discovered thousands of things that didn't work. Finally, he completed Patent 251,539 for the lightbulb, which ensured his fame and When an experiment failed, Edison fortune. would always ask what the failure re- .~ Edison had an enormous talent for apvealed and would enthusiastically '~ propriating ideas that may have failed record what he had learned. His ~~ ~ in one instance and using them for notebooks contain pages of mater- ~ something else. For example, when it ial on what he learned from his became clear in 1900 that an iron -ore abortive ideas, including his many exmining venture in which he was finanperiments on willpower. (Biographer cially committed was failing and on the Neil Baldwin writes that Edison conbrink of bankruptcy, he spent a weekducted countless experiments end studying the company's rewith rubber tubes extended sources and came up with ideas

and sketches to redirect efforts toward the manufacture of Portland cement, which could capitalize on the same equipment, materials and distribution systems of the iron-ore company.

Record your ideas Edison relentlessly recorded and illustrated every problem he worked on in his notebooks. Whenever he succeeded with a new idea, he would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions abandoned in the past in light of what was recently learned. If he was mentally blocked working on a new idea, he would review his notebooks for some thought or insight that could trigger a new approach. For example, he took the principle for an unsuccessful undersea telegraph cable-variable resistance-and incorporated it into the design of a telephone transmitter that adapted to the changing sound waves of the caller's voice. This technique instantly became the industry standard.

Edison would often jot down his observations of the natural world, failed patents and research papers written by other inventors, and ideas others had come up with in other fields. He would also rou-

tinely comb a wide variety of diverse publications for ideas that sparked his interest and would record them in his notebooks.

He advised his assistants to keep on the lookout for ideas that others had used successfully on problems in other fields. To Edison, ideas needed to be original only in their adaptation to the problem he was working on.

Edison's lesson is to record your ideas and other novel ideas in a notebook.

When confronted with a problem, review your notebook and look for ways to crossfertilize ideas, techniques and conceptual models by transferring them from one problem to the next.

Top: Not much levity at this business lunch.

The real test for Thomas Edison's new research assistants was whether they salted the soup before or after tasting it. If the candidate seasoned the soup without tasting it, Edison wouldn't hire him.

Above: Edison punches a time clock at his West Orange Laboratory in New Jersey.

Constantly improve your ideas and products and the ideas and products of others Contrary to popular belief, Edison didn't invent the lightbulb: His genius, rather, was to perfect the bulb as a consumer item. Edison also studied all his inventions and ideas as springboards for other inventions and ideas in their own right. To Edison, the telephone (sounds transmitted) suggested the phonograph

(sounds recorded), which suggested motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect, isn't it? Genius usually is.

Edison believed that every new idea is actually an addition or modification to something that already exists. You take a subject and manipulate it into something else. There are nine principal ways you can manipulate a subject. These ways were first formally suggested by Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming, and later arranged by educator and author Bob Eberle into the mnemonic SCAMPER: Substitute; Combine; Adapt; MagnifyModify; Put to other uses; Eliminate; Rearrange- Reverse.

You isolate the subject you want to think about and ask the checklist of SCAMPER questions to see what new ideas and thoughts emerge. Think about any subject-from improving the ordinary paperclip to reorganizing your corporation-and apply the SCAMPER checklist.

You'll find that ideas start popping up almost involuntarily, as you ask: Can you substitute something? combine your subject with something else? adapt something to your subject? magnify or add to it? Can

you modify or change it in some fashion? put it to some other use? eliminate something from it? rearrange it? What happens when you reverse it?

Edison was tireless in his persistence to change a subject into something else through trial and error until he found the idea that worked. In Edison's laboratory, there's a staggering number-hundredsof phonograph horns of every shape, size and material. Some are round, square, angular, thin, short, squat; others are curved and as long as 6 feet tall. This collection of rejected ideas is a visual testament to Edison's approach to creativity-which was, in essence, to tryout every possible design he could conceive of. Once asked to describe the key to creativity, he reportedly said to never quit working on your subject until you get what you're after.

Be exploratory Whenever Edison was working on one thing and found something else "interesting," he would drop everything else and explore it. In developing the electric light, Edison and his assistants decided to use platinum for the filament, but it stayed lit only briefly and was scarce and expensive.

One day, Edison absentmindedly rolled some lampblack in his . f mgers while working with a platinum filament. He looked at the twisted piece of lampblack and got his "Eureka" moment-why not try to use carbon for the filament? His first carbon bulb burned for 13 hours with the power of 30 candles; a few days later he got it up to 100 hours by twisting and shaping the filament like a horseshoe.

The interesting aspect of carbon to Edison was the fact that he could twist it like rope. ' Edis?n wasn't the first person _. m hIS lab to notice that you could twist carbon, but he was the first to pursue it. ~ Whenever Edison found something interesting, he would explore it intellectually, before he applied his emotions and prejudices. Others working on the lightbulb had emotionally decided that the filament should be platinum, blind to the "interesting" aspects of carbon.

They lacked the will to explore carbon, once they had made the decision that platinum was the answer.

To explore a subject with your intellect, you need to will yourself to direct your attention in different ways. A commonly used exercise to help you do this is "Plus/Minus/Interesting," or PMI. This is designed to deliberately direct your attention to all the positive, negative and interesting aspects about your subject.

Carrying out a PMI is simple. What isn't simple is to deliberately concentrate your attention in one direction when your emotions and prejudices have already decided how you should feel about your subject.

Instead of using intelligence to support your emotions and prejudice, you are now using it to explore the subject matter. The guidelines are: • Make three columns on a sheet of paper. Title the columns "Plus," "Minus" and "Interesting."

• Under the "Plus" column, list all the positive aspects about the subject that you can.

• Under the "Minus" column, list all the negative aspects that you can.

• Under the "Interesting" column, list all those things that are worth noting but do not fit under either "Plus" or "Minus."

The "Interesting" items help you to react to the inherently interesting aspects of an idea and not just to judgmental feelings and emotions about the idea. ~ At the end of the explo~ ",,~ ration, emotions and feelings ~ '" can be used to make a ~ iSI decision about the mat'" ~ ter. The difference is that ~ ~ the emotions are now ~ "';s applied after the exploration, instead of being ~ applied before and thereby preventing exploration. With a PMI, one of three things can happen: • You don't change your mind.

• You may change your mind about the idea.

• You may move from an "interesting"

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aspect of the idea to another idea. In 1944, for example, scientists at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT developed a radar that could detect a tower at a distance of 10 kilometers. But when humidity increased, the system didn't work anymore. To their frustration, the scientists discovered that they had somehow developed a radar that was tuned to the natural frequency of water vapor. Rather than trashing their work, they looked for ways to use this "interesting" aspect for some other purpose. Their wo k developed the technology that eventually led to the microwave oven.

The PMI forces you to explore every aspect of your subject. Once a point has been put down under any of the headings, that point cannot be "unthought," and it will influence the [mal decision. You react to what ' you put,down and your feelings change.

Finally, if you want to become more creative, start acting like you are creative.

Suppose that you wanted to be an artist; you would begin behaving like an artist by painting every day. You may not become another Vincent van Gogh, but you'll become more of an artist than someone who has never tried. Similarly, to increase your creativity, start acting like Thoma5 Edison. Cultivate the following creativethinking habits: • When looking for ideas, create lots of ideas.

• Consistently challenge assumptions.

• Record your ideas and the ideas of others in a notebook.

• Learn from your failures and the failures of others.

• Constantly look for ways to improve your ideas and products and the ideas and products of others.

• Be exploratory. You may not become the next Edison, but you'll become much more creative than someone who has never tried.

D About the Author: Michael Michalko specializes in providing creative-thinking workshops for organizations.

He is the author of Tinkertoys: A Handbook of Business Creativity and the new Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Geniuses.

IN PRAISE OF ADVERTISING Advertising can bore us and irritate us, but it has its advantages. Advertising can drive down prices in a competitive market.

It offers us a variety of choices. It can also help us to vicariously fulfill our fantasies of freedom and adventure without having to play basketball like Michael Jordan. or the last few years-until 1998, at least-the Super Bowl hasn't exactly featured the most interesting and competitlve offootball games. They've been blowouts, over by the first half at the latest. But one form of competition has remained as strong and vibrant as ever: the fight to put on the most memorable television advertisement. Over the years, many such ads have made their debut during the Super Bowl, including Apple's "1984" ads touting their new Macintosh, celebrity ads for Pepsi and Coke, and the croaking frogs of "Bud-wei-ser."

Isn't there something wrong with this picture? Should advertising overshadow that for which it is supposed to be merely a sponsor? Well, the answers to these questions lie far beyond the game offootball. As James Twitchell, author of Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture, points out, it isn't just the Super Bowl ads that live on long after the game is forgotten. Advertising generates powerful and lasting social symbols.

Think of Morris the cat, Mikey the Life cereal kid, the Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant, the Energizer Bunny. Think of tunes like "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," "Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz" and "We've Only Just Begun" (a song the Carpenters made a hit after it had already been widely heard in a bank commercial). Think of slogans like "Have it your way," "Just do it," "Snap, crackle, pop" and "Be all you can be."

The ubiquity of advertising, as well as its apparent excess and wastefulness, has led many social critics and would-be consumer "advocates" to demonize it. "Advertising is the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it," wrote one critic. Novelist George Orwell said advertising "is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket." Clare Boothe Luce wrote that advertising had "done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor." A common attack is

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that ads manufacture consumers' demand for products that they would otherwise not feel a need to buy. "Few people at the beginning of the 19th century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted," groused economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

"The institutions of modern advertising and salesmanship," he continued, " ...cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for their central function is to create desires-to bring into being wants that previously did not exist."

But there is another side to advertising, one that these and other social commentators have largely overlooked. Advertising represents the triumph of the consumer over the power of producers and vested interests. Commercial advertising, at least, is found only in societies where individuals have the right to choose their own goods and services from competing suppliers. Ads convey critical information about price, quality and availability.

Furthermore, in many cases ads are indistinguishable from the product; to consume it is to express yourself through the symbols that ads have invoked (the thrill of driving a new car down a highway is a good example of this phenomenon).

In short, advertising is good for consumers. It's worth exploring how in greater detail. ::~

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Many of advertising's critics have portrayed it as playing either no role or a counterproductive role in advancing consumer interests. For example, some economists have long argued that ads create barriers to entry in particular industries, thus reducing competition and making prices higher. This happens, it is argued, because the ads differentiate an existing product-say, a breakfast cereal-from a possible competing product that might taste better or cost less, or both. Consumers might be better off trying this new product, but they are already made familiar with the existing product's name through ads and thus don't make the buying decision that would best satisfy their wants.

This model of consumer decision making neglects to address an obvious dilemma that all of us face every day: limited time and attention span. Given the multitude of activities each of us carries out every day, it is a myth to suggest that we have the

time, ability or inclination to gather perfect information about every alternative available for every good or service we wish to purchase. Because of this practical constraint on market decisions, clever and memorable advertising serves a useful function if it establishes loyalty to a brand that offers us what we want. Of course, advertising alone won't create a lasting attachment. We have to experience the good, and actually enjoy it or find it beneficial and economical. Once having done so, however, brand loyalty then helps us remember and subsequently purchase that useful good again without having to spend a great deal of costly time and resources searching for it.

One study of brand loyalty did, indeed, find that for consumer products such as soft drinks, electric shavers, hair spray, detergents and cigarettes, consumers do display a kind of brand loyalty called "inertia." That is, they tend to buy the same brand consistently. But as economists Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and David S. Saurman wrote in their award-winning book Advertising and the Market Process, "to conclude that advertising of these brands cause the inertia would be similar to convicting a suspect with only the prosecutor's opening statement to the jury as evidence."

In fact, one obvious reason why some products that are bought often tend to display consumer inertia is that consumers are well satisfied with them, and have made the rational judgment that alternative products are unlikely to provide significantly better value. More important, Ekelund and Saurman report that the intensity of advertising more often correlates with less consumer inertia rather than more. Expenditures are higher, in other words, where consumers exhibit less clear attachment to one brand.

Another study found that, from 1948 to 1959, the market share of leading brands actually decreased in highly advertised industries; indeed, the market share of leading brands in toiletries and cosmetics, the highest-advertised industry in the study, decreased faster than in industries such as soap and food, where advertising expenditures were lower.

More generally, Ekelund and Saurman report that competition among firms is, if anything, more fierce-and market shares more uncertain-in industries with higher-than-average advertising expenditures. "The more intensively all firms in industries advertise," they write, "the less stable are market shares or the more these market shares tend to change." The reason is obvious.

It's not just the market leaders who get to advertise. So do their rivals. For entrants into a new sector, advertising isn't a barrier but an opportunity. How else can a new producer get the attention of a busy consumer, and get him or her to trying something new?

Advertising, far from being a constraint on vigorous competition, is more likely a necessary prerequisite for it to occur.

What about prices? Surely, one might surmise, the hundreds of billions of dollars a year spent on intensive advertising are passed along, at least in part, to consumers in the form of higher prices.

But this view is completely contradicted by the facts. Take eyeglasses. For years, some states restricted or banned advertising for eye examinations and eyeglasses, while others did not. This

gave researchers a good data set from which to draw conclusions about advertising and price. As it turns out, states that limited advertising had eyeglass prices that were 25 percent higher than their peers without ad restrictions. To take the most extreme examples, Washington, D.C., and Texas had no advertising restrictions at all, while North Cirolina had the most wide-ranging restrictions in the nation. North Carolina eyeglass prices were double those in D.C. and Texas.

Another study looked at gasoline prices. After adjusting for income and other factors, American Enterprise Institute researchers Thom Kelly and Alex Maurizi found that regions where gas stations displayed their prices prominently to drivers had significantly lower average gas prices than regions where the prices, for whatever reason, weren't clearly visible from the road.

Interestingly, this study not only demonstrated how advertising can reduce prices by encouraging competition, but did so with billboard advertising-one of the most loathed forms of commercial activity on the part of many critics.

Finally, the relationship between advertising and product quality deserves a mention. It appears to be strongest for products that are expensive and purchased infrequently. For disposable "experience goods" like soap or food that are purchased often, consumers develop their own body of information about quality. They either like a brand or they don't. But for high-cost, high-value "search goods" such as automobiles, farm equipment, computers or household appliances, consumers seem to demand information on quality. One study of the Yellow Pages bore this out. Ads for search goods and services were four to 12 times more likely to include information about licensing or certification, consumer ratings and other quality selling points than did ads for experience goods, which focused more on price and availability.

Some critics of advertising might grant that it plays an important role in the competitive process, but still criticize it for "creating" consumer demand where it would otherwise not exist. In particular, many point to advertising for products such as perfumes and soft drinks that rely rarely on price or specific quality information and more on images, music, celebrities or symbolism. What practical benefit could this kind of advertising possibly provide? Isn't it just an expensive and wasteful form of brain candy?

Only if one adopts a limited, even soulless, view of markets.

After all, they don't exist simply to supply proteins, mildly stimulative liquid refreshments, tonal recreational amenities or person-carrying devices. They give us sizzling steaks, a beer after work, a concert on Saturday night, and a fast car to get us there.

As in other areas of our lives--such as family or faith-free enterprise is a means by which we seek meaning and enjoyment.

The extent to which advertising contributes to that function is greater than is usually perceived.

Take sports merchandise. No matter how many Nike shorts or Air Jordans you wear, you are very unlikely to be as good at basketball as the athletes who advertise these wares. No matter how many banners, jackets, buttons or flags you buy with your favorite team's logo on them, you will never actually be part of the team or directly share in its wins or losses. But that isn't the point. People seem to enjoy expressing their affinity, their affection for their heroes and teams by sporting their colors. It makes the game more meaningful to them.

Similarly, the fact that millions of Americans are buying four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicles will not change the fact that most will never actually use them as some of the people in ads do-to haul things, for example, or to go four-wheeling through rugged mountain terrain. Even images of families with children heading home from soccer practice don't necessarily comport with the actual use of sport utilities by young singles. But something about those images resonates with the buyer. It might be a true aspiration to do those things, or just a sense that the purchase of such a vehicle might expand their possibilities. Whatever the source, it is obvious that in these cases the advertising becomes, in a way, part of the good being purchased. To some extent, the buyer of a new Mustang convertible is buying the feeling that ads for the convertible have expressed, a sense of freedom or adventure.

Some may view this side of advertising as a vice, but I see it as a virtue. It doesn't mean that advertising actually creates a demand for a product. It's not that powerful. The desire for goods and services to make our lives safer, cleaner, easier and more enjoyable is already implanted deep within us. What advertising does is merely to bring that desire out into the open, and give it a distinct form. As James Twitchell observes, "The real work of Madison Avenue is not to manipulate the doltish public but to find out how people already live ... not to make myth but to make your product part of an already existing code." He summarizes the concept neatly this way: "Advertising is simply one of a number of attempts to load objects with meaning. It is not a mirror, a lamp, a magnifying glass, a distorted prism, a window, a trompe l'oeil, or a subliminal embedment as much as it is an ongoing conversation within a culture about the meanings of objects. It does not follow or lead so much as it interacts. Advertising is neither chicken nor egg. Let's split the difference: it's both. It is language not just about objects to be consumed but about the consumers of objects."

It is also a language that is spoken only in a society where individuals-not guilds, not bureaucracies, not all-powerful institutions -ultimately decide what goods and services will be produced and consumed. They do so by exercising their choice as consumers.

Advertising helps them do that. It's no more complicated than that. D About the Author: John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a think tank based in North Carolina, and the author of

The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good.

HOWAD~ TO OUR The persuasive purpose of advertising and the healthy skepticism of the consumer are two sides of a single process. The relationship stimulates advertisers-sometimes unwittingly-to serve the consumer by providing vital information.

This, says the author, promotes the public good and improves quality of life. great truth about advertising is that it is a tool for communicating information and shaping markets. It is one of the forces that compel sellers to cater to the desires of consumers. Almost everyone knows this because consumers use advertising every day, and they miss advertising when they cannot get it. This fact does not keep politicians and opinion leaders from routinely dismissing the value of advertising.

But the truth is that people find advertising very useful indeed.

Of course, advertising primarily seeks to persuade and everyone knows this, too. The typical ad tries to induce a consumer to do one particular thing-usually, buy a product-instead of a thousand other things. There is nothing obscure about this purpose or what it means for buyers. Decades of data and centuries of intuition reveal that all consumers everywhere are deeply suspicious of what advertisers say and why they say it. This skepticism is in fact the driving force that makes advertising so effective. The persuasive purpose of advertising and the skepticism with which it is met are two sides of a single process. Persuasion and skepticism work in tandem so advertising can do its job in competitive markets.

Hence, ads represent the seller's self-interest, consumers know this, and sellers know that consumers know it.

By understanding this process more fully, we can sort out much of the popular confusion surrounding advertising and how it benefits consumers.

A

IITISING INFO ENIFIT The first mass-marketed soft drink in America, Moxie, was also among the first to use a health sales pitch.

Its original cure-all claims were modified with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Introduced in the I 880s, Moxie was finally muscled out by CocaCola after World War II.

Just how useful is the connection between advertising and information? At first blush, the process sounds rather limited.

Volvo ads tell consumers that Volvos have side-impact air bags, people learn a little about the importance of air bags, and Volvo sells a few more cars. This seems to help hardly anyone except Volvo and its customers.

But advertising does much more. It routinely provides immense amounts of information that benefits primarily parties other than the advertiser. This may sound odd, but it is a logical result of market forces and the nature of information itself.

The ability to use information to sell products is an incentive to create new information through research. Whether the topic is nutrition, safety or more mundane matters like how to measure amplifier power, the necessity of achieving credibility with consumers and critics requires much of this research to be placed in the public domain, and that it rest upon some academic credentials. That kind of research typically produces results that apply to more than just the brands sold by the firm sponsoring the research. The lack of property rights to such "pure" information ensures that this extra information is available at no charge. Both consumers and competitors may borrow the new information for their own purposes.

Advertising also elicits additional information from other sources. Claims that are striking, original, forceful or even merely obnoxious will generate news stories about the claims, the controversies they cause, the reactions of competitors (A price war? A splurge of comparison ads?), the reactions of consumers and the remarks of governments and independent authorities.

Probably the most concrete, pervasive and persistent example of competitive advertising that works for the public good is price

advertising. Its effect is invariably to heighten competition and reduce prices, even the prices of firms that assiduously avoid mentioning prices in their own advertising.

There is another area where the public benefits of advertising are less obvious but equally important. The unremitting nature of consumer interest in health, and the eagerness of sellers to cater to consumer desires, guarantee that advertising related to health will provide a storehouse of telling observations on the ways in which the benefits of advertising extend beyond the interests of advertisers to include the interests of the public at large.

A Cascade of Information

Detailed nutritional information and lists of contents are now features offood product advertising. This is partly a marketing ploy and partly the result of consumer protection laws. Greater knowledge about a product allows the consumer to make well-informed decisions about purchases.

Here is probably the best documented example of why advertising is necessary for consumer welfare. In the 1970s, public health experts described compelling evidence that people who eat more fiber are less likely to get cancer, especially cancer of the colon, which happens to be the second leading cause of deaths from cancer in the United States. By 1979, the U.S. Surgeon General was recommending that people eat more fiber in order to prevent cancer.

Consumers appeared to take little notice of these recommendations, however. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) decided that more action was needed. NCI's cancer prevention division undertook to communicate the new information about fiber and cancer to the general public. Their goal was to change consumer diets and reduce the risk of cancer, but they had little hope of success given the tiny advertising budgets of federal agencies like NCI. Their prospects unexpectedly brightened in 1984.

NCI received a call from the Kellogg Corporation, whose All-Bran cereal held a commanding market share of the high-fiber segment. Kellogg proposed to use All-Bran advertising as a vehicle for NCI's public service messages. NCI thought that was an excellent idea. Soon, an agreement was reached in which NCI would review Kellogg's ads and labels for accuracy and value before Kellogg began running their fiber-cancer ads.

The new Kellogg All-Bran campaign opened in October 1984. A typical ad began with the headline, "At last some news about cancer you can live with." The ad continued: "The National Cancer Institute believes a high fiber, low fat diet may reduce your risk of some kinds of cancer. The National Cancer Institute reports some very good health news. There is growing evidence that may link a high fiber, low fat diet to lower incidence of some kinds of cancer. That's why one of their strongest recommendations is to eat high-fiber foods. If you compare, you'll find Kellogg's All-Bran has nine grams of fiber per serving. No other cereal has more. So start your day with a bowl of

Kellogg's All-Bran or mix it with your regular cereal."

The campaign quickly achieved two things. One was to create a regulatory crisis between two agencies. The U.S. Food and Drug Adrllinistration (FDA) thought that if a food was advertised as a way to prevent cancer, it was being marketed as a drug. Then the FDA's regulations for drug labeling would kick in. The food would be reclassified as a drug and would be removed from the market until the seJJer either stopped making the health claims or put the product through the clinical testing necessary to obtain formal approval as a drug.

But food advertising is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, not the FDA. The FTC thought KeJJogg's ads were non-deceptive and were therefore perfectly legal. In fact, it thought the ads should be encouraged. The Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection declared thai "the [Kellogg] ad has presented important public health recommendations in an accurate, useful and substantiated way. It informs the members of the public that there is a body of data suggesting certain relationships between cancer and diet that they may find important." The FTC won this political battle, and the ads continued.

The second instant effect of the All-Bran campaign was to unleash a flood of health claims. Vegetable oiF manufacturers advertised that cholesterol was associated with coronary heart disease, and that vegetable oil does not contain cholesterol.

Margarine ads did the same, and added that vitamin A is essential for good vision. Ads for calcium products (such as certain antacids) provided vivid demonstrations of the effects of osteoporosis (which weakens bones in old age), and recounted the advice of experts to increase dietary calcium as a way to prevent osteoporosis. Kellogg's competitors joined in citing the National Cancer Institute dietary recommendations.

Nor did things stop there. In the face of consumer demand for better and fuller information, health claims quickly evolved from a blunt tool to a surprisingly refined mechanism. Cereals were advertised as high in fiber and low in sugar or fat or sodium. Ads for an upscale brand of bread noted: "Well, most high-fiber bran cereals may be high in fiber, but often only one kind: insoluble.

It's this kind of fiber that helps promote regularity. But there's also a kind of fiber known as soluble, which most high-fiber bran cereals have in very smaJJ amounts, if at all. Yet diets high in this kind of fiber may actually lower your serum cholesterol, a risk factor for some heart diseases." Cereal boxes became convenient sources for a summary of what made for a good diet.

Increased Independent Information The ads also brought powerful secondary effects. These may have been even more useful than the information that actually appeared in the ads themselves.

One effect was an increase in media coverage of diet and health.

Consumer Reports, a venerable and hugely influential magazine that carries no advertising, revamped its reports on cereals to emphasize fiber and other ingredients (rather than testing the foods to see how well they did at providing a complete diet for laboratory rats). The health-claims phenomenon generated its own press coverage, with articles like "What Has All-Bran Wrought?" and "The Fiber Furor." These stories recounted the ads and the scientific information that prompted the ads; and articles on food and health proliferated. Anyone who lived through these years in the United States can probably remember the unending media attention to health claims and to diet and health generally.

Much of the information on diet and health was new. This was no coincidence. Firms were sponsoring research on their products in the hope of finding results that could provide a basis for persuasive advertising claims. Oat bran manufacturers, for example, funded research on the impact of soluble fiber on biood cholesterol. When the results came out "wrong," as they did in a 1990 study published with great fanfare in The New England Journal of Medicine, the headline in Advertising Age was "Oat Bran Popularity Hitting the Skids," and it did indeed tumble. The manufacturers kept at the research, however, and eventually the best research supported the efficacy of oat bran in reducing cholesterol (even to the satisfaction of the FDA). Thus did pure advertising claims spill over to benefit the information environment at large.

The shift to higher fiber cereals encompassed brands that had never undertaken the effort necessary to construct believable ads about fiber and disease. Two consumer researchers at the FDA reviewed these data and concluded they were "consistent with the successful educational impact of the KeJJogg diet and health campaign: consumers seemed to be making an apparently thoughtful discrimination between high- and low-fiber cereals," and that the increased market shares for high-fiber non-advertised products represented "the clearest evidence of a successful consumer education campaign."

Perhaps most dramatic were the changes in consumer awareness of diet and health. An FTC analysis of government surveys showed that when consumers were asked about how they could prevent cancer through their diet, the percentage who mentioned fiber increased from 4 percent before the 1979 Surgeon General's report to 8.5 percent in 1984 (after the report but before the AJJ-Bran campaign) to 32 percent in 1986 after a year-and-a-half or so of health claims (the figure in 1988 was 28 percent). By far the greatest increases in awareness were among women (who do most of the grocery shopping) and the less educated: up from 0 percent for women without a high school education in 1984 to 31 percent for the same group in 1986. For women with incomes of less than $15,000, the increase was from 6 percent to 28 percent.

The health-claims advertising phenomenon achieved what years of effort by government agencies had failed to achieve.

With its mastery of the art of brevity, its ability to command attention and its use of television, brand advertising touched pre-

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cisely the people the public health community was most desperate to reach. The health claims expanded consumer information along a broad front. The benefits clearly extended far beyond the interests of the relatively few manufacturers who made vigorous use of health claims in advertising.

Health claims for foods are only one example, however, of a pervasive phenomenon-the use of advertising to provide essential health information with benefits extending beyond the interests of the advertisers themselves.

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Advertising for soap and detergents, for example, once improved private hygiene and therefore, public health (hygiene being one of the underappreciated triumphs in 20th century public health). Toothpaste advertising helped to do the same for teeth.

When mass advertising for toothpaste and tooth powder began early in this century, tooth brushing was rare. It was common by the 1930s, after which toothpaste sales leveled off even though the advertising, of course, continued. When fluoride toothpastes became available, advertising generated interest in better teeth and professional dental care. Later, a "plaque reduction war" (which first involved mouthwashes, and later toothpastes) brought a new awareness of gum disease and how to prevent it.

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Brushing Teeth Right After Eating with

COlGATE DENTAL CREAM

STOPS BAD BREABI AND

STOPS mOlH DECAY! The Colrate way of brushilll teeth ri{ht after eatin{ Is the best home metbod known to belp stop tooth decay! And Colrate's iRstantly stops bad breath in 7 out of 10 cases that ori{inate ie the mouth!

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right .ft" ealing mak('~ your mouth (('('1 c!eam'r l()lIger-give.~ you a c1r8.ll. fresh mouth ~11day ltmg.' S<'ientific tt"."Il~ have prOf'ed that in 7 out of 10 ('8i<"~.Colgatt"s i,u/antly stop:J bad breath thal'onginalt's in tilt> mouth. And 110 othf'r toolhpa."ih· df'an:J tt'f:'th more t>ff('(·tiv("ly. yet ~ salt'I)'!

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dwarfed by the benefits to consumers in the form of fewer cavities and fewer lost teeth.

Health claims induced changes in foods, in non-foods such as toothpaste, in publications ranging from university health letters to mainstream newspapers and magazines, and of course, consumer knowledge of diet and health.

These rippling effects from health claims in ads demonstrated the most basic propositions in the economics of information. Useful information injtially failed to reach people who needed it because infoffilation producers could not charge a price to cover the costs of creating and disseminating pure infoffilation. And this problem was alleviated by advertising, sometimes in a most vivid manner.

Other examples of spillover benefits from advertising are far more common than most people realize. Even the much-maligned promotion of expensive new drugs can bring profound health benefits to patients and families, far exceeding what is actually charged for the products themselves.

The market processes that produce these benefits bear all the classic features of competitive advertising, We are not analyzing public service announcements here, but old-fashioned profitseeking brand advertising. Sellers focused on the information that favored their own products. They advertised it in ways that provided a close link with their own brand, It was a purely competitive enterprise, and the benefits to consumers arose from the imperatives of the competitive process.

One might see all this as simply an extended example of the economics of information and greed. And indeed it is, if by greed one means the effort to earn a profit by providing what people are willing to pay for, even if what they want most is information rather than a tangible product. The point is that there is overwhelming evidence that unregulated economic forces dictate that much useful information will be provided by brand advertising, and only by brand advertising, Of course, there is much more to the story. There is the question of how competition does the good I have described without doing even more harm elsewhere. After all, firms want to tell people only what is good about their brands, and people often want to know what is wrong with the brands. It turns out that competition takes care of this problem, too.

It is often said that most advertising does not contain very much information. In a way, this is true. Research on the contents of advertising typically finds just a few pieces of concrete information per ad. That's an average, of course. Some ads obviously contain a great deal of information. Still, a lot of ads are mainly images and pleasant talk, with little in the way of what most people would consider hard information. On the whole, information in advertising comes in tiny bits and pieces.

(Continued

on page 58)

OneYear In a Richard F. Celeste is about to complete his first year as u.s. Ambassador to India. He shared his reflections on life at the diplomatic helm in an exclusive interview with SPAN. It was not entirely what he anticipated, he says, upon reviewing his past 12 months in the ambassador's office.

Reflections on the past year I would describe my first year in India as typically Indian, in that it was full of the unexpected. When I arrived I did not expect to witness a national electioncertainly not in the first four months that I was here. When I arrived I did not expect that I would be dealing with the consequences of a decision by the Government of India to test nuclear weapons. When I arrived I anticipated a presidential visit.

Now I've nearly finished my first year, and I still anticipate a presidential visit, but it looks like it's going to be down the road a few months, or perhaps a bit longer.

It's been a year of unexpected turns of events.

At the same time, of course, it has been a year in which all of the things that attracted me to India have been reinforced-the importance of this country as

a friend and a potential partner for the United States, the devotion of this country to democracy, and the diversity of this country which always makes it interesting. All of these things have made it a very rewarding year, as well.

Indo-U.S. relations One of the consequences of India's decision to test nuclear weapons, and the dialogue that we have engaged in sincebetween Strobe Talbott, our Deputy Secretary of State, and Jaswant Singh, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission-is, in my view, a maturing of the way in which we talk to each other.

I have had the good fortune to sit in on most of these meetings. And I have been struck by the candor of the two senior representatives of our governments, by the seriousness with which they are addressing very tough issues, and by their determination to look for a common ground-based on an honest affirmation of each country's national interest. In other words, I think we are getting down to brass tacks in our relationship. In many respects the implications go well beyond matters relating to nonproliferation, and go to what a strategic dialogue really should be about.

For example, what are the core interests that affect India's security perceptions, India's national interest as its leaders understand it, and their dreams and ambitions? What are the core interests of the

United States as we look at this region, as we look at global events, and as we examine our own security perceptions, and our dreams and ambitions?

There is no easy set of answers in this discussion, or the work of the Deputy Secretary and Deputy Chairman would have been over after several meetings. I hope that even after the current issues on the table-which concern how to meet India's perceived security needs and how to restore the integrity of the global nonproliferation effort-are addressed, this same kind of high-level, serious, candid conversation will continue on a broadened basis. That kind of dialogue would be very good for our countries.

South Asia I am often struck by the irony that many Indian friends say, "Please don't equate India and Pakistan," and then the first question they ask me has to do with our policy toward Pakistan. I'm impressed by how difficult it is to convey effectively our desire to maintain a friendly relationship with India's neighbors, and at the same time build a friendly relationship with India. As a consequence every step which these two countries take to address those issues which divide them is a step that our government applauds. The fact that the prime ministers had a constructive meeting in New York during the United Nations General Assembly, the fact that their foreign secretaries are once again

Depury Chairman olthe Planning Commission JaslVant Singh and Depury Secretary of State Strobe Talboll are escorted by Ambassador CeleSTe as they emerge from the u.s. Embassy in New Delhi during Talboll's recent visil.

meeting, offers hope to those of us who want to see positive relations between this great democracy which is India and its neighbor Pakistan.

We want to encourage not only a conversation about issues that divide them, but we would certainly like to encourage cooperation, active cooperation.

1've taken pride in the little glimmers of hope that have been provided by forums created by our U.S. Information Service, where Indian and Pakistani experts, or concerned citizens, can come together to talk about their shared concerns on a particular subject, such as the environment.

I feel that the more we can support that kind of contact, the more it can provide a groundwork for government-to-government dialogue. This willingness to talk about serious issues between neighbors has all taken on an additional sense of urgency, of course, since both countries tested nuclear weapons. So I am modestly encouraged by the signs of willing-

ness to talk between India and Pakistan, and I hope that can be built on in the coming year.

Future cooperation I am an incurable optimist. I think you have to be to have spent your life in politics as I did. I am optimistic over the long term about the relationship between the United States and India. When I look at those bonds between our two countries, I see business partners, U.S. businesspeople in partnership with Indian businesspeople who perform to the highest level of business activity anywhere on the face of the planet. When I look at American scientists working with Indian scientists in a whole range of areas-from agriculture to health care to civilian space applications, I see the best science in the world being undertaken on a collaborative basis. And when I look at people-to-people relation路ships, and the glowing-enthusiasm for American higher education that you find

among young Indian students for graduate and postgraduate work in the United States, who then bring their experience back to India-l see models for the partnership which I hope one day our governments can achieve.

I think businessmen and scientists and students are ahead of diplomats and government leaders in this respect. So I am optimistic for the future. The opportunity for a much closer relationship between our two countries is substantial, but I don't think achieving it will be easy. I believe we carry an accumulated burden of history that has kept the government-togovernment relationship from realizing its potential.

I was encouraged by what Prime Minister Vajpayee said to the Asia Society in New York, when he described the United States and India as natural allies. I have heard an aspiration expressed by many Indian citizens that reflects my ambition: to realize the special relationship between India and the United States that many of us believe lies as an unfulfilled promise. We simply haven't been wise enough or skillful enough to craft it into the day-to-day diplomatic reality between our countries. This is the big challenge on my desk, and in the work that I do each day-to nurture one of the four or five most important relationships that the United States will have in the 21 st century and foster a genuine partnership between the world's two greatest democracies.

D

Nearly 25 years old, the American Center Jazz Club continues to keep the spirit of jazz alive in Calcutta.

It has hosted Herbie Hancock, the Charles Mingus band, John McLaughlin and Dizzy Gillespie. The author, a longtime jazz buff and music critic, has a look in.

F

or some members of the American University Center (AUC) Jazz Club in Calcutta, it was Duke Ellington who started it all. In 1963, the legendary composer-arranger-bandleaderpianist brought to the city his orchestra with a remarkable all-star lineup that included Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Cootie Williams, Jimmy Hamilton, Harry Carney, Sam Woodyard and Cat Anderson.

For my part, the three memorable concerts left me with indelible recollections and several prized autographs, the most valuable being those of Ellington himself and his close collaborator, Billy Strayhorn.

To others, it was All India Radio, with its Friday jazz programs that sparked off their interest in the music. "That's where I first heard Mingus, Dolphy and Coltrane," says one of the earliest members of the Jazz Club. "Then, of course, there were the live broadcasts of the Ellington con-

certs." Since jazz records were hard to come by in the country in the 1950s and '60s, radio provided a vital listening post.

But for most, it was the Voice of America's Jazz Hour, hosted by Willis Conover, that introduced them to the absorbing American art form. Sitting up late nights, waiting for the deep voice to announce, "Time for jazz," listening to Conover's measured cadences listing the musicians on a track and the date of its recording. The program featured such a diversity of styles and performers that it is little wonder that a good number of young people got hooked on the music.

The American University Center was, as its name implies, an organization that interacted with students. Located on Bidhan Sarani, near Calcutta University, it had a fairly well developed cultural section. In early 1972, it established a jazz club as a means of "promoting an understanding of, and appreciation for jazz."

Managing Director Mike Bennett and Program Manager Ila Jasani got together a small group that, over the years, was to become the nucleus of the AUC Jazz Club.

"The AUC had apparently tried, unsuccessfully, in the past to form a jazz club," says Ashok Gupta, one of its first members. "This time it worked."

Calcutta has always been a city that loves music. It had a symphony orchestra that played regular concerts with such y~~= iting performers as Yehudi Menupin: Indian classical musicians, too, found Calcutta audiences to be very receptive and knowledgeable. World War II and its influx of American troops introduced jazz to the city. Calcutta was, till the 1960s, an important commercial center, drawing young people from all over the country to its tea, jute and engineering industries.

Every hotel and restaurant worth its salt in the entertainment area around Park Street had a band that played jazz-tinged evergreens, standards or dance music six nights a week.

By the early '70s, however, with the emigration of the entertainers, many of whom were Anglo-Indians, and the consequent departure of musicians to the more commercially attractive cities of Mumbai and Delhi, the music died. The city was in

the midst of change, of shifts in tastes, ideologies and attitudes. So opportunities to listen to jazz dwindled down to the occasional visit by overseas musicians, usually sponsored by the cultural wings of foreign governments. The audience for western music diminished.

The time, therefore, was right; the AUC Jazz Club couldn't have happened at a more favorable moment. Renamed the American Center Jazz Club in 1989, it celebrated its silver jubilee last year.

The first few meetings of the club were held in the homes of members, who played their own jazz records, sharing the music and their experiences of it, with a small group of about 15 people. Films were also shown-though, on at least one occasion, it turned out not to be what was expected.

"I turned up at a meeting, and there was a film on country-and-western music," says Jayanta Sengupta. "I wasn't sure if I'd come to the right place. Yet, by August 1972 membership had to be closed at 50 and the venue shifted to the USIS conference room, then on Chowringhee Road.

Interestingly, since the meetings were held on Saturdays or Sundays, when the US IS was closed, Jazz Club members had to enter the building through an alleyway at the back-in the true style of the Prohibitionera speakeasy, even though only coffee was served at these sessions. "We paid three rupees each as 'coffee money' and we brought our own biscuits," recalls Ajoy Ray, another veteran member.

At about the same time, Sengupta and Pradip Mitra presented a program tracing the growth and changing style of Miles Davis, an event that was to set the pattern for the club's activities. By focusing on a musician, a style or trend, jazz enthusiasts were not only able to share the music but also to put it in the proper historical perspective.

It wasn't always an interest in jazz that drew initial audiences to the club's sessions. "I first went for the ambience," admits Jaweed Moiz. "The music and the soft lighting, people sitting on the carpet, were what attracted me." That was about 25 years ago. Moiz is still "into" the Rolling Stones, but his preference in mu-

sic today covers the spectrum of contemporary jazz.

Courting couples were also a distraction to the jazz lovers at the club. "I just played some Coltrane, and after a while they got the message and left," laughs Ray, who shows no remorse at playing the spoilsport. But those who stayed, stayed on for years.

Such faithfulness to the genre has, of course, produced a dedicated core of jazz aficionados. Some may call it singlemindedness, but there is little doubt that the Jazz Club has been instrumental in keeping alive the city's interest in the music and providing a forum for visiting musicians.

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hus, when the Jazz Ambassadors Duo was in town on a United States Information Agency and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts-sponsored visit recently, they were pleased to meet and interact with quite a few jazz literates with whom they could talk about their music.

The duo-Daniel Zemelman, pianist, and Matthew Lewis, who plays trumpet and sings-are from the Chicago area and grew up together, but had never played music together till they auditioned for, and won, the chance to showcase America's jazz as traveling ambassadors. Zemel man came to jazz from a classical training and states as his influences Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and stride pianists such as Art Tatum. His music then, is melodic, lyrical and alive with myriad colors. Lewis's trumpet admittedly shows the influences of Louis Armstrong, Clark Terry and Miles Davis; his vocals, those of Bobby McFerrin, Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks, thus combining scat, vocalese and the limitation of instruments, providing a rhythm section for the piano solos.

That the two, even while searching for individual styles, have got together in an unusual combination to produce very accessible music, says as much for the virtuosity of the young musicians as it does for the versatility of jazz.

Visitors like the Jazz Ambassadors are what keeps the adrenaline high at the American Center Jazz Club. But such

events do not occur as often as one would like them to, depending as they do on programs and budgets originating in Washington. So from the very beginning, the club has organized live concerts by the city's professional musicians as well as young aspirants, providing a platform for performance of jazz.

A local group, the Soul Crusaders, played for the club's first anniversary. The second saw a six-day festival that included concerts by Braz Gonsalves, Pam Crain and the Louis Banks Brotherhood.

"It was at our celebrations that Louis first played jazz in a concert situation," says Ray. There are fewer musicians in town today, but the concerts continue each year; among these who keep the music going are Arthur Gracias, Anto Menezes and Carlton Kitto.

The decade, 1975-84, could well be considered the Golden Age of the Jazz Club. In that period it either co-sponsored, presented or was associated in some way (the distinctions are subtle) with concerts by some of jazz's outstanding performers, as well as by some who are today making a mark on the scene. A partial listing, as recalled by those who were there: the first to arrive, in 1975, was Dave Liebman and Lookout Farm, with Badal Roy on tabla and percussion. In 1978, Clark Terry and blues singer Joe Williams came to Calcutta with Willis Conover on their way home from Jazz Yatra. Two years later, Susan Mingus, widow of Charles Mingus, brought Mingus Dynasty, some of whose members had played with the legendary bassist. In 1982, we had the Billy Taylor Trio, and the following year the Chico Freeman Quintet with Kenny Barron on piano. Trumpeter Woody Shaw played Calcutta in 1984; with him on trombone was Steve Turre. In addition, some club members banded together to bring to Calcutta Herbie Mann in 1982, Shakti with John McLaughlin in 1984, and in 1985, that supreme innovator Dizzy Gillespie. A more recent landmark was the concert by Herbie Hancock and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance Ensemble that heralded the start of the club's 25th anniversary celebrations.

The 19805 were heydays at the Jazz Club: Chico Freeman (right) performing in 1983; Woody Shaw (above) tooting his horn in 1984.

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Top: Herbie Hancock takes a break as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance Ensemble goes through their paces. Above: Old-timers at the Jazz Club celebrate its 10th anniversary in 1982.

he fortunes of the Jazz Club have fluctuated over the years, its highs and lows depending on the level of support from individuals at the AUC, and thereafter, at the USIS. Get a number of longtime club members together and the list of those who have helped keep the club on keel comes rolling out like jazz phrases: Ila Jasani Good, who started it all, David Good (now director, North Africa, Middle East and South Asia [NEA] division at U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C.), who helped get it going and then married Ila; Alan King, Richard Kaplan and Barbara Good, Rebecca Winchester, Peter Sawchyn, Dino Caterini and Terry White.

But even when the going wasn't good, the diehards soldiered on undeterred.

"Jazz is one music you can't hear by yourself. And it covers an age range no other music can," says Moiz. It has been the efforts of these few that have kept the interest going. "Young people drop by, sample the music. If they like it, they stay; else they move on. There's no proselytizing," says one of them.

That the American Center Jazz Club has remained active for more than 25 years is no small achievement. "Over the years, the crowd has changed as members left the city or got too busy with their jobs and family to come to our meetings," says Debashish Gupta, who seems himself to have successfully combined career and family with jazz. "The crowd has changed, but it hasn't expanded."

Currently, the club has about 200 members on its mailing list, though attendance at the monthly meetings tends to remain small and intense. Jazz has never had a large audience, even in the United States, and as the Jazz Ambassadors confirmed, even with all the media available, it is impossible for most musicians to make a living playing just jazz. "So, if there are larger turnouts for live concerts and the film shows we organize than for listening sessions, that's the way it's always been," says Ray. "It's the way jazz is."

0 About the Author: Ian Zachariah, who spent several years in advertising agencies, is now a communications consultant and a freelance writer on the arts.

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began to draw when I was four years old, and what I drew was Popeye. Not the animated Popeye. I was too young to go to movies, and TV was a couple of decades away. The Popeye I drew was taken from the newspapers, the comic strip creation of E.C. Segar, who had introduced the squint-eyed, bulging-forearmed sailor in 1929: the year of my birth, the year of the Great Depression, the year comic strips and cartoons were boisterously reshaping our popular culture.

Popeye came out of a format that was barely 30 years old. Tum-of-the-century pioneer illustrators working mainly for Hearst and Pulitzer had invented the comic strip in the late 1890s, beginning with Richard Outcault, whose Yellow Kid was the first newspaper character to move out of a single-panel existence into multiframes.

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Mutt and Jeff, The Katzenjammer Kids and Happy Hooligan followed, but it was Winsor McCay, with his Little Nemo in Slumberland, who elevated tills crude hybrid of words and pictorial gags into a previously urumagined beauty and elegance.

Comics ranged from the raffish to the decorative, sometimes combining both, from baggy-pants rock 'em, sock 'em vaudeville to gentler depictions of the fast-fading past: the general store, the barbershop, barefoot boys carrying fishing poles-wistful symbols of American innocence, done in 15 years earlier by a European war.

The funny papers were a sanctuary for what was left of our innocence. Daily strips, five or six columns wide, four inches deep, filled a tabletop size newspaper page, while Sunday supplements, in

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full color, showed off a range and mix of hues beyond anything known today. It was lowbrow art, devised by immigrants, or the sons of immigrants, for the entertainment of immigrants.

This son of immigrants found the sight of a newspaper comics page all but overwhelming. It was like looking at dancing wallpaper, a page full of Cagneys, fighting, strutting, stomping, gesticulating.

This was just-off-the-boat energy in drawings and text, the noise of the streets, the trolley cars, the tenements, the wharfs with their wharf rats, like Popeye, exploding into comic violence for the smallest of reasons. It was reason enough that this runty, one-eyed sailor was the single moral creature in a crazy-quilt universe that took corruption and instability for granted-and thrived on it.

Not all the strips were great, not all of them were good, but even the so-so ones

strips: Dick Tracy, Dan Dunn, Red Barry, Kerry Drake; and the vaudevillians: Count Screw loose , Smokey Stover, Barney Google, Bringing Up Father, Popeye.

But what I loved most-what meant more to me than home and family and life itself - were the adventure strips. Soldiers of fortune, danger in exotic lands, death on the high seas ...these were the dreams that boys were made of. I was transported out of my Bronx bedroom to desert islands, where a young man with his wits about him might well find buried treasure.

The adventure strip was born with Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and reached its zenith with Milton Can iff's Terry and the Pirates. Crane's cartoons couldn't sit still: They ran, pounced, jumped and fell.

Buffoony characters cavorted against realistically rendered backdrops: on Monday, a teeming jungle, by Friday, a roiling sea. And fights, fights galore, replete with appropriate sound ef-

fects: ZAM! WHAM! KABLAM! POWEE! Caniff was more suave. His densely detailed camera eye gave us movielike storyboards of gentlemen adventurers and gun-toting, pirate dominatrices.

Adult banter in the middle of a firefight, slashing brush strokes, ominously shaded

planes, tanks and firearms, all combined to suggest that once the heat of battle was over, something equally torrid was going to take place. While Wash Tubbs gave us classic brawls, it was Terry that introduced offstage sex onto the comics page.

The wonder of it all! George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals, Frank King's

Gasoline Alley-masterpieces of bombastically beautiful, surreal design, turned out Sunday after Sunday, year upon year-no one thought this stuff was art. How could it be? It was on newsprint! This week's fish was wrapped in last week's Prince Valiant, and tossed out at night with the rest of the garbage.

Where I retrieved it. The tragic irony of my boyhood was that the particular comics without which I couldn't have survived a life on the ropes in the fifth grade appeared in newspapers that were not allowed in my house-or any good, liberal, Jewish household. The truly great strips were carried in the worst papers-the Hearst press, or the New York Daily News-Republican, antiliberal (and not overly fond of Jews, either). The more enlightened papers-the Post, the Telegram,

the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunfeatured mainly bourgeois, middlebrow strips: Mr. and Mrs., Pa's Imported Sonin-Law and The Timid Soul. The Timid Soul? Give me a break! My soul cried out for guts and glory! I had an unquenchable thirst for rowdy action, which, when sated, or partly sated, gave me a halfcrazed caffeineLike high. But where was I to go for it? The super!

There were no Jewish superintendents in the Bronx. They were all gentiles, poorer than even us poor Jews, and fans of the right-wing populism of the News, Mirror and Journal American. Yester-

day's papers stood in stacks outside the super's door, or out in the alley by the garbage cans, where, late at night, my heart pounding like the thief I was, I stole them. Mine, all mine!

Newspapers I stole, comic books I traded for: one Detective Comics for two Famous Funnies; one All-American Comics for two of The Blue Beetle. Comic books were just hitting their stride in the early 1940s. They were more crudely drawn, more simply plotted, more badly written than newspaper strips and, as a result, entirely accessible to lO-year-olds.

Though short on plot, they were strong on action, a galaxy of costumed heroes, hooded and huge and evilhating. They broke out of the page to get at the bad guy, punching through the framed borders of panels, leaping across the left-hand page, / across the gutter, onto the right-hand page, just to better beat a brush-cut Nazi or a fanged foaming -atthe-mouth Japanese into oblivion.

Jack Kirby's Captain America posed for us like a model in an anatomy class: bulging biceps, popping pecs, twisted torso, ridged abdomen, hardly any butt or crotch at all, but boxlike calves.

It was hard to imagine anyone standing up to him, including other superheroes.

I enjoyed matching up one superhero against another. The Green Lantern would be no match for Captain America, but could take the Blue Beetle, who might well take the Hawkman, but would fall to the Sub-Mariner, who could not beat the Human Torch, but could easily defeat Daredevil. Batman could dish it out, but couldn't take it: The Joker regularly got in what was called a "lucky punch" and knocked him senseless. Wonder Woman could take Batman. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, could take Wonder Woman.

Superman, of course, could take anybody,

but that, as it turned out, was his failing.

Yes, he could handle Captain Marvel, but he was a little too sure of himself, a trifle smug. Captain Marvel was, I was sure, more fun to hang out with.

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omic-book artists modeled their styles after the men who drew for the newspapers, Joe Shuster's Superman was clearly a blend of Wash Tubbs and Flash Gordon. Alex Raymond's sci-fi strip, Flash Gordon, was the most imitated comic strip in history.

Every comic-book artist wanted to be Alex Raymond. He drew better than a cartoonist, more like a Saturday Evening Post illustrator. His characters looked like portraits of movie stars, posing on the pages like fashion models. They were outfitted in skintight costumes, leg-hugging boots, stylish hats and caps, an outer-space fashion statement. Raymond rendered his strip in the most glittering of brush lines, highgloss strokes of awesome glamour.

Comic-book artists were green with envy. Superman's Joe Shuster tried to imitate Raymond, but he just couldn't draw as well. Superman caught a little of Flash's litheness, but nothing of his grace: Where Flash waltzed, Superman clunked. Bob Kane's Batman was an odd mixture of styles, blending the ultrasophisticated Caniff with the ultra-hard-boiled Chester Gould.

Gould's Dick Tracy was classic Capone-era violence, ratcheted up with freakish villians and torture, torture, torture. Gould didn't draw much better than Joe Shuster; Dick Tracy looked carved out of wood. But it didn't matter-no more than it mattered that Batman, in action, appeared arthritic, with haphazardly connected body parts. So what if Gould and Kane were poor draftsmen? They could deliver the message and tell a good story.

Examples abound of cartoonists who can't draw or draw well, but are no less effective. Perhaps the best of them was Little Orphan Annie's Harold Gray, a primitive who drew lumbering, hamhanded, pudding-faced characters with sightless eyes. Yet, in the history of comics, no one set the stage better, composing scenes in black and white and scratchy tones of gray that were masterpieces of charged atmosphere.

The crudity of comic-book art endeared me to the form. A boy of my untested skills could hope to be Joe Shuster, Bob Kane or one of the more secondary talents like Bernard Bailey, who drew The Spectre, or Fred Guardineer, who drew Zatara. But it was unimaginable that, at 12 or 13, I was ready to be Milton Caniff-or even Al Capp, whose Li'l Abner set the standard for mocking, satiric humor at the time.

Both men were masters of what I admired most: the ability to combine words and pictures into a graceful, seamless whole, in which the distinction between text and art blurs, till you can't tell where one begins and the other ends.

Their only equal was Will Eisner, whose strip The Spirit in some ways meant more to me than the others because of its appealing hybrid nature, and because I recognized something of myself in the style and weight of the stories. The Spirit was a comic book that was not a comic book because it appeared in newspapers. Still, it wasn't a newspaper strip, because it was laid out like a comic book. But it wasn't a comic book either, because its characters had a sense of reality, irony, charm and wit unknown in comic books.

And it spoke to me, personally, sometimes literally, with a character who stepped out front on the page and addressed me directly, confiding in me. Can you imagine? Eisner spoke my laner: guage; this wasn't & surprising, since

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he was also from the Bronx. This man was the closest thing to what I wanted to be as a grown-up.

The New Yorker was the furthest thing from my ideal. I read it as a boy and a young man, of course. Anyone trying to be smart, and hoping someday to be somebody, read The New Yorker-the cartoons, if nothing else. The New Yorker was brilliant, great, none better, but it was not for me. I was too Bronx for Peter Arno, too ungenteel for Gluyas Williams, too unConnecticut for Whitney Darrow, Jr., or any junior. With my nose pressed against Eustace Tilley's window, I sensed that this was a club I could not get into.

I truly didn't belong. I came from Eisner's streets, which were clotted with puddles and swill, where garbage floated in the river. I couldn't make it in the Copa, or EI Morocco or with one-liners. I couldn't talk-or think-in captions. I needed frames; I needed the talk, talk, talk, talk of cheap newsprint mega-panels.

I would love to have sipped martinis at the "21 Club" with William Powell, Myrna Loy, Moss Hart and Gertrude Lawrence, but who was I kidding? I belonged on a street corner with John Garfield, our eyes squinting into the glare of the class system.

I hated The New Yorker and all it r~presented, except for Robert Benchley, who was the first to teach me what little-guy humor was all about; except for Gluyas Williams, who illustrated Benchley; except for Charles Addams, who was hilariously disturbed; and Carl Rose, Sam Cobean, Daniel Alain, Alan Dunn, Mischa Richter, Saul Steinberg and, of course, Arno, who I had to forgive, in spite of his toniness, because he was the cartoon equivalent of Picasso.

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y politics were strongly leftist, so I was more drawn, in the cold war '50s, toward editorial cartoons than gag panels. I found little to admire in the prevailing practitioners. They were, with few exceptions, loyal, dim-witted cold warriors.

Only Herblock, Bill Mauldin and one or two others, like Hugh Haynie and the young Paul Conrad, who had the

chutzpah to take on Ike-age pieties.

As was Walt Kelly, who, at a time when other cartoonists, like Al Capp, ran for the hills, turned his comic strip Pogo into a courageous and scathing satire on McCarthyism and dogmatism of every kind, Right and Left. Kelly's rage was informative. I learned from Kelly that rage had a place in the business of humor. It sent me back in time to look at the past masters of rage: the old Socialists of The Masses, some of whose graphic images have been reimagined in Broadway's Ragtime; Robert Minor's blistering rage; Art Young's humane rage; Boardman Robinson's Jehovahlike rage. Rage, rage, rage.

You didn't find rage in The New Yorker.

You didn't find it anywhere, except in this small handful of dissenting cartoonists. They were the ones I was lured to live up to. And then, one day, I came across William Steig's Agony in the Kindergarten. These abstract drawings, which were New Yorker rejects, looked like nothing I had ever seen, and revealed the secret thoughts of children and grownups. More rage, but this was not political.

It was private: angst- and guilt-ridden imprints of the soul. What a way to go, I thought. And I went.

I have left out many important cartoonists (they will kill me): Nicole Hollander, whose Sylvia is a brilliant satiric creation.

I've restrained myself from trying to talk you into thinking that comics are art.

Americans adore comics and cartoons, but will go on forever disdaining the idea of them as art. We are living, and will, doubtless, go on living, in a time when mature people are embarrassed to read Spider-Man in public but feel no such qualms about Entertainment Weekly or the New York Post.

This battle is too dumb to be worth fighting.

0 About the Author: JuLes Feiffer is a cartoonist, pLaywright, screenwriter, children's book author and novelist. He has received a PuLitzer Prize, an Obie Award and an Academy Award.

THE GREATEST

By STEFAN KANFER

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illiam Randolph Hearst, promoter of yellow journalism and shrieking headlines, was not known for truth in advertlSlng. Except once. He described the Sunday comics section of his New York Journal as "Eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe," and when the work of Winsor McCay was on display, Citizen Hearst did not exaggerate.

McCay's art school was a dime museum in Cincinnati, where he acted as the house "lightning sketcher," drawing objects as fast as customers could name them. After illustrating the local papers for a decade he came to New York in 1902. Within a year he had become the superstar of the comics section. McCay be-

gan with Little Sammy Sneeze in the Evening Telegram, then moved on to Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in the New York Herald. Sammy was essentially a one-joke affair: A boy anticipates a violent sneeze and in the last panel lets go with a giant KER-CHOW! - blasting cans from grocery shelves, blowing the wigs off plutocrats and, on one occasion, shattering the black borders of the strip itself.

On the surface, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was as simple as Sammy. Sleepers find themselves in bizarre situations: A child's toy blocks fall down and topple a city; a dentist climbs inside a patient's mouth. Here the artist seemed to be presenting a situation farce; in fact, he was using the strip as a kind of therapy.

Winsor's younger brother Arthur had been confined in an insane asylum since adolescence. John Canemaker, McCay's discerning biographer, concludes that Winsor "feared and hated the horrible possibility that he would suffer Arthur's unfortunate fate. His drawing ability saved him from that, and so he kept on drawing for escape, for survival and for salvation."

Little Nemo in Slumberland allowed the ultimate escape. At a time when television, radio and glossy magazines were unknown, the Sunday funnies offered vast oblong galleries for artists to display their wares. Audiences did not merely read these comjcs; they entered them like ticket

holders going into an arena-and Nemo was the most beguiling drama of all. In a richly tinted narrative the hero, based on the artist's son Robert, strode through a Carrollian world where logic had lost its significance. Each week the diminutive hero saw fantastic hybrids of elephants and giant birds, got swallowed up by the earth and hurtled through a phosphorescent universe. McCay had tapped into his own unconscious, fancifully disguising its desires and terrors. The episode of Queen Crystalette is typical. Nemo rises from his bed to get a drink of water and finds himself in a world of glass people. The boy is taken before the Queen, a figure of such delicate glass that she can barely return his bow. "Blind and deaf with infatuation," Nemo embraces the Queen and bends her backward in a kiss far too passjonate for his years. She shatters like a tumbler dropped on stone; so does her retinue.

Nemo awakens with "the groans of the dying guardsmen still ringing in his ears."

McCay's landscapes often evoked the canvases of Bosch and Breughel. As for the melting perspectives, they would have no parallel until the Freudian productions of Dali and De Chirico. Without quite understanding him, the public made Nemo a favorite: Intellectuals avidly discussed the boy; Victor Herbert built an operetta arround him.

Alas, the four walls of the comic page could not hold the restless McCay, and he ventured into the brand-new field of motion pictures. For America's first animated cartoon, Gertie the Dinosaur, he drew every frame-some 4,000 in all-and then toured the vaudeville circuit with a print. In his final years he returned to the Herald and attempted to resurrect Nemo, but the creative fire was banked, and the artist slipped into obscurity. Today McCay is better remembered for what he did on celluloid than on paper. A pity. Disney and Warner Bros. took animation to places it had never been, but no newspaper artist ever came close to the work Winsor McCay displayed in his months of Sundays.

0 About the Author: Stefan Kanfer, former editor of Time, is author of eight books. His latest book, Serious Business, covers animation in the United States.

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he Katzenjammer Kids made its debut in 1897 when it was created by Rudolph Dirks for the Sunday humor supplement of the New York Journal. Cartoonist Harold Knerr also drew the strip in the early days. "Katzenjammer" means "the howling of cats" -and is also slang for a

hangover-in German. The comic strip employed a patois European-English dialect and two bratty kids as protagonists. Their mother, a sea captain who boarded with them, and the odd passerby were the victims of their mischief. Still in syndication after a hundred years, it is the most enduring of a genre of comics

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that were inspired by European immigrants who came to the United States in great numbers at the turn of the century.

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or me, the two great masters of the narrative comic strip in this century were Roy Crane, born in 1901, and Milton Caniff, 1907. Crane gave us Wash Tubbs (which evolved into Captain Easy) and Buz Sawyer, Caniff gave us Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. For the most part, their finest work was done before World War II, and there is no way for me to brood about my own youth without their work being part of the tale.

The subject was adventure. In search of it, Crane sent his heroes everywhere, from the comic-opera Ruritanian fastnesses of a mythical central Europe to the banana republics of Latin America. They were shot at, beaten up, imprisoned; they came into immense fortunes and swiftly lost them; and wherever they went, they had fun.

Crane's merging of story and pictures was strikingly original. His characters were drawn in a cartoony, "big foot" style, with an energetic line and rich This article previously June/July 1998 issue.

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blacks. Even when slttmg down they seemed poised for some new, rambunctious action. They were always rushing somewhere-into one of Crane's spectacular fistfights, in search of buried treasure, rescuing one of his lusciously plump women, confronting the evil Bull Dawson. It was Crane who first gave the comic strip a visual soundtrack: fights were punctuated with words like KAPHWOK! or LlCKETY-SPLAT; planes roared; fish plopped.

But Crane added another element to this cartoon vision: the real world. The quality of his drawings of mountains, harbors, islands, ships, airplanes, castles, cities and above all, the sea, had never been seen before in a comic strip. They were not derived from magazine illustration or the fine arts; they were unique to Roy Crane, to his comic strip. In his earliest work-Wash Tubbs first appeared in 1924-Crane experimented with a variety of techniques to add tone and texture to conventional black-and-white strips: lithograph pencils, benday dots, spattering, cross-hatching. Then, about 1937, he

discovered a treated board called Craftint.

With the use of a chemical, an artist could effect a light tone by bringing up a pattern of single strokes; a different chemical produced a darker tone made of cross-hatch lines. With his rich blacks, the use of white space, and those two tones, Crane made hundreds of extraordinary drawings. His pictorial sense was on a par with that of filmmaker John Ford, and his influence on younger cartoonists was enormous. "Roy Crane showed us how to do this work," Caniff told me in the late 1970s. "He practically invented the form."

In the earliest of Caniff's Terry and the Pirates strips, which began in 1934, the homage is obvious. There are echoes of the Easy-Tubbs combination in the Pat Ryan-Terry Lee relationship, along with the exotic Asian locale. For a few months the strip seemed like Roy Crane without the energy or the fun. Then it swiftly matured. First the drawing changed.

Under the influence of his close friend and studio mate Noel Sickles, who was producing Scorchy Smith for the Associated Press, Caniff set down his crow-quill pen and picked up a brush. The style grew looser and bolder. Soon he was dramatizing his stories with powerful impressionistic shadows, and the use of cinematic rhythms and the timing of the cliffhanger. To find out what happened next, the reader had to buy the next day's newspaper.

But Caniff did more than master a

unique pictorial style. He was probably the finest writer ever to work in comic strips. In Terry, he invented a wonderful cast of characters, with a recurring theme of class difference and an atmosphere of sex that had never been seen before.

Every ten years or so, some powerful American woman still finds herself nicknamed the Dragon Lady, after Caniff's tough Eurasian pirate. But the original was more than tough; she was erotic. Her body was lush and desirable, but she was not just a babe; she was a complicated, powerful woman with her own sexual desires.

Caniff created literally dozens of other memorable women in the course of his picaresque narrative: the blonde Burma, derived from Maugham's Sadie Thompson, working as a blues singer in the dives of the China coast; Normandie Drake, the spoiled little rich girl who rejected Pat Ryan and married a worthless upper-class bum; Raven Sherman-a nurse patterned after Katharine Hepburn or perhaps Greer Garson - whose death from cholera brought Can iff thousands of letters of sympathy.

His villains were just as vivid a lot: Papa Pyzon, Klang the warlord, Captain Judas and dozens of others. One of the most daring was Sanjak, probably the only lesbian villain in the long history of comic strips. Caniff's women and his villains were always more interesting than the protagonist, Terry Lee. By the time of the Korean War, the grand inventiveness of Caniff and Crane had begun to wane. The dismal orthodoxies of the cold war seemed to chill the imaginations of both artists. As television began to absorb most forms of popular narrative, newspaper editors started shrinking the sizes of the strips. The amazing pictorial set pieces of Crane and Caniff could not be appreciated when reduced to the size of stamp collections or printed on Sundays in the coarse colors of offset reproduction. For want of a canvas suited to their heroes, they began to wither away.

D About the Author: Pete Hamill has served as editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. He has also been a columnist for the Village Voice.

BELOW THE BELT ill Eisner brought dance to the comics. He was a master of human bodies and their clothing in every state of motion, no matter how grotesque, as, may I say, Edgar Degas was not. Looking at

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Eisner's art, I often felt as though my own bones and muscles and facial expressions were being twisted this way and that-like those of his characters.

Another hero of mine, the artist George Grosz, once whimsically confessed that he wanted to learn composition.

That Grosz never mastered this academic subject didn't matter much in his case, but young artists who are serious about composition could do worse than study Eisner's The Spirit, which long ago set such impossibly high standards for the art of cartooning.

0 About the Author: Kurt Vonnegut is author of many novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle and, most recently, Timequake.

This article previously appeared in Civilization magazine, JunelJuly 1998 issue.

he'd still be in the clique. There would also be a Big Dumb Likable Ox-Guy who had a girl, but not the right one.

There would, of course, be a Sidekick, the best friend of the Main Guy. The Sidekick

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hen I was 10, my parents were extremely anti-comic book.

They were teachers, so they took the whole idea of improving one's mind very seriously, and comic books were not the way to go. The exception was Classic Comics, which they happily bought for me. I never read a single one. I am now more or less aware that my parents were not deliberately trying to ruin my life, but merely trying to protect me from the American pop culture that they saw as trying to swallow me up in its moronic maw.

Naturally, all their good intentions came to naught. Every day after school, I'd go up to my friend's apartment on the fifth floor and read through her Archie comic books. She had tons of Archies, because her mother didn't give a damn if her mind turned to mush. Archie's Joke Book, Betty and Veronica-she had them all.

In some ways, this was where I got my first ideas about what being a teenager might be like. Teenagers were still a bit mysterious. They were kind of like adults, but much, much smarter and cooler. They knew about the latest pop songs and fashion trends and were interested in boy-girl stuff. If you were lucky enough to have one as a sibling, you'd have to really work at it to be unpopular.

So what did I learn from Archie and his pals? Well, for one thing, I learned about cliques. Your clique was who you did stuff with, like hang out, which was the main thing you did if you were a teenager.

On a clique's fringes, there'd be the Conceited Rich Kid, who usually had something humiliating happen to him, like he'd slip on something and everyone would laugh. He'd never get the girl, but

would be eccentric and maybe wear a funny little hat. Girls weren't interested in him. Then there were the Girls: They'd be best friends with one another, but kind of competitive. All they talked or thought about was boys and fashion. They were pretty and perky. I knew for a complete fact that Betty was not a hypochondriac, and that Veronica was not an oversensi-

tive weeny who worried incessantly about what other people thought of her.

At the very center of this crowd was Average Joe Teen: not too smart, but not too dumb; not alarmingly gorgeous, but nicelooking; polite to authority figures, but not a brownnose; not rich, not poor; not an athlete, but he could toss a ball around as well as the next guy. This was Archie.

If you were a teenager, you would not only have this group of friends, you'd have a "hangout." Maybe it would be a soda shop of some sort, run by an irascible but kindly fellow named Pops. You could go there at any time and run into at least one member of your clique. You'd have a

jalopy.

It might have some engine troubles, but only humorous ones, involving lots of hilarious noises. And if you were a true teenager, you'd live in a house with a yard, not in an apartment.

This was the Archie universe. At 10, I knew that my life might not exactly resemble theirs, but a part of me really did believe that all that separated me from these characters was about six years. By the time I was 11, I preferred my cousin's MAD magazines.

By the time I was 12, I decided that when I was a teenager, I was going to be a hippie. Archie and his cronies disappeared from my life completely.

0 About the Author: Roz Chast has been drawing cartoons for The New Yorker since 1978.

She is the illustrator of four children s books, including Meet My Staff.

YER eON, W&HAVeMe1 1HISeNeMY ANP HI! 'S us.

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alt Kelly's endearing yet incisively political comic strip Pogo first appeared in 1948. Pogo was a cuddly-looking possum who discussed life's vagaries with a cast of animals and humans who frequented his swamp home. By the 1960s Pogo had a cult following that grew as Kelly sharpened his pen on politicians. He deplored the anti-communist witch-hunts and blackl ists of Senator Joe McCarthy and his henchmen, and Kelly's political satire of the 1950s ridiculed them with characters like the unforgettable Deacon, whose bigoted self-righteousness is underlined by the Gothic lettering of his speech. Kelly carried on his efforts in the 1960s and '70s to include caricatures of figures like J. Edgar Hoover and Spiro Agnew.

Kelly's satire earned the wrath of conservatives, but he preferred to stick to his principles and risk losing

conservative newspaper clients, if necessary. POgO'5 observation, "We have met the enemy and he is us," became the slogan of a generation of activists. Though the cartoon depicted (above) is directed at environmental degradation, the message is universal.

Kelly managed to deliver his barbs with humor and humanity. He died in 1973, but his wife Selby continued the strip for two more years, when Pogo was retired after a 26-year run.

-L,T.

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ART SPIEGELMAN

M

y father bleeds history," Art Spiegelman called the first volume of his stellar Maus, which is at once the most horrific of all horror comics and the most graphic of all history comics. Taking the vilest Nazi stereotypes and turning them upside down-Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs-Spiegelman took a personal story and made it stand for a modern epic. He imagined a form for the unimaginable-a form both human and inhuman for a story both human and inhuman. He took one story, singular, of his parents' lives as Polish Jews and made it reek of the enormity of the Nazi mass murder, and the horror exacted not only upon his parents but upon the next generation. And he did all this in a comic book!

A comic book! In an age overstuffed with easy irony, Spiegelman accomplished something excruciatingly difficult, and amazing. He took one of our culture's seemingly most innocent forms and turned it inside out to depict the actually monstrous. He took a subject-the extermination of the Jews-that has become banal, and excavated one of its bitter truths. Spiegelman's audacity was breathtaking. No wonder more than a dozen publishers turned down the first volume of Maus before Pantheon put it out in 1986.

At first blush, little connects

Spiegelman's humanism-to use a word prematurely discredited these days-to Robert Crumb's savage "comix," which adorned the underground press of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continue to this date, although in a weakened form. (SelfLoathing Comics is one of his recent productions.) Crumb's characters are schleppy and horny men, marauding and compliant women. He trades in stereotypes, including racial ones, and whether he subjects them to criticism may be doubted. Whether satirizing countercultural gurus or indulging them, Crumb is obsessed with sex-nothing legal or tender about it.

In Crumb's own partly self-satirizing words: "All the smut. ..all the perversion ...the explicit, twisted sex ...."

No one turned culture upside down in the 1960s like Crumb.

Where MAD had satirized popular culture's idiocies from the early 1950s on, Crumb took counterculture idiocies and pushed them to their limits. Playing both ends, he was both the darling of the counterculture and one of its secret critics. In much of his work he also took on ordinary life and rendered it disgusting-as disgusting, he would say, as it already is. He drew himself in a far from romantic fashion-

pronounced Adam's apple, stubble of beard, bitter words. His antiheroes were predatory, whiny, frequently silly. He and his victims exchanged unpleasantries with casual, often pornographic and racist, wildness.

Still, in all his excess, Crumb was a founding father. He opened the comic book form for the likes of Spiegelman.

Crumb and Spiegelman: Even their names seem drawn directly from Central Casting. Crumb( the fragment of something nutritious. Crumb, the affectionate insult. Spiegelman, in Yiddish or German, is the mirror man, he who throws back to us what we are prepared for. The common note shared by the two artists is the shock that is felt when the repressed returns. 0 About the Author: Todd Gitlin, professor of culture and communications at New York University, is author of The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. He is also columnist for the New York Observer.

This article previously appeared in Civilization magazine, June/July 1998 issue.

Doonesbury

below spoofs California-style Trudeau's satire more often current American political debate.

Characters such Doonesbury, Zonker, Duke, Lacey, Andy Lippencott and

snobbery. deals with and social as Mike JJ Caucus, others have

brought up issues from the Vietnam War, to Watergate, to AIDS, often stirring controversy and occasionally interfacing with reality outside the cartoon frame. Once a strip urged readers to seek residency in tax-free Texas as a barb directed at the then U.S. President, pointing out the state

was the "primary legal residence of George Bush" and including a residency application coupon. It resulted in 45,000 applications from all over the U.S. and some foreign countries ("Like the prez, you won't pay a dime of state income tax here ...Residency requirements? None!"). The Texas State Controller reportedly refused to disclose names of Pennsylvania applicants to tax sleuths from that state who wanted to discover whether or not the people had paid their state taxes. Trudeau says targeting issues has never been the driving force behind Doonesbury-rather, it has been "unapologetically, stone silliness."

In 1975 Trudeau won the first Pulitzer Prize given to a comic strip artist. He took a sabbatical for nearly two years in the early '80s, but returned with a focus readjusted to the fast-changing age of new technology.

-L.T.

corporate pressures. Adams draws from the absurdities of the white-collar workplace: bosses, coworkers and general frustration.

Adams is well-qualified to comment on the environment-a computer programmer and applications engineer himself, he studied for his MBA at the University of California, Berkeley, in the '80s. Not only does he get ideas from his own work experience, but he publishes his E-mail address - scottadams@aol.comand receives thousands of night~ mare office tales

from fans which he sometimes turns into comic strips. Adams once told an interviewer, "The real story of Dilbert is the basic disregard for his dignity as a human being, which is the biggest problem in workplaces generally. If you acknowledge people's basic dignity, suddenly all these other things seem less important. If somebody's feeling good about their job, they're going to go the extra mile." About the possibilities for Dilbert's future, Adams observed, "I have no sense of purity that Dilbert will be used in only one way. He's my employee, and damn it, he'll do what I tell him to do."

-L.T.

By G.B. Trudeau

S

ocialcommentary became hipper and gained new relevance with the advent of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury in 1970. For the first time real people, events and places were specifically mentioned and consistently discussed in a comic strip. The example

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bout as contemporary as a comic strip can get, Dilbert is a product of the corporate cyberculture of the 1990s. Creator Scott Adams's droll view is expressed through his hero, computer engineer Dilbert, faithful Dogbert, a boss whose hairstyle is reminiscent of Satan's horns and other denizens of an austere, high-tech, business world. The strip is drawn on minimalist lines with a scathing message for managers and advice for their downtrodden underlings cloaked in ironic humor.

Dilbert achieved swift popularity after being created in 1989, often finding its niche on business pages instead of the comics page, where it provides a few seconds of daily relief from the intensity of

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"Join, or Die" recognized as the first American political cartoon. The drawing is by Benjamin Franklin and was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1794. Its purpose: to urge the new American states to unite.

T

he first known use of the cartoonist's art in America was for political purposes, getting the revolutionary message across in the easiest way possible to a public that was not universally literate. As the nation grew to accommodate newspapers and periodicals, the political cartoon became a staple of editorial pages. Caricature has long been a tool of political cartoonists, though not all caricatures are meant to be political. David Levine is probably America's best-known caricaturist, and his work bas appeared regularly for decades in the New York Review of Books. While he bas sketched brilliant political satire-such as his famous cartoon of President Lyndon B. Johnson showing the scar from an appendectomy - he more frequently draws the famous in literature and the arts. Each

wordless drawing incorporates a subtle comment on the subject. As Jules Feiffer observed, "Levine can cut a subject to pieces, and the subject, unknowing, will bid to buy the original." His caricature of Rabindranath Tagore (right) adorned a recent study of the comparative ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore.

Caricature is used to skewer or otherwise comment on politicians daily in newspapers around the world. Few in Ohio would fail to recognize the caricature of their former Governor-now U.S. Ambassador to IndiaRichard F. Celeste. This 1996 cartoon from the Columbus Dispatch (above) graphically depicts speculation that the former Governor would run again, perhaps taking a leaf from the book of a well-known comeback artist.

-L.T.

February

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17, 1895

Ain't I Hot Stuffl The comics are born A _~.:;; bald-headed urchin who will become ~ known as the Yellow Kid appears In Richard Outcault's single-panel cartoon Hogan's Alley. William Randolph Hearst soon lures Outcault from

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Pulitzer's New York World to his New York Journal.

1914

1915

Able the Agent, by Harry Hershfield, offers an amusing view of business, friendship and family-in Jewish dialect, no less,

Rube Goldberg's hapless Boob McNutt begins a 19-year run, joined by friends Ike and Mike and Bertha, the Siberian Cheesehound,

Rudolph Dirks's anarchic Katzenjammer Kids-"Ve iss sorry ve vas badl"-<!ebuts in Hearst's Journal. It is the first comic to routinely use sequential panels to tell a story.

Dean of commentary cartoonists Frederick Opper hits the lowbrow funny pages for Hearst, creating tin-hatted tramp Happy Hooligan-and brings to comics the first regular use of the speech balloon.

Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Patterson wants a strip about lower-middleclass family life, so Sidney Smith creates The Gumps. The strip becomes a national institution; in 1922, Patterson gives Smith a 10-year, $1million contract Smith dies shortly afterward, but the strip lives on until 1959

Gasoline Alley, at first an ode to the automobile, becomes a favorite family strip-and introduces real time to the comics, Cartoonist Frank King allows baby Skeezix to grow up in some of the most beautiful Sunday pages ever.

Another Outcault strip, for the New York Herald, introduces the page-boy scamp Buster Brown, a respectable contrast to the Yellow Kid.

Martin Branner's Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner is the first of the virtuous career girls, followed by Tillie the Toiler (1921), Molly the Manicure Girl (1928) and others.

1930

1930

1931

1934

1934

1934

He Done Her Wrong,

by Nize Baby cartoonist Milt Gross, is the first comic strip novel.

Blondie begins as a flapper-era golddigger, Dagwood as a millionaire-but Chic Young soon settles them into middle-class domesticity in a strip that becomes a generation's favorite,

Bullets fly in Joe Patterson's Chicago Tribune when Chester Gould's two-fisted crimefighter takes on gangsterland, Dick Tracy is a new kind of adventure strip-urban and filled with violence,

Blasting off to compete with Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon betters it in the lush art of Alex Raymond, whose style will influence a generation of cartoonists.

Millon Caniff masters the fusion of words and pictures in Terry and the Pirates: cinematic techniques, exotic evildoers and vivid dialogue,

By far the most successful satirical strip yet, AI Capp's Li'l Abner runs for 43 years-and an increasingly bellicose Capp becomes America's bestknown cartoonist

June 1938

May 1939

1940

1940

1940

February

Look! Up in the sky!

The first issue of DC's Action Comics introduces Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman; it is an instant hit, but Siegel and Shuster are required to sign over all rights and so forefeit the millions to come,

Bob Kane's Caped Crusader appears in Detective Comics No, 27. A year later, Batman's brooding hero and noir cityscapes are lightened with the arrival of Robin, created to appeal to younger readers.

DC's sister company All American delivers a new crop of superheroes-the Flash, Hawkman, Green Lantern-and gives them their own club, the Justice Society of America,

Will Eisner combines Capp's satiric eye with Caniff's visual storytelling gifts in The Spirit, a supplement to the Sunday funnies.

Donald Duck joins Mickey in the comic-book cavalcade and soon has the good luck to get Carl Barks to draw and write him; the animation spillover wi I! continue with Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse and more,

C.C, Beck and Bill Parker's Captain Marvel, the first funny superhero, appears in Fawcett's Whiz Comics No, 2, and gives Superman a run for his audience.

1950 EC Rules! Publisher William Gains launches Entertaining Comics' Crypt of Terror (later Tales from the Crypt). Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and, at the end of the year, Harvey Kurtzman's realistic war comics.

Art Spiegelman and Fran<;oise Mouly pUblish RAW, an elegant magazine that showcases the work of young cartoonists, including Charles Burns, Ben Katchor and Chris Ware,

1940

SHAZAM!

1952 Gaines and Kurtzman triumph again: EC publishes MAD, their Bronx cheer at American pop culture.

Twenty-two-year-old RO, B!echman's The Juggler of Our Lady, an innovative novellalength cartoonpoem, appears.

Nicole Hollander's smart, satirical Sylvia is the first strip with a feminist flavor to be syndicated,

Pow! Seduction of the Innocent, by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, triggers a wave of national anxiety over comics' corrupting influence. The comic-book industry responds with the self-censoring Comics Code Authority,

Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's Love & Rockets explores a Latino world, rendered realistically and lovingly in a continuing series of narrative comic books.

Jules Feiffer's Sick Sick Sick strip begins in The Village Voice, offering left-wing politics and Freudian inner turmoil.

Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, a dazzling heir to Krazy Kaf, Pogo and Peanuts, becomes a national craze in its 1O-year career, appearing in 2,400 papers.

Kurtzman creates Help!, the magazine "for tired minds" which will feature the early work of underground artists R Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and others,

Acme Features Syndicate forms to distribute Matt Groening's Lifl in Hell, a Godot-like romance passing as a comic strip, and Ernie Pook's Comeek, Lynda Barry's up-close-and-personal look at adolescence,

1913 Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Siumberiand is the apogee of fantasy strips (Lyonel Feininger's brilliant Kin-der-kids among them), exquisitely drawn, colored and imagined.

A. Mutt, racetrack rogue and star of his own strip, soon meets a mental patient who thinks he's prizefighter Jim Jeffries. Mutt and Jeff, the first successful daily strip, brings vaudeville to the comics-and outlives creator Bud Fisher by nearly 30 years.

In Cliff Sterrett's exquisite Polly and Her Pals, cubist elegance comes to a conventional family strip.

The Dingbat Family, George Herriman's strip about apartment living, introduces Krazy Kat, who soon gets a surreal, wildly worded strip of hislher own. e.e. cummings loves the strip the way Krazy loves dahlink Ignatz.

January The ringleted Little Orphan Annie resembles Mary Pickford, only much scrappier. Harold Gray draws the sermonizing melodrama for 44 years.

E.C. Segar launches Pop eye in his strip Thimble Theatre. In episodes that last for months, the sailor man meets zanies like Eugene the Jeep, Alice the Goon and the Sea Hag.

BAM! KA-WUMpl Fwop!

With Wash Tubbs, Roy Crane invents the adventure strip-and is the first cartoonist to use cinematic techniques.

Sidekick Captain Easy gets his own strip in '33.

Bringing Up Father, by George McManus, gives Hearst's readers the immigrant Jiggs, winner of the Irish sweepstakes, and his wife, Maggie.

Jiggs spends a lifetime escaping her socialclimbing clutches.

7, 1929

Both based on pulp fiction, Hal Foster's Tarzan and Dick Calkins and Phil Nowlan's Buck Rogers in the 25th Century spring into action on the same day-bringing a new level of thrills to the adventure strip.

Mickey Mouse appears as a syndicated strip.

March 1937

1935 The birth of the comic book! Great debate over this one, but New Fun No.1 counts as the first comic book with all original material.

Black cartoonist Ollie Harrington, who will become internationally renowned, introduces Bootsie, whose Harlem adventures in Dark Laughter soon appear in many black papers.

Langston Hughes calls Harrington an "unsurpassed social satirist in the field of racial relations"

January 1942

1941 A flood of heroes and superheroes is released on the planet, including Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America and the elastic Plastic Man by Jack Cole.

All American introduces Wonder Woman, the world's first female superhero.

The Phantom, Lee Falk's masked man in a bodysuit, anticipates the costumed comic-book heroes to come.

In the tradition of Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, Hal Foster brings the magic of bravura storybook illustration to the comics page in Prince Valiant.

1942

1942

1943

1948

1950

A gritty new series, Crime Does Not Pay, starts a crimecomics crazeand the first warning is sounded in the debate over comics' pernic10us influence.

Smart art: William Steig publishes his book The Lonely Ones, filled with psychocomical cartoons; Crockett Johnson creates Barnaby, the most intellectual strip yet.

Comics' answer to film's Andy Hardy and radio's Henry Aldrich arrives with Archie and friends.

Reversing the usual sequence.

Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum appears first in comicbook form, then as a brilliant syndicated strip.

It's Peanuts! Charles Schulz's strip will become the most widely syndicated in history. This same year Beetle Bailey,

by Mort Walker, becomes the style setter of the gag strip that takes over the post-World War II comics pages-including Johnny Hart's B.C. and Mell Lazarus's Miss Peach.

1978

1970 Superhero renaissance!

Marvel editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby introduce the Fantastic Four.

Marvel's other stars, introspective and vulnerable, will include The Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the mutant X-Men.

R. Crumb publishes Zap!, a seminal underground comic and the beginning of Mr. Natural.

According to '60s lore, Crumb peddles it in Haight Ashbury from a baby carriage.

Frank Miller's violent The Dark Knight Returns presents a 50year-old Batman as what one critic calls a "marginal psychopath."

Watchmen,

by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, offers other dysfunctional heroes.

Detective Comics (DC) appears, offering "Action-Packed Stories in Color" which feature villain Chin Lung and others. It is the first successful comic book with a single theme.

Torchy Brown, From Dixie to Harlem debuts in African-American papers. Its creator is a black woman; Jackie Ormes says her heroine is "no moonstruck crybaby."

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, the first strip to mix counter culture mores and breaking news with real names on the mainstream comics page, is syndicated.

Dilbert, the computer generation's favorite comic strip, is hardly drawn at all, but nonetheless is a hit.

The traveler Zippy the Pinhead appears in a Real Pulp comic story and, in 1985, will become the first underground strip with aboveground syndication. Also this year: Trina Robbins produces the first feminist comic book.

Barbara Brandon, daughter of popular cartoonist Brumsic Brandon, becomes the first African-American woman with a nationally syndicated comic strip: Where I'm Coming From.

TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT R.F. OUTCAULT, TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES; JERRY SIEGEL AND JOE SHUSTER, KING FEATURES SYNDICATE: TM OF DC COMICS; COURTESY DC COMICS; CHARLES SCHULz/UNITED FEATURES SYNDICATE. ADDITIONAL RESEARCH SARAH DAVIS. THIS ARTICLE PREVIOUSLY APPEARED IN CIVILIZATION MAGAZINE, JUNEIJULY 1998 ISSUE.

Will Eisner's Contract with God, a watershed graphic novel, dramatizes the lives of poor New York Jews in the '30s.

Garfield, starring Jim Davis's megalomaniacal cat, gets off to a slow start but becomes a merchandising juggernaut.

Comics are 100 years old! The Yellow Kid is gone, but the Katzenjammer Kids, Gasoline Alley and Bringing Up Father live on, succeeded by a wave of sardonic newcomers: Peter Kuper, Tom Tomorrow, Carol Lay, Kyle Baker, Howard Cruse, David Mazzucchelli and Ted Rail among them.

Be prepared.

COMICpnCllOLO"

You thought comics were just for entertainment, did you? Well, think again. Here the therapeutic benefits of comic strip humor are evaluated by the author, who says the funnies playa deeper role in our lives than we might imagine.

I

:aWOUldlike to propose a radical hypothesis. Without we use funnies to deal with various problems we have, to cope with ~pressures we face and to fight stress and anxiety. And we often find particular episodes of strips that help us deal with specific problems. The funnies, then, are a therapeutic tool that millions of people use.

The notion that humor has an important role to play in our physical and mental health has been fairly well accepted. We know that "laughter is the best medicine." But how humor works, how it heals, is another matter. I suggest that humor helps us on four levels and will use examples from the funnies to illustrate. First, I will consider humor at the biological level (that is, what it does for our bodies). Second, I will deal with its intrapsychic or intrapersonal effects and offer an explanation of how humor heals, how it helps us, as individuals, to cope with everyday problems. Third, I will deal with humor's role in our interpersonal relationships and discuss how it helps us deal with other people. And finally, I will deal with the way humor helps people cope with anxieties and difficulties at the social and cultural level.

I being aware of what we are doing,

How Humor Heals There are a few things to keep in mind when we think about how humor heals. What is important in creating humor is not the subject (though it plays a role) but the various techniques

Excerpted and reprinted with permission from The World & I, a publication of The Washington Times Corporation.

that humorists use to create humor.

Some of the more common are eccentricity (zany characters), facetiousness, absurdity, repartee, sarcasm, stereotypes, unmasking, exposure, imitation, impersonation and parody. But the most immediate way in which comic strips generate humor is with their art styles. Comics are, after all, a visual medium. Many of the characters that we follow in the strips are innately funny looking. Artists can use exaggeration, show facial expression and create fantastic images, all elements that contribute to the humor inherent in a comic strip.

But the creator of a comic also can play with language and make jokes using the power of language to advantage. In some cases, such as Pogo, typefaces were used to create humor.

Finally, artists create zany personalities who amuse and fascinate us as we get to know them over the years and, in many cases, decades. All of this suggests that the comic strip is a powerful and complex medium of communication, and that "there's more than meets the eye in the funnies," as many scholars today argue.

The techniques of humor, as found in comic strips, do the work of generating mirth. And because laughter helps us cope with life's daily problems, any humorous strip that leads to a laugh or a chuckle is good for us. Indeed, even when we may not find these comics to be funny, their general impact is quite beneficial. Consider a typical episode from the popular series Calvin and Hobbes. A given episode may not lead to explosive laughter, but it probably generates a mild chuckle-in most people.

Indeed, we've always had a notion that laughter was, somehow, good for us. But until the last decade or so, when scientists conducted experiments to demonstrate its physiological benefits, we never realized how good laughter was for us or how it affected us. As William Fry, a psychiatrist who has spent many years studying the physiological effects of humor, explained in Using Humor to Save Lives: "Mirthful laughter has a scientifically demonstrable exercise impact on several body systems. Muscles are activated; heart rate is increased; respiration is amplified, with increase in oxygen exchange-all similar to the desirable effects of athletic exercise."

Fry also confirmed that stress and anxiety are lowered by laughter.

Laughing at Ourselves When we move on to the intrapersonallevel, to that dialogue that we carryon in our heads, comics also play an important role. Because funnies are, by definition, "not serious," they can deal with important problems we all face and yet not raise alarms that may trigger our defense mechanisms. This function is analogous to the role fools play in Shakespeare's works.

Because they are fools, they are allowed to speak the truth-but nobody pays attention because they are, by definition, fools and not to be taken seriously.

Consider Matt Groening's episode on "Parents out of Control" in his strip Life in Hell. In this episode a character reflects, in a

monologue, on all the terrible things some parents do to their children. "They can really screw up your mind," his character says, "because they're the only parents you know. So you think this is the way the world is, but it isn't. And you end up growing up all weird and damaged and unhappy and stupid."

What Groening is offering, in actuality, is a disquisition on the problems many people face as the result of growing up in families that psychologists now describe as "dysfunctional." Had Groening written this material in an essay, it would not be taken quite the same way by his readers. The humor, the funny characters and the nonidealized view of life quite likely are of benefit to large numbers of people. Recognizing themselves in his strip, they can laugh at characters like the poor soul who is enduring this "childhood in hell" and at themselves.

In the same light, the series of comics My Day, by Victoria Roberts, deals with (and spoofs) the lives of famous individuals.

Her strip on Jorge Luis Borges, the avant-garde, modernist writer, is most instructive. Borges awakes to find himself in a labyrinth and then spends a literary day, ending up with a toothache at night. He makes comments about his age, his not getting the Nobel Prize, about the food habits of Americans and the English, about his feelings, and so on. There is an existential

quality to his musings and doings: For example, he gives a prize to novelists, but it is based on the quality of the paper in the books, not the novels themselves.

This strip suggests the absurdity of life if we look at it too seriously. The strip's moral, from a psychological point of view, is that we must not be too uptight about things; we must accept an element of the ridiculous in our lives and enjoy the simple things-the bliss of a good cup of Colombian coffee or of peppermints. This capsule biography pokes fun at Borges and, through him, at people in general. And as we laugh at Borges and think about his comments about life, we gain some insights about how to live and learn something quite valuable-how to laugh at ourselves.

The Groening and Roberts strips are just examples of the kind of thing we experience daily as we read the comics. We learn that being overliteral (a favorite technique of humorists) is silly, that being rigid is destructive, that there is an element of absurdity in life.

We now move to interpersonal relations, those involving other people. As the comics we have examined to this point show, the world is full of absurdity and nonsense.

Adopting a "what fools these mortals be" attitude (including ourselves in this category) helps downgrade the seriousness of some of the things we and others do and say, which otherwise might be looked upon as hostile or insulting.

Many of the comics focus on interpersonal relationships. In some cases, as in the strip Doonesbury, sexual relationships may be the subject of the strip. The hero of one episode innocently asks for a good-night kiss. He is immediately berated as a "male chauvinist pig" by his date, who raises her left hand (in solidarity with women, we must assume) and glares at him.

Doonesbury is a controversial comic. Some editors see it as being so political that they place it on the editorial page. But most newspapers place it on the comics page, for even though it often deals with politics, it also spoofs education, family life, and relations between people and the media, among other topics.

One of the basic humorous techniques involves creating characters who are eccentric, who have manias that shape their behavior and affect all their relationships. In Beetle Bailey, for example, we meet the lazy Private Beetle, a gluttonous sergeant, an insecure lieutenant and a daffy general. All the characters interact, and, at the same time, each pursues his private passion.

In Peanuts, several characters are thrown together and, despite their attendant problems and passions, have to find some way of making do. Snoopy tends to have one concern: food. He may take on all kinds of roles and identities, but the one constant in Snoopy's existence is making sure that his food dish is full.

Linus, of course, has his blanket, and Charlie Brown has his insecurity. Charles Schulz's genius is that he has found ways of capitalizing on his characters' needs and has created a strip that has universal appeal: It speaks to passions shared by all.

Social Impact and Concerns It could be argued that if the funnies help people on the biological level, help them deal with personal anxieties and worries, and assist them with their relationships with others, they already are having a considerable social impact. Funnies that deal with relationships between men and women, with family life and with politics have, implicitly, a social dimension. But the comics often focus directly and explicitly on social concerns.

In 1985, for example, a group of comic-strip artists got together and dealt with the theme of world hunger. Their strips were auctioned off, and the money was donated to relief efforts.

The strips were collected into a book, Comic Relief This effort was the idea of Garry Trudeau, who got a number of comic-strip artists to tackle the theme.

Robert Crumb contributed a parody of a typical magazine ad-

vertisement on the back of The Best of Rip Off Press (volume 1) that is amusing but also worth thinking about. We see Crumb pointing a finger at us: "Don't you think it's time to stop watching TV?" He suggests that if people want a media injection, they should read Motor City Comics: "These comics break through the TVinduced stupor, for this is anti-media! It's got the medicine for the blues, and has been known to turn mentally ill persons into healthy, good-humored free-thinkers."

Crumb was making fun of television (described by his character Newton Minow as a "vast wasteland") and being satirical about the benefits that reading Motor City Comics conferred on people. But, ironically, many would suggest that he was correct about the negative impact of television on individuals and American society, and that he was also right about the value of reading.

Crumb's parody, then, had a great deal of truth to it. His drawing of a person watching television and getting "bad vibes," "lies" and "paranoia" is not as farfetched as it might seem. And the "goodness," "humor" and "honesty" that he showed emanating from Motor City Comics are, as I have demonstrated, found in many of the funnies we read. They help us become healthy and good-humored and, like all humor, they free us from any number of anxieties.

As Harvey Mindess has pointed out in Laughter and Liberation, "A flourishing sense of humor is fundamental to mental health. It represents a source of vitality and a means of transcendence second to none." It frees us, he says, from conformity, from a sense of inferiority, from being overly rational about things and from being too serious about our lives-among many other things.

We don't, as a rule, hear jokes every day. We don't always see situation comedies when we watch television. We don't always choose comedies when we go to the movies. But most of us read the comics every day and have a chuckle or two as we follow the exploits of Beetle Bailey, Snoopy, Calvin, Cathy or any of the other characters in the strips we read. These brief moments of mirth are valuable to us on a number of different levels. That is why we consider people like Charles Schulz or Mort Walker or Garry Trudeau or Bill Watterson "national treasures."

The funnies are not only for children and are not just simpleminded diversions. Our brief escapes into the make-believe worlds of Peanuts and Doonesbury and Calvin and Hobbes and Cathy and Mr. Natural make it possible for us to function better in the real world. The funnies are gifts to us from humorists of great skill-and, in some cases, genius-and they playa much more profound role in our lives than we previously have imagined.

D About the Author: Arthur Asa Berger is professor of broadcast communication arts at San Francisco State University in California. He is the author of numerous books and articles on popular culture and the mass media. His most recent book is Reading Matter: Multidisciplinary Perspecti yes on Material.culture.

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in a Slump Marl<et American Financial Companies Show the Way

American Express, Bank of America and Citibank are pushing ahead enthusiastically with expansion in India. Oldtimers in India, market vagaries don't faze them.

he only thing you can say with certainty about the economy right now is that it has weakened abruptly and that it is likely to be a whole lot weaker through 1999 than anyone thought. Everything else is guesswork. Figuring out what's happening on the economic roller coaster ride has been a guessing game for a while. And there is good reason to be concerned as to where the economy is heading. But then, there is a consensus forecast that also says focused companies will continue to register solid growth despite such depressed conditions. Is India heading for a prolonged recession period? American banks do not think so. And as technology and travel make the world increasingly smaller, these financial institutions have realized

the growing need for organizations which can meet the diverse demands of today's global clients.

This challenge is nothing new for American Express, the world's largest travel-related services company with a network of 1,700 offices in more than 120 nations. Or Bank of America, which started operations in India way back in

T

Sanjay Rishi, country manager of American Express Travel Related Services.

1963 and currently works for an astounding seven days a week, 365 days a year. Or Citibank-popular among the millions as the night banker for its array of services which also include the extremely popular credit card and automated teller machines (ATMs) operating across the length and breadth of the country.

"We are talking of a market that is growing at a rate of 25-30 percent per year. We have just scratched the surface and the growth has been simply astounding," exulted Sanjay Rishi, country manager, American Express Travel Related Services.

With more than 2.5 million cardholders, American Express has been registering a phenomenal growth of nearly 45 percent annually in the Indian market. "Our growth has been primarily because we always consider our local clients as global customers ...they are more demanding than in the past. As a result, banks such as ours are integrating capabilities so that we can respond efficiently and quickly to these wide-ranging customer needs," added Rishi. Worldwide, American Express currently serves more than 42 million cardholders and, in the process, notches up annual billings in excess of $208 billion.

It is no wonder, then, that the company

Seven-day operations, 24-hour banking machines and credit cards are among the attractions introduced by the big banks. Bank of America is also trying to get Indian companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

has grown at an astounding annual pace of 55 percent in the corporate card business that remains unparalleled in the annals of the nation's $2 billion travel and entertainment business. And why not? Corporations in India rank travel and entertainment expenses as the second largest controllable expense, higher than that for advertisiqg and infofJllation technology. ~ile companies on an average spent Rs. }6.5 rnillio~ on travel and entertainment in 1997, those in the retail, wholesale and financial services sector spent substantially higher.

Similar has been the growth in the travelers check segment. American Express, which invented travelers checks in 1891 and is the largest issuer worldwide, currently stands as the supreme market leader in the subcontinent. While its 1997 global travelers checks volume was over $25 billion, in India its market share remained as high as 75 percent. "Can you remember one brand that has remained consistently uppermost in the minds of the international travelers, not just in India but also across the world?" asked Rajan Bhat, area director, travelers checks (India and area countries). A recent survey conducted by the Indian Market Research Bureau

(IMRB) showed more than 50 percent of India's international travelers preferred American Express travelers checks over the next leading brand (26 percent) and, in the process, making it the undisputed market leader.

And never one to rest on its laurels, American Express Travel Related Services has finalized plans to tap the nation's growing corporate business in India. It recently signed a marketing alliance with SOTC-Kuoni, India's largest package leisure tour company. Under this agreement, SOTC will recommend only American Express travelers checks to its customers across India. SOTC, founded in 1949, became a 100 percent subsidiary of the $2.5 billion Swiss giant Kuoni Travels. Since 1980, SOTC has focused exclusively on marketing of package tours to residents in India and nonresident Indians (NRTs' l'\ l' t,~ . 'the' United States, United Kingdom and the Middle East.

This steady growth in the range of services has helped the I48-year-old, FORTUNE500 giant expand its already influential position across the globe with more than $17 billion in annual travel sales. And the Indian chapter has matched the global growth in style. Starting from a t

in

small office in an obscure bylane in Calcutta way back in 1921, American Express today has the largest network of 28 travel locations across the country and offers consultancy services as part of its corporate services portfolio which also includes business travel, corporate cards and forex services.

"India and the United States has a tinge of history that is common with Amex. For example, we signed the first corporate client (Taj Hotel group) in India the same year we launched our highly popular charge card in the United States (1958) ....Our commitment to India is total and is not governed by political ups and downs between the two governments ....In fact, to further cement our excellent track record, we will soon launch a host of new products like credit cards and retail banking which would make our portfolio second to none," says Vijay R. Parekh, president (Asia Pacific & Australia) of American Express, whose organization also funds heritage projects like preserving medieval forts in Rajasthan.

Analysts agree that the stupendous growth registered by American financial companies in India has primarily been be(Continued on page 57)

GOOD CORPO Multinational companies are cleaning up their act.

Once they were seen as bad guys who exploited environmental and human resources. But corporate winds are changing, and now many companies have built-in programs to ensure they conserve the environment and contribute to the countries that host them. The author surveys a few of the new breed of concerned corporations, and what they are doing to make a positive difference.

CITIZENSHIP., or a tiny six-year-old girl, Sunrider International meant life. Sunrider International is an American corporation set to enter India that takes good corporate citizenship seriously, and it has tied up with Advantage India, a nonprofit social help organization.

When a team from Advantage India arrived on a routine visit to a shanty town in the southern suburbs of New Delhi, they found the child in a critical condition. The morning after a midnight assault by an unidentified person, she still lay without medical attention. Local doctors were too scared to get mixed up in what they thought was a "police case." Says Meenakshi, part of the Advantage India team that rushed her to Safdarjung Hospital: "We appealed to the doctors there and they treated her. The child is not well yet, but she's recovering."

In another part of India-a small agricultural village in Andhra Pradesh-teenager Manohar herded cows to help out his parents. He had finished school but knew that a college education was out of reach. His family, which lived at the subsistence level, could never afford it. Then Cargill stepped in. Now Manohar is a Cargill Vidyarthi, a student at an agricultural college under Cargill's rural education program that covers the states of Kamataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Similarly, Bank of America (BA), Enron Corporation, Amway International and other American corporations are striving to make better lives and better futures for many underprivileged Indian individuals. But what do corporations gain from such social development activities?

Says Manisha Suneja of CARE India (Cooperative for American Relief to Everywhere): "Corporate giants have realized that without social investment, their investment in production activities would not make good economic sense. They need to project a positive corporate identity and portray themselves as well-wishers of the community they operate in."

A new reality in the developing world is that government

P

Left: A girL goes to school, rhanks ro Cargill's rural educarion progralll.

Righr: Village children gather around a worker from Advantage India, part of a primarY healrh program sponsored by Sun rider Inlernarional.

funding worldwide for reducing poverty is at its lowest level. On the other hand, private investment is growing. Development agencies have recognized this decreasing support from governments and, instead, are tapping private companies which are flush with funds. The corporations, on the other hand, have come to recognize that they need a positive image in the societies in which they set up their industries. In short, they are becoming more aware of their social responsibilities and are showing better "corporate citizenship."

Enron Corporation, for example. "We are embarking on a long-term effort to improve the quality of life for the people of Maharashtra and hopefully, many other communities in India," said Joseph W. Sutton, chairman of Enron International, at the launch of the project.

CARE has joined hands with Enron Corporation in this endeavor with the objective of improving the socioeconomic status and self-reliance of low income families. The partnership recently initiated the Konkan Integrated Development (KID) project in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra, which is expected to benefit poor villagers through job creation and strengthening of local institutions and services. Four years ago, CARE had left Maharashtra for lack of funds. "Enron gave us funds and brought us back," says Tom Alcedo, country director for CARE. Enron Corporation is part of CARE's Corporate Council in the U.S. The council includes a large number of corporations who donate funds to CARE's social development programs regularly and who also advocate governments to support these efforts. Some of these corporations are also on CARE's board of directors.

In India, CARE and Enron are using local, nongovernment agencies such as Siddhi and Gardha to implement their projects through specific programs. For example, there are 54 fishing communities along Dhabol creek. The fisherfolk are forced to sell their catch immediately, before it spoils, and consequently at low prices. Enron-CARE are together developing infrastructure for the community-such as an ice factory and cold storage facilities-so that the fishermen can sell the fish at commercial rates. Fishing cooperatives will help the fishermen in market linkages, better management and selling of fish.

Other programs include nursery management and horticultural activities for landless and small farmers; savings and credit groups and skill training for women and adolescent girls; skill training and work camps for youth; enhancement of primary education and village infrastructure improvement. The principal

CARE facilitates social tribute, and this amount is deducted from their aim of these programs is to generate addiwelfare programs paychecks. The art exhibitions that BA allows at tional income for the poor families in these areas. Proctor & Gamble (P&G), another ensponsored by the likes of its office also come with a commitment to SOS. A percentage of all paintings sold at the exhibitity on CARE's council, is promoting primary Enron, Proctor & school education for girls in Uttar Pradesh. tions go to the villages. In Mumbai, BA held a Gamble, Bank of Are government funds for social developpainting contest for children with the theme America and the Tata "Clean Mumbai, Green Mumbai," thus spreadment drying up? Alcedo doesn't think so. "But Foundation. Children are ing awareness about environmental concerns. yes, there is definitely a decrease," he says.

With Enron earmarking $2 million a year Sunrider International-a $700 million often the beneficiaries. turnover health and beauty herbal product comoverall in India (not just CARE projects), pany which is still in the stage of setting up its P&G $100,000 per year for CARE projects, and the Tata Foundation contributing 25 percent of the cost for a first office in India-is doing it in a smaller way. It has already child survival program in Bihar, which is also being promoted by "adopted" Kishangarh-an illegal settlement of ragpickers that CARE and USAID, it really does look like corporations are gethas sprung up in southern Delhi. The inhabitants live in pitiable conditions with no clean source of drinking water nor sanitation ting serious about their social commitments. Says Alcedo, "It is the economic sector which can promote a dynamic development infrastructure.

The immigrant Chinese couple that started Sunrider 14 years process." ago and have spread to 27 countries is very conscious of cleanliBut then it's not all about money. The Bank of America has ness and hygiene. "We use no preservatives in our products. So $50,000 in an Indian corpus fund which is disbursed to various sowe have to be extra careful," said Dr. Oi-Lin Chen who is presicial development areas. It does not make sense for CARE to compete for that small amount. "CARE is looking not just for funds, dent of the company. It seems logical that the company should but for a participatory role of corporate staff. We want to use their have sponsored an area that is its prime concern-health. brains and their skills in social development," says Alcedo.

With Sunrider sponsoring and Advantage India Community Development Pvt. Ltd. implementing it, "Health for All: A But money comes into the picture again. Bank of America in Primary Healthcare Intervention in Kishangarh Slum" has taken San Francisco earmarks $100 million a year to social development worldwide. "If they know that their staff are already inoff in just a few months. Already many women have been treated for gynecological problems while tuberculosis and bronchitis volved in such projects in India, they would be more interested have be.enidentified as chronic problems in the area. in funding social development here," adds Alcedo. And banks Amway Corporation, the largest direct selling corporation in have shown an interest.

J the world-its global sales were $7 billion last year-made its The Bank of America.

8JJT!1 which operates in 38 ,iR!.

-~ance into India in 1995 as Amway India Enterprises. countries around the ~ Under the umbrella of Amway Opportunity Foundation, it has involved itself in several globe, recognizes chilaid projects. dren as the foundation , <7 of a nation and feels .+ fill I!!!l'I When he was in New Delhi earlier this year, Dick De Vos, Amway Corporation presitheir grooming is of the_ dent, noted: "Amway offers an opportunity utmost importance. That ~ to everyone .... We look for ways to help is why BA, after looking people achieve success for themselves, their at various other options, families and their communities." chose in 1996 to commit to In November 1996, Amway gave a state-of-the-art, fullya long-term association with SOS Children's Villages of India. This equipped mobile dental clinic to the Rotary Club of Delhi is a voluntary child care organization funded by public contribuMidtown to provide dental health care to underprivileged sections tions. The SOS movement, started in India in 1964, now has 32 in and around Delhi. Up to 80 patients a day are treated six days a week. In 1997, the company entered into a partnership with the All villages and looks after 15,000 children. Over 200,000 people benefit from the allied services including medical facilities, famIndia Confederation of the Blind in which Amway would sponsor the printing, production and distribution of textbooks to blind stuily helper programs and schools. dents across the country. Braille printing is an expensive exercise BA involves its customers and employees in its cause of social and so the few braille print books produced in India are too highly responsibility. Every time a customer in India issues a BA check, priced for most blind students. So Amway India has further comthe bank sets aside an amount for contribution to the SOS villages. mitted to initiate a modular program to sponsor the production of Up to Rs. 189,000 is handed over to SOS every quarter. In addition, braille textbooks, initially for blind students of classes VIII BA sends out mailers to customers updating them on the cause and through XII in Rajasthan. More recently, it bestowed a chair on enseeking contributions, and by installing contlibution boxes at its trepreneurial development at the University of Delhi, donating a various branches. The bank also motivates its employees to con-

+ ""

check ofRs. 3.5 million to the Faculty of Management Studies.

Cargill India recognized the need and desire in rural India for quality education. In a survey in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, it found that state governments had built widespread primary and secondary schools but had paid no attention to maintaining educational aids and facilities.

There were poor quality blackboards and chalk, no desk or chair for the teachers, a shortage of teachers, poor equipment in labs, inadequate notebooks, writing instruments, school bags, etc. Playing fields were available but no sports facilities.

Recognizing the lack of motivation among parents to send their children to a school where they were likely to gain little, and the lack of interest among students themselves, Cargill devised the Cargill Vidyarthi Scholarship Programme in villages where it produced seeds. The company helps to upgrade the identified school with specific equipment. It contributes to the recruitment of teachers in specific subjects while the village makes a matching contribution for the salary.

Students are provided with school bags, writing aids and uniforms at an appropriate frequency. Notebooks are issued periodically. Sporting aids, such as balls, bats, nets, wickets, etc., are provided and replenished to encourage abundant use. After school hours, other people of the village are allowed to use the playfield and equipment to play, say volleyball.

Hardeep Singh, chairman of Cargill India and country head of Cargill Seeds, was personally involved in the conception and launch of the program in 1996. "The Cargill Vidyarthi Programme, beside benefiting the villagers, also raises the selfesteem of our staff and workers. They feel they are involved in a vital social activity. It is those who are in the field that are most closely associated with it," he says.

Cargill has further extended this program into a continuing education program where "vidyarthis" from supported schools who gain admission to an agricultural college get a fully-paid scholarship for the full period of study. The program currently encompasses about 7,000 children in two states. Cargill further hopes to extend the program to Uttar Pradesh to sow the seeds of a happier future for a lot more people.

Certainly good corporate citizenship comes with benefits for the corporations too-they get tax rebates and international funding agencies look more kindly on their enterprises.

However, for a country such as India where there are so many social problems and so few avenues of resource to deal with them, tapping private corporate funds to help uplift at least a section of the underprivileged is a welcome new fountain of benefit.

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Max Desfor was the Associated Press photographer in India during one of the most eventful periods this century, between 1946 and 1950. He witnessed-and recorded for posterity-the transition from British rule to independence. One of his photos, ~ that of Pandit Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, literally became an icon and was subsequently turned into a postage stamp. Desfor, a sprightly 84-year-old, was recently in New Delhi in connection with the 150th anniversary of the Associated Press.

While relaxing at Max Mueller Bhawan, where the AP photo exhibit was being held, he told SPAN about his tryst with India.

Max DesfO!; standing in front of his famous J 946 photo of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, at the recent J 50th anniversary exhibition of Associated Press photography in New Delhi.

Two lima, Volcano Islands, February 23, 1945-U.S. Marines raise the flag atop Mount Suribachi on the Pacific island of Two lima in World War ll.

Joe Rosenthal, Pulitzer Prize.

MAX DESFOR: I first arrived in Calcutta in 1946. My reason for coming through India in the first place was that I got a message when I was in Manila, where I was covering the war crimes trials of Japanese generals Yamashita and Homma. The word was that there was a mutiny by the Indian Navy in Bombay, and I immediately took off and came to

Calcutta. Well, I didn't get very far out of Calcutta because all transport and everything else was shut down, and so I missed any coverage I could have possibly done on the mutiny. However, I was there for what was a rather terrible introduction to India, because it was that time that the fighting between Muslims and Hindus was taking place. It was what became known as the big Calcutta killings of 1946, so it was a rather terrible introduction to India.

But from there I did get to Bombay, and I spent a lot of time in and around Bombay.

We had only a stringer in Bombay at that time. We did have an office in New Delhi, and so I also went to New Delhi and was based there. When I say based, it was strictly that, because I was not permanently assigned to India as yet. I was sent out to cover the first police action between the Dutch and the rebels in Indonesia and I covered many other assignments from Delhi. I went on home leave at the end of '46,just a short time, and I requested a posting here in India. Fortunately, they agreed and sent me back. So I was permanentlywell, as permanently as AP can get with its correspondents-posted here in New Delhi. We did have a bureau here at the time, in fact I still remember our office was located at Narendra Place, and right next

door to it the AP had a flat called "Wenger's Flats." That's all gone now, by the way.

Part of my return this time was to look for the old haunts. I went to Old Delhi to try to find the hotel we did stay at, which was Cecil Hotel. And I discovered it was completely gone, and it is now a block of flats. It was a lovely place to come back to after traveling throughout India in good and bad times. I played tennis there early in the morning. My wife and son came out to join me in 1947. Delhi was no place for youngsters, so we sent him up to Mussoorie and he went to school there, at Woodstock School in Mussoorie. He was about six years old, and I remember celebrating his seventh and eighth birthdays at the school.

What about your famous picture?

The photo of Pandit Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi was made in 1946 in Bombay at the All India Congress Party convention. I was not too familiar at the time with the politics in India, but I was well aware that this was an important meeting and an important function. There they were, seated up at the dais, talking to each other. It was taken without a flash because Gandhi did not permit flashbulbs. I was just lucky to have caught that moment of expression, and it has somewhat symbol ized the relationship be-

The Rev. Martin Luther King. 1J:, is welcomed with a kiss from his wife, Coretta, after leaving court in Montgomery, Alabama. March 22, 1956.

King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott city buses in a campaign to desegregate the bus system.

Gene Herrick.

Jazz great Louis Armstrong shares a quiet moment with his trumpet in a Las Vegas dressing room, 1970.

Eddie Adams.

tween the two men. You can see an intimacy there, and how well they get along.

I am extremely amazed, though, at the outcome after that picture. Because as it turned out, that picture seemed to grab everybody in India, and it was lifted and stolen and used everywhere in the country. Years later, in 1973, the Government of India issued a postage stamp based on that picture. A few years after that the Government of India was gracious enough to acknowledge the fact that, yes, that picture was designed from my photograph. And what I am really thrilled about, particularly now, having come to this exhibit, is the fact that everybody who came to see this picture hanging in this exhibit here at Max Mueller Bhawan, they all said, "My gosh, I've known this picture all my life. I had no idea who made the picture, but this has been in my house, I grew up with it." And it's funny how everyone said the same thing-perhaps not exactly the same words, but it boggled my mind to get the same reaction all the time. And I was so thrilled.

Everybody has seen it. Nobody knows who I am, but they all know that picture.

Well, that's what makes a good picture.

That's what news photography is all about: to have that impact, to be able to influence thinking. You can form opinions.

What was it like to be here then?

There was a good side and a bad side, which you can say about anywhere you are. It was rather gracious living here, being in the hotel, and particularly when my wife and son came out, there was a very nice social life, lots of social activities.

The dark side of it, of course, was after Independence, those terrible, tragic times of the crossing, the Muslims going one way the Hindus going the other way, and the slaughter on both sides, and going around photographing these events, which were all part of the job ...to me, as a news photographer. You can look back at those events, you can look back at those pictures, and think, my God, how horrible.

But it can act as a shield, also. I can only photograph as it happens before me, I

record it. The main thing, and the important thing to me, as part of my memory, is that I was here at a very eventful period.

And I recorded history. And this to me is so very remarkable, that I recorded history. It is not just this picture of Gandhi and Nehru, but so many others. The events that happened, whether it was the negotiations, whether it was the raising of the flag on Independence Day and the lowering of the British flag, the departure of the Mountbattens, the Aga Khan on his diamond jubilee birthday when he was weighed in Bombay on a scale, his weight against diamonds. I went around to villages, showed life in the villages, showed people, the monuments, Agra. I went back again to Agra, incidentally, and that hasn't changed a bit. It is as beautiful as ever. All of these events remain in my memory and it's always good to look back at it.

Do yOlt have any good stories to tell of that time?

Part of the business of being a foreign correspondent for an organization, it

became sort of instinctive for me to be able to socialize with people. Among those people were a group of ex-China-Burma-India pilots from World War II who were sOl1of freelancing in India and became commercial pilots. They worked for the Maharajas, and they started up with Air India when Tata began it. I used to sit at the bar of the Taj in Bombay and drink with these young

men. It's amazing how that camaraderie paid off. When the war first broke out in Kashmir, I went up to Srinagar and, of course, was told very decidedly, by Indian troops with guns pointing the way for me, to get back on that plane and get out of there.

There was no question about it. I couldn't get anywhere, I couldn't go with the troops and cover a war as it should be covered, so I

turned around, had to forcibly leave. Then I called on these drinking buddy friends of mine, knowing that they were going to be in on this. As pilots they were in training for the commercial airline. And they were taken over, the entire airline was taken over, by the Indian Army. So there they were, piloting the troops up to Srinagar, and I thought, hey, that's for me. They said they

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New York docks, February 1942The former luxury passenger liner Normandie, in New Yorkfor refitting as a World War Jl troopship, lies capsized at her 50th Street pier after afire during renovations.

Uncredited.

were being very carefully checked and watched and you can't go as a newsman, but you know, they said, you could go as a crewman. They signed me on as an engineer, so I sat up in the cockpit as an engineer, and we flew up there and so I made pictures of the troops in the plane. We landed at Srinagar, took off immediately, and I shot out the window, from my position

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American GIs returning from Europe after World War II hang out the portholes as the Queen Elizabeth pulls into a pier in New York harbor on August 31, 1945.

Uncredited.

up in the cockpit. We flew back to Bombay, so I was able to get the fIrst pictures of such action as it was out to the rest of the world. I had pictures of the villages being burned, and the troops being loaded up. So friendship paid.

How does it/eel to be back?

I don't know how to really describe

it. I'm so elated. I'm really riding a high, particularly after the reception at this gallery, when all these people, as I mentioned before, who are familiar with the picture came up to me. It was also nice that they noted that I had other pictures. I wasn't just a one-picture man. (Laughs) It is very sentimental.

You talk about a sentimental journey,

"' ..... "' .. '"

Baseball Hall of Fame star Babe Ruth warms up at Yankee Stadium for an exhibition to raise money for the ArmyNavy Relief Fund during World War II. New York, August 21, 1942.

Tom Sande.

Heavyweight champion Mohammed A Ii-then Cassius Clay-taunts challenger Sonny Liston after dropping him with a right to the jaw in the first round of their fight in Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965. Ali was declared the winner.

John Rooney.

Pony driver John Streets pauses outside an independent coal mine where he earns $/4.80 per day. It is /969, in Deamy Hollow, West Virginia.

Eddie Adams.

this was it. I had some marvelous times-and very bad times in the course of business- but some marvelous times. I remember going up to live on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Sri nagar, I remember the many receptions at Government House, I remember often playing tennis with the hotel pro, I remember touring the countryside. It was all so interesting. And I got a great deal of satisfaction at that time and it came to me much later, knowing I had done what I thought was a thorough job of showing India as it was. I didn't just go and show beggars and the maimed. I showed the way of life. So it's interesting coming back. Some things don't change. Connaught Place is completely foreign to me now, it is so grown up. It used to be leisurely stroll, now it's so busy. In many ways it's progress. People are striving to get on. Commerce is good, it's nice to see.

D

President Richard M. Nixon checks his watch while shaking hands with a Belgian crowd, on his way to lunch with King Baudouin at the Royal Palace, June 26, 1974. Charles Tasnadi.

Children of the Dust Bowl pump water in Springfield, Colorado, as the wind whips up.

Soil swept up in windstorms destroyed thousands of acres of farmland in the American Midwest.

March 25,1935.

Uncredited.

cause of these institutions investing significantly in a whole range of products like technology platforms, customer service and products and also in developing local talent for decades. This, in turn, has ensured a strong growth in product lines, thereby enabling the companies to maintain their edge above the rest by offering a host of innovative services.

Take the case of Bank of America, which has prepared a multi-pronged strategy for India that includes a focused approach on listing of Indian companies in the U.S. stock markets, privatization, loan syndication, asset securitization and distribution of debt securities.

"India is an important market for us and we have been here for more than three decades, developing our brand image with a host of products and services. We are the only bank in the country which operates on all 365 days up to 1900 hours and has an unique cash delivery system (up to Rs. 25,000) at home ....Today, 80 of the top 100 corporate companies in India bank with us," says Anuroop (Tony) Singh, head of the bank's retail banking operations. "Now, our bank will make forays into equity-related product in India by the virtue of its merger with NationsBank which owns Montgomery Securities."

Singh said Bank of America has now started making a concerted pitch for Indian companies to be listed in the United States, which will include companies in infotech and biotechnology, where the bank's services are extremely strong. The bank will soon be floating a securities company to deal in distribution of debt and will focus on infrastructure areas. The main thrust of the bank will be syndicated loans, project finance in power, telecom and oil, asset securitization, mergers and acquisitions and privatization.

Bank officials say Bank of America will advise on financial participation in privatization. The bank will guide its international clients on strategic participation in state-owned Indian companies and also finance the transactions. Bank of America is also active in financing takeovers, an area of activity which has been growing rapidly in India. "Business relations between the United States and

India will continue to grow despite economic sanctions, and I think it is in the mutual interest of both the nations that they are lifted," said Singh, whose institution has also been involved in a number of philanthropic activities like funding the SOS Children's Villages with sizable donations which helps more than 15,000 children in a number ofIndian villages.

On a similar growth track is Citibank, the undisputed market leader with a 54 percent share and an unmatched network to service the Rs. 16 billion Indian credit card industry that is growing at a phenomenal rate of 15 percent annually.

Analysts admit that such has been Citibank's growth that other players like ANZ Grindlays, Hongkong Bank and Standard Chartered pale into relative insignificance.

"We have been in the business for more than two decades and we have a product range which offers a host of benefits. We have painstakingly developed the market and understood its pulse. We realize that Indian consumers have a tremendous

Despite the slump in the economy, consumer spending habits have not reduced and have maintained a steady trend. spending capacity and use our retail banking and card services because of the tremendous brand value," says Ashok Chawla, a senior manager at the Citibank card center in Delhi.

Chawla is right. Research organizations have just announced that despite the slump in the economy, consumer spending habits have not reduced and have maintained a steady trend for an estimated 150 million urban middle-class people for the last three years. In fact, studies have shown that despite the steep fees, more than 78 percent cardholders in India prefer premium cards. And along with the growth in the card business has come an increased growth in advantages and ser-

Anuroop (Tony) Singh, head of Bank of America's retail banking operations.

vices offered by various banks. Interestfree periods have increased, cash withdrawal limits hiked, 24-hour services offered, insurance packages now include even home cover and membership reward programs can guarantee a cardholder the best of times.

What is the basic unique selling proposition (USP) of the American banks as compared to their domestic counterparts?

Experts agree with the notion that foreign banks have better services- both in the case of plastic money as well as retail banking-as compared to Indian banks, which have not been able to take the upper hand despite having the advantage of a nationwide network.

According to Ashok Chawla, Citibank's growth has been primarily because it was one of the earlier players in the market that triggered off the plastic money boom in a country where spending was hitherto limited to annual family budgets. "The boom actually started in the mid-1980s and continues to date despite certain apprehensions about the prevailing slump in the market," added Chawla whose bank has been registering an annual growth of 35 percent in its card and retail banking business in India. It is a figure most banks would envy.

D About the Author: Shantanu Guha Ray is a TV journalist.

Cost is only one reason. To be sure, cramming more information into ads is expensive. But more to the point is the fact that advertising plays off the information available from outside sources. Hardly anything about advertising is more important than the interplay between what the ad contains and what surrounds it. Sometimes this interplay is a burden for the advertiser because it is beyond his control. But the interchange between advertising and environment is also an invaluable tool for sellers. Ads that work in collaboration with outside information can communicate far more than they ever could on their own.

The upshot is advertising's astonishing ability to communicate a great deal of information in a few words. Economy and vividness of expression almost always rely upon what is in the information environment. The famously concise "Think Small" and "Lemon" ads for the VW "Beetle" in the 1960s and 1970s were highly effective with buyers concerned about fuel economy, repair costs and extravagant styling in American cars. This was' a case where the less said, the better. The ads were more powerful when consumers were free to bring their own ideas about the issues to bear.

The same process is repeated over again for all sorts of products. Ads for computer modems once explained what they could be used for. Now a simple reference to the Internet is sufficient to conjure an elaborate mix of equipment and applications. These matters are better left vague so each potential customer can bring to the ad his own idea of what the Internet is really for.

Leaning on information from other sources is also a way to enhance credibility, without which advertising must fail. Much of the most important information in advertising-think of cholesterol and heart disease, anti lock brakes and automobile safetyacquires its force from highly credible sources other than the advertiser. To build up this kind of credibility through material actually contained in ads would be cumbersome and inefficient.

Far more effective, and far more economical, is the technique of making challenges, raising questions and otherwise making it perfectly clear to the audience that the seller invites comparisons and welcomes the tough questions. Hence the classic slogan, "If you can find a better whiskey, buy it."

Finally, there is the most important point of all. Informational sparseness facilitates competition. It is easier to challenge a competitor through pungent slogans-"Where's the beef?", "Where's the big saving?"-than through a step-by-step recapitulation of what has gone on before. The bits-and-pieces approach makes for quick, unerring attacks and equally quick responses, all under the watchful eye of the consumer over whom the battle is being fought. This is an ideal recipe for competition.

It also brings the competitive market's fabled self-correcting forces into play. Sellers are less likely to stretch the truth, whether it involves prices or subtleties about safety and performance, when they know they may arouse a merciless response from injured competitors. That is one reason the FTC once worked to get comparative ads on television, and has sought for decades to dismantle government or voluntary bans on comparative ads.

\\Less-Bad Advertising II

There is a troubling possibility, however. Is it not possible that in their selective and carefully calculated use of outside information, advertisers have the power to focus consumer attention exclusively on the positive, i.e., on what is good about the brand or even the entire product class? Won't automobile ads talk up style, comfort and extra safety, while food ads do taste and convenience, cigarette ads do flavor and lifestyle, and airlines do comfort and frequency of departure, all the while leaving consumers to search through other sources to find all the things that are wrong with products?

In fact, this is not at all what happens. Here is why: Everything for sale has something wrong with it, if only the fact that you have to pay for it. Some products, of course, are notable for their faults. The most obvious examples involve tobacco and health, but there are also food and heart disease, drugs and side effects, vacations and bad weather, automobiles and accidents, airlines and delay, among others.

Products and their problems bring into play one of the most important ways in which the competitive market induces sellers to serve the interests of buyers. No matter what the product, there are usually a few brands that are "less bad" than the others. The natural impulse is to advertise that advantage-"Iess cholesterol," "less fat," "less dangerous" and so on. Such provocative claims tend to have an immediate impact. The targets often retaliate; maybe their brands are less bad in a different respect (less salt?). The ensuing struggle brings better information, more informed choices and improved products.

Perhaps the most riveting episode of "less-bad" advertising ever seen occurred, amazingly enough, in the industry that most people assume is the master of avoiding saying anything bad about its product.

Less-Bad Cigarette Ads Cigarette advertising was once very different from what it is today. Cigarettes first became popular around the time of World War I, and they came to dominate the tobacco market in the 1920s. Steady and often drastic sales increases continued into the 1950s, always with vigorous support from advertising. Tobacco advertising was duly celebrated as an outstanding example of the power and creativity of advertising. Yet amazingly, much of the advertising focused on what was wrong with smoking, rather than what people liked about smoking.

The very first ad for the very fust mass-marketed American cigarette brand (Camel, the same brand recently under attack for its use of a cartoon character) said, "Camel Cigarettes will not sting the tongue and will not parch the throat." When Old Gold broke into the market in the mid-1920s, it did so with an ad campaign about coughs and throats and harsh cigarette smoke. It

settled on the slogan, "Not a cough in a carload."

Competitors responded in kind. Soon, advertising left no doubt about what was wrong with smoking. Lucky Strike ads said, "No Throat Irritation-No Cough ...we ...removed ...harmful corrosive acids," and later on, "Do you inhale? What's there to be afraid of? ..famous purifying process removes certain impurities." Camel's famous tag line, "more doctors smoke Camels than any other brand," carried a punch precisely because many authorities thought smoking was unhealthy (cigarettes were called "coffin nails" back then), and smokers were eager for reassurance in the form of smoking by doctors themselves. This particular ad, which was based on surveys of physicians, ran in one form or another from 1933 to 1955. It achieved prominence partly because physicians practically never endorsed non-therapeutic products.

Things really got interesting in the early 1950s, when the first persuasive medical reports on smoking and lung cancer reached the public. These reports created a phenomenal stir among smokers and the public generally. People who do not understand how advertising works would probably assume that cigarette manufacturers used advertising to divert attention away from the cancer reports. In fact, they did the opposite.

Small brands could not resist the temptation to use advertising to scare smokers into switching brands. They inaugurated several spectacular years of "fear advertising" that sought to gain competitive advantage by exploiting smokers' new fear of cancer.

Lorillard, the beleaguered seller of Old Gold, introduced Kent, a new filter brand supported by ad claims like these: "Sensitive smokers get real health protection with new Kent," "Do you love a good smoke but not what the smoke does to you?" and 'Takes out more nicotine and tars than any other leading cigarette-the difference in protection is priceless," illustrated by television ads showing the black tar trapped by Kent's filters.

Other manufacturers came out with their own filter brands,

and raised the stakes with claims like, "Nose, throat, and accessory organs not adversely affected by smoking Chesterfields.

First such report ever published about any cigarette," "Takes the fear out of smoking," and "Stop worrying ...Philip Morris and only Philip Morris is entirely free of irritation used [sic] in all other leading cigarettes."

These ads threatened to demolish the industry. Cigarette sales plummeted by 3 percent in 1953 and a remarkable 6 percent in 1954. Never again, not even in the face of the most impassioned anti-smoking publicity by the Surgeon General or the FDA, would cigarette consumption decline as rapidly as it did during these years of entirely market-driven anti-smoking ad claims by the cigarette industry itself.

Thus advertising traveled full circle. Devised to bolster brands, it denigrated the product so much that overall market demand actually declined. Everyone understood what was happening, but the fear ads continued because they helped the brands that used them. The new filter brands (all from smaller manufacturers) gained a foothold even as their ads amplified the medical reports on the dangers of smoking. It was only after the FTC stopped the fear ads in 1955 (on the grounds that the implied health claims had no proof) that sales resumed their customary annual increases.

Fear advertising has never quite left the tobacco market despite the regulatory straitjacket that governs cigarette advertising. In 1957, when leading cancer experts advised smokers to ingest less tar, the industry responded by cutting tar and citing tar content figures compiled by independent sources. A stunning "tar derby" reduced the tar and nicotine content of cigarettes by 40 percent in four years, a far more rapid decline than would be achieved by years of government urging in later decades. This episode, too, was halted by the FTC. In February 1960 the FTC engineered a "voluntary" ban on tar and nicotine claims.

Further episodes continue to this day. In 1993, for example,

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Liggett planned an advertising campaign to emphasize that its Chesterfield brand did not use the stems and other less desirable parts of the tobacco plant. This continuing saga, extending through eight decades, is perhaps the best documented case of how "less-bad" advertising completely offsets any desires by sellers to accentuate the positive whi Ie ignoring the negative.

Consumer Reports magazine's 1955 assessment of the new fear of smoking still rings true: "...companies themselves are largely to blame. Long before the cunent medical attacks, the companies were building up suspicion in the consumer by the discredited 'health claims' in their ads ....Such medicine-show claims may have given the smoker temporary confidence in one brand, but they also implied that cigarettes in general were distasteful, probably harmful, and certainly a 'problem.' When the scientists came along with their charges against cigarettes, the smoker was ready to accept them."

And that is how information works in competitive advertising.

Less-bad can be found wherever competitive advertising is allowed. I already described the health-claims-for-foods saga, which featured fat and cholesterol and the dangers of cancer and heart disease. Price advertising is another example. Prices are the most stubbornly negative product feature of all, because they represent the simple fact that the buyer must give up something else. There is no riper target for comparative advertising. When sellers advertise lower prices, competitors reduce their prices and advertise that, and soon a price war is in the works. This process so strongly favors consumers over the industry that one of the first things competitors do when they form a trade group is to propose an agreement to restrict or ban price advertising (if not ban all advertising). When that fails, they try to get advertising regulators to stop price ads, an attempt that unfortunately often succeeds.

Someone is always trying to scare customers into switching brands out of fear of the product itself. The usual effect is to im-

press upon consumers what they do not like about the product. In 1991, when Americans were wonied about insurance companies going broke, a few insurance firms advertised that they were more solvent than their competitors. In May 1997, United Airlines began a new ad campaign that started out by reminding fliers of all the inconveniences that seem to crop up during air travel.

Health information is a fixture in "less-bad" advertising. Ads for sleeping aids sometimes focus on the issue of whether they are habit-forming. In March 1996, a medical journal reported that the pain reliever acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, can cause liver damage in heavy drinkers. This fact immediately became the focus of ads for Advil, a competing product. A public debate ensued, conducted through advertising, talk shows, news reports and pronouncements from medical authorities. The result: consumers learned a lot more than they had known before about the fact that all drugs have side effects. The press noted that this dispute may have helped consumers, but it hurt the pain reliever industry. Similar examples abound.

We have, then, a general rule: sellers will use comparative advertising when permitted to do so, even if it means spreading bad information about a product instead of favorable information.

The mechanism usually takes the form of less-bad claims. One can hardly imagine a strategy more likely to give consumers the upper hand in the give and take of the marketplace. Less-bad claims are a primary means by which advertising serves markets and consumers rather than sellers. They completely refute the naive idea that competitive advertising will emphasize only the sellers' virtues while obscuring their problems.

D About the Author: John E. Calfee, a former Federal Trade Commission economist, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Instilute, in Washington, D. C, and author of Fear of Persuasion: A New Perspective on Advertising and Regulationfrom which this is adapted.

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