Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe

By Paul Buhle and Iain McIntyre

Before the Golden Age of comic books, there was Mr. Block: a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead, brought to life over a hundred years ago by subversive cartoonist Ernest Riebe.

A dedicated labour activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Riebe dreamed up his iconic, union-hating anti-hero to satirize conservative workers’ faith in the capitalist system that exploits them. This wickedly funny anthology of Riebe’s writings and comics is a treasure trove of radical 20th-century art and an essential addition to the bookshelves of comics lovers, historians, and labour activists alike.

As income inequality skyrockets and the collective power of the working class is undermined, the lessons from Mr. Block’s misadventures and misbeliefs are as relevant today as ever. Building the new world from the ashes of the old demands many tools—and laughter will always be one of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887440026

Paul Buhle

Paul Buhle, a labor historian of 1960s vintage, published Radical America Komics in 1969. After an explicable lapse of 35 years, he has produced, since 2005, a number of non-fiction comics, including Wobblies! A Graphic History. He lives in Rhode Island.

Book preview

PREFACE

Mr. Block is back with this wonderful and important collection. What a sight!

Thanks to the hard work and diligent research of the Graphic History Collective (GHC) and Iain McIntyre, the memorable working-class character of Mr. Block, created by Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) artist Ernest Riebe, will be remembered and rightly ridiculed by new generations. Mr. Block holds many lessons for those workers today fighting against blockheads and bosses for a better life, so pay attention.

Now solidly in the third decade of the twenty-first century, amid the ongoing and deleterious effects of de-industrialization and decline in quality of life for millions around the globe, we can appreciate keenly the need for blue-collar humor. Satire of the ridiculous situation we find ourselves in is absolutely necessary: millions of workers around the world toil and suffer while a small handful of billionaires profit and express their smug satisfaction at the wonders of so-called progress, including shooting themselves into space and planning their escape from the planet they are destroying. Laughing at the absurd can help clarify what we must fight against, as Riebe understood so well back in the 1910s when he created Mr. Block.

The comic strip Mr. Block was created in the rising industrial society of a century ago, including the rapidly modernizing agricultural economy of factory-like farms, which displaced the timeless family operation. As readers will see, Mr. Block is often an itinerant, on the move because he has no choice, no economic security, not even a family (with the exception of rare mentions of a Mrs. Block, who scorns her silly husband). But no matter where he is, Mr. Block consistently displays his blind faith in the capitalist system, an optimism that somehow in a society producing so much wealth there must be some for him. He only has crumbs, but he holds out hope that he’ll soon get a bigger piece of the pie.

His square, thick head is empty and, as a result, so is his stomach —except for the occasional Liberty Steak. No matter how much he suffers, Mr. Block never grasps the need for class consciousness and collective industrial and political action by his fellow workers. He is also, in that way, selfish, blind to the suffering of others. He’s an individual in a social world.

Though many of Riebe’s Mr. Block comics and writings appeared in the 1910s and 1920s, rescuing them from obscurity became a special project of Wobbly artists like Carlos Cortez and historians such as Franklin Rosemont in the 1980s. Rosemont worked with the Charles H. Kerr Company of Chicago to republish some of Riebe’s original comics in 1984. A Chicagoan through and through, and son of a prominent newspaper union activist, Rosemont grew up in the circles of old-timers who could remember the grand strikes and social movements of the 1910s–40s, likewise the bohemianism of itinerant, self-taught or movement-educated intellectuals and artists like Riebe. His work on the counterculture of the IWW, in general, and songwriter and agitator Joe Hill, in particular, added something new and important to our understanding of labor radicalism. The GHC and McIntyre are continuing this important tradition—and keeping alive its dissident and fighting spirit.

Labor cartooning was a couple of decades old when Riebe’s work appeared. It reached an early peak, artistically speaking, in the pages of IWW newspapers in the 1910s. It was part of a growing scene of radical artists and new publications, such as The Masses, that included illustrated content. Artists as popular and highly regarded as Art Young and Hugo Gellert established the standard for cartooning as sophisticated in tone and message, suitable in those ways for the pages of the New Yorker and others in the following decades. Meanwhile, ordinary labor and socialist cartoonists in the radical press hit capitalism’s evils and deceptions hard, presumably winning over thousands of casual readers with satirical messages more effective than prose.

In this world of agitational and occasional high art graphic expression, Riebe’s work remains unique. Like a small handful of other Wobbly artists drawing mostly for the newspapers that circulated among the impoverished followers and curiosity seekers around the IWW press, Riebe was an amateur—that is, unpaid or scarcely paid, untrained in any formal sense, and likely an itinerant worker himself. He was, in one way or another, on the run.

This may help explain the sketchiness of his presentation and, even more, the sharp edge of his disdain for the backward worker. This contempt is the telltale Wobbly marker in the broader field of radical humor because the ability or even willingness to make fun of conservative workers, at least in sophisticated and smart ways, remained (and still remains) rare. In many circles, such disdain has been considered a form of disloyalty to the Left and labor, in the sense that everyone must be brought along, none ridiculed.

Riebe knew better. A war on Blockism was (and is still) necessary. The best medicine for naive faith in the grand benevolence of capitalism is satirical disproof and disdain. Racists, strikebreakers, and evangelical worshippers at the throne of capitalism deserve a good swat, reminding all the rest of us that we can use humor against the system.

The relevance of Riebe’s work endures today and is ideally suited to critiquing new kinds of precarious and exploitative work in the gig economy and the service world where short-term jobs and frequent, often unwanted, geographical mobility is increasingly the norm. The sympathies of young people have turned away from capitalism, which has robbed them of security and the expectation that life can continue in a hellish world increasingly destroyed by its ravages.

So, dear reader, enjoy, laugh, and look closely: Ernest Riebe has insight for you. Mr. Block is not the hero we need but the antihero we deserve to laugh at as we sharpen our wit to organize and fight the blockheads and bosses standing between us and a better world. ■

—Paul Buhle

INTRODUCTION

Please give me your attention, I’ll introduce to you

A man that is a credit to Our Red, White and Blue;

His head is made of lumber, and solid as a rock;

He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.¹

So begins Joe Hill’s song about the misbeliefs and misadventures of Mr. Block, a fictional character representing the typical anti-union blockhead. As the song’s lyrics go on to explain, Mr. Block has no time for labor agitation. He scorns radical and revolutionary unions, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) to which Hill belonged. Instead, Mr. Block puts his faith in capitalists and the labor aristocracy. He wrongly believes that loyalty to boss and bureaucrat— rather than organizing on the job with his fellow workers—will get him all the good things in life. In the song’s chorus, Hill vents his frustrations with this kind of thick-headedness among some members of the working class, which Mr. Block symbolizes:

Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,

You take the cake,

You make me ache.

Tie a rock to your block and then jump in the