For years, the Milwaukee Journal ran its comic strips in a four-page insert printed on green newsprint called, naturally, the Green Sheet. Through the summer of 1985, I returned home from camp every day hoping that the afternoon’s Journal had already arrived: Opus and Cutter John had disappeared on an epic journey in a balloon-powered wheelchair, and Opus had returned an amnesiac.
Each afternoon, I pulled the Green Sheet from its nest and spread it out on the kitchen floor. I carefully cut out “Bloom County”and secured it in a photo album, just beneath the strip from the day before. I was quite certain I was saving for posterity something amazing — a story future generations would demand to know.
"The Comics: The Complete Collection" by Brian Walker (ComicArts. 672 pp. $40)
Today, Berkeley Breathed’s “Bloom County” is gone. So is the Green Sheet — it disappeared in 1995, when the Journal merged with the Milwaukee Sentinel. But that memory came back to me as I browsed Brian Walker’s “The Comics,” a beautiful guide to 100-plus years of funny pages. Walker’s doorstop of a tome — at 672 copiously illustrated pages, it conjoins his books “The Comics Before 1945” and “The Comics Since 1945” — is excellent at conjuring the feeling of feverish joy that comics can provide, the feeling that led me to archive my 10-year-old passion. It’s less excellent at exploring the reasons — hinted at by the death of the Green Sheet — that, so often, the comics no longer give that feeling.
Walker — son of Mort, creator of “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois” — is a tireless researcher and a thoughtful curator. The true treasures of “The Comics” are the more than 1,300 strips reproduced within. Early works of creators like Richard Outcault — whose 1896 “The Yellow Kid and His New Phonograph” is credited by Walker as the first-ever true comic strip — are vibrant portraits of urban life, even if their dated references and lingo can be difficult to penetrate today. Mid-century comics that you may consider square (if you consider them at all) shine on these pages: “Prince Valiant” is gorgeous; “Nancy” is jazzy and inventive.
And “The Comics” excels in highlighting wonderful examples of strips that will make you glad that someone, somewhere, was hoarding these comics like a kid on a kitchen floor: Ted Shearer’s poignant “Quincy,” set in the inner city from 1970-86; Jerry Dumas and Mort Walker’s Pirandellian meta-comic, “Sam’s Strip,” about a comics character who knows he’s a comics character, which lasted less than two years in the 1960s; “Male Call,” which “Steve Canyon” creator Milton Caniff drew unpaid for World War II soldiers — one representative strip offers four sultry, semi-clad girls, with the caption “You mean you want a gag, too?”
Comics fans will find plenty to quibble with. Where are the deadpan modern-day pirates of Chip Dunham’s “Overboard”? Why do Denys Wortman (one of the great chroniclers of Depression-era New York) and Dow Walling (whose 1933 “Skeets” strip is my favorite in the book) receive only passing mentions? What about the great alt-weekly comics artists, like Lynda Barry or Matt Groening?
Loading...
Comments