Many readers will also be frustrated by Walker’s congenital niceness, which means that anodyne features get praised above and beyond their actual importance. (Is “Mother Goose & Grimm” really “wildly entertaining”?) As a writer, Walker reminds one of his dad, who had multiple mediocre strips running nationwide at once. He’s a hard worker, but not all that inspiring.
“The Comics” is resolutely optimistic, which means that it pays scant attention to the issues facing comics today: legacy strips, still taking up space in comics sections years after their creators’ deaths; the shrinking of comics pages and mass closures of newspapers nationwide; the talented new generation of comic-strip artists who avoid newsprint entirely. (Webcomics receive nary a mention.) Discussion of the future is reserved for a single page at the end of the book, on which Walker indulges in pure fantasy: “Perhaps someday, in the not-too-distant future, an enterprising newspaper editor will experiment with enlarging the comics and printing them on higher-quality paper. . . . The newspaper’s circulation might take off.”
"The Comics: The Complete Collection" by Brian Walker (ComicArts. 672 pp. $40)
Nevertheless, “The Comics” is worth the hefty weight (seven pounds!) and heftier cover price ($40!). To leaf through its pages is to be repeatedly surprised and delighted by the list of “Little Nemo in Slumberland” ripoffs (“Nibsy, the Newsboy, in Funny Fairyland”) rushed into print by competing syndicates; by the realization that someone (specifically, Rudolph Dirks) had to invent comics shorthand, like those beads of sweat that indicate fear; by the misbegotten ideas of bygone days: the strip set entirely on an unpopulated island, or “Marvin” creator Tom Armstrong’s satirical comic about a TV host that ended in the hero’s assassination, or Popeye urging a pregnant Olive Oyl to get an abortion. (An aborshkun?)
Most amazing of all? The 1922 salary of long-forgotten cartoonist Sidney Smith for his strip “The Gumps,” not at all outrageous for a comic strip at the time: $100,000 a year, with a brand new Rolls-Royce delivered triennially. “The Comics” is terrific at summoning the past, only mediocre in describing the present, and hopeless at discussing the future. But it’s still an essential text for anyone interested in the history of a most disposable art form.
Kois is the author of “Facing Future,” about Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.
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