E.C. Segar’s earliest Popeye comics have just been made available in a gorgeously designed hardcover, also from Fantagraphics. Segar’s Thimble Theatre strips featured some of the most charming characters ever to appear in newsprint, including the hilarious Bernice the Whiffle Hen, a magical African bird with a winning personality.
Each book in the ongoing Complete Peanuts series (Fantagraphics) is beautifully designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, and features two years of thoughtfully reproduced daily and Sunday newspaper cartoon strips. This magnificently conceived project, whose latest addition is the sixth volume (1961–1962), will keep the work of Charles M. Schulz on the shelves of bookstores for years to come.
The Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly has launched Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922, the first in a series that collects Frank King’s seminal Gasoline Alley strips. While these books are fitting testaments to King’s incredible illustrative talents, the content (from the early years, anyway) has dated rather badly—not least the regular appearances of Walt’s stereotypical African- American maid.
The recent Krazy & Ignatz 1937–1938: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty is one of the most agreeably bonkers tomes published in recent memory. Just about every strip tells the story of Ignatz Mouse’s compulsion to hurl bricks at the willing Krazy’s head, and each is told in a linguistic and visual vernacular that defies description.
Moomin (Drawn & Quarterly) collects a cartoon created in the 1950s by Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist who published her work in a British newspaper—proving that comic innovation was not a uniquely American phenomenon. The Moomin strip was a conscious attempt to take Jansson’s much-loved children’s book characters to an adult audience.
By way of contrast, Asterix the Gaul (Orion), another comic book classic recently reprinted, tramples over all sorts of contemporary niceties. Working in early-1960s France, Rene Goscinny (writer) and Albert Uderzo (artist) created a band of ancient Gaulish heroes whose greatest joys were hunting, brawling, quaffing “magic potion” and scoffing at the strange ways of foreign types.
The Complete Peanuts: Volume 1, 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics) is the first in a series of deluxe hardback editions in which every single Peanuts comic strip will be reprinted, in order.
The people who published these two books have recently released an anthology that not only illustrates this last point marvellously but also provides insight into the enviable cultural contexts that have allowed traditions of substantial cartooning to flourish overseas. Many of the stories presented in Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5, in particular, Dupuy & Berbérian’s “Monsieur Jean” and Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s “Kept,” have an unselfconsciously literary feel that is foreign to the North American scene.
Joe Matt’s Fair Weather (Drawn and Quarterly) compiles four recent issues of his autobiographical comic book Peep Show. The collection details events that took place over a balmy weekend in suburban Pennsylvania in the 1970s, most involving the prepubescent Matt acting up, like an egocentric brat of the worst kind.
[Chester Brown’s] latest collection, Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Drawn & Quarterly), is a fascinating look at the westward expansion of colonial Canada. The oddly detached style of the dialogue gives this volume an almost textbook-like feel, which is compounded by Brown’s bold, unfussy art.
