Book Review: KING AROO, VOLUME 2 by Jack Kent (IDW/Library of American Comics, 2013)

Still struggling to catch up hereabouts...  I was hoping to post the next DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE this past weekend, but life once again got in the way (or ran me over, "as the bee may case").  In the interim, I'll try to catch up on some overdue books -- book reviews, that is.

For a while there, it looked as if we weren't going to make that second journey to the kingdom of Myopia.  IDW evidently had considerable difficulty finding good-quality copies of Jack Kent's KING AROO strips from the period 1952-54, and, as a result, this volume is checking in a year or two late.  (To be fair, some other publishers' classic comics reprint projects remain stubbornly stuck on the launching pad.)

I can give this volume no higher praise than to say, if you enjoyed the first AROO collection, then you'll certainly like this one.  By now, Kent's drawing style has definitively settled into the deceptively relaxed, scritchy-scratchy approach that would carry his strip through to the end.  Distinctive differences between AROO and its closest strip relatives -- KRAZY KAT and POGO -- begin to manifest themselves.  Among these are a curious predilection for bad puns (complete with appropriate groaning reactions from the victims) and a willingness to occasionally take the characters outside Myopia's one square acre of territory.  Sometimes, these travels land our friends in the "real-for-sure world," for example, when Aroo goes to England to attend Queen Elizabeth's coronation.  (This being a fantasy strip, Aroo and his major-domo Yupyop stop on their way home for an extended visit in a surreal land called Hebefrenia.)  Aroo also literally "travels through time" -- a grandfather clock, to be precise -- and winds up in a "world beyond time" where he runs into such fanciful figures as Diogenes and a "missing link."  On occasion, Kent seems to be borrowing directly from his hero George Herriman, crafting a long story in which a retired moon-jumping cow is encouraged to get back into action and a series of gags involving a "coach dog," both of which ideas popped up at various times during KRAZY KAT's run.  Well, there are much worse places from which to swipe.

I was a little surprised that Bruce Canwell's "groundbreaking" introductory biography of Jack Kent wrapped up in this volume.  So what ancillaries can we expect in future volumes?  Artifacts from this fairly obscure strip seem to be rather thin on the ground.  I would hate for a lack of supporting materials, combined with the arduous search for easily reproducible strips, to cause the next edition of this fine series to be delayed even longer than Volume 2 was. Hopefully, IDW has discovered a reliable pipeline of material and Volume 3 will appear in short order.

Well, At Least "Schulz" Wasn't Spelled with a "T"...

Just recently, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL gave a shout-out to the second volume in the Fantagraphics Barks library.  All credit to reviewer Tim Marchman and the WSJ editors who green-lighted this review, but the piece could have done with one or two additional fact-checks.  We certainly wouldn't want the readers of this august journal to think that Carl Barks' Ducks lived in "Duckville," or that the seminal Barks $CROOGE story was titled "Only a Poor Man."  I'm not too thrilled about that reference to George "Harriman," either.

The weirdest thing about the review that isn't an error is the puzzling comment that the way Japanese manga and anime artists depict "saucer-shaped" eyes was influenced by Barks.  Readers of this blog will remember that Osamu Tezuka did correspond with Barks on at least one memorable occasion.  Considering Tezuka's vast influence on the subsequent direction of Japanese comics and animation, Tezuka's enthusiasm for Barks' work may have rubbed off on some of the "Manga God"'s peers.  Still, this is a fairly broad generalization to make, no? 

Book Review: KRAZY AND IGNATZ 1922-1924: AT LAST MY DRIM OF LIFE HAS COME TRUE by George Herriman (Fantagraphics Press, 2012)

With this release, Fantagraphics wraps up its packaging -- in this case, as in the case of the last several volumes of the series, "repackaging" is the more appropriate word -- of Herriman's KRAZY KAT Sunday pages.  The book would be thicker than normal in any case, because three years' worth of strips, rather than the standard two, are included here.  But FG also goes the extra mile and plumps the thing out to near-"brick"-like (see what I did there?) proportions by including several other previously unreprinted Herriman strip series.  Indeed, 1903's MRS. WAITAMINNIT, unearthed by Herriman's soon-to-be biographer Michael Tisserand, is a genuine find, as it appears to be Herriman's first continuing daily strip, running through roughly 20 installments in September and October 1903 in the New York EVENING WORLD.  The conceit is simple (a dithering lady unknowingly causes chaos for her hapless husband), and Herriman's figure drawing was still rather crude and inconsistent at this time (Mrs. W. never quite seems to look the same from strip to strip), but traces of Herriman's tradework verbal facility are already apparent, and the vaudeville-style slapstick gags are punched over with verve.  Tisserand provides a useful page of background text on the strip, in addition to contributing to the "Ignatz Mouse Debaffler Pages" at the back.  If this find is representative of the average level of quality of research that Tisserand has put into his Herriman biography, then that forthcoming book should be something.

Following the Kat-Mouse-Pupp-brick main event, Jeet Heer presents a complete color reprinting of US HUSBANDS, a Sunday domestic-comedy strip from 1926-1927.  This is perhaps the most "normal," not to say mundane, Herriman production that I've ever seen, spinning entire pages out of casual incidents and minor disagreements in married life.  The production was casual to the extent that Herriman didn't even bother to keep names and faces of his supposed "main characters" straight.  Just as well, as the wives, husbands, and "confirmed bachelors" here are pretty interchangeable.  In his text introduction, Heer speculates that Herriman cooked up the US HUSBANDS in order to convince the powers that were at King Features that, just in case William Randolph Hearst ever withdrew his personal "patronage" from the esoteric (and not all that popular) KRAZY KAT, then Herriman could, too, contribute more commercially "salable" material to the syndicate's manifest.  This theory seems reasonable to me, given Herriman's known level of insecurity.  (It was probably for the same reason that Herriman also pitched in to help with the panel feature EMBARRASSING MOMENTS at around this time.)  The standard "topper strip" for US HUSBANDS featured anachronistic husband-vs.-wife conflict in a vaguely medieval setting ("oh, thou rogue, thou hast snuck out to ye poker game agayne?!").  This isn't strange; what's strange is the strip's title: MISTAKES WILL HAPPEN (often with a following "." emphasized for some reason).  George, I love ya and I know that your mind worked in mysterious ways at times, but I can't for the life of me figure out how you fell upon this title for that particular scenario.  A meta-comment, perhaps, on how frustrating you found all this extra work to be as these two strips' brief lives slid by?

The end of this series is unfortunate enough, but an additional melancholy note is sounded with a tribute to the recently deceased Bill Blackbeard, Editor-in-Chief of this series from the start and so much more besides.  Blackbeard's role in the gradual, and often grudging, recognition of the comic strip as a legitimate art form -- one worth preserving, studying, and displaying -- over the last 40-odd years was immense.  He was quite literally one of the first people to bring the qualities of strips like E.C. Segar's THIMBLE THEATRE and Floyd Gottfredson's MICKEY MOUSE to the attention of the wider public.  Since a good deal of the material used to produce the KRAZY KAT volumes came directly from Blackbeard's collection, it seems a real shame that he didn't see the entire project through to this triumphant finish.

Defining Digest-cy Down?

There hasn't been much comics-related news of late, nor have I made many (um, make that any) major purchases at the store in recent weeks. Things will start to pick up again in April and May as Fantagraphics and IDW release several volumes in their "continuing series," including the final volumes of the POPEYE and KRAZY KAT Sunday-strip collections. There was also some happy news in today's PREVIEWS: Classic Comics Press is officially soliciting the collected BUCK O'RUE by Dick Huemer and Paul Murry for release in late June or early July. If we can't have new Disney comics, then seeing this little-known early-50s work from a pair of old-line "Disney Masters" is the next best thing.

There's still no indication as to when Ape Entertainment will restart its "rebooted" RICHIE RICH title. Indeed, if the latest Ape releases and solicitations are any indication, then the company appears to be pulling back a bit on its RICHIE commitment, in the manner of a "shrinking violet." Symbolic of the horticultural hesitation are the RICHIE RICH DIGEST releases that have just recently begun to appear. Now, when I think of a comics digest, I think of a chunky collection that delivers fair value for the money: WALT DISNEY COMICS DIGEST from Western Publishing, the "classic" Harvey and "Gladstone I" digests, Gemstone's DONALD DUCK ADVENTURES and MICKEY MOUSE ADVENTURES... and, yes, I'm even willing to throw in DISNEY ADVENTURES, provided that we only count the issues with Disney Afternoon -related material. For Ape to be flogging these 48-page (!) slick-cover pamphlets as "digests," however, I have to stretch the definition of "digest" so far that it snaps back into my face like an over-strained rubber band.

Ape's Web-site description of RICHIE RICH DIGEST is, to put it charitably, somewhat misleading. The "wealth" of additional RICHIE material that appeared in the one RRD issue that I perused appeared to consist of nothing more than one five-page Warren Kremer-drawn story, plus a gag or two. If Richie were that "wealthy," then he'd be forced to run Rich Rescue 24/7 just to make ends meet. What Ape should have done here is obvious -- collect all the parts of the initial RICH RESCUE saga into a trade paperback, perhaps throwing in a few "classic" adventure stories to "make weight." How hard can a decision like that be to make? Or, maybe there's an ulterior motive for Ape's apparent madness. Perhaps Ape's elongated re-release of the early RICH RESCUE material is an attempt to stall for time while the final details (whatever they might be) of the regular title are being worked out. If so, then the company is going to as absurd an extent as did Fenton Crackshell when he was trying to delay getting shot by the Banana Republic firing squad in "Allowance Day."

Wait, it gets worse! Here is the blurb for RICHIE RICH GEMS TREASURES (sic??), solicited in this week's PREVIEWS...

Get ready for thrills and chills in this collection of stories taken from issues #44-47 of the critically acclaimed RICHIE RICH GEMS title! This collection reprints the 4 new stories that were done by Richie Rich's creator Sid Jacobson with art by long-time fan-favorite Ernie Colon! Each issue reprinted digitally re-colored classic RICHIE RICH stories, and there are short stories from the all-new RICHIE RICH: RICH RESCUE series!

The fact that the original Jacobson/Colon stories are headlined takes a bit of the sting out of the revelation that RRGT will be reprinting material from... a reprint title. What really concerns me is the inclusion of RICH RESCUE material. Um, wouldn't this include some of the same material that was just recently reprinted in RRD? How many "variations of repetition" are you planning to feed us, guys?

At this point, Ape is my only source of new newsstand-style comics, so you'll pardon me for getting a bit exercised over exactly what the heck is going on here.

All Tripped Out

Now that my trip to Vancouver for the Joint Statistical Meetings is over, I'm willing -- nay, eager -- to play homebody for the foreseeable future. Three sizable Summer journeys will do that to a fellow. Not that I didn't enjoy my stay in Vancouver, of course. The weather was pleasant, and I took advantage by concluding my stay with a trolley tour of different parts of the city, including beautiful Stanley Park. My talk went well (I've already gotten a request for my Power Point slides from an attendee) and maybe, just maybe, it can be turned into a paper.

The dinner visit to William Van Horn and his wife Elaine in "North Van" on the 3rd was great, apart from the $65 I had to shell out for cab fare. (The guy taking me there could at least have known where he was going. As it was, he had to drive with a city map on his lap.) Bill and I talked about everything from Duck comics (bien sur) to roofing during the 4 1/2 hours I was there. In Bill's studio, a partially finished Duck story lay on the drawing board (yes, he's still producing them, though at a much slower pace and with absolutely no idea as to whether they will ever be printed in the U.S.) and the walls were adorned with comic-art originals by George Herriman, Walt Kelly, and Chester Gould, among others. (I was unaware that Bill is a big DICK TRACY fan.) Bill's son Noel is prospering and has now turned his hand to Duck stories. Wouldn't I love to see both VH's represented in a reformatted DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS?

Gott Rights?

This project has been "teased" for a long time, but it appears to be about to come to pass. It will certainly be an "acid test" for the acceptability of politically incorrect material; Fantagraphics' PEANUTS, KRAZY KAT, and THIMBLE THEATER collections contain no material quite so dicey as that seen in, say, "The Great Orphanage Robbery" or "An Education for Thursday." FG's well-regarded ongoing collections, however, have bought the company quite a lot of good will, which no doubt helped during the negotiating process.

Will this collection extend to the end of Gottfredson's working career, in 1975? I rather doubt it. Previous efforts to collect the Mouse master's work stopped when the format switched permanently to "gag-a-day" mode in the mid-50s. Even before that time, in the 1940s, when the gag format was occasionally used for brief periods of time, the quality of the gags was not exactly top-notch. (In particular, the gags tended to put Mickey in a surprisingly bad light more often than not, though he never came off as badly as Donald consistently did in Al Taliaferro's strip.) I'll definitely call it quits once the adventures trail off, but how nice it will be to have such a luxury to begin with!

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In his comments on the Gottfredson Library news, GeoX wonders whether Disney is sending a signal to Boom! by assigning the publication rights to Fantagraphics. If I were Boom!, I'd be a bit more concerned about this news. The TRON graphic novel -- which, with its "departures" from the movie cast and storyline, certainly sounds like a setup for a continuing series to me -- is different from the Library in that it's an honest-to-goodness original comics creation. Are we now simply counting down the days until Disney flips all of its remaining comics over to Marvel?

Book Review: KRAZY AND IGNATZ 1916-1918: "LOVE IN A KESTLE OR LOVE IN A HUT" by George Herriman (Fantagraphics Press, 2010)

Fifteen months after closing out the chronological reprints of KRAZY KAT Sunday pages, Fantagraphics doubles back to tackle George Herriman's earliest Sundays, plowing earth previously tilled by Eclipse Comics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These World War I-era strips (and you can easily tell; Herriman makes far more direct references to WWI than he did to WWII several decades later) were the works in which the great creator vaulted out of the four-panel daily-strip straightjacket and began to flex his artistic muscles, attracting a crowd of admiring glitterati in his wake. Not that old habits were easy to break; for the first several months, Herriman treats the Sunday like a "super-sized" daily, breaking up the large black and white page (which ran in the Hearst papers' "drama and arts" section, the place where you see book reviews and crossword puzzles today) into a large number of smaller rectangular segments. Not until the Summer of 1916 does the artist begin to play with his format on a regular basis, and then all bets are off (though the number of "discrete intra-strip events" remains high; Herriman's more visually sumptuous poster-art phase wouldn't kick in until some years later). During these years, Herriman casts "Bull Pupp" as an officer of the law, turns the spare world of the KRAZY daily strip into something close to a mini-society, and establishes offbeat themes that would sustain many a gag in the years immediately ahead, such as occasional "just-so" stories (how the robin got his red breast, why the rattlesnake and garter snake are different, etc.). Most important of all, of course, he begins to flesh out the precise relationship between Kat, Mouse, and brick. (Offissa Pupp is on hand as well, but the jail routine hasn't quite jelled as of yet; he's still a pretty minor player, getting less mug time than, for example, brick magnate Colin Kelly.)

In his Introduction, Bill Blackbeard notes that regional Hearst editors, who had the freedom to juggle individual sections of their papers (though not the comics section), fought battles with the front office over the inclusion of a comic strip that baffled the average reader. Even those who read the spare, to-the-point KRAZY KAT dailies were disoriented, as Herriman introduced a whole new raft of characters and turned Coconino County into a real (or as "real" as such things can be) place. Once again, Hearst receives, and deserves, the credit for insisting that his editors keep the Sunday KRAZY in the paper. Blackbeard also attempts to trace the "first appearance" of Krazy back beyond his/her "commonly accepted" debut in the bottom part of Herriman's THE DINGBAT FAMILY in 1910. He digs up a couple of black cats who appeared (and even talked) in such early, extravagantly ephemeral Herriman works as LARIAT PETE, ROSY'S MAMA (aka ROSY POSY GRANDMA'S GIRL), BUD SMITH, and ZOO ZOO. But sometimes a black cat is just a black cat, and I don't see any real connection between these critters and "The" Kat of word-mangling, brick-begging fame. Blackbeard's on slightly more solid turf when he displays a BARON MOOCH strip of 1909 in which the black cat is finally referred to as a "Kat."

Book Review: GEORGE HERRIMAN'S KRAZY AND IGNATZ IN "TIGER TEA" (IDW Publishing and Yoe Books, 2010)

The most notable things that have been said about "Tiger Tea" -- by far, George Herriman's most notable "experiment" in the KRAZY KAT daily strip -- are either demonstrably false or completely unprovable. It is not "Herriman's great adventure story," as some folks would have it; it's more like a running theme that recurred at intervals for almost a year (May 1936 to March 1937), probably because Herriman was able to mine more gags out of it than he had expected at the beginning. I also rather doubt that it was Herriman's surreptitious lobby for legalizing marijuana or celebrating its use, as some of the great cartoonist's "artsy-fartsier" fans would no doubt like to believe. Herriman was probably aware of the existence of hallucinogenic substances, thanks to his friendship with the Navajos of Monument Valley, but, as Michael Tisserand (the author of an upcoming Herriman biography) admits in Craig Yoe's introduction, there is no evidence that Herriman ever "indulged" in any way, and that he simply took the idea of an elixir that caused individuals to act out of character as a convenient excuse to have some fun with his cast. I'm nonetheless happy to have the entire (?) collection of "Tiger Tea" strips between hard covers at long last. It doesn't measure up to the spectacular work Herriman did in his Sunday pages, but, as a window into Herriman's thoughts on the whole subject of continuity, it is a valuable piece of work.

"Tiger Tea" begins with katnip (yep, that's how it's spelled) magnate Mr. Meeyowl going bust. Feeling sorry for Meeyowl, Krazy follows his/her nose through several days' worth of desert perils (this is the closest the sequence gets to true "adventure," with Herriman generally eschewing dialogue in favor of letting pictures tell the story) and ultimately returns to Coconico County inside a bag of Tiger Tea (don't ask). Tiger Tea is the ultimate katnip, capable of giving a docile worm the attitude of a "King Kobra" or, more to the point, giving Herriman an excuse to allow the perpetually passive Krazy to "act up." "That I should have lived to see this!" groans Offissa Pupp upon seeing Krazy tippling like Foster Brooks on a particularly bad day. I think that Herriman intended this one scene as the real payoff, but that ideas just kept popping into his head, and he ran with them. This was, after all, an artist who mined 30 years' worth of strips out of a conceit (bricks, jail... you probably know the drill) that is surely the slenderest reed upon which a comics masterpiece was ever draped, so you know he would have been sensitive to any promising new riff on his well-worn theme. We get subsequent strips of Krazy attempting to hide his/her stash of Tea, using some magic pollen to help unmask individuals who have stolen from his/her Tea sack, and, finally, Ignatz, Pupp, and other characters swearing off the brew. The whole sequence resembles one of those lazy, meandering POGO storylines more than a tightly controlled narrative of the kind favored by the likes of Harold Gray -- and even Walt Kelly didn't wander off the reservation the way Herriman did before ceasing his "Tea Bagging" for good. Ultimately, Herriman's interests simply didn't lie in the direction of telling a continuing story, even while his competitors were rushing to introduce long narratives into their strips. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why KRAZY KAT's popularity gradually waned in the 1930s. If Herriman had followed the crowd, though, he wouldn't have been Herriman.

Four on the (Lucas Oil Stadium) Floor

Final Four time again, and at least I got one of the four participants right, picking West Virginia to defeat Kentucky. The young, talented, and clueless Wildcats cooperated in full by heaving up enough bricks against the Mountaineers to satisfy even Ignatz Mouse. I also correctly predicted the Butler-Kansas State and Duke-Baylor Elite Eight set-tos but got the winners wrong. Extenuating circumstances may be claimed in the former case, as the NCAA and CBS obliged K-State to play the early game last Saturday after the Wildcats had barely survived an epic double-OT thriller with Xavier two nights before. Nicky can vouch for the fact that I predicted that K-State would poop out long before CBS' Gregg Doyel made the same point in his blog after the fact. Between getting a fried opponent in the Regional final and playing an Arinze Onuaku-less Syracuse in the Sweet 16, Butler's first Final Four appearance benefited from a huge helping of good fortune. Remember that the Bulldogs only beat Murray State (the school in Kentucky, not the dancing academy) by two points in the second round. Butler getting to play the national semi a few miles from its campus in Indy is a great story, and I certainly wouldn't mind if they scratched out two more wins in their unspectacular but effective fashion, but my gut tells me that Michigan State's experience will prevail in Saturday's first Final Four game.

The game between Duke and West Virginia will probably decide the national champion. Here, I think that Duke's team intelligence will rule the day. Mike Krzyzewski is not going to stand idly by like a mannequin, as John Calipari did while Kentucky was melting down and missing shot after shot. I figure that, given the extra time to prepare, Coach K will figure out how to get his shooters good looks. I like Duke over WVU by a handful of points. Then, in Monday's final, last year repeats itself as Michigan State hits the wall, Duke wins relatively easily, and Krzyzewski bags his fourth national title -- and his most unexpected one apart from 1991, when a youngish Blue Devil team shocked unbeaten UNLV in the national semis.

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Speaking of big-time (relatively speaking, that is) sports showdowns this weekend, #1 Stevenson plays #2 Salisbury in men's lacrosse on Saturday afternoon at the Owings Mills athletic complex. The two schools' women's teams will play in the morning. This is as big as it gets for Stevenson athletics -- the games have been hyped on Stevenson's home page for a solid week -- and I hope to get over there with Nicky to see at least part of the action. Neither of us "get" lacrosse, but it is definitely an "in" sport around here and the laxers are the closest thing Stevenson has to big athletic stars on campus.

Book Review: JACK KENT'S KING AROO, VOLUME 1 (IDW Publishing, 2010)

IDW Publishing's LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS line has already made a considerable mark in the flourishing biz of classic comic-strip reprints, as readers of this blog are surely aware. Now their activities have risen to the nobler -- and, hopefully, just as remunerative -- level of performing a genuine public service. Jack Kent's whimsical fantasy strip KING AROO, which ran from 1950 to 1965 and enjoyed a small but very devoted following, has always sounded as if it were right up my (Hogan's) alley -- a cleverly written "intellectual" lark along the lines of KRAZY KAT, POGO, and BARNABY -- but, until IDW proffered this volume of the first two years of daily and Sunday strips, my total exposure to Kent's much-praised work consisted of a handful of daily strips reprinted in THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS and Ron Goulart's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN COMICS. A reprint volume appeared in 1953, but it apparently didn't sell well enough to warrant additional collections. Now IDW, armed with syndicate proofs and with the cooperation of Kent's heirs, is taking the not-inconsiderable gamble that the diminutive monarch of Myopia can be sold to 21st-century audiences. If there's any justice, its gamble will pay off.

Kent, who became a prolific author of children's books after shutting his AROO-gala down, was a self-taught artist with a profound respect for his fellow comics creators. He corresponded with such luminaries as Milton Caniff and George Herriman, receiving original artwork from each, and apparently had some dealings with Walt Kelly, turning down an opportunity to become Kelly's assistant on POGO (cf. Bruce Canwell's introductory essay in this volume). Kent's willingness to learn from the "masters" probably accounts for the fact that his strip arrives on the scene more or less "fully formed." Herriman took a while to develop KRAZY KAT from a sub-feature to another one of his strips into an independent feature; Kelly's POGO started in a comic book and likewise took some time to round into shape; but Kent, from day one, panel one, seems to know exactly what he is trying to accomplish insofar as humor style, approach to continuity (to wit: rambling with occasional lengthy diversions), and level of sophistication are concerned. His art style takes a little longer to mature; it looks a little stiff at the start, quickly mutates into something akin to Walt Kelly's style circa 1951 (albeit with supporting characters who look a bit more Herriman-esque, with their dot-eyes and invisible mouths), and finally settles into the pleasantly loose, semi-sketchy style that would serve Kent well for the rest of AROO's life. Modern comic-strip creators should be so fortunate as to be able to "ramp up" their new features so quickly. Usually, they're still trying to learn how to draw.

Unlike POGO (comic-strip version) and KRAZY KAT, KING AROO features a "mixed cast" of humans and animals. (Actually, King Aroo looks more like a cross between a human and a gerbil, but the other characters refer to him as human, so I'm not going to argue.) Aroo plays the Pogo role of the apparent innocent who is nonetheless (usually) aware of what is going on around him. His human factotum Yupyop -- who, strangely enough, gets co-billing with Aroo in the Sunday strips -- is more worldly-wise, though he does have his "drift-off" moments, such as when he decides to go into business saving damsels in distress. Aroo, for his part, is enamored with "The Beautiful Princess from the Kingdom Next Door," who, like all female humans appearing in this volume, is tall (comparatively speaking) with dot eyes and no appreciable nose. The expected crew of "fairy-tale" characters supporting the lead duo -- witches, dragons, goblins, ghosts, and whatnot -- all have endearing flaws. Wanda Witch's spells backfire more often than not, while Drexel Dragon (I wonder whether Kent got the idea of that name from here) has only limited control of his fire-breathing apparatus. Professor Yorgle, a creature of indeterminate origin who believes he knows everything but actually doesn't, is a cross between Ludwig von Drake and POGO's Howland Owl. There might even be a "shout-out" to the contemporary radio comedy Fibber McGee and Molly in the person (so to speak) of Mr. Pennipost, the kangaroo mailman with an apparently bottomless pouch (think Fibber's closet, not to mention the magic bag owned by the future version of Felix the Cat). As noted above, it doesn't take long at all for Kent to establish these characters' personalities and set them in full motion.

Kent's writing style is much more straightforward than that of Herriman or Kelly; he plays with words a lot, explores the "hidden meanings" of fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme cliches, and the like, but he generally steers clear of the "fenciful" word-wrangling of KRAZY KAT or the dialect-heavy speech that dominates POGO. He does use a couple of "walk-on" characters with accents, but I can't say that I'm overly impressed with what he does with them; the ingenuity of the "fractured French" patois used by his French poodle Genevieve, for example, does not measure up to that employed by Herriman's French poodle schoolteacher Mimi or Kelly's Miss Ma'amselle Hepzibah. Kelly's relatively straightforward approach makes it all the more mystifying to me why his strip wasn't more popular with a general audience. POGO, after all, appeared in several hundred papers at its peak and was much more of an "acquired taste" than I found AROO to be. The ultimate reason for AROO's obscurity may lie in the fact that Kent sold it to the McClure Newspaper Syndicate. McClure was the first syndicated feature service in American newspaper history, dating back to 1884, but, by 1950, it was on its last legs. McClure sold out to the Bell Syndicate in 1952, and Kent apparently had much more trouble dealing with Bell than with McClure. AROO would have gone under even earlier than it did had the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE not pieced together a small-scale syndicate primarily devoted to keeping AROO afloat. Perhaps Kent should have considered several offers before casting his lot with McClure.

I'm certainly on board with this collection for the duration, and all praise to IDW for taking a chance on it in the first place. But I'm still waiting for that "official" LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS Web site, guys. When is it going to launch?

Book Review: SAM'S STRIP by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas (Fantagraphics Press, 2009)

There's a reason why "conventional wisdom" is called "conventional" -- more often than not, it's passed the test of time and is sound. Sometimes, however, "conventional wisdom" takes on a life of its own and oversimplifies a situation that is really much more complicated than is commonly believed. Such appears to be the case with SAM'S STRIP, a short-lived but ingenious early-60s comic strip by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas that, according to EVERY comment about it that I have ever read, prominently featured past comics characters doing constant "guest shots," yakking it up with the strip's protagonists (the bulb-nosed, apparently neckless Sam and his skinny, bespectacled, nameless sidekick/assistant), being feted at "comics characters' conventions," etc., etc. Well, this slender volume reprints the strip's entire run, and... remember what I said about "conventional wisdom"? The "comic about comics" (so claims this book's subtitle) did give other denizens of the funny papers a chance to "slum it" in Dumas' bare panels, but that conceit was only a small part of the fun. In fact, Walker and Dumas' inability to, in the immortal (albeit somewhat paraphrased) words of Gadget Hackwrench, "choose a thing... one thing... and stick with it" may be the reason why this witty, engaging effort never found an audience and ultimately died after a year and a half.

The core idea of SAM'S STRIP is that Sam and "Silo" (who'd get that name in a later Walker-Dumas strip that resurrected the characters but otherwise bore little resemblance to the original) are proprietors of their strip and engage in near-incessant "fourth-wall" breaking and ruminations about the ups and downs of running a panelological concern. They have closets full of punctuation marks and cartoon props, debate about the appropriate format for the strip (with the somewhat egotistical Sam usually having the more inflated notions of what the subject matter should be), and are constantly aware of their pen-and-ink insistence. For the early 1960s, this was high-concept indeed. It was only natural that Walker and Dumas should get the idea of featuring other characters in walk-on roles, though they did usually play it safe by employing fellow King Features characters (Blondie, Krazy Kat and Ignatz, Popeye) or figures who had long since vanished from the scene (with Fred Opper's Happy Hooligan -- whose attempts to "crash" the strip became a running gag -- getting the most "mug time"). On several glorious occasions, Walker and Dumas trotted out a big-league cameo, as when Sam sees Charlie Brown driving by (!) and muses, "I knew having that big automobile account [i.e. the PEANUTS Ford Falcon franchise] would change that kid." The problem was that the creators didn't use these inter-strip get-togethers nearly as much as they should have. Instead, they whiled away a lot of their time with politically themed, time-dependent gags trading on the "New Frontier" administration of John Kennedy and the contemporary Cold War atmosphere. There's even a diabolically obscure reference to Vaughn Meader, the comedian who had 15 minutes of fame because of his uncanny vocal imitation of JFK. At various times, Sam identified as a Republican (when he and "Silo" discuss a good GOP candidate for 1964, "Silo" suggests Walt Disney -- who definitely had the right ideology!) and "Silo" as a Democrat. A casual reader who stumbled upon the strip one day and assumed it was some kind of politically-charged strip a la POGO could be excused for the mistake. These Cold War gags not only date the strip to a certain extent, they also detract from the strip's "primary mission," i.e. its "meta-comical" explorations and those delightful crossover visits. Perhaps Mort and Jerry had trouble thinking up enough self-referential gags to fill six days' worth of strips each week (the strip never had a Sunday page); if so, more's the pity.

SAM'S STRIP is definitely worth getting if you're a serious comics fan, or someone with an interest in the Kennedy era in general. The fact that I can logically recommend the volume to both groups, however, only points up how blurred the strip's focus could be at times. It's a highly fascinating misfire, but, I'm afraid, a misfire nonetheless.

Book Review: KRAZY AND IGNATZ 1943-44: HE NODS IN QUIESCENT SIESTA by George Herriman (Fantagraphics Press, 2008)

With this volume, Herriman's great comic-strip opus (the full-page version of it, anyway) grinds to a somewhat weary, but nonetheless ingenious-to-the-end, halt. Herriman died of a liver ailment in April 1944, and the final full-page strip (the original of which I've seen in Baltimore's own Geppi's Entertainment Museum) appeared on June 25. As Bill Blackbeard points out in a brief foreword, you can definitely sense Herriman's weakening powers in the last month or two of strips. While the composition remains strong, the figure drawing becomes less and less assured, and the gags, of increasing obscurity ever since the late 1930s, become positively inscrutable. Since Herriman had become a virtual recluse by the time of his death, the effect is that of a striking but fragile seasonal flower slowly closing and crumpling as its time of growth expires. I'd seen a number of these late strips in black and white form, but only in the poor reproductions in the 1946 Henry Holt collection (about which more here), and they do indeed have a rather mournful quality to them even when seen "unobscured" and whole.

In order to fill out a volume that would otherwise have been rather slender, Fantagraphics asked readers of its KAT collections to send in any Herriman memorabilia that had not previously appeared in its pages. Well, the Kats certainly came crawling out of the woodwork in response, and we get to see everything from a curious "Big Little Book" version of KRAZY KAT from the mid-30s (if this was meant to be sold to contemporary kids, then they were probably as baffled as were the kids of the mid-60s who watched the Gene Deitch King Features cartoons, given how few papers the strip appeared in by that time) to a 1930's souvenir paper bag featuring an "unauthorized" Kat that's at least 15-20 years out of date with Herriman's then-current model. More substantial, and aesthetically pleasing, are the numerous hand-tinted strips and gift drawings that Herriman created for friends and acquaintances. All of these date from the late 1930s or earlier, indicating just how completely Herriman isolated himself post-1940. (We do get a drawing that Herriman made for his daughter's 40th birthday to make up some of the difference.)

Happily, Fantagraphics plans to reissue the KRAZY KAT volumes produced by Eclipse Comics that reprinted the full-page strips before 1925, so the full-blown version of the Kat will soon be coming back. I have my fingers and "toze" crossed that the announced plans to reprint the KRAZY KAT dailies will also come to pass. Fantagraphics has done a great job with this series, especially given the paucity of surviving material on Herriman, and I salute them for their heroic efforts to preserve this great comic masterpiece.