Book Review: THE COMPLETE DICK TRACY, Volume 17: 1956-57 by Chester Gould (IDW Publishing/Library of American Comics, 2014)... plus RIP Jay Maeder

** SPOILERS **

This latest TRACY collection begins by wrapping up the "Joe Period and Flattop Jr." continuity.  The denouement features one of Gould's most (literally) haunting sequence of images, as the ghost/spirit of a murder victim of Flattop Jr.'s literally attaches itself to his neck and won't let go until he himself is gunned down.  By the time Flattop meets his demise, he is white-haired and completely barmy.  The fact that he is a teenager makes the images particularly compelling.  Joe Period doesn't fare much better, getting arrested by Tracy and crew after scoring his first (and, since he's thereby doomed to the electric chair, only) notch on the old gun-butt.  In another highly effective and eerily mounted series of strips, Joe's grieving mother comes to see him in prison, laments her inability to be a good and responsible parent for her boy... and promptly commits suicide by running out into city traffic.  Gould applies a final twist of the knife when he refuses to let us see Joe's on-panel reaction to the shocking news; all we get is a panel of a guard coming to tell the "juvie" prisoner that something has happened.

The Joe Period/Flattop Jr. tale was the latest one in time order to be reprinted by Harvey Comics' old DICK TRACY COMICS MONTHLY.  From here on in, easily accessible pre-IDW reprints of TRACY continuities will be conspicuous by their absence.  Not quite "uncharted waters," but close enough to smell the salt air.

The year 1957, the very crux of the 50s, was once described as "the year it seemed that everyone graduated from high school -- or at least wished they had."  As for Gould, well, he had certainly had better years.  The Kitten Sisters, a trio of close-cropped, acrobatic, "butch" burglars who take a giant step up on the ladder of crime when they commit a revenge murder, are fairly interesting as characters, but they are almost captured too easily: these are the types of arrogant villains that I would have expected to have gone down in "a blaze of gory."  There's actually more bloodshed in the next continuity, which is supposed to serve as comedy relief, or at least I heard some rumor to that effect.  B.O. Plenty's father Morin Plenty (it only seems as if old B.O. has had as many relatives as Snoopy) spends many weeks of panels touting his amazing new invention, a screw-on shoe heel, only to vow bloody revenge after a pair of would-be swindlers cause the death of his barefooted, teenaged hillbilly wife Blossom.  In his Introduction, Max Allan Collins calls this Gould's worst comedy continuity ever.  I can't bring myself to go that far.  OK, it's far from a laugh riot, but Morin is an engaging, genial sort, with an energy that belies his advanced age, and it's genuinely touching to see him break down after Blossom is killed.  Some of Gould's comedy bits from the 30s -- the ones with half-witted wannabe rube detectives and stereotypical black servants -- were far more annoying than this.  The whole affair comes to a classic DICK TRACY conclusion, with the requisite high body count.  Thankfully, despite his vow of revenge, Morin wasn't involved in any of the carnage.

Atypically, the volume closes on the end of a continuity, the tale of the unfortunate Crystal family and the "mad" mother Elsa.  Child abuse, fire, flood, drug pushing, and a gruesome form of murder all compete for attention in this story.

Several "this could only have happened in the 50s" moments are scattered about.  Tracy and his partner Sam Catchem get crew cuts, and Tracy gets involved in a young men's organization that wants to combat the JD plague by having its members "dress like men," as opposed to outfitting themselves in leather jackets and skintight jeans.  Collins sniffs at the idea, joking that he "must have missed" the day when that was discussed in school.  But now that we have college students routinely coming to class wearing baggy pants and pajama bottoms... who's to say that Gould wasn't onto something?

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This volume is dedicated to NEW YORK DAILY NEWS columnist Jay Maeder, who died in July of cancer.  If any of you are wondering about the origins of my interest in DICK TRACY, you have a combination of Maeder and the first (sort of) incarnation of Gladstone Comics to blame.  Back in the early Summer of 1990, as stores filled up with chatchkas of all sorts touting the Disney-Touchstone Dick Tracy movie and various local TV stations unwittingly set themselves up for various ethnic protests by planning a rerelease UPA's old Dick Tracy Show, Maeder published a paperback biography of the jut-jawed flatfoot.  As fate would have it, Gladstone, trying to keep its hand in the comics game after Disney had stepped in and given the Disney comics license to its own comics subsidiary, had recently started publishing a DICK TRACY reprint title.  Wanting to continue my support of Gladstone, I bought the reprint comics, liked them, saw the Maeder book in a local library, bought it, and thoroughly enjoyed Maeder's virtually year-by-year examination of the progress of Gould's strip.  Having read all of the IDW volumes, I now know that Maeder simplified some things and got some other things wrong, but it was his enthusiasm for the strip and its milieu that grabbed me.  I've maintained that level of interest ever since. 

Some years after writing the TRACY bio, Maeder took over the writing chores on the near-moribund LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE strip and boldly "reimagined" it for the 21st century -- changing Annie's dress and appearance, giving her a female adventuress for a companion, etc.  That didn't prevent ANNIE from ultimately being "orphaned" for good and all, but it was Maeder's devotion to the idea of the classic newspaper adventure strip that should, and hopefully will, be remembered.  Thanks, Mr. Maeder, for fighting the good fight.

Book Review: THE COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, Vol. 10: 1941-43 by Harold Gray (IDW Publishing, 2014)

** SPOILERS **

For LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, World War II can be said to have "begun" in May 1942, when "Daddy" Warbucks, supposedly killed after leading a "mysterious" (and non-American) army aboard, suddenly returns stateside (albeit only temporarily).  The mere fact that Harold Gray doesn't perform any sort of buildup to the Prodigal Tycoon's latest comeback is the signal for a quickening of the strip's pace, as if Gray were trying to match America's rapid buildup for war.  Soon, "Colonel" Annie is performing her most noteworthy homefront service by organizing neighborhood children into the Junior Commandos.  The idea quickly spread to the real world and inspired thousands of children to mimic Annie and her compadres in collecting scrap metal and fats, keeping the perimeters around the homes of sleeping war workers quiet, and performing similar useful tasks.  While developing the JC's activities, Gray struck a brief but noteworthy blow for equal rights by devoting a Sunday page to a young black child's acceptance into the organization.  Jeet Heer's introduction to this latest collection of strips details the reader blowback -- both positive and negative -- that resulted from this departure.  Gray never used the black character again, which seems a shame.

Heer points out that making Annie the head of the Junior Commandos helped Gray get around the dilemma that, as a young girl, she couldn't imitate other comic-strip heroes of the era and join the armed forces.  Still, he couldn't help giving Annie opportunities to blow up the occasional marauding U-boat, culminating in a lengthy -- entirely too lengthy, to be honest -- early-1943 continuity in which Annie and her friends trap dozens of Nazis in a creepy, trap-ridden castle that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an episode of Scooby-Doo.  The similarity to Scooby is more than superficial, as the plot peters out into a series of repetitive confrontations with the Nazis.  (Thankfully, these are not accompanied by forced group laughs.)  The sag in storytelling acumen is matched by a sudden decline in the quality of the strip's art.  Heer speculates that Gray might have been feeling the emotional aftereffects of his father's death in a car crash.  Just as significant may have been a slight change in the dimensions of the daily strip, with panels elongating vertically and narrowing horizontally.  Suddenly, Gray shifts from his usual practice of drawing figures from the waist up to drawing full figures, and the change is not a fruitful one, especially since many of the new drawings are "shot from a distance."  Gray seems to have had problems with this perspective, as far too many of the adult human full figures frequently resemble peas awkwardly perched atop open ladders.

Gray's inability to corral the unwieldy castle sequence, coupled with renewed irritation at the inconveniences of wartime life, seem to have goaded him into doing a rethink.  The immediate future will see the return of more nakedly partisan material to the strip, culminating with the notorious "FDR is dead, so 'Daddy' Warbucks is alive" incident of 1945.  It can't be said that the cartoonist hadn't already done his bits for the war effort, though.

Book Review: THE COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, VOL. 9: 1940-41 by Harold Gray (IDW/Library of American Comics, 2013)

As was the case with the latest DICK TRACY volume, unwelcome signs of editorial corner-cutting can be seen in the ninth ORPHAN ANNIE collection.  Jeet Heer's introductory essay is the only substantial "extra" we get here, apart from a couple of Al Capp parody strips on the inside back cover.  More significantly, the "My Most Recent Adventures" feature has been eliminated.  Given the meticulousness with which Harold Gray typically crafted his continuities, this represents a major omission.  It took me a short while before I could get back up to speed with the ongoing "Nick Gatt/Axel" story.  IDW really ought to consider restoring the "Last time..." features in future ANNIE and TRACY collections.

* SPOILERS *

Gray seems to be repeating himself just a tad as the 1940s begin and the world lurches into war.  Our "bullseye boy" for this volume's cover, the arrogant bandleader and movie star Pete La Plata (nee Bill Slagg), undergoes a thorough rehabilitation, just as Rose Chance's estranged husband Ace did during the "Shanghai Peg" storyline.  There is a moral catch, however; the change takes place as the result of a brain operation that clears up the aftereffects of a long-ago injury.  Therefore, Slagg's redemption cannot be considered to be a change of character so much as a change of a physical affliction affecting character.  In much the same manner, the surprisingly likable gangster Nick Gatt does good "by accident" when he determines to smash Axel's band of would-be revolutionaries.  Given that Gray generally takes a rather dim view of what one might call "professional" do-gooders, his inclusion of "goodness by stealth or accident" in the Gatt/Axel tale reflects a much more nuanced vision of good and evil than he is typically given credit for.  Matters moral are further muddled by Gray's introduction of the character of Sam the pants-presser, who is pretty clearly meant to be a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe -- and, Jeet Heer convincingly argues, is treated as something of a Christ-figure.  Sam even "sacrifices himself" by going back to Europe at the end of the Gatt/Axel story, presumably to help his people.  Given Gray's somewhat unorthodox religious views -- Heer describes him as a "deist" who was strongly affected by his membership in the Masonic order -- I probably shouldn't be surprised that his handling of moral issues here takes so many different forms.

I'd rate Nick Gatt as one of the most memorable figures in comic-strip history.  Significantly, Gray can't bear to show his eventual death on screen; his death during a gunfight with the police and would-be mob usurper Byron Bolo (who, ironically, is hailed as just the man to clean up the crooked Gatt operation by the usual "do-gooder" suspects) takes place between the end of a Sunday strip and the beginning of the following Monday strip.  Gray depicts numerous deaths and "disappearances" in this volume, so his decision not to show how Gatt died speaks volumes about his undeniable feelings for the character.

"Daddy" Warbucks returns from a tortuous stay in a foreign concentration camp (run by either the Germans or the Soviets -- at this time, remember, they were in cahoots) and immediately lives (back) up to his name by devoting his factories to military production in the name of "preparedness."  In doing this, Gray was obviously flying in the face of the isolationist sentiments trumpeted by his flagship paper, the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, but he also tweaked the New Dealers by having Warbucks ostentatiously refuse to profit from his work.  Warbucks must dodge several attempts at industrial sabotage, including one engineered by the bitter Pete La Plata, who nearly gets himself and "Daddy" killed before finally coming right, thanks to the wonders of medical science.  With remarkable speed, Warbucks proceeds to make the rechristened Bill Slagg his right-hand man.  The volume closes with another rerun of sorts, this one of the "I'm trapped and I can't get out" variety, as Warbucks, Annie, and Punjab (disguised as an Indian guide) investigate strange goings-on at a Warbucks mine, only to be imprisoned in the mine's depths -- a scenario very similar to one seen early in the "Axel" story.  Gray's "Injuns" mimic most of his "ethnic" characters in that they are presented in a stereotyped manner (1941 natives with medicine men, tepees, the whole bit), yet are characterized with respect.  At one point, Warbucks comments that Indians, unlike white men, are almost always trustworthy.  If this is "condescension to the savages," then, by all means, let's have more of it.

There are surprisingly few direct references to the war in this collection, but that will change soon as Annie becomes involved with the Junior Woodchucks, er, Commandos.  (I wonder whether Carl Barks' choice of a name for the Nephews' scouting organization was affected by Gray in some manner.)  The strip remains a bulwark of solid storytelling and is well worth diving into even if you haven't sampled any of the earlier volumes. 

Post-Sandy Posting

Hurricane Sandy wound up dealing Maryland only a glancing blow, but the residual aftereffects were not trivial.  Stevenson had to cancel classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and the campus is still dealing with flooding and leakage issues in certain buildings.  For example, the copier down the hall from my office was put out of commission when a ceiling tile collapsed and fell on it.  Johns Hopkins suffered considerable damage as the cancer research building next to Nicky's building had major flooding problems and power outages, resulting in the deaths of large numbers of genetically engineered lab animals.

No, I don't think they were among the victims.

We're hearing some horror stories out of the New York area, and I hope that my readers in that region are holding up as well as they can. 

Book Review: HAROLD GRAY'S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, VOLUME 8: 1938-40 (IDW Publishing/Library of American Comics, 2012)

It's well nigh impossible to argue the point that Harold Gray and his comic strip reached a creative and imaginative peak of sorts in the late 1930s.  The "Saga of Abigail Alden, Shanghai Peg...  and The Rest," which wraps up in this volume, is considered by many to be Gray's best single narrative, but that's only part of the story.  In the triumphant wake of the Alden affair, Gray, who evidently felt himself to be on a roll, comes up with not one, but two memorable antagonistic characters to drive the next sequence of related stories, which will take us up through the middle of 1940 (and the early portion of the upcoming Volume 9).  This is particularly noteworthy in that Gray, as skilled as he was at creating both permanent allies ("Daddy" Warbucks, Punjab, The Asp) and well-rounded one-time friends and acquaintances for Annie, had never before proven capable of emulating his longtime friend Chester Gould and putting Annie up against a really strong bad guy, one capable of maintaining the threat level for an extended period of time.  Crooked businessmen and politicians, bullies, minor mobsters, shyster lawyers, and so forth were fine insofar as putting Annie in temporary danger was concerned, but the sinister, vaguely European Axel, who begins to pursue Annie immediately upon the conclusion of the Alden saga, would become more or less of a fixture in the strip for the better part of two years.  And he isn't even the more intriguing or multifaceted of this issue's duo of memorable baddies.

Axel, with his more "global" conception of skullduggery, was clearly Gray's response to the deteriorating situation in Europe at the time, but the bearded villain's nationality and ideology would prove to be remarkably flexible.  After Axel's initial attempt to kidnap Annie and use her to squeeze money out of "Daddy" Warbucks is foiled by "Daddy" et al.'s dramatic return and rescue, he falls out of sight for a short time, only to return with a far more comprehensively evil agenda.  By early 1940, he's scheming with a bunch of cohorts with "Slavic" names to spring a coup on an unsuspecting America.  The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact evidently gave Gray the excuse he needed (not that he really needed that much of an excuse) to turn Axel into a boring (as in termite, not Ben Stein) Marxist.  America still had a strong isolationist movement at the time of the second Axel story, and Gray was working for a syndicate headed up by the uber-isolationist CHICAGO TRIBUNE, but the artist clearly intended this plot point to be a wake-up call of sorts, warning Americans to be prepared for whatever the warring world might bring to its doorstep. 

Axel resurfaces during a lengthy story that finds Annie in the home of John Tecum, a bright young lawyer ("Daddy" having disappeared almost as quickly as he had reappeared), and introduces the second of this volume's memorable adversaries -- one that clearly illustrates the degree to which Gray's concepts of law, order, and justice differed from those of Chester Gould's.  While attempting to get justice for an elderly couple who'd been victimized by one of Gray's noxious political fixers, Tecum becomes ensnared in the coils of rotund gang boss Nick Gatt.  Gould would surely have run Gatt up against Dick Tracy in short order (not to mention given Gatt some strange physical tic or feature), but the more Gatt appears in Gray's narrative, the more likable he becomes.  Soon Gatt has manipulated things so that the bewildered Tecum has become district attorney on a platform to clean up corruption in the town -- which all "good citizens" assume will include Gatt himself.  The volume concludes just as Axel has returned and taken a shot at Annie -- only to be greeted with return fire from Gatt, whom Annie has gotten to like and trust.  A Gatt vs. Axel battle is clearly on the horizon, and, as Jeet Heer notes in his introduction, Gray clearly believes that homegrown gang bosses are infinitely preferable to totalitarian schemers.  Even before Axel's resurfacing, however, Gatt was already busily engaged in setting up events with no apparent benefit to himself -- rather the opposite, in fact.  So what was Gray's larger point here?  That gangsters can be good guys and yet still exert some sort of control of events?  I would have loved to have been the proverbial "fly on the wall" as Gray tried to "explain" Gatt to his buddy Gould.  My own take is that Gatt was simply another manifestation of Gray's core belief that extra-legal means are sometimes necessary and justified to produce "cosmic justice."  If Punjab can wave a magic cape over a bad guy and make him vanish with no cop or judge being the wiser, then certainly Gatt can provide the "muscle" that a town needs to fight off a sinister, un-American threat.  Gatt is probably the definitive proof that Gray's supposedly "simple-minded," black-and-white sense of right and wrong was far more complex than his critics would care to admit... and that, by 1940, LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE had become, and would remain, a comic strip for adults.

Book Review: HAROLD GRAY'S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, VOLUME 7 (IDW Publishing, 2011)

Harold Gray was on the roll of all rolls during the period 1936-38 covered in this latest volume. The volume concludes with the initial portion of what is arguably Gray's best single story (actually, it's practically a comic-strip novel in terms of density and detail), the saga of Abigail Alden, Jack the truck-driver, the abandoned mother Rose Chance and her waif, the greedy Uriah Gudge, and the one-legged old salt Shanghai Peg. The best-known part of this epic was reprinted many years ago in THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS; this early installment allows us to settle in with the characters and really get to know them. Imagine a creator daring to do that in this era of stamp-sized panels and transparent gags -- as if it were even possible, of course. After several stories in which she is oddly passive, Annie returns to proactive mode as she helps the elderly Abigail stave off foreclosure and keeps the impromptu "family" in Alden's home operational. The only thing that seems fairly contrived about the story is the way in which Annie and Sandy wind up in Alden's town; just after completing another adventure, they are accidentally locked in the back of a truck and driven away. I suppose it could have happened, especially during the rail-hopping era of the Great Depression, but still, it seems a bit... unsubtle.

Gray was at such a compositional peak here that he manages to take what on the surface seem dreary plot notions -- Annie helps the down-on-her-luck flower-seller Ginger to fend off protection racketeers, Annie is adopted by a no-goodnik who wants to bump her off for insurance money -- and makes them interesting to read from beginning to end. The more fanciful side of Gray's creative genius also flowers as he introduces two of his best-known supporting players, the "omnipotent" Mr. Am (think a multi-million-year-old Santa Claus... with willing slaves) and the slithery Asp. Mr. Am would appear only infrequently in the future, and it's probably a good thing, as he basically possesses Godlike powers (or at least something close to infinite wisdom). Had he been used too often, he would have undercut the strip in the same manner that the all-powerful genie Shazzan cut short the plots in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name. The Asp is much more of a "keeper," of course, a more believable (and hence far creepier) "unsavory ally" for "Daddy" Warbucks than the magic-mongering giant Punjab. The Asp is sort of a sinister, Asiatic Cadbury, apparently possessing immense strength (e.g., handling huge portraits by holding one corner with two hands) and, no doubt, many other hidden abilities that we won't get to see until they are needed (or until The Asp regales Annie with tales of his previous service to Sir Ruddy Blighter).

Gray seems to have another potential fixture character in the person of Arunah Blade, the aged, proud occupant of a "haunted" house who apparently can commune with the spirit world and displays some of the traits of a master psychologist as he helps thwart the plans of con-artists Brittlewit and Blabble, the dastards behind the insurance plot. We are led to the brink of believing that the failures of many attempts to "off" Annie owe something to the timely intervention of ghosts (and yes, I did have something of an issue with that -- surprised, Joe?), but Blade's manipulation of the villains is what is most memorable here. I don't believe that Blade ever appeared again, however, which seems a shame. Here, Gray is definitely paralleling his friend Chester Gould in terms of playing "one-and-done" with a character who could have contributed to any number of additional stories.

In his introduction, Jeet Heer makes much of the darker tone of ANNIE during this period and speculates that Gray was (1) reacting to the increasingly dangerous world at large plus what, to him, was a disaster in the reelection of FDR, and (2) trying to compete with DICK TRACY's more violent aesthetic. This reasoning seems sound to me, though, despite the upped body count in these stories, the creepiest moment by far has nothing at all to do with violence or death. International criminal Boris Sirob and his two compadres pay for attempting to kill "Daddy" and extort riches from Mr. Am by turning into "man-apes" after getting a whiff of some mysterious, ancient substance that Am tricks them into investigating. There's a definite Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe going on here, but I'd guess that Sirob et al. would have preferred to have had their faces melted off than to have been left to live out mindless lives in the remote jungle.

Heer also includes a good discussion of the Western Sunday strip LITTLE JOE, which bore the signatures of Gray's assistants Ed and Robert Leffingwell but also featured plenty of direct input from Gray, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The strip, which lasted until the early 1970s -- long after its "modern old-fashioned Western setting" had become almost as antiquated as the West featured in early silent movies -- was one of the best serious Western strips not based on "prepackaged" characters. I'd certainly like to see more of it, just as I'd like to see the run of the humorous Paul Murry and Dick Huemer strip BUCK O'RUE. Someone in Europe is working on the latter; perhaps IDW and Fantagraphics can pool their resources to put two strip collections into a single volume?? We kin only hope, pardner.

Book Review: THE COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, VOLUME 6: PUNJAB THE WIZARD by Harold Gray (IDW Publishing, 2010)

Guess which canonical ORPHAN ANNIE regular debuts in this volume, which features strips from the period February 1935-September 1936? Hint: It isn't the funny-looking, white-bearded guy in the red bullseye. The massive, magic-mongering, vaguely sinister Punjab represents Harold Gray's first serious foray into the world of fantasy, and, as such, he presents some immediate continuity problems. For example, soon after Punjab meets Annie for the first time, he gives her a special whistle that she can use to summon him whenever she needs help. All well and good, but there's no clear indication that the whistle is a one-shot gimmick of the type featured in "Tex" Avery's famous short Bad Luck Blackie (1949), nor is there any apparent radial limit to the "penumbra" of the whistle's effectiveness. Why couldn't Annie use the device to call for Punjab in any and all circumstances? It seems to me that this actually undercuts one of the sources of Annie's appeal, namely, her self-reliance. In several adventures later in the book -- Annie's sojourn in Hollywood, her alliance with the elderly shoe repairman Jack Boot in the town of Butternut -- Annie could certainly have used the whistle, but she did not. It will be interesting to see whether the whistle ever appears again.

Punjab plays a tangential, but creepily decisive, role in this volume's most famous continuity, the "Eonite" story. In his introductory essay, Jeet Heer correctly notes that the idea of the perpetually cackling ("He! He! He!") inventor Eli Eon creating a substance with a seemingly infinite number of useful properties is every bit as much of a flight of fancy as a nine-foot-tall Indian mystic. Eon is a less interesting character than other oddball comic-strip inventors of the era, such as Floyd Gottfredson's Dr. Einmug ("Island in the Sky"), but his existence is strictly a means to several ends. Gray uses the fight over "Eonite" to lay bare the distinction between "good" capitalists ("Daddy" Warbucks, who wants to help Eon develop his idea for the good of America) and "bad" capitalists (the ruthless J. Gordon Slugg, who hires loudmouthed, business-bashing politicians and "Bolshie" rabble-rousers to portray Warbucks as a public enemy) and to illustrate, in lurid detail, his loathing of unions and the "class warfare" rhetoric frequently used by proponents of the New Deal. It was this storyline that prompted THE NEW REPUBLIC to famously brand Gray as a purveyor of "Fascism in the Funnies." This was definitely a case of overegging the critical pudding, yet I'm not surprised that the overwhelmingly sincere manner in which Gray staged this morality play led some to believe that he must have had some sinister "hidden agenda." The story is alarmingly modern in some ways, too. In portraying Slugg as a power-mad rich man who is willing to exploit dupes from both sides of the political spectrum to achieve his ends -- as opposed to simply running as profitable a business as possible -- was Gray somehow intuiting the future existence of a figure like George Soros?

The lengthy story "Annie in Hollywood," with its gleeful send-up of the Shirley Temple phenomenon, gives Gray ample opportunity to hop onto one of his other favorite hobbyhorses and bash hypocrisy. Tootsie Snoots, the "adorable" Temple placeholder for whom Annie doubles, is a spoiled brat with litigious, "enabling" parents, not unlike the nasty Darla Dimple in Cats Don't Dance (1997). The plucky Annie refuses to accept the status quo and eventually wangles a part as a blacked-up "native princess" who becomes an overnight (albeit anonymous) sensation. You might think that the blackface routine would be offensive, but it actually isn't; it simply looks as if Annie has a really, really, really nice tan. Annie takes time from her rise to sort-of-stardom to play inadvertent matchmaker for her mentor and ally, the struggling actress Janey Spangles, and risk-taking producer George Gamble. No politics here, just good, clean satire and another test of Annie's seemingly boundless optimism.

The lengthy "Jack Boot" storyline takes its cue from several continuities earlier in the 1930s, throwing Annie together with a kindly caretaker with more of a "past" than seems apparent on the surface. The "mystery" element of this story is expertly planned and executed, and Gray has a high old time taking pot shots at the two-faced townsfolk who swing back and forth in their opinions of Boot with comical suddenness. For the ability to lure readers back for more day after day, Gray's work of this period has rarely been equaled.

Book Review: THE COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, Volume 5: THE ONE-WAY ROAD TO JUSTICE by Harold Gray (IDW Publishing, 2010)

Who's the bigger villain -- a ruthless con artist, jewel robber and gang boss, or a smoothly-operating, utterly amoral exploiter of an orphan and a blind man? The question dominates this collection of ANNIE strips, which takes us from the Summer of 1933 through the first month of 1935. We also catch the first glimpse of Harold Gray's antipathy towards the New Deal, with "Daddy" Warbucks being sent to jail on trumped-up charges in what has long been interpreted as a direct reference to the pursuit and prosecution of corner-cutting electrical magnate Samuel Insull.

This lengthy sequence should put paid to any reader's stereotypical notion of Warbucks as a "ruthless capitalist magnate." What he is is a martyr for capitalism -- an innocent roughneck, if you can wrap your mind around such a thing. In short order, he's taken in by a pair of swindlers who claim to be Annie's parents, gypped by a "loyal lifelong employee" who absconds with money meant for taxes, and railroaded by a blustering, demagogic district attorney. Even after he's cleared of all charges and has helped to bust a few crooked eggs in high places, he's left without a fortune and is soon back on the road with Annie. At different times, he could have cut his losses by saddling others with his failing company, but, needless to say, he refuses. These events were too much for a contemporary writer for the liberal NEW REPUBLIC, who blasted the Warbucks trial story as an example of "Hooverism in the Funnies." It wasn't pro-Hoover so much as anti-New Deal, and, as such, it made Gray a critical target for the rest of his career. Not that the hard-shelled cartoonist minded, of course.

In another fine introduction, Jeet Heer marks Gray's penchant for constructing elaborate, "delightfully maddening" plots that pile injustice atop injustice until the reader is ready to pop with indignation. The two main plot lines here certainly qualify. Slick agent Charles Chizzler (I do wish Gray had been a bit subtler with his character names) quickly repulses us as he tricks the singing Annie and her temporary partner, the blind violinist "Uncle" Dan Ballad, into signing a contract that gives Chizzler virtually all of the profits from their musical performances, but it's Chizzler's downfall that marks him as a truly evil character -- he simply refuses to believe that he's to blame for anything, constantly whining, "What did I do to deserve this?". He keeps up the keening even after the prison doors close behind him. By contrast, the conniving Boris Bleek, who mutates from Annie's irritable, phony father into the ruthless, homicidal leader of the thieving "Ghost Gang," seems like a much more commonplace villain, despite the dramatic darkening of his character. Gray's penchant for turning outcasts and scofflaws into likable characters comes to the fore once again in these stories, with Boris' wife Libby (a grown-up "ringer" for Annie) gradually learning to love the kid she originally only wanted to con and a genial confidence man giving Annie and Dan a hand by setting a trap that ensnares Chizzler.

Supplemental material includes a discussion of the much-loved ANNIE radio series (how many people drink Ovaltine anymore, I wonder?) and RKO's 1932 Annie movie, the first attempt to bring the character to the screen. Gray apparently had difficulty getting adequate compensation for the radio show, which may have contributed to his creation of Chizzler. It wouldn't be the last time that a personal gripe of Gray's found voice in the strip. There is no mention of the recent cancellation of the ANNIE strip, though the cancellation was mentioned on the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS Web site, which is now up and running. Perhaps this can be addressed in the next volume. Absent that omission, this is as good as it gets.

RIP, Frank and Annie

Frank Frazetta's death on Monday the 10th affected me only tangentially in terms of my comics interests. I only knew him as the guy who painted the barbarians and so forth. Then I looked at a COMICS JOURNAL interview from 1994 and found myself filled with a "strange new respect." Here was a strong conservative who nonetheless assisted Al Capp on LI'L ABNER during the strip's liberal phase and cooperated with Ralph Bakhshi on the feature film Fire and Ice (1983). I only wish that we had that sort of ideological "cross-pollination" today. Your subject matter may not have been my "cup of mead," Frank, but rest in peace.

Speaking of conservative comics icons, LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE has been cancelled by Tribune Media Services. The last strip will run (in fewer than 20 newspapers -- think about that for a moment and sigh) on June 13. The irony, of course, is that ANNIE is now getting the full, "from-strip-one" reprint treatment, thanks to IDW Publishing and its superb LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS.

In truth, Annie, Sandy, Warbucks et al. have been living on borrowed time since Harold Gray's death in 1968 and only managed to survive this long thanks to a few thick slabs of good old-fashioned luck. Consider:

(1) Between 1968 and 1974, the Tribune syndicate chewed up potential Gray heirs like Orson Welles buzzing through a Dagwood sandwich. David Lettick, one of the unfortunate souls who managed to snag the gig, drew terribly enough to be three decades ahead of his time. The Trib finally stopped the bleeding, at least for the moment, by rerunning old Gray strips for several years.

(2) Just when the novelty of the Gray reprints had begun to wear off, the musical version of Annie became a freak hit, prompting Leonard Starr to reboot the strip under the name ANNIE. The "gas fumes" supplied by the musical and the subsequent movie version of same -- coupled with the considerable talents of Starr -- bought the strip another couple of decades of life.

In 2000, writer Jay Maeder presided over yet another revamping of the strip, giving Annie a new wardrobe and an adult female sidekick who served as the Baloo to Annie's Kit Cloudkicker. (Better yet, imagine Baloo taking Gosalyn Mallard on as a partner.) I recall reading about this at the time and figuring that updating Annie into a streamlined, modern-day adventurer who could more easily "relate" to today's kids had at least a puncher's chance of being successful (or as successful as a modern, space-squeezed adventure strip could possibly be). Evidently, however, the strip became too simplistic, losing whatever adult audience it had retained from the old days, and proved unable to attract new, young readers. The eternal orphan has, at long last, been truly left alone... and the strip's current story line apparently won't even be officially resolved. I think Annie deserves better than that.

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.

Book Review: THE COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, Volume 4: A HOUSE DIVIDED by Harold Gray (IDW Publishing, 2009)

As was the case with Volume 3, IDW's fourth collection of ANNIE strips, produced during the period January 1932-July 1933, took its sweet time arriving at the local shop. It would be ironic indeed if the delay were due to the current economic climate, since this batch of strips appeared at the very nadir of the Great Depression. While Harold Gray's strip continues to reflect some of the harsh realities of the time, there does seem to be a layer of "insulation" between the characters and the worst of what is going on around them: the two main plot lines traced herein involve "Daddy" Warbucks' ill-conceived remarriage and Annie and Sandy's lengthy sojourn in the small town of Cosmic City, where the biggest concerns are strictly parochial (though no less intriguing -- and potentially dangerous -- for all that). One can sense a certain hardening of Gray's positions on several issues, however, as he takes time to swipe at irresponsible intellectuals and begins to elaborate his, shall we say, ethically controversial theory of justifiable revenge.

Warbucks' romance with and marriage to the vulgar ex-showgirl Trixie Tinkle makes sense only if you buy the notion that the tycoon's desire to give Annie a "real" mother has temporarily blinded him to the faults of character that he is quick to pick up on in other instances. The blowsy Trixie, who bears a frankly unsettling resemblance to Russi Taylor, makes a weak attempt to "connect" with Annie, but is soon trying to "off" Sandy (who survives several attempts on his life with an elan that The Road Runner would be hard-pressed to match) and alienating Warbucks' friends to the extent that they no longer want to visit him. The ultimate affronts (at least in Gray's eyes) come when Trixie hires "moderns" to redecorate "Daddy"'s cozy apartment and invites a gaggle of hirsute revolutionaries, bohemians, and assorted ne'er-do-wells to the place for a party. This can only be taken as Gray's reaction to the then-burgeoning radical strain in American life, a warm-up for his later frontal assault on FDR's New Deal. Even after Trixie has made it clear that she wants Warbucks' money and nothing else, "Daddy" is willing to give the relationship one more chance, to the extent that he takes Trixie on a round-the-world cruise in an old sailing ship (bad memories of the Gargoyles "Cruise Arc" are fluttering about my head now) and allows Trixie to pick a suitable "boarding school" for Annie to attend in the meantime. Suffice it to say that Annie and Sandy are much better off hitting the open road.

The Cosmic City story arc, which lasts about a year, isn't particularly outstanding, with Annie's benefactors the Futiles a fairly bland couple (apart from the occasional slapstick pratfall that justifies the surname) and the solution of the story's "mystery" being helped along by a couple of extremely fortunate coincidences. It does, however, deserve note for giving readers their most "hissable" pair of stock villains to date. Parsimonious mortgage-monger Phineas Pinchpenny and his alternately cruel and blase son Elmer are presented as bad eggs from the off, but we gradually learn that Pinchpenny is hiding a deep, dark secret that goes well beyond "merely" foreclosing on widows. Elmer, for his part, nearly kills Sandy with his speeding car more or less for the heck of it. With the help of Tom Take, the feeble-minded but friendly town kleptomaniac, Annie executes a fairly gruesome revenge on Elmer that goes well beyond the occasional "gotcha" gag she played on Trixie and others in Sunday strips. Pinchpenny gets his in due course, though not after attempting to murder Annie so that she won't reveal his shameful secret. Both villains deserve their fate, but those who decry ANNIE as "sentimental pap" will receive a good shaking-up when they read this sequence.

Speaking of extra-legal activity, Gray's introduction of Warbucks' Oriental friend, the businessman Wun Wey, presages his creation of the tycoon's most famous (and sinister) allies, Punjab and The Asp, whose initial appearances are just over the horizon. Gray may have hated those who preached revolution in the face of economic catastrophe, but Wun Wey and his vaguely defined band of "brethren," who seem perfectly willing to go to extreme lengths to protect one of their own, illustrate that the cartoonist harbored his own severe doubts that the legal structure could withstand the strain and regarded vigilantism with surprising equanimity. Gray's "universe" may not have been as bloody as Dick Tracy's, but it could be a much chillier place at times.

Book Review: HAROLD GRAY'S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, Volume 3: AND A BLIND MAN SHALL LEAD THEM by Harold Gray (IDW Publishing, 2009)

Pay no attention to the blandly genial cover of this delayed third release in the ANNIE reprint series. The Great Depression bites down HARD during the course of a year-long continuity in which "Daddy" Warbucks, after losing both his fortune and his eyesight, endures a sad stretch as a patient in a hospital's charity ward and is even reduced to outright beggary before clawing his way back to the top. Meanwhile, Annie once again is forced to fend for herself, and her status is even more precarious than it had been in earlier spells of Warbucks-less-ness. Only the generosity of Maw Green, a crusty but kindly Irish landlady, and Jake, a Jewish shopkeeper, allow Annie and Sandy to maintain a knife's-edge existence in a dingy apartment where they are waiting for "Daddy" to return home from his attempts to find work. Things become even more complicated after a botched child-abduction drops a toddler on Annie's doorstep, and Annie is forced to care for the kid. (Actually, Sandy does most of the active babysitting while Annie is out helping in Jake's store. Can you imagine such a scenario coming close to passing editorial muster in this era of "helicopter parenting" and mandatory car safety seats?) This sequence clearly shows that Gray, for all his hyper-capitalist reputation, was well aware of the havoc that the Depression was wreaking on America and wasn't afraid to showcase the realities of the situation in his strip. Critics may carp at Gray's "naive" belief that optimism and a sense of renewed purpose would be enough to revivify the economy, but he certainly didn't ignore what was going on around him.

Towards the end of the Depression continuity, with Annie and a newly-flush "Daddy" reunited, the toddler Pat having been reunited with her parents, and Warbucks having regained his sight through the "convenient miracle" of a million-to-one operation, Gray permits Annie to sermonize a bit on how "organization" and the like is going to beat hard times. I find this interesting in that Roosevelt's New Deal, with its creation of a myriad of federal agencies, certainly contained plenty of "organization," yet Gray regarded it as anathema. Gray may have been referring here to Hoover's efforts to gin the economy in what many historians now regard as a precursor of the New Deal. Jeet Heer, in his introductory essay, misses this point entirely, falling back on the cliche that Hoover was "just another Calvin Coolidge" (not that that's a bad thing, mind you!). With the next volume containing strips from 1932 and 1933, it will be interesting to see how Gray's viewpoint changed as FDR's regime took hold.

Gray's use of a grab-bag of ethnic characters and "outcasts" also deserves more attention than Heer gives it in his article. Aside from Maw Green (whose ostensible Irishness isn't really on display here; it would become much more apparent in the later companion strip that ran under the ANNIE Sunday page for many years) and Jake, the dwarf Flop-House Bill becomes Warbucks' main ally during his fight to regain his empire. In the era of Tod Browning's Freaks and (a bit later) The Terror of Tiny Town and the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, the relatively straightforward portrayal of the hard-bitten, but decent and loyal, Bill is fairly remarkable. Bill rues his small status to the extent that he's convinced that, once Warbucks recovers his sight, the tycoon will jettison him. "Daddy," of course, does no such thing. Gray may have trafficked in the stereotypes of his time, but he didn't let the stereotypes define his characters.

The continuities that make up the first half of this volume, while strong enough, don't measure up to the Depression epic. After Gray diddles with the idea of giving Annie a boyfriend (thank God, he finally thought better of it) and does give her a new pet/companion in the form of a cute bear cub named Willie, Annie's tossed onto a country work farm, escapes the place only to get caught up in the midst of a devastating flood, is befriended by "old salt" Spike Marlin, and promptly gets marooned on what appears to be a South Seas island. (I say "appears" because, for the life of me, I can't see how Marlin's little boat could have made it from Middle America, no matter how badly flooded, to a palm-tree-bedecked, monkey-populated island in such a short time period.) The "Shipwrecked" continuity goes on a little too long (the length of time that it takes Annie and Spike's "message in a bottle" to reach the right hands is positively irritating) and strays into Gilligan's Island territory at times, but it's not bad; it's just not as good -- not to mention as relevant -- as the later Depression story. After both Spike and Annie have suffered illnesses that leave them all but "done fer," it's "Daddy" to the rescue. (Willie is later dispensed with in a single Sunday strip that sees him rather improbably reunited with his mother in a zoo; I don't know whether Gray was simply tired of drawing two animal companions for Annie or was consciously battening down the hatches for the upcoming Depression story by paring down the cast. Whatever the reason, it's a rather abrupt way to get rid of such a cute and likable character.)

In the front of the book, in addition to Heer's ongoing efforts to sanitize Gray and ANNIE for contemporary progressive consumption -- it must be working, or why else would Art Spiegelman be doing a blurb on the back cover of this volume? -- we get a brief article by Bruce Canwell on Annie's role as a trail-blazer for aggressive female characters in the comics and other popular media. Several examples of PRIVATE LIFE OF..., Gray's first attempt at a Sunday companion strip -- a clever, if repetitive, feature in which various inanimate objects such as potatoes, hats, and baseballs relate their "stories" -- are also included. All in all, this is a superb package that maintains IDW's quality standards. Hopefully, Volume 4 will not have to undergo a similarly long lacuna before its release.

Book Review: CHESTER GOULD'S DICK TRACY, Volume 7: 1941-42 by Chester Gould (IDW Publishing, 2009)

"Gould in High Gear" (so saith Max Allan Collins in the Introduction)? More like Gould popping the clutch, goosing the gas pedal, and otherwise struggling to get up to cruising speed as World War II -- and the cartoonist's most creatively fertile decade -- begin. What a piebald collection of continuities we have in this volume: the appearances of three of Gould's better-known grotesques -- Little Face, The Mole, and B-B Eyes -- mixed up with a clutter of ephemeral evildoers including, among other things, a gang that stages real accidents in order to collect "realistic" sound effects for radio shows, a knuckle-headed debutante who "takes care of" an incapacitated Tracy after the detective breaks his leg and otherwise makes his life miserable, and a couple of Orson Welles-lookalike actors who swing wildly between good-guy and bad-guy roles (as does the woman they both love). No wonder Gould decided to wholeheartedly traipse down the gimmicky-rat route once America's war began and he realized (as noted by Jay Maeder in his marvelous history of the TRACY strip) that he would henceforth have to be at the top of his game in order to compete with the real-world headlines.

Truth be told, Little Face and The Mole don't get a whole lot of interest to do during their moments in the sun (which seems an inappropriate phrase to use when The Mole is concerned, actually). The pico-panned LF is basically your bog-standard vicious gang boss, a dealer in "hot" diamonds to be precise. The most memorable thing about him is his long period of suffering after accidentally being locked in a deep freeze and suffering near-terminal frostbite during his attempt to escape the clutches of the law. (LF is ugly enough with ears, thank you very much.) The Mole, a long-missing criminal who operates a "hideout" for fleeing crooks and takes advantage of their plight to strip them of their ill-gotten gains, is barely established as an insane creep when a freak snowstorm and ensuing runoff causes his lair to flood (um... he's being hiding there for 15 years and this is just now happening for the first time?) and Tracy literally "crashes" his party. The hand-to-hand between Tracy and The Mole and The Mole's frantic attempt to escape are legitimately gripping, though, and Tracy even shows some compassion for the kook, giving him Christmas cigarettes, fruit, and candy in jail. I wouldn't call The Mole an "appealing" character, as Max does, but you can definitely sense Gould mulling over the possibility of bringing him back (and he would do so, in the early 1970s). B-B Eyes' caper is a little more imaginative and timely (dealing in black-market tires), and he gets to stick Tracy with one of Gould's goofiest death traps, encasing Tracy and Pat Patton in wax and planning to shoot them both into the path of a train. The little crook's heavy-handedly ironic demise is also noteworthy and memorable.

Of the minor-league villains dealt with herein, only the hooded-eyed Selbert Depool -- who looks uncannily like "Badman," one of the villainous opponents of "Super" Richie Rich and Cadbury back in the 70s -- rates any mention at all. For a supposed maniac who's escaped from an asylum, Depool is suprisingly lucid as he seeks to avoid capture following the murder of the rich uncle who'd sent him to the looney bin. With his eyes surrounded by what appears to be a permanent coat of lampblack, he'd seem to be easy for cops and others to recognize and apprehend, but whatever. After leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, Selbert falls victim to that dreaded trap, the deadly Mardi Gras parade float. Yes, really.

Physically, this volume brings the TRACY series in line with other ongoing IDW reprint projects, such as LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. The larger dimensions allow Gould's Sunday pages to be viewed without eye strain. The supporting features are stronger as well, with Collins' introduction being accompanied by an interesting Jeff Kersten essay describing Gould's working methods and life as a "gentleman farmer" in Woodstock, IL. With the immortal Pruneface (and wife) and Flattop scheduled to appear in the next volume, the format shift couldn't have come at a better time.

Book Review: CHESTER GOULD'S DICK TRACY, Volume 6: Dailies & Sundays 1939-1941 (IDW Publishing, 2009)

Thank God for IDW Publishing! With Gemstone once again having fallen silent -- let us hope that the struggling company hasn't finally begun to "flatline" -- the fecund comics-reprint house has become one of my primary sources for comics-review fodder. LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE Volume 3 is just around the corner, with an announced release date of March 1. Between LOA, DICK TRACY, Fantagraphics' THE COMPLETE PEANUTS, and Dark Horse's ongoing Harvey Comics reprint project, my trips to the comics shop may become less frequent in the absence of Gemstone releases, but they'll yield prime merchandise.

The latest TRACY volume opens with "Unholy Matrimony," unquestionably my least favorite Gould continuity (of those of which I'm aware, of course). Like the other continuities in this volume, I'd previously read the tale of Tess Trueheart's thwarted tie with batty ex-big-leaguer Edward Nuremoh in a Pacific Comic Club collection. I panned it when I reviewed it the first time, and, trust me, it hasn't improved on reacquaintance. Before "Matrimony" (as Max Allan Collins points out in his introduction to Volume 6), Gould hadn't used Tess in a major story in quite some time, so it made sense to train the spotlight on her -- but NOT in a melodramatic mishmosh that Jay Maeder accurately describes as "loony" and even Collins admits is "at times, ridiculously over the top." What's more, once Nuremoh's suicide has literally driven the traumatized Tess crazy, the poor girl remains in that state for an additional agonizing month, stumbling into a brief partnership with a crook who deals in stolen dogs (and I thought Nuremoh was a cad!). The whole mess ends with Tracy clearing Tess of a murder rap and the babe herself sprawled in a self-abasing position at her no-longer-ex-boyfriend's feet. And just think, the two still wouldn't get married for another decade.

Getting the Nuremoh nonsense out of his system appears to have caused Gould to do a major rethink. After restoring some manner of equilibrium with a brief and rather unmemorable continuity involving a crooked fur dealer, Gould brings back one of his strongest early villains, Stooge Viller, for a last bow. Yes, more melodrama ensues as Viller (who, predictably, refuses to reform, preferring to become a supplier to the underworld) desperately seeks to reconnect with his alienated daughter Binnie -- who inadvertently helps bring about Stooge's finish -- but tidying up this particular loose end appears to have cleared Gould's mind and reminded him where his strengths lay: in the depiction of strong criminal opponents for Tracy. Shortly after Viller's fall, midget crime boss Jerome Trohs and his obscenely fat and unnaturally strong "moll" Mamma (see, Joe, it didn't start with Little Lotta!) appear on the scene, presaging the onrushing era of classic Tracy grotesques. Trohs himself isn't exactly a grotesque -- apart from his size and his Harold Gray-style blank eyeballs, he's basically a conventional mobster -- but his use appears to have struck a spark of newfound creativity. It's significant that two of Tracy's next three foes are Yogee Yamma, a tricked-up mystical fakir, and Deafy, a dealer in stolen bicycle parts whose supposed handicap -- like The Blank, whose blank face was only a cheesecloth covering, Deafy hears just fine despite the hearing aid in his ear -- gives him his name. In between those encounters, Black Pearl, a vaguely sinister arms dealer, hints at the coming war and its own contributions to the Tracy "universe," such as enemy agents Pruneface and The Brow.

Regarding artwork, Collins correctly notes that 1940 sees the appearance of the "glossier, simpler, [and] stronger" art style that will carry TRACY through the war years and beyond. Actually, I'd date the first hints of this new, slicker style to the Jerome Trohs story, rather than the Yogee Yamma continuity. What happened here, I think, was the final disappearance of the Dick Moores influence that dated back to the mid-1930s. Moores' style of lettering stayed intact, but the elaborate, busy backgrounds that Moores designed for TRACY (and which can also be seen in JIM HARDY, his first syndicated strip) are somewhat simplified and scaled back, letting the characters in the foregrounds stand out more effectively. TRACY would never be the best-drawn adventure strip, but it was well on its way to becoming the most visually distinctive, save perhaps LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. (Speaking of which, guess whose likeness in doll form can be seen in Binnie's bed in the strip of 12/28/39?)

Book Review: HAROLD GRAY'S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, Volume 2: THE DARKEST HOUR IS JUST BEFORE DAWN (IDW Publishing, 2008)

Before I get going, a brief remark on something I said in my previous LOA review... Do any of you follow the current ANNIE strip in your local newspaper? The major makeover of eight or nine years ago seems to have made Annie more of a clone of Gosalyn Mallard than ever! The modern Annie doesn't have a ponytail and isn't wearing "pump-up" sneakers, but she should be. To paraphrase a line from Gosalyn in "Darkly Dawns the Duck" : "When you have a lotta spirit, everyone else's eyes seem empty!" :-)

Volume 2 of the Harold Gray reprint parade brings us strips from 1927-1929, and, this time, a number of color Sunday pages are included. For a short period of time during 1928, Gray maintained his continuity in both dailies and Sundays before abandoning the practice with the strip of Dec. 30. A few years later, he would merge the two for good. Why he experimented in this way, I haven't the foggiest. Annie starts the volume in the company of Daddy Warbucks and reunites with him once before it's through, but not before Gray drags us all through the wringer by, first, getting Annie in bad with a bunch of train robbers (who stage a vengeful kidnapping after the spunky kid has doped out where they hid their stolen loot) and then dumping her back into nasty Miss Asthma's Orphans' Home for a long, painful spell, even as Warbucks is literally tearing the town apart trying to find her. The juxtaposition of Warbucks' frantic actions, Annie's spells of misery, and colossally unfunny Sunday-page gags in which Annie, purposely or otherwise, gives Miss Asthma grief is almost too much for the reader to bear. Gray eventually tires of this game and uses the convenient medium of a fire to (1) level the Orphans' Home, (2) wipe out any trace of Annie's pre-Orphans' Home history, and (3) literally force Annie and Daddy back together. Gray lets Annie rest on her hard-earned laurels for a while, then incapacitates Warbucks in a plane crash. Soon thereafter, Warbucks is off again trying to save his fortune, and Annie -- because she can't remember the name of the city hotel where the two were staying (!!!) -- is forced back into the "madding crowd." By volume's end, she's in the town of Blunderville with a kindly seamstress and playing more or less of a secondary role in a mini-drama of unwise stock-market speculation that's far too close to the contemporary headlines (read: The Crash of '29) for comfort.

During this period, Gray tackles the subject of "collective worker action" -- a future bugaboo of his -- for the first time and emits decidedly mixed signals. In the town of Mayfair, Annie gets a job as a waitress at a railroad beanery, then decides to strike as a result of unfair treatment. Gray doesn't seem to have a problem with this, perhaps because the strike was called by an individual in this case. When Warbucks later argues at great length with farmer Silo about the "farm situation" -- a major issue in the otherwise prosperous 20s, and one that Gray knew quite a bit about, since he came from a farming family -- Gray appears to be advocating, if not quite a farmers' union, then certainly more effective cooperation among farmers so that they can air their grievances more successfully. Gray then counterbalances these progressive touches with a Labor Day strip in which Annie makes a comment about small-town people being able to work when they care to, since no unions are involved. Gray's views on this subject would calcify soon enough once unions became an important part of the New Deal coalition, but, here, they're very much in flux. (By the bye, the long wrangle between Silo and Warbucks over farm policy definitely dispels any illusions that Gray meant for his strip to be read primarily by kids. The juvenile-friendly version of Annie that gained popularity on radio in the 1930s must have seemed almost like a completely different character to those deeply familiar with the progression of the comic strip.)

Jeet Heer's ongoing essay on Gray -- in this segment, he discusses the debts that Gray's storytelling style and themes owed to Charles Dickens -- continues to be interesting reading. A bonus of sorts is included in the form of a mock-serious summary of the continuities contained in Volume 1. The flippant tone ("They made a trapeze performer out of [Annie]. She really should have sent [her doll] Emily Marie in to perform. But she didn't. And the rope broke. And so did Annie's legs.") makes me wonder if this was meant to be a parody of Gray's habit of summarizing recent strip events in occasional "catch-up strips." If so, it was quite funny. If not, someone at IDW has a peculiar sense of humor.

Book Review: HAROLD GRAY'S LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, Volume 1: WILL TOMORROW EVER COME? (IDW Publishing)

Like IDW's ongoing DICK TRACY reprint project and Fantagraphics' THE COMPLETE PEANUTS series, IDW's exhaustive cataloging of the adventures of America's favorite orphan (now there's an ironic turn of phrase...) bids fair to be on my "pull" list (or, in this case, my "pick up gingerly and deposit the large item carefully into the box" list) for a long time to come, economic vagaries permitting. It may even top those fine efforts, since it enjoys the added feature of a legitimately interesting and challenging series of essays by comics scholar Jeet Heer that, when they are finally fully compiled, should shake up a lot of what comics fans think they know about Annie's creator, Harold Gray, and the singular worldview that informed his work from day one.

This first volume reprints daily strips from Annie's debut in August 1924 through October 1927, plus a handful of Sunday pages. (Most of Gray's Sundays during this period were standalone gags; the editors reprint a few of these, plus a handful that actually tie in with the ongoing daily narrative.) For those, like me, who got most of their previous exposure to Gray's spunky, two-fisted waif from the massive Arlington House volume that only reprinted strips from the period 1935-1945, Gray's earliest strips will seem crudely over-elaborate, the work of a modestly talented artist trying to distinguish himself from the style of his ex-boss Sidney Smith (whom Gray assisted on THE GUMPS) by punching above his weight. It doesn't take long, however, for Gray's "natural" style to reveal itself. The cycle of "hard-knocks adventures among the common folk" linked to brief but memorable reunions with Daddy Warbucks, the clipped sentences, the occasional "pause and reflect" strips, and the fourth-panel philosophical ruminations manifest themselves with similar swiftness. So, too, do Gray's odd touches of amoralism. We're still some time away from the introduction of Warbucks' notorious sidekicks Punjab and The Asp, but this somewhat less sinister Warbucks is still capable of using two toughs to "encourage" a French doctor to leave his cushy practice and come to America to fix Annie's paralyzed legs. Likewise, Warbucks' snooty wife, who'd earlier treated Annie like dirt and abandoned her husband to take up with a suave European swindler, returns to the storyline poorer but wiser and genuinely contrite -- she even looks like a nicer person, facially speaking -- but no sooner has she reformed than she's disposed of through the impersonal medium of a storm at sea that swamps the Warbucks yacht.

Oddly, when they first meet, Annie has better diction and grammar than Warbucks, the self-made war profiteer who's initially characterized as a diamond in "rough" of razor-wire consistency. As time passes, however, Daddy acquires polish, while Annie begins dropping her "g"s with regularity and otherwise using the lower-middle-class style of speech that she'll employ for the rest of her career. Both Annie and Warbucks are obviously great, sympathetic characters from the first moment, and I'm perfectly willing to amend my well-known affection for "feisty young male characters" and invite Annie to join the club. (She can room with Darkwing Duck's Gosalyn Mallard, a very similar character -- to state the glaringly obvious.) Aside from these two, Annie's dog Sandy -- who debuts as a puppy (!) and undergoes a rather dramatic "ear-bob" during his physical development as an adult -- and the Silos (the kindly farmers who are the first of many strangers to take in the Warbucks-less Annie), the ANNIE cast at this stage is still pretty skimpy. Give Gray time, however.

Heer's essay on Gray's youth and early work argues convincingly that Gray, at least at this stage of his career, was far more of a "progressive" Republican than the later hard-shell guy who despised FDR. He overstates his case in places, but, more importantly, he makes clear why Gray was so opposed to the New Deal later on. If Gray hated anything, it was hypocrisy, pretense, and putting on airs; the quintessential Gray walk-on character, the neighborhood busybody, is very much in evidence from the start of ANNIE. Rather like H.L. Mencken, Gray hated FDR as the consummate pretender who purported to serve the common man by in effect buying his vote through a national elaboration of the old-fashioned ward boss strategy. (The pork-laden "stimulus package" passed a few days ago is merely an updated version of this strategy, of course.) Since Gray was among the most sincere and least ironic of comics creators, his rage was fueled by a genuine sense of disillusionment. Like Charles Dickens (to whom Heet compares Gray in the intro to Volume 2), Gray believed that reform began not with the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen but with a change of heart. Unfortunately, Gray's very sincerity led directly to his greatest failing, a lack of humor. There are a number of slapstick gags in the early strips, and Annie occasionally serves as her own worst enemy by committing such small-beer sins as eating too many bananas, but the laughs get fewer and farther between as the strip moves forward. Well, at least Gray knew what his strengths were.

I should be getting on to Volume 2 soon. These are DEFINITE keepers.

No Fan is a (Fantasy) Island

The recent passing of Ricardo Montalban -- and a nugget of info about the man that I gleaned from NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE -- completed a most astonishing "daily double" of sorts for me. According to the NR piece, Montalban -- whose wonderful turn as the Kim Possible villain Senor Senior Senior meant far more to me, in a fannish sense, than any appearance as a eugenic superman and would-be world dictator or shill for cars with "Corinthian leather" ever will -- was a longtime supporter of NATIONAL REVIEW and even did subscription promotions for the magazine. So what, you say. Well, this comes on the heels of learning that, prior to hitting it big in the role of Christopher Lee's sidekick Nick Nack in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, Herve Villechaize spent a period of time in the early 1970s doing inking for, would you believe, Harvey Comics. (No, I'm not able to definitely recognize his work, though some of the RICHIE RICH stories of the period feature unpleasantly "thin" inking that is unlike any other inking ever done on the character. The fact that this individual was apparently employed for only a short time -- and the additional fact that Villechaize is known to have worked for Harvey for only a couple of months -- suggests that this unusual inking might actually be Villechaize's work.)

Two of my personal interests -- conservatism and Harvey Comics -- bound together in this unlikely duo. Ain't fandom great?

Check back this weekend for new reviews, including some extensive comments on IDW Publishing's new COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE collection, the first volume of which I've just completed.