A Treasury of XXth Century Murder – Compendium II


By Rick Geary (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-333-2 (Digest TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.

Rick Geary is a unique talent in the comic industry not simply because of his style of drawing but especially because of his method of telling tales. For decades he toiled as an Underground cartoonist and freelance illustrator of strange stories, published in locales as varied as Heavy Metal, Epic Illustrated, Twisted Tales, Bop, National Lampoon, Vanguard, Bizarre Sex, Fear and Laughter, Gates of Eden, RAW and High Times, where he honed a unique ability to create sublimely understated stories by stringing together seemingly unconnected streams of narrative to compose tales moving, often melancholy and always beguiling.

Discovering his natural oeuvre with works including biographies of J. Edgar Hoover and Leon Trotsky and the multi-volumed Treasury of Victorian Murder series, Geary grew into a grand master and unique presence in both comics and True Crime literature. His graphic reconstructions of some of the most infamous murder mysteries recorded since policing began combine a superlative talent for laconic prose, incisive observation and meticulously detailed pictorial extrapolation, filtered through his fascination with and understanding of the lethal propensities of humanity. His forensic eye scours police blotters, newspaper archives and history books to compile irresistibly enthralling documentaries and then unleash them on a voracious never-replete readership.

In 2008 he progressed beyond Victoriana into the last century with the (hopefully still-ongoing) Treasury of XXth Century Murder series. It’s been while since anything new has emerged, but at least there are still mega-compilations such as this one, and gradually his other works are being rereleased as eBooks. If you still crave more Geary, there’s the recently-released Daisy Goes To the Moon in collaboration with Mathew Klickstein (for more of which stayed tuned)…

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder – Compendium II gathers a quartet of meticulously researched and imaginatively presented case files highlighting little-remembered scandals which seared the headlines as well as one murder that gripped the world and entered the vocabulary of humanity. They are delivered here with compelling understatement and a modicum of wry gallows wit…

In 2011 The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti exposed one of the greatest and most painful travesties of American justice in a case which took the entire world by storm in contemporary times. In 1920 a payroll robbery and double homicide in Eastern Massachusetts led to the arrest of two Italian anarchists who were either cunning, ruthless enemies of society, haplessly innocent victims of political scaremongering and judicial bigotry or – just maybe – a little of both…

The captivating capsule history opens with a selection of detailed maps of pertinent locales before ‘The Crime’ details how a bloody wages-snatch in South Braintree, Massachusetts took place on April 15th 1920. Those events are dissected with forensic care, rich in enticing extra data local police ignored when picking up two ideal suspects: immigrant left wing activists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco.

‘The Accused’ details their personal histories, involvement with Anarchist and Socialist groups and their version of the events leading to their arrest on May 5th after which their deeply flawed trial is deconstructed in ‘The Case For the Commonwealth’: paying particular attention to the illegal manner in which the jury was convened; the nature of the witnesses and the prejudices of presiding judge and prominent anti-immigrant advocate Webster Thayer, who declared before, during and after the trial how he was going to “get those Bolshevicki bastards good and proper”  and “get those guys hanged”…

The farcical days in court, in which the defendants found themselves as much at the mercy of their own lawyer’s political agenda as the prosecution’s, and the public’s assumptions and fabrications are detailed in ‘The Case For the Defense’. They inevitably led to a guilty verdict and death sentences for both on July 14th 1921.

‘The Legal Jungle’ follows the numerous appeals, delays, public campaigns for clemency and stays of execution – paying particularly mordant attention to the unfortunate and peculiar legal convolutions of Massachusetts Law which dictated that all appeals in a case must be heard by the judge in the original case – meaning that Web Thayer was “compelled” to rule on his own judgements and directions in the case. Unsurprisingly, every appeal was overruled. He even threw out a confession by a professional gangster who came forward and admitted to committing the crime, calling him a “robber, crook, liar and thief with no credibility whatsoever”…

The graphic account closes with ‘A Global Cause’ as proceedings caught world attention, sparking a massive movement to re-examine the case; its subsequent co-opting as a cause celebre by both fascist and communist national leaders and violent anti-American protest, even riots and bombings in the streets of many countries. At least that sort of stuff can’t happen now, right?

Sacco and Vanzetti, who had always proclaimed their total innocence, were executed on August 23rd 1927, and this chilling chronicle concludes with those events, further facts and arguments that have continued to surface to this day regarding what is still a cruelly unfinished drama…

Travesty gives way to scandal in Lovers Lane – The Hall-Mills Mystery. Occurring during the “Gilded Age” of suburban middleclass America, it describes infidelity that rocked staid, upright New Jersey in 1922 and – thanks to the crusading/muckraking power of the press – much of the world beyond its normally sedate borders. Geary’s re-examination of the case begins here after a bibliography and detailed maps of ‘The City of New Brunswick’ and ‘Scene of the Hall-Mills Murders’, setting the scene for a grim tragedy of lust, jealousy, deception and affronted propriety…

The account proper commences ‘Under the Crabapple Tree’ as a well-to-do conurbation of prosperous churchgoers is rocked by the discovery of two bodies on park land between two farms. Reverend Edward W. Hall of the Church of St. John the Evangelist was found with a single fatal gunshot wound, placed beside and cradling the corpse of Mrs. Eleanor R. Mills, a parishioner and member of the choir. Her fatal injuries easily fall into the category we would now call overkill: three bullet wounds, throat slashed from ear-to-ear and her throat and vocal cords removed and missing…

‘The Victims’ are soon subject of a clumsy, botched, jurisdictionally contested investigation which nevertheless reveals Reverend Hall was particularly admired by many women of the congregation and, despite being married to a wealthy heiress older than himself, was engaged in a not especially secret affair with Mrs. Mills. This fact is confirmed by the cascade of passionate love letters scattered around the posed corpses…

The case swiftly stalls: tainted from the first by gawkers and souvenir hunters trampling the crime scene and a united front of non-cooperation from the clergyman’s powerful and well-connected family who also insist on early burial of the victims. However, the police doggedly proceed in ‘The Search for Evidence’, interviewing family and friends, forming theories and fending off increasingly strident interference from journalists.

With pressure mounting on all sides – a persistent popular theory is that the victims were killed by the Ku Klux Klan who were active in the State and particularly opposed to adultery – the bodies are exhumed for the first of many autopsies. Not long after, the youngsters who first found the bodies are re-interviewed, leading to an incredible confession which later proves to be fallacious.

It is not the only one. A local character known as “the Pig Woman” also comes forward claiming to have been present at the killing. Eventually, the police of two separate regions find themselves presiding over ‘The Case to Nowhere’: awash with too much evidence and too many witnesses with wildly varying stories which don’t support the scant few facts. In the midst of this sea of confusion a Grand Jury is finally convened and peremptorily closes after five days without issuing indictments against anybody…

‘Four Years Later’ the case is suddenly and dramatically reopened when the Widow Hall’s maid – whilst petitioning for divorce – is revealed to have received $5000 dollars to withhold information on her mistress’ whereabouts for the night of the double murder. When New York newspapers get wind of this story they unleash a tidal wave of journalistic excess that culminates in a fresh investigation and a new trial, scrupulously and compellingly reconstructed here by master showman Geary. With all actors in the drama having delivered their versions of events at last, this gripping confection concludes with a compelling argument assessing ‘Who Did It?’

This is a shocking tale with no winners, and the author’s meticulous presentation as he dissects the crime, illuminates the major and minor players and dutifully pursues all to their recorded ends is truly beguiling. Geary is a unique talent not simply because of his manner of drawing but because of the subject matter and methodology in the telling of his tales. He always presents facts, theories and even contemporary minutiae with absorbing pictorial precision, captivating clarity and devastating dry wit, re-examining each case with a force and power Oliver Stone would envy.

Famous Players – The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor sees Geary again combine his gift for laconic prose, incisive observation and detailed pictorial extrapolation with his fascination for the darkness in humanity, here re-examining a landmark homicide that changed early Hollywood and led in large part to the punishing self-censorship of the Hays Commission Production Code.

In 1911, the first moving picture studio set up amidst sunny orange groves around rural Hollywood. Within a decade it was a burgeoning boom town of production companies and backlots, where movie stars were earning vast sums of money. As usual for such unregulated shanty metropolises, the new community had swiftly accumulated a dank ubiquitous underbelly, becoming a hotbed of vice, excess and debauchery. William Desmond Taylor was a man with a clouded past and a massive reputation as a movie director and ladies’ man. On the morning of Thursday, February 2nd 1922 he was found dead in his palatial home by his valet. The discovery triggered one of the most celebrated (and still unsolved) murder cases in Los Angeles’ extremely chequered history. By exposing a sordid undisclosed background of drugs, sex, booze, celebrity and even false identity, this true crime became a template for every tale of “Hollywood Babylon” and, even more than the notorious Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal, drove the movers and shakers of Tinseltown to clean up their act – or at least to sweep it out of the public gaze.

Geary examines the suspects – major and minor – and dutifully pursues all players to their recorded ends. Especially intriguing are snippets of historical minutiae and beautifully rendered maps and plans which bring all the varied locations to life (he should seriously consider turning this book into a Cluedo special edition), giving us all a fair crack at solving this notorious-yet-glamorous cold case.

Closing the police blotter is a legendary murder mystery, focusing on the Noir-informed, post-war scandal of Elizabeth Short: forever immortalised as the Black Dahlia.

Delivered as always in stark, uncompromising monochrome, the insightful deliberations diligently sift fact from mythology to detail one of the most appalling killings in modern history. Opening with the traditional bibliography of sources and detailed maps of Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood Boulevard (1944-1946) and the body-dump site, Geary diligently unpicks fact from surmise, and clue from guesswork beginning with ‘Part One: The Vacant Lot’

Los Angeles California, Wednesday, January 15th 1947. At or around 10:AM, a mother pushes her baby’s stroller past open ground in Downtown’s Leimert Park neighbourhood. When she spots the two halves of a discarded shop mannikin lying in the grass, something makes her look again…

Soon the scene is a hotbed of activity, with cops (the notoriously corrupt LAPD of Police Chief Clemence B. Horrall) and headline-hungry reporters racing each other to glean facts and credit in a truly sensational killing. After a botched beginning, proper forensic procedure identifies the posed, much-mutilated victim and a call goes out to Medford, Massachusetts. Sadly, the distraught mother is talking to a canny, scruples-shy reporter rather than a police representative…

The victim’s life history is deftly précised in ‘Part Two: The Life of Elizabeth Short’ which describes a smalltown girl from a broken home, gripped by big dreams, a penchant for men in uniform and unsavoury morals. Described as flighty, with connections to notable underworld characters and night clubs, Elizabeth has a gift for finding Samaritans to help her out, but as detailed in ‘Part Three: Her Last Days’, with unspecified trouble following her, she walks out of the Biltmore Hotel at 10:PM on January 9th 1947. No one ever sees her again, except presumably her killer…

With attention-seekers of every stripe climbing on the accelerating bandwagon, ‘Part IV: The Investigation’ relates how Captain Jack Donahoe of Central Homicide employs 700 LAPD officers, 400 County Sheriff’s deputies, hundreds of other law-enforcement professionals and even private detectives to trace and interview hundreds of men connected with Short. In the end there are 150 suspects but not one arrest and, despite building a solid picture, Donahoe achieves nothing substantive. The case gets even further muddied and sensationalised when – just as public interest is waning – a string of anonymous letters and items of Short’s personal possessions are sent to the press by someone claiming to be the killer. Of course, those articles and knick-knacks might have already been in journalists’ possession from the first moment they identified her, long before the LAPD did…

The case remains active for years until it’s subsumed in and sidelined by a city-wide gang-war and resultant house-cleaning of corrupt cops in 1949. ‘Part V: Wrap-Up’ recaps prevailing theories – such as the fact that Short’s death might be part of a string of serial killings the police never connected together, or that she was linked to city officials with the case subsequently covered up from on high. Many more false trails and dead-end leads have come and gone in the decades since. The Black Dahlia murder remains unsolved and the LAPD case files have never been made public.

These grisly events in the tainted paradise of Tinseltown captivated public attention and became a keystone of Hollywood’s tawdry mythology. The killing spawned movies, books and TV episodes, and one tangible result. In February 1947 Republican State Assemblyman C. Don Field responded to the case by proposing a state-wide Registry of Sex Offenders – the first in America’s history. The law was passed before the year ended…

Rick Geary is a unique talent not simply because of his manner of drawing but because of the subject matter and methodology employed in telling his tales. He thrives on hard facts, but devotes time and space to all theories and even contemporary minutiae with absorbing pictorial precision, captivating clarity and devastating dry wit, re-examining each case with a force and power Sherlock Holmes would envy. He teaches with chilling graphic precision, captivating clarity and devastating dry wit, a perfect exemplar of how graphic narrative can be so much more than simple fantasy entertainment. This merrily morbid series of murder masterpieces should be mandatory reading for all comic fans, mystery addicts and crime collectors.

© 2009-2016 Rick Geary.

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder- Compendium II will be published on February 13th 2025 and is available for pre-order now. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

Peanuts Dell Archive


By Charles M. Schulz, Jim Sasseville, Dale Hale, Tony Pocrnick & various (KaBOOM!)
ISBN: 978-1-68415-255-1 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-64144-117-9

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Peanuts is unequivocally the most important comics strip in the history of graphic narrative. It is also the most deeply personal. Cartoonist Charles Monroe “Sparky” (forever dubbed thus by an uncle who saw young Charlie reading Billy DeBeck’s strip Barney Google: that hero’s horse was called “Spark Plug”) Schulz crafted a moodily hilarious, hysterically introspective, shockingly philosophical epic for half a century, producing 17,897 strips from October 2nd 1950 to February 13th 2000. He died, from the complications of cancer, the day before his last strip was published. Twenty five years later, his strip is still seen daily all over the world.

At its height, Peanuts ran in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries, translated into 21 languages. Many of those venues are still running perpetual reprints, and have ever since his departure. Attendant book collections, a merchandising mountain and television spin-offs made the publicity-shy artist a billionaire.

In case you came in late – and from Mars – our focus (we just can’t call him “star” or “hero”) is everyman loser Charlie Brown who, with increasingly high-maintenance, fanciful mutt Snoopy, is at odds with a bombastic and mercurial supporting cast hanging out doing kid things with disturbingly mature psychological overtones…

The gags and tales centre on play, pranks, sports, playing musical instruments, teasing each other, making baffled observations about the incomprehensible world and occasionally acting a bit too much like grown-ups. The ferocious unpredictability and wilfulness of seasonal weather often impacts on these peewee performers, too. You won’t find many adults in the mix – which includes Mean Girl (let’s call her “forthright”) Violet, prodigy Schroeder, “world’s greatest fussbudget” Lucy, her strange baby brother Linus and dirt-magnet “Pig-Pen” all adding signature twists to the mirth – because this is essentially a kids’ world.

Charlie Brown has settled into existential angst and is resigned to his role as eternal loser: singled out by fate and the relentless diabolical wilfulness of Lucy who sharpens her spiteful verve on everyone around her. Her preferred target is always the round-headed kid though: mocking his attempts to fly a kite, kicking away his football and perpetually reminding him face-to-face how rubbish he is…

A Sunday page debuted on January 6th 1952; a standard half-page slot offering more measured fare than the daily. Both thwarted ambition and explosive frustration became part of the strip’s signature denouements and these weekend wonders gave Sparky room to be at his most visually imaginative, whimsical and weird. By that time, rapid-fire raucous slapstick gags were riding side-by-side with surreal, edgy, psychologically barbed introspection, crushing judgements and deep ruminations in a world where kids – and certain animals – were the only actors. The relationships were increasingly deep, complex and absorbing…

None of that is really the point. Peanuts – a title Schulz loathed, but one the syndicate forced upon him – changed the way comics strips were received and perceived, by showing cartoon comedy could have edges and nuance as well as pratfalls and punchlines. It also became a multimedia merchandising bonanza for Schulz and the United Features Syndicate, generating toys, games, books, TV shows, apparel and even comic books. These days there’s even an educational institution, The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, from which a goodly portion of the archival contributions in this wonderful compilation originate…

Just how and why the comic book version differs from the strip is explored with incisive and analytical vigour in Derrick Bang’s (of CMS M&RC) Introduction ‘Peanuts in Comic Books’ revealing how, in the early 1950s, reprints in St. John and, later, Dell Comics titles such as Tip Top Comics and United Comics gradually gave way to original back-up material in Fritzi Ritz, Nancy and other anthology titles. Very little of it was by Schulz – although he did contribute many covers – but rather were ghosted by hand-picked associates like Jim Sasseville, who ably aped Sparky Schulz and kept the little cast in character and on message for strips in Fritzi Ritz, Nancy, Tip Top or Nancy and Sluggo. Sasseville wrote and drew all of the Western Publishing’s Peanuts try-out issue (Four Color #878, February 1958). However, Schulz contributed heavily to the second FC Peanuts (#969, February 1959) with Dale Hale and Tony Pocrnick handling subsequent back-up tales plus third Four Color tester #1015 (August/October 1959).

The fourth release became Peanuts #4: a title that ran for 13 issues, before ending in July 1962. By then, Dell staff artists and writers were generating the stories and the overall quality was nothing to brag about – although Schulz still drew covers, at least. In terms of calibre and standards, the 75 comic tales here – beginning with the very first by Schulz from Nancy #146 (September 1957) to the anonymous last – are quite enjoyable and some are truly exceptional: such as Sasseville’s ‘The Mani-Cure’ (Tip Top #211, November 1957/ January 1958) or Dale Hale’s untitled treatise on keeping secrets from Tip Top #217 (May/July 1959).

Admittedly, hard core fans might have trouble with later yarns as the kids face an amok robot or dare the terrors of an old haunted house, but overall this collection remains a splendid peek at a little known cranny of the franchise and there is the joy of all those lost gems from Sparky to carry the day. After all, where else are you going to see the kids in stories you haven’t read yet… you Blockhead!?
Peanuts Dell Archive all contents unless otherwise specified © 2005 Peanuts Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

Popeye: The E.C. Segar Popeye Sundays volume 4: Swea’Pea and Eugene the Jeep (February 1936 – October 1938)


By Elzie Crisler Segar, with Charles H. “Doc” Winner, Tom, Sims Kayla E. & various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 979-8-8750-0001-0 (TPB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

There is more than one Popeye. If your first thought when you hear the name is the cheerful, indomitable swabby in full Naval whites always biffing a hulking great beardy-bloke and mainlining tinned spinach, that’s okay. The Fleischer Studios and Famous Films animated features have a vivid brilliance and spontaneous energy of their own (even later, watered-down anodyne TV versions have some merit) and they are indeed all based on the grizzled, crusty, foul-mouthed, bulletproof, golden-hearted old swab who shambled his way into a fully cast and firmly established newspaper strip and would not leave. But they are really only the tip of an incredible iceberg of satire, slapstick, virtue, vice and mind-boggling adventure.

Popeye first washed ashore on January 17th 1929: a casual extra in the Thimble Theatre comic feature. That unassuming newspaper strip had launched on 19th December 1919: one of many funnies parodying and burlesquing the era’s silent movie serials. Its more successful forebears included C.W. Kahles’ Hairbreadth Harry and Ed Wheelan’s Midget Movies/ Minute Movies… which Thimble Theatre replaced in William Randolph Hearst’s papers.

All these strips employed a repertory company of characters playing out generic adventures based on those expressive cinema antics. Thimble Theatre’s cast included Nana & Cole Oyl; their gawky, excessively excitable daughter Olive; diminutive-but-pushy son Castor and Olive’s sappy, would-be beau Horace Hamgravy. The feature ticked along nicely for a decade, competent, unassuming and always entertaining, with Castor and Ham Gravy (as he became) stumbling and tumbling through get-rich-quick schemes, frenzied, fear-free adventures and gag situations until September 10th 1928, when explorer uncle Lubry Kent Oyl gave Castor a spoil from his latest exploration of Africa.

It was the most fabulous of all birds – a hand-reared Whiffle Hen – and was the start of something truly groundbreaking…

Whiffle Hens are troublesome, incredibly rare and possessed of fantastic powers, but after months of inspired hokum and slapstick shenanigans, Castor was inclined to keep Bernice – for that was the hen’s name – as a series of increasingly peculiar circumstances brought him into contention with ruthless Mr. Fadewell, world’s greatest gambler and king of gaming resort ‘Dice Island’. Bernice clearly affected and inspired writer/artist E.C. Segar, because his strip increasingly became a playground of frantic, compelling action and comedy during this period. When Castor and Ham discovered everybody wanted the Whiffle Hen because she could bestow infallible good luck, they sailed for Dice Island to win every penny from its lavish casinos. Big sister Olive wanted to come along, but the boys planned to leave her behind once their vessel was ready to sail. It was 16th January 1929…

The next day, in the 108th episode of that extended saga, a bluff, brusquely irascible, ignorant, itinerant and exceeding ugly one-eyed old sailor was hired by the pathetic pair to man the boat they had rented, and the world met one of the most iconic and memorable characters ever conceived. By sheer surly willpower, Popeye won readers’ hearts and minds, his no-nonsense, rough grumbling simplicity and dubious appeal enchanting the public until, by tale’s end, the walk-on had taken up residency. He would quickly make Thimble Theatre his own. The Sailor Man affably steamed onto the full-colour Sunday pages forming the meat of this curated collection.

This paperback prize is the closing quartile of four books designed for swanky slipcases, comprehensively re-presenting Segar’s entire Sunday canon. Spiffy as that sounds, the wondrous stories are also available in digital editions if you want to think of ecology or mitigate the age and frailty of your spinach-deprived “muskles”…

Son of a handyman, Elzie Crisler Segar was born in Chester, Illinois on 8th December 1894. His early life was filled with solid, earnest blue-collar jobs that typified his generation of cartoonists. Young Segar worked as a decorator/house-painter, played drums to accompany vaudeville acts at the local theatre and when the town got a movie house played for the silent films. This allowed him to absorb staging, timing and narrative tricks from close observation of the screen, and these became his greatest assets as a cartoonist. Whilst working as a film projectionist, he decided to draw for his living, and tell his own stories. He was 18 years old.

Like so many of that “can-do” era, Segar studied art via mail order: in this case W.L. Evans’ cartooning correspondence course out of Cleveland, Ohio – from where Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster would launch Superman upon the world. Segar gravitated to Chicago and was “discovered” by Richard F. Outcault (The Yellow Kid, Buster Brown), arguably the inventor of newspaper comics. Outcault introduced Segar around at the prestigious Chicago Herald and soon – although still wet behind the ears – Segar’s first strip – Charley Chaplin’s Comedy Capers – debuted on March 12th 1916. Two years later, Elzie married Myrtle Johnson and moved to Hearst’s Chicago Evening American to create Looping the Loop. Managing Editor William Curley saw a big future for Segar and promptly packed the newlyweds off to the Manhattan headquarters of the mighty King Features Syndicate. Within a year Elzie was turning Thimble Theatre for The New York Journal. In 1924, Segar created a second daily strip. The 5:15 was a surreal domestic comedy featuring weedy commuter/would-be inventor John Sappo and his formidable, indomitable wife Myrtle

A born storyteller, Segar had from the start an advantage even his beloved cinema couldn’t match. His brilliant ear for dialogue and accent shone out from admittedly rather average melodrama adventure plots, adding lustre to stories and gags he always felt he hadn’t drawn well enough. After a decade or so – and just as cinema caught up with the introduction of “talkies” – he finally discovered a character whose unique sound and individual vocalisations blended with a fantastic, enthralling nature to create a literal superstar…

Incoherent, ignorant, plug-ugly and stingingly sarcastic, Popeye shambled on stage midway through ‘Dice Island’ and once his very minor bit part played out, simply refused to leave. Within a year he was a regular. As circulation skyrocketed, he became the star. In the less than 10 years Segar worked with his iconic matelot (from January 1929 until the artist’s untimely death on 13th October 1938), the auteur built an incredible metaworld of fabulous lands and lost locales, where unique characters undertook fantastic voyages, spawned or overcame astounding scenarios and experienced big, unforgettable thrills as well as the small human dramas we’re all subject to. They also threw punches at the drop of a hat…

This was a serial saga simultaneously extraordinary and mundane, which could be hilarious or terrifying at the same time. For every trip to the rip-roaring Wild West, idyllic atoll or fabulous lost kingdom, there was a sordid brawl between squabbling neighbours, spats between friends or disagreements between sweethearts – any and all usually settled with mightily-swung fists and a sarcastic aside.

Popeye was the first Superman of comics and its ultimate working-class hero, but he was not a comfortable one to idolise. A brutish lout who thought with his fists, lacking respect for authority, he was uneducated, short-tempered and – whenever “hot termaters” batted their eyelashes (or thereabouts) at him – painfully fickle. He was also a worrisome gambling troublemaker who wasn’t welcome in polite society… and wouldn’t want to be. However, the mighty marine marvel might be raw and rough-hewn, but he was always fair and practical, with an innate, unshakable sense of what’s right and what’s not: a joker who wants kids to be themselves – but not necessarily “good” – and a guy who took no guff from anybody. Of course, as his popularity grew, he somewhat mellowed. Always ready to defend the weak and with absolutely no pretensions or aspirations to rise above his fellows, he was and will always be “the best of us”… but the shocking sense of unpredictability, danger and anarchy he initially provided was sorely missed by 1936 – so Segar brought it back again…

This concluding compilation of Segar’s Sunday comics masterpiece spans February 23rd 1936 to October 2nd 1938, with the classic pages and vintage views preceded by another sublimely whimsical cartoon deconstruction, demystification and appreciation. ‘“Gift from Uncle Ben” – An Introduction by Kayla E’ finds creative director/designer/artist Kayla E. (Precious Rubbish, Now: The New Comics Anthology) anticipating and celebrating the legacy of the strip in a captivating “silent” cartoon yarn starring the cast and highlighting the incredible Jeep

Throughout, the weekend wonderment accentuates arcane antics of the star attraction, but increasingly the support cast provide comedy gold via potential straight man Popeye’s interactions with Wimpy, Olive Oyl, our eponymous co-stars and all the rest of Segar’s cast of thousands (of idiots). The humorous antics – in sequences of one-off gags alternating with occasional extended sagas – see the Sailor Man fighting for every iota of attention whilst mournful mooching co-star Wimpy becomes increasingly more ingenious – not to say surreal – in his quest for free meals.

An engaging Micawber-like coward, cad and conman, the insatiable J. Wellington Wimpy debuted on May 3rd 1931 as an unnamed and decidedly partisan referee in one of Popeye’s frequent boxing matches. The scurrilous but polite oaf obviously struck a chord and Segar gradually made him a fixture. Always hungry, keen to take bribes and a cunning coiner of immortal catchphrases like “I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” and “Let’s you and him fight” – he was the perfect foil for a simple action hero and increasingly stole the entire show; just like anything else unless it was firmly nailed down…

When not beating the stuffing out of his opponents or kissing pretty girls, Popeye pursued his flighty, vacillating and irresolute Olive with exceptional verve, if little success, but his life was always made more complicated whenever the unflappable, so-corruptible and adorably contemptible Wimpy made an appearance. He was even an occasional rival suitor, joining returning foils such as long-suffering local charmer Curly as convenient competitors for Olive’s dubious and flighty affections…

Infinitely varying riffs on Olive’s peculiar romantic notions or Wimpy’s attempts to cadge food or money for food were irresistible to the adoring readership, but Segar wisely peppered the Sundays with longer episodic tales, and the weirdest cast in comics then or since. Foils like diner owner Rough House, Alice the Goon and ever-irascible Mr. George W. Geezil perpetually vied for attention with baroque figures like subhuman pal Toar, King Blozo of Spinachovia and the vile Sea Hag, but so many semi-regulars simply defy description.

Eugene the Jeep debuted on March 20th 1936 in the daily strip: a fantastic 4th dimensional beast with incredible powers used by Olive and Wimpy to get very rich, very quickly. They soon lost it all betting on the wrong guy in another of Segar’s classic and hilarious set-piece boxing matches between Popeye and yet another barely-human pugilist. The tales come from an astonishingly fertile period for the strip’s long history. On August 4th, Eugene was instrumental in kicking off another groundbreaking and memorable sequence as the entire ensemble cast took off on a haunted ship to find Popeye’s absentee dad. That memorably riotous tale introduced ancient, antisocial reprobate Poopdeck Pappy and his diminutive hairy sidekick Pooky Jones. The elder mariner was a rough, hard-bitten, grumpy brute quite prepared and even happy to cheat, steal or smack a woman around if she stepped out of line and a visual warning of what might be Popeye’s eventual fate. Once the old goat was firmly established, Segar set Popeye & Olive the Herculean task of civilizing him; a task ongoing to this day…

The full-colour Sunday pages in this volume span February 23rd 1936 to October 13th 1938, opening with uniquely sentimental monster Alice the Goon resurfacing, permanently switching allegiance and becoming nanny to rambunctious tyke Swee’Pea after saving the “infink” from abduction by the sinister oceanic witch. Alice was a regular by the end of April. Her assimilation was part of a series of stand-alone gags revealing Popeye’s violent courtship of Olive and tactics for deterring rivals, counterpointing a stream of pugilistic bouts and reinforcing the gastronomic war of wills between Wimpy and Rough House, with Geezil’s hatred of the moocher also strongly represented week by week.

August 9th saw the Jeep make his spectacular Sunday debut, with a few demonstrations of the fanciful beast’s incredible powers to make money and cause chaos leading to infinitely varying riffs on Olive’s peculiar romantic notions or Wimpy’s attempts to cadge food or money (for food). These incidents were irresistible to the adoring readership, but Segar wisely peppered the Sundays with longer episodic tales, such as the saga of ‘The Terrible Kid Mustard’ (December 27th 1936 – February 28th 1937) and pitting the “sprize-fighting” Sea Salt against another boxer who was as ferociously fuelled by the incredible nourishing power of Spinach… an epic war of nerves that culminated in a ring bout adjudicated by Wimpy and remembered forever…

Another extended endeavour starred the smallest addition to the cast and co-star of this volume. Rambunctious tyke Swee’Pea was never an angel, and when he began stealing jam and framing Eugene (March 7th through 28th) the search for a culprit proved he was also precociously smart too. The impossible task of civilising Poopdeck Pappy also covered many months – with no appreciable or lasting effect – incorporating an outrageous sequence wherein the dastardly dotard becomes scandalously, catastrophically entangled in Popeye’s mechanical automatic diaper-changing machine…

On June 27th Wimpy found the closest thing to true love after meeting Olive’s friend Waneeta: a meek, retiring soul whose father owned 50,000 cows. His ardent pursuit filled many pages over following months, as did the latest scheme of his arch-nemesis Geezil, who bought a cafe/diner with the sole intention of poisoning the constantly cadging conman. Although starring the same characters, Sunday and Daily strips ran separate storylines, offering Segar opportunities to utilise the same good idea in different ways. On September 19th 1937 he began a sequence wherein Swee’Pea’s mother comes back, seeking custody of the boy she had given away. The resultant tug-of-love tale ran to December 5th, displaying genuine warmth and angst amidst the wealth of hilarious stunts by both parties to convince the feisty nipper to pick his preferred parent…

On January 16th 1938, Popeye was approached by scientists who had stumbled upon an incipient Martian invasion. The evil extraterrestrials planned to pit their pet monster against a typical Earthman before committing to the assault, so the wily boffins believed grizzly old pug Popeye was our world’s best bet…

Readers had no idea that the feature’s glory days were ending. Segar’s advancing illness was affecting his output and between December 1937 and August 1938 many pages ran unsigned and were ghosted by Charles H. “Doc” Winner and Tom Sims. When Segar resumed drawing, the gags were funnier than ever (especially a short sequence where Pappy shaves his beard and dyes his hair to impersonate Popeye and woo Olive!), but tragically the long lead-in time necessary to create Sundays only left him time to finish 15 more pages.

The last signed Segar strip was published on October 2nd 1938. He died eleven days later from leukaemia and liver disease.

Popeye and the bizarre, surreally quotidian cast that welcomed and grew up around him are timeless icons of global culture who have grown far beyond their newspaper strip origins. Nevertheless, in one very true sense, with this marvellous yet painfully tragic final volume, the most creative period in the saga of the one true and only Sailor Man closes. His last strips were often augmented or even fully ghosted, but the intent is generally untrammelled, leaving an unparalleled testament to Segar’s incontestable timeless, manic brilliance for us all to enjoy over and over again.

Popeye is four years shy of his centenary and deserves that status as global icon. How many comics characters are still enjoying new adventures 96 years after their first? These volumes are a perfect way to celebrate the genius and mastery of E.C. Segar and his brilliantly flawed superman. These are tales you’ll treasure all of your life and superb books you must not miss. There is more than one Popeye. Most of them are pretty good and some are truly excellent. Don’t you think it’s about time you sampled the original and very best?
Popeye volume 4: Swea’Pea and Eugene the Jeep is copyright © 2024 King Features Syndicate, Inc./™Hearst Holdings, Inc. This edition © 2024 Fantagraphics Books Inc. Segar comic strips provided by Bill Blackbeard and his San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. “Gift from Uncle Ben” © 2024 Kayla E. All rights reserved.

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips volume 3 1938-1940


By Roy Crane with Leslie Turner (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-529-7 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

The comics industry evolved from newspaper strips and these circulation-boosting pictorial features were, until relatively recently, utterly ubiquitous, hugely popular with the public and regarded as invaluable by publishers who used them as an irresistible sales weapon to guarantee consumer loyalty, increase sales and ensure profits. Many a scribbler became a millionaire thanks to their ability to draw pictures and spin a yarn.

It’s virtually impossible for us to today to understand the overwhelming power of the comic strip in America (and the wider world) from the Great Depression to the end of World War II. With no television, broadcast radio far from universal and movie shows at best a weekly treat for most folk, household entertainment was mostly derived from the comic sections of daily and especially Sunday Newspapers. The Funnies were the most common recreation for millions who were well served by a fantastic variety and incredible quality. From the very start humour was paramount… that’s why we call them “funnies” or “comics”, after all. From these gag and stunt beginnings, blending silent movie slapstick, outrageous antics, fabulous fantasy and vaudeville shows, came a thoroughly unique entertainment hybrid: Royston Campbell Crane’s Wash Tubbs.

Debuting on April 21st 1924 Washington Tubbs II was a comedic gag-a-day strip not entirely dissimilar from confirmed family favourite Harold Teen (by Crane’s friend and contemporary Carl Ed). Tubbs was a diminutive, ambitious young shop clerk when the strip began, but gradually he moved into mock-heroics, then through harm-free action into full-blown, light-hearted rip-roaring adventures with the introduction of pioneering he-man, moody swashbuckling prototype Captain Easy in the landmark episode for 6th May, 1929.

As the tales became increasingly more exotic and thrill-drenched, the globe-trotting little dynamo clearly needed a sidekick who could believably handle the combat side of things, and thus in the middle of a European war Tubbs liberated a mysterious fellow American from a jail cell and history was made. Before long the mismatched pair were inseparable comrades; travelling the world, hunting treasure, fighting thugs and rescuing a bevy of startlingly comely maidens in distress…

The 2-fisted, bluff, completely capable and utterly dependable, down-on-his-luck Southern Gentleman was something not seen before in comics: a raw, square-jawed hunk played straight rather than the buffoon or music hall foil of such classic serials as Hairsbreadth Harry or Desperate Desmond. Crucially, Crane’s seductively simple blend of cartoon exuberance and compelling page-design was a far more accessible and powerful medium for action story-telling than the static illustrative style favoured by artists like Hal Foster (just starting to make waves on the new Tarzan Sunday page).

While we’re thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs, it’s difficult to re-read the phrase “Southern Gentleman” these days without pausing to consider how much of that term originally denoted chivalric do-gooder, rather than Defender of Slavery, to most readers. Frankly, I’m not sure Crane gave a moment’s thought to political or social implications, although his heroes never made any distinction between races and treated all characters equally, even back then. Their only motivations were getting rich honestly and helping folks in trouble. These stories come from a long time ago, so just read along with a sense of historical perspective, please…

Tubbs and Easy were easily as exotic and thrilling as the Ape Man but rattled along like tempestuous Sailor Man Popeye, full of vim, vigour and vinegar, as attested to by a close look at the early work of the would-be cartoonists who followed the strip with avid intensity: Floyd Gottfredson, Milton Caniff, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and especially young Joe Shuster…

After a couple of abortive attempts starring his little-guy hero, Crane bowed to the inevitable and created a full colour Sunday page dedicated to his increasingly popular hero-for-hire. Captain Easy debuted on 30th July 1933, in madcap, two-fisted exploits (originally) set before his first fateful meeting with Tubbs.

The third terrific tome of a stupendous 4-volume set covers May 22nd 1938 to December 15th 1940 and opens with a Foreword by Rick Norwood contrasting storylines in Daily and Sunday iterations whilst re-presenting a number of Crane’s illustrated articles on life in Mexico, after which R.C. Harvey’s Introduction provides some historical context and speculates on a potential real-life inspiration for the enigmatic Captain. There’s also a long-overdue appreciation of the artist’s friend, silent partner and eventual successor in ‘Easy Does it… And So does Leslie Turner’. Initially hired to provide Crane time and breathing room from the punishing seven day a week deadlines, from 1937 Turner increasingly took responsibility for the Sunday strip after the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate ordered Crane to drop his cherished full-page experimental designs.

When he first began the Sunday page in 1933, Crane’s creativity went into overdrive: an entire page and sharp vibrant colours to play with had clearly stirred his imagination. The results were wild visual concoctions which achieved a timeless immediacy and made each instalment a unified piece of sequential art. The effect of the pages can be seen in so many comic and strips since – even in the works of such near-contemporaries as Hergé and giants-in-waiting like Charles Schulz. The pages were a clearly as much of a joy to create as to read but the commercial argument ran that the company couldn’t sell a feature which client periodicals were unable to cut-up and reformat to suit their own needs. In 1943 the former assistant inherited the black-&-white Daily feature after Crane quit NEA to produce his creator-owned Buz Sawyer strip for William Randolph Hearst’s King Features syndicate.

Once Crane was gone, Turner took Wash & Easy into ever more comedic regions, crafting the strip until his retirement in 1969 after which other writers and artists carried the Captain until the feature was ended in 1988. But that’s largely immaterial as here the superb high-adventuring is seen in its absolute prime…

As seen in Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips volume 2, after a spectacular string of solo adventures the solitary soldier of fortune at last met Tubbs whilst jugged in a jail cell in a Ruritanian European kingdom. He had been framed in an espionage plot. Risking life and diminutive limb to save his pal, Wash also rescued sultry spitfire Ruby Dallas who promptly entangled them in her own unfortunate tale of woe. Witness to a murder in America, she had been on the run ever since because the killer was a prominent millionaire with too much to lose. Once the trio escaped murderous cutthroats, slavers and assassins, they soon settled his hash…

The story picks up here with the lads again looking for jobs and passage home. Opportunity knocks in the form of an animal collector in need of a crew, but when his tiger gets loose on the boat everybody jumps overboard. Washing up on the isolated island of Koolyhow where an American entomologist and his female assistant are hunting the legendary doodle-bug, the boys sign on as helpers. They are soon embroiled in burgeoning madness gripping local governor Sergeant Major Gaspe Shalayli, and further complicating matters is a lost temple full of ancient treasures and a cute furry creature called a Swink. The gluttonous little anteater takes a shine to Wash and has a capacity for finding trouble or creating chaos exponentially greater than his new owner’s…

With bugs and Swink – christened “Bennie” – the triumphant Americans reach Singapore only to be targeted by grifters Sadie and Dipper, who believe their latest marks have the temple jewels (actually confiscated by the local government). Tricking their way onto the flying boat carrying Wash and Easy home, the crooks cause a crash leaving Sadie and our heroes stranded on a desolate island inhabited by the extremely civilised descendants of piratical bandits. The place is a utopian paradise with only one rule: nobody ever leaves…

Of course Easy, Wash & Bennie do, in a stolen sail boat which promptly starts sinking, leaving the voyagers in dire straits. They’re almost saved by a passing vessel but the pirates aboard The Typhoon gleefully ignore their plight and sail on…

Frantically bailing, they reach land just as Cap’n Robbins sinks and plunders a trading ship. Once again in hot water, Wash & Easy rescue Mona Milson – stranded survivor of a previous shipwrecking – and return her to her grateful father on yet another Pacific paradise, only to find the furious Robbins waiting for them. He’s just agreed to transport the old gent, his family and, most importantly, his life savings to Honolulu…

Unable to dissuade old man Milson, the boys book passage with him and Mona and, after days of outrageous hijinks as the voracious and disaster-prone Bennie makes life hell for the pirates, expose and capture the villains. With reward money in their pockets Wash & Easy (and the Swink) finally get back to America and begin a search for gainful employment which highlights a return to gag-filled short stories. The ever-ravenous Swink is a popular sensation, prompting his owners to buy a travelling medicine show truck. Whilst touring the country they discover the elixir they’re peddling has genuine restorative powers whilst encountering a succession of conmen, women, thieves, scheming women, bandits and determinedly marriage-minded women – some of whom even steal the fabulous, potentially invaluable Bennie. A martyr to crazy, hungry critters, Wash improbably inherits a hippo named Kittie.

It’s just one disaster after another…

Feeling they’ve outlived their welcome Wash & Easy go adventuring again, accidentally ending up in Peru, where dauntless Mary Lancaster is searching for her lost father. She enlists their help to enter the forbidden Lost Canyon region where they discover not only the missing archaeologist but a lost race of Indians who still practise human sacrifice. The humans only escape by trading their lives for Bennie, but as they make their forlorn way back to civilisation, the indomitable Swink catches up to them, having proved too smart for the Andeans. Packing the Lancasters off home, but too short of funds to accompany them, our heroes are soon clapped in jail for vagrancy, where they meet magician, ventriloquist and escapologist “the Great Plunkett”: an inveterate prankster who joins them as stowaways on a steamer back to the USA. Once there, Plunkett’s gift for opening safes makes him a target for opportunistic mobsters – until his new friends step in…

Big changes were underway at this time and Turner was increasingly yielding the focus on his titular stars to explore an array of new and returning supporting characters – presumably to allow Crane more leeway, if not exclusivity – on Tubbs and Easy. However with January 21st 1940’s episode, the boys were back, as Easy became a freelance spy-hunter/crimebuster in a nation progressively, inevitably marching towards war. The tone was still light and humorous, but the writing was on the wall…

After stopping spies, Easy tracked down escaped convict Killer Beck, exposed the murder of a Chinese servant and captured America’s Most Wanted female-impersonating conman. That led to his being hired to safeguard a new aviation weapon from a veritable army of foreign agents and the diabolical Mata Hari Z-1. Defeating her led to Easy and Wash being marooned in a vast jungle of cactus in the Western American desert where they stumbled onto a gang of ruthless counterfeiters before tackling train-stealing gunrunners in Mexico.

More short yarns bracket a concerted re-lightening of mood as the lads are hired by arrogant, flighty heiress and aspiring film star Honey Darling who uses them to stage dangerous, headline-grabbing stunts, before they’re hired to recover a yacht and rescue the passengers after the Captain loses control of it in a rigged card game. The mission goes slightly awry and leaves the boys, heiress Ginger Nelson, her chaperone aunt and some of the more nefarious crewmen shipwrecked. Amongst the saved luggage is the 12th biggest diamond in the world.

… And then the murders start happening…

Nevertheless Easy & Tubbs again save the day, but on returning stateside, the surly Soldier of Fortune is made the basis of a bet between two wealthy men. One wagers that any man can be made afraid, but the other believes Easy disproves the notion. Of course, neither has asked him to participate, and after the hero is tricked into a haunted house the trouble really begins as the mountaintop dwelling is invaded by bandits wanting their perfect hideout back…

After discovering the only thing that frightens Easy, this compelling cartoon carnival ends with the heartwarming tale of newsboy Buddie Burns who turns his passion for detecting into a successful anti-crime campaign – with a little help from a certain South’un Gen’leman…

Also included here are examples of original artwork and this colossal luxury hardback compilation (pages 380 x 270mm) even offers an extra colour tear-sheet plus a full hand-coloured page by Crane, used by print processors as a guide to produce finished instalments.

This volume also heralds the irrepressible humour which Turner would increasing bring into the feature and the stories – although still action adventures – abound with breezy, light-hearted banter, outrageous situations, hilarious slapstick and outright farce: a sure-fire formula modern cinema directors plunder to this day.

Captain Easy was the grandfather of Indiana Jones, Flynn (the Librarian) Carsen and Jack (Romancing the Stone) Cotton, clearly setting the benchmark for all of them. Happily, Crane’s rip-snorting, pulse-pounding, exotically racy adventure trailblazer fell into hands every bit as talented and the huge pages in this stupendous chronicle, crackling with fun and excitement, provide the perfect stage from which to absorb and enjoy the classic tale-telling of another sublime master raconteur.

This is storytelling of impeccable quality: unforgettable, spectacular and utterly irresistible. These tales rank alongside the best of Hergé, Tezuka, Toth and Kirby and unarguably fed the imaginations of them all as they still should for today’s comics creators. Now that you have the chance to experience the strips that inspired the giants of our art form, how can you possibly resist?
Captain Easy strips © 2012 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. This edition © 2012 Fantagraphics Books, all other material © the respective copyright holders. All rights reserved.

Scorchy Smith: Partners in Danger


By Noel Sickles (Nostalgia Press)
ISBN10: 0-87897-029-0 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

This is a big year for comics and strip anniversaries. Here’s one of the very best; but good luck and deep pockets to you if you decide to act on my fervent recommendations…

For one of the most influential and well-regarded comics strips of all time, aviation feature Scorchy Smith is also one of the most enigmatic and unreachable. A surprisingly long-lived proposition running in total from March 17th 1930 to December 30th 1961, the strip took off in the heyday of adventure comics and employed a pretty impressive roster of story-makers – officially ten in total including Bert Christman (The Sandman), Frank Robbins (Johnny Hazard) and George Tuska (Buck Rogers). However, it achieved its zenith in the mere three years pioneering cartoon visionary Noel Sickles steered its course.

Noel Douglas Sickles (January 24, 1910-October 3, 1982) had a very short and barely acknowledged career as a newspaper cartoonist. He worked as a jobbing illustrator in the features department of the Associated Press – an organisation that provided top-rated news items but only cheap (if high-quality) filler material such as cartoons, ads, comic strips, recipes, horoscopes, puzzles: All the pages a local newspaper might need but couldn’t afford to produce themselves…

In 1934 Sickles took over the inexplicably popular aviation strip Scorchy Smith from animator & political cartoonist John Terry, after the creator/originator contracted rapid-acting terminal tuberculosis. The publishers required Sickles to emulate Terry’s style, which Sickles diligently did (with his first credited strip on April 2nd 1934) until Terry’s death. At that point he was invited to make the strip his own and – a driven experimenter – he replaced Terry’s scratchy, cross-hatched, intensely feathered methods with a moody impressionism that used volume, solid blacks and a careful manipulation of light sources to tell his tales. He also traded standard proscenium arch layouts for impressionistically styled (if not actually expressionistic), cinematic composition which made backgrounds and scenery an integral part of the story-telling process.

An exceedingly straight action/drama serial about a pilot for hire based on the public persona of Charles Lindbergh, the high-flying exploits of named star Scorchy Smith catalogue the travels of a stout hearted, valiant Knight of the Skies, complete with trusty sidekick, “Heinie”, flying about and Doing Good. That’s it.

Sickles famously never worked to a plan when writing the strip, he just made it up as he went along to avoid boring himself. For an extended exploration of his chimeric art process you should read R C Harvey’s Meanwhile…: a superb biography of Sickles’s friend and studio-mate Milton Caniff, who sat across from the innovator taking notes and making his own inspired style revolutions…

Stories abound that the two frequently collaborated. Certainly, Caniff admitted to helping out with deadlines and story-polishing, but the bold visuals were always the product of a driven and dedicated seeker of artistic truths. The Chiaroscurist style developed by Sickles was adopted by Caniff, although he largely eschewed the lavish use of photomechanical dot-screens Sickles applied to create different flavours of Black in his monochrome masterpieces.

Reprinted in this slim tome are three thrillers from that brief period. ‘Lafarge’s Gold’ (10th October 1935 – January 30th 1936), ‘New York, N. Y.’ (January 31st 1936 – March 18th 1936) and ‘Desert Escape’ (March 19th 1936 – August 14th 1936) all come from the very end of Sickles’ strip career, with a pretty girl swindled out of a goldmine, big-city conmen, and Tuaregs and the Foreign Legion providing admittedly lacklustre narrative maguffins. However, the bravura vivacity and artistic flair employed by Sickles to tell these tales elevate the B-movie plots into breathtaking high art drama by the sheer magnificence of the drawing and design.

Over his tenure, the great experimenter pushed the minor strip’s syndication to over 250 papers, so he asked for a raise. When he was refused, he quit, with his last episode published on October 24th 1936. Noel Sickles left the restricted and drudge-work world of newspaper strips, chasing the greater challenge of higher education. He eventually settled into the more appreciative and challenging magazine illustration field, making new fans in the Saturday Evening Post, Life and Readers Digest. His few months in narrative story-telling changed our entire industry, not so much with what he did, but by the way he did it and who he shared his discoveries with. He is an unsung immortal, and his brief output deserves a commemorative, retrospective collection more than any other creator that I can think of. Until the precious few previous collections are rereleased – and preferably in digitised formats – lost gems like this will have to suffice.
© 1936 The A. P.

Hägar the Horrible: The Epic Chronicles – Dailies 1980-1981


By Dik Browne (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78116-715-1 (HB)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Perfect Traditional Plunder-fun… 8/10

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Although very much in decline these days, for nearly 200 years cartoon strips and gag-panels were the universal medium of wit, satire, mirth and cultural exchange. Latterly we purveyors of primarily sequential narrative have exhibited an unhappy tendency to become protective and parochial about our own particular specialism within the greater art form. How many times have we heard an artist or writer working on a hot new comic book property revelling in sales of 50 thousand monthly copies, almost simultaneously disparage strips such as Dilbert, Dick Tracy or Garfield whose daily readership can be numbered in millions, if not billions?

Let’s all just try to remember that tastes differ, and that we’re all just making lines on a surface here, and most especially that TV and Computer Games are the real enemy of our industry, shall we?

OK, rant over.

Mainstream cartooning is a huge daily joy to a vast and often global readership whose needs are quite different from those of hard-core, dedicated comic fans, or even that ever-growing base of intrigued browsers dipping their toes in the sequential narrative pool. Even the stuck-up stickybeaks who have STILL pointedly “never read a comic” have enjoyed strips or panels, and in this arena Britain has seen not only a golden bounty of home produced material but also imported some of the very best the rest of the world has to offer.

Richard Arthur Allan “Dik” Browne was a native New Yorker born in 1917 who studied at Cooper Union and apprenticed as a copy boy and art-bod for the New York Journal America before joining the US Army. His wartime duties in the Engineering Corps included strategic map-making, but whilst in service he also created the comic strip Jinny Jeep about the Women’s Army Corps, which set the tone for his peacetime career. As a professional cartoonist and illustrator, he worked for Newsweek and in advertising after mustering out, gaining a reputation as a superb logo designer (The Campbell Soup Kids, Chiquita Banana and the Birdseye Bird number amongst his most memorable creations).

Dik also dabbled with comic books – a few Classics Illustrated Junior issues – and produced children’s books, before teaming up in 1954 with Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker to draw hugely successful spin-off strip Hi and Lois. Whilst illustrating that family comedy – and deviously training his sons Chance and Chris to take eventually over his cartooning duties – Browne devised another strip that he would write as well as render.

Hägar the Horrible debuted through the King Features Syndicate on February 4th 1973 and quickly became a global hit. The strip is a fixture of 1900 papers in 56 countries and a dozen languages with the characters migrating to books, comic albums, games, animated movies, toys and more. Dik Browne retired from cartooning in 1988 and died from cancer on June 4th 1989. Chance continued Hi and Lois whilst Chris, assisted by Gary Hallgren, wielded pen, waved sword and wore the chief’s horned helmet on Hägar until his own death on February 5th 2023…

A certified classic of World Cartooning, Hägar the Horrible is the ongoing subject of comprehensive collectors series. This one – the sixth monolithic hardback compendium of a treasured and much missed series – is a personal favourite, covering 7th July 1980 – January 2nd 1982, with the hard-drinking, voracious sea-roving Viking and his scurvy crew trekking out to far climes before perennially staggering home to their quirky families in a never-ending stream of sight gags, painful puns and surreal situations.

We open with a passionate reverie from a close associate and fellow star cartoonist in the Foreword by Lynn Johnston before Chris Browne shares memories of one of his dad’s most imaginative and appealing children’s books (The Land of Lost Things, co-created with Mort Walker) in ‘The Lost World of Dik Browne’. Then, before the cavalcade of comic calamity commences, readers old and new are regaled with a handy chart of the Hägar Family Tree, reintroducing the great man and his doughty dependents: Helga the long-suffering wife, studious son Hamlet and troublesome teenaged daughter Honi. Also making an appearance are faithful canine Snert, stroppy house-duck Kvack and the hero’s faithful if intellectually challenged sidekick Lucky Eddie

The magic of these daily strips’ stream of japes and capers is that they constantly revisit established themes and hot-button topics. Over hundreds of pages that follow you will see Hägar’s perpetual struggle to bring home the bacon (and wine and gold and textiles and…), spar with Helga as she fruitlessly struggles to civilise her barbaric oaf of a man, and Honi’s torment as she pines equally for seedy musician Lute and noble knight Sir Philip Courtright whilst testing out other matrimonial options; and alternatively considers a career as an axe-swinging Valkyrie…

Bookish Hamlet is always there to disappoint and delight his gregarious, bellicose dad; Snert and Kvack frequently outwit and appal the humans who share their home whilst Lucky Eddie and the mismatched crew of incompetent sea-reavers follow the red-bearded rascal into battle against foreign armies, daunting dragons, a coterie of assorted clergy and the unwelcoming elements, content in the knowledge that somehow, somewhere they will find more booze…

Enticing, irrepressible, outrageously old-fashioned, utterly unreconstructed, hilarious and yet deeply satisfying, Hägar the Horrible is a masterpiece of the strip cartoonists’ unique art form and one guaranteed to deliver delight over and over again to young and old alike.
Hägar the Horrible is © 2014 King Features Syndicate ™ & © Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. All strips © 1980 & 1981 King Features Syndicate. All rights reserved. All other material © 2014 their respective authors.

Kids Are Still Weird – and More Observations From Parenthood


By Jeffrey Brown (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-344-8 (digest TPB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-345-5

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Fabulous Family Fable … 9/10

It’s never too late to find a treasure or have a good time. Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown certainly knows that, as a glance at any of his painfully incisive autobiographical mini-comics, quirky literary graphic novels and hilarious all-ages comedy cartoons will show.

Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1975, Brown studied Fine Art at the Chicago Art Institute but abandoned painting to concentrate on comics. His intense, bizarrely funny observational strips garnered him fans amongst in-the-know consumers and fellow creators alike: all finding something to love in such varied fare as his 4-volume “Girlfriend Trilogy” (Unlikely, AEIOU and Every Girl is the End of the World For Me and opening shot Clumsy), Bighead, A Matter of Life, Little Things, Funny, Misshapen Body, Undeleted Scenes, Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations, Little Things or Sulk. If he’s new to you and you’re looking for a new multi-ranging talent to follow, other career treats include the Lucy & Andy Neanderthal series, slyly satirical all-ages funny stuff for The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror, Marvel’s Strange Tales, Incredible Change-Bots, and similar visual venues.

Happily, unlike so many creators with such an eclectic oeuvre, Brown also achieved a measure of mainstream success thanks to a keen artistic sense and lifelong love affair with the most significant popular arts phenomenon of the last 45 years. In 2012 Brown created a breakout best-seller with an hilarious exploration of soft, nurturing side of the Dark Lord of the Sith. Wondering what might have been, Brown had the most dangerous man (more or less) in the Empire spend a little quality time with his missing offspring.

The hilarious pre (Jedi) school experiences of Darth Vader and Son (as would have been seen in Star Wars – Episode Three and a Half) were followed by Vader’s Little Princess, Star Wars: Jedi Academy and more, investigating deliriously daft and telling snatches of Skywalker domesticity – like baseball practise with light sabres – and was utterly irresistible.

No fan of the all-conquering franchise could possibly do without those deliciously sweet treats and those superbly subversive cartoon confections fully inform this stunning collation of similar kiddie hijinks which exploit the best thing about being a cartoonist with children… ready-made, constant gag ideas just waiting to be shared…

A follow-up to 2014’s Kids are Weird, here Brown and wife Jennifer reveal more things Oscar – and his little brother Simon – do and say that make sense to them but cause hidebound adults to gasp, splutter, spit-take and reach for notebooks. It’s a world of froot loops and green poops, toys (soft and so not) and declamatory statements, books read and trips misremembered and a package of experiences designed to prompt the response “yeah, but mine went…”

Both delicious and agonising in their forthright simplicity, these non-sequential pictorial snippets reveal how we’ve all been there, or somewhere quite near. Packed with joyous wonder, Kids Are Still Weird is a magical delight for all engaged in raising the next generation and an intoxicating examination of what makes us human, hopeful and incorrigible…
© 2024 Jeffrey Brown.

Everything’s Coming Up Beatrix – A Breaking Cat News Adventure (volume 6)


By Georgia Dunn (Andrews McMeel)
ISBN: 978-1-52487-974-7 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-5248-9062-6

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Categorically Unmissable… 9/10

There’s a burgeoning trend amongst certain men – mostly loitering on the internet – to think their threat of replacing women they can’t “get” with sex-bots that don’t exist is in some way a deterrent to being turned down by people they don’t have the ability to ask nicely in the first place. These uncouth, mis-evolved oafs also warn that if the “females” don’t wise up and lower their standards they will be stuck with living with cats…

Guys – and I’m using the term in the least pejorative manner I can muster – wise up, yourselves. Neither of those propositions are unwelcome outcomes. Cats already rule the world and you just can’t compete.

On any level.

In 2016, illustrator and cartoonist Georgia Dunn found a way to make her hairy housemates (the ones with more than two feet) earn their keep after watching them converge on a domestic accident and inquisitively, interminably poke their whiskery little snouts into the mess. That incident led to Breaking Cat News: a hilariously beguiling webcomic detailing how her forthright felines operate their own on-the-spot news-team, with studio anchor Lupin, and field reporters Elvis (investigative) and Puck (commentary) delivering around-the-clock reports on the events that really resonate with cats – because, after all, who else matters?

On March 27th 2017, a suitably modified (for which read fully redrawn and recoloured) version began newspaper syndication, alternating with new material designed expressly for print consumption. As the strip and cast grew, print publication led to books like these – also a far more enticing prospect than any night out with the boys…

If you’re a returning customer or already follow the strip, you’re au fait with a constantly expanding cast and ceaselessly surreal absurdity, but this stuff is so welcoming, even the merest neophyte can jump right in with no confusion… other than that which is intentional…

Be warned though, Dunn is a master of emotional manipulation and never afraid to tug heartstrings. Always keep hankies close. You too, lads…

In this volume, the strip’s spookier whimsy-corners are revisited, and the year’s seasonal markers (a mainstay of most newspaper comic strips for more than a century) are gleefully addressed as the news-mews crew and other occupants of the ancient (by US standards!) house pop up in short gags and extended serial dramas, beginning with a passionate yet hilarious cartoon polemic encouraging everyone to defend libraries, librarians and reading itself in today’s dangerously post-literate America.

Returning to episodic riffs in celebration of ‘Fuzzy Blanket Season’, we see the Dunn’s toddler – under the guidance of the scoop-starved kitties – cope with the loss of plushy pal Pengo. His return from the washing machine leads to learning all about the dangers of peanut butter before the felines face another crunchy leaf crisis and anticipate impending Halloween treats through the eyes of the new baby.

The jaded kitties clue in viewers to the best comestibles, carry on the search for legendary cryptid “The mailman” and celebrate the joyous resurrection of ‘The Space Heater’, with a “camp in” and some scary tales…

An extended frightening yarn – which does end happily, my nervous darlings – finds three-legged Puck indulge his passion for climbing and get lost in the house’s superstructure. When he is in danger of suffocating, ghosts of previous pets and the old lady who originally owned the place augment the frantic, still-breathing searchers…

The story of the were-floof segues into more spectral surprises – such as the advent of Count Puckula – before order of a catly kind is ultimately restored, leading to riffs on feline trophy-taking, coiffure gaffes and monsters under beds. When  Christmas and New Year’s come, the cats are ready even if The People aren’t, and no decoration or fancy edible is safe. At least wrapping paper is a gift that keeps on giving and giving and giving and…

January sees a big expose on ‘Shelves, the Silent Killer’, more “facts” about snow – and groundhogs – as well as sweaters, colds, why the People bathe, and contagious cat clumsiness. Food items are always newsworthy, and a protracted debate on the point of lettuce leads to fun with temporary foster kitten and agent of chaos Beatrix

Time marches on to St. Patrick’s Day, which is co-opted by adherents of feline patron saint St. Gertude to launch new holiday ‘St. Catty’s Day’, complete with a bundle of new traditions. Eating corned beef might not make the final cut, though…

Another high point comes with the launch of affiliate BCW, but is the world ready for Best Cat Wrestling and glam-costumed kitty luchadores? If not there’s always cake and reading. That’s what new cat Sophie prefers, much to outside cat Tommy’s disappointment. It almost makes up for The Woman running out of coffee and English period detective dramas.

By the time Peep Toad season starts, Beatrix is moving on to her forever home – a book shop – and social media goes into  underdrive. At least old pals like the “gypsy” cats are happy to provide entertainment to the news-starved, and there is always cat yoga, home-tanning, sock-hunting, new toys to review and the start of baseball season…

As always Rolling News episodes revisit favourite themes like things that don’t need to be on shelves, climbing into bags, kibble, packaging helping The People eat, sleep and exercise…

Closing festivities is another selection of activity pages considered as Breaking Cat News: More to Explore providing full painted and fully-detailed tips and plans on how to ‘Make your own Bookmarks!’, ‘Make a Little Book!’ and ‘Build a Reading Fort!’

Outrageous, alarming, extra-especially courageous and always charming – and certainly often far too autobiographical for comfort – the romps, riffs and occasional sad bits about a fully integrated multi-species family is a growing necessity of life for many folk – just like most men simply Are Not. Smart, witty, imaginative and deliciously whimsical, Breaking Cat News is fabulously funny, infinitely re-readable feel-good fun rendered with artistic elan and a light and breezy touch to delight not just us irredeemable cat-addicts but also anyone in dire need of a good laugh.
Everything’s Coming Up Beatrix © 2023 Georgia Dunn. All rights reserved.

Bloom County: Real, Classy, & Compleat 1980-1989


By Berkeley Breathed (Little, Brown & Co./IDW)
ISBN: 978-1-63140-976-9 (HB/Digital editions)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in far less enlightened times.

Oh Joy! Oh Joy! More American elections!

This review is a blatant deception. As usual, I’ve cited a specific release you should have – especially if you’re a hedonistic sucker for the comfortingly tactile and simultaneously intoxicating buzz of a sturdy, well-bound block of processed tree, glue, stitches and inks containing wonderful stories and images – and it’s worth every penny. Actually, though, I’m really telling you to take a look at one remarkable creator’s entire output…

For most of the 1980s and half of the 1990s, Berke Breathed dominated the American newspaper comic strip scene with his astoundingly funny, edgy-yet-surreal political fantasy Bloom County (8th December 1980 to August 6th). All his stuff is fully available digitally – so don’t dawdle here with my reviews, just get them now!

At the top of his game and swamped with dazzling awards like Pulitzer prizes, Breathed retired from strip work to concentrate on a series of lavish children’s fantasy picture books – such as Red Ranger Came Calling and Mars Needs Moms! They rank among the best America has ever produced. Get them too.

His first foray into the field was 1991’s A Wish for Wings That Work: a Christmas parable featuring Breathed’s signature character, and his most charmingly human. Opus is a talking penguin, reasonably well-educated (for America), archaically erudite, genteel, emotionally vulnerable; insecure yet unfalteringly optimistic (think Alan Alda in a tux and fat-suit). His two most fervent dreams are to be reunited with his absent mother one day, and that in the fullness of time he might fly like a “real” bird…

Between 2003 and 2008, Breathed revived Opus as a Sunday strip, but eventually capitulated to a career-long antipathy to manic deadline pressures in newspaper production and the often-insane, convoluted contradictions of editorial censorship. It seemed his ludicrous yet appealing cast of misfits – all deadly exponents of irony, sarcasm and common sense residing in the heartland of American conservatism – were done and gone for good.

Ultimately, however, the internet provided a platform for the opinionated artist to resume his role as a gadfly commentator on his own terms. Since 2015, Bloom County has returned to mock, expose and shame capitalism, celebrities, consumerism, popular culture, politicians, religious leaders and people who act like idiots. He does it at his own pace (only seven strips in 2023!) and became guardian of America’s artistic soul when he began – with permission – to incorporate Bill Watterson’s immaculate clowns Calvin and Hobbes into his outings.

These post-2015 efforts, unconstrained by syndicate pressures to not offend advertisers, are also available in book collections. You’ll want those too, and be delighted to learn all that Bloom County treasure is available in digital formats – fully annotated to compensate for the history gap if you didn’t live through events such as Iran-Gate, Live-Aid, Star Wars (both cinematic and military-industrial complex versions), assorted cults and televangelists experiencing less that divine retribution and the other tea-cup storms that have made us Baby Boomers so rude and defensive…

Once more, I’m recommending an entire canon of work rather than a specific volume, but Bloom County, Outland, Opus and – oh, heaven, unbound! – the triumphant second coming of the Bloom County crew of recent years are absolute classics of comics creation: political, polemical, sardonic, surreal, groundbreaking, witty, acerbic, frequently angry and always, ALWAYS cripplingly funny.

I barely survived those years and can honestly admit it’s probably the best treatise of modern history and social criticism you will ever see.

Set firmly in The Heartland – what we’ve all accepted as Trump’s fact-resistant, rationality-immune base territory – the strip pitilessly lampoons fads, traditions and icons through the lens of youngsters and a menagerie of astute talking animals living in or around the Bloom Boarding House. Also adding to the confusions are bastions and bulwarks of American society: horny ambulance-chasing jock lawyer Steve Dallas, Vietnam survivor Cutter John, liberal feminist school teacher Bobbi Harlow, New Age hippie Quiche Lorraine, corrupt Senator Bedfellow, and many more lampoonable archetypes, like fundamentalist Christians and Donald Trump…

The true stars though are the kids and beasts who perpetually vex, perplex and test them, asking questions and taking radical action to set the old order “all higgledy-piggledy” – such as their creation of a third force in politics: The Meadow Party that has (unsuccessfully, thus far) fought every presidential election since 1980…

Hilarious, biting, wildly imaginative and crafted with a huge amount of sheer emotional guts and empathy, these strips are simply incomparable. If you love laughter, despise chicanery and crave unique characters and great art, this is a universe you simply must inhabit.

… And while you’re at it, get those other books I mentioned. It can’t be Christmas without them. When the family have almost ruined the holiday, of if you find yourself somewhere other than where you’d want or expect to be, this is what you want to restore your spirits. Kids too.
© 2017, 2020 Berkeley Breathed. All Rights Reserved.

Batman: Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1968 – 1969


By Whitney Ellsworth, Joe Giella, Al Plastino & various (IDW)
ISBN: 987-1-63140-121-3 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

For more than seven decades in America the newspaper comic strip was the Holy Grail cartoonists and graphic-narrative storytellers hungered for. Syndicated across the country and often the planet, winning millions of readers and accepted (in most places) as a more mature and sophisticated form of literature than comic-books, it also paid better, with the greatest rewards and accolades being reserved for the full-colour Sunday page. So it was always something of a poisoned chalice when a comic book character became so popular that it swam against the tide (after all weren’t the funny-books invented just to reprint strips in cheap, accessible form?) and became a syndicated serial strip. Superman, Wonder Woman and Archie Andrews made the jump soon after their debuts and many features have done so since.

Due to war-time complications, the first newspaper Batman and Robin strip was slow getting its shot, but when the Dynamic Duo finally hit the Funny Pages the feature quickly proved to be one of the best-regarded, highest quality examples of the trend, both in Daily and Sunday formats. Yet somehow the strip never achieved the circulation it deserved, even though the Sundays were eventually given a new lease of life when DC began issuing vintage stories in the 1960s for Batman 80-page Giants and Annuals. The exceedingly high-quality all-purpose adventures were ideal short stories and added an extra cachet of exoticism for young readers already captivated by simply seeing tales of their heroes that were positively ancient and redolent of History with a capital “H”.

Such was not the case in the mid-1960s when, for a relatively brief moment, mankind went bananas for superheroes in general and most especially went “Bat-Mad”…

The Silver Age of comic books revolutionised a creatively moribund medium cosily snoozing in unchallenging complacency, bringing a modicum of sophistication to the returning genre of masked mystery men. For quite some time changes instigated by Julius Schwartz in Showcase #4 (October 1956) had rippled out in the last years of that decade, affecting all of National/DC Comics’ superhero characters but had generally bypassed The Gotham Gangbuster. Fans buying Batman, Detective Comics, World’s Finest Comics and latterly Justice League of America would read adventures that in look and tone were largely unchanged from the safely anodyne fantasies that had transformed a Dark Knight Detective into a mystery-solving, alien-fighting costumed Boy Scout just as the 1940s turned into the 1950s.

By the end of 1963, however, Schwartz having, either personally or by example, revived and revitalised the majority of DC’s line (and by extension and imitation, the entire industry) with his reinvention of the Superhero, was asked to work his magic with the creatively stalled and near-cancellation Caped Crusaders. Installing his go-to team of creators, the Editor stripped down the accumulated luggage and rebooted the core-concept. Down – and usually out – went the outlandish villains, aliens and weird-transformation tales in favour of a coolly modern concentration on crime and detection.

Even the art-style underwent a sleek streamlining and rationalisation. The most apparent change to us kids was a yellow circle around the Bat-symbol but, far more importantly, the stories had changed. A subtle aura of genuine menace had crept back in.

At the same time Hollywood was in production of a television series based on Batman and, through the sheer karmic insanity that permeates the universe, the studio executives were basing their interpretation not upon the “New Look Batman” currently enthralling readers but the rather the addictively daft material DC was emphatically turning its editorial back on.

The Batman TV show premiered on January 12th 1966 and ran for three seasons of 120 episodes, usually airing twice weekly in the first two. It was a monumental, world-wide hit and sparked a wave of trendy imitation. Resulting media hysteria and fan frenzy generated an insane amount of Bat-awareness, no end of spin-offs and merchandise – including a movie – and introduced us all to the phenomenon of overkill. No matter how much we might squeal and froth about it, to a huge portion of this planet’s population Batman is always going to be that “Zap! Biff! Pow!” buffoonish costumed Boy Scout…

“Batmania” exploded across Earth and – almost as quickly – became toxic and vanished, but at its height led to the creation of a fresh newspaper strip incarnation. That strip was a huge syndication success and even reached fuddy-duddy Britain, not in our papers and journals but as the cover feature of weekly comic Smash! (from issue #20 onwards).

The TV show ended in March, 1968. As it foundered and faded away, global fascination with “camp” superheroes – and no, the term had nothing to do with sexual orientation no matter what you and Mel Brooks might think – burst as quickly as it had boomed. The Caped Crusader was left with a hard core of dedicated fans and followers who now wanted their hero back…

However, from the time when the Gotham Guardians could do no wrong comes a second superb compilation re-presenting the bright and breezy, sometimes zany cartoon classics of Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder, augmented by a wealth of background material, topped up with oodles of unseen scenes and background detail to delight the most ardent Baby-boomer nostalgia-freak. The fun-fest opens with more informative, picture-packed, candidly cool revelations from comics historian Joe Desris in ‘A History of the Batman and Robin Newspaper Strip: Part 2’: stuffed with behind-the-scenes set photos, communications between principal players like Bob Kane and the Producers, clippings, glorious unpublished pencils from strip illustrator Joe Giella as well as newspaper promotional materials, followed by pictorial essays on ‘Newspaper Strip Trivia’ and ‘Batman/Superman Crossovers’, more unpublished or censored strips and a note on the eclectic sources used to compile this collection before the comics cavorting continue…

Dailies and Sundays were scripted by former DC editor (and the company’s Hollywood liaison) Whitney Ellsworth and initially illustrated by Kane’s long-term art collaborator Sheldon Moldoff, before inker Giella was tapped by the studio to produce a slicker, streamlined modern look – usually as penciller but ALWAYS as embellisher. Since the feature was a 7-day-a-week job, Giella often called in comic book buddies to help lay-out and draw the strip; luminaries like Carmine Infantino, Bob Powell, Werner Roth, Curt Swan and others.

In those days, monochrome Dailies and full-colour Sundays were mostly offered as separate packages and continuity strips often ran different stories for each. For Batman the strip started out that way, but by the time of the stories in this volume had switched to unified 7-day storylines.

Riding a wave and feeling ambitious, Ellsworth & Giella had started their longest saga yet in July 1967, combining the tales of ‘Shivering Blue Max’ with ‘“Pretty Boy” Floy and Flo’, wherein a perpetually hypothermic criminal pilot accidentally downed the Batcopter and erroneously claimed the underworld’s million dollar bounty on Batman and Robin.

Our heroes were not dead, but the crash caused the Batman to lose his memory and, whilst Robin and faithful manservant Alfred sought to remedy his affliction, Max had collected his prize and jetted off for sunnier climes. With Batman missing, neophyte crimebuster Batgirl then tracked down the heroes – incidentally learning their secret identities – and was instrumental in restoring him to action… if not quite his fully-functioning faculties.

However, when underworld paymaster BG (Big) Trubble heard the heroes had returned, he quite understandably wanted his money back, forcing already-broke Max back to Gotham where he gullibly fell foul of Pretty Boy whilst that hip young gunsel and twin sister Flo were enacting a murderous scam to fleece a horoscope-addicted millionaire…

The tale picks up here on January 1st 1968 with Batman held at gunpoint, patiently trying to convince supremely suggestible, wealthy whale Tyrone Koom he is not there to assassinate him as the tycoon’s new astrologer Madame Zodiac (AKA Flo Floy) was insisting she had foreseen. When her minted dupe proves incapable of murder, Flo/Zodiac takes matters into her own hands by knocking out the mighty manhunter, but despite all her and her brother’s arguments, the millionaire cannot be convinced to pull the trigger…

Instead, befuddled Koom – still thinking the masked marvel wants him dead – has Batman bundled off to an isolated island where a fully-automated, exotic palace of wonders will act as the Caped Crusader’s impregnable prison for the remainder of his life. With the hero as good as dead Pretty Boy & Flo plan to claim BG’s million dollar bounty, but have not reckoned on Blue Max horning in…

When the pilot collides with Robin (tracking his senior partner by Bat-Radio) the erstwhile enemies reluctantly join forces but cannot prevent Batman’s banishment. Moreover, in the frantic melee, the Boy Wonder suffers a broken leg. Meanwhile, lost in an endless ocean, Batman slowly adjusts to life of enforced luxury on palatial penitentiary island Xanadu, unaware that life at home has become vastly more complicated for Robin and Alfred. Not only do they believe the Cowled Crimebuster dead but Max has ferreted out their secret identities and blackmailed them into cooperating in his vengeance scheme against Pretty Boy. Max plans to prevent the young thug collecting the reward by impersonating Batman…

Events spiral to a grim climax when Max finally confronts his criminal enemies and Koom realises he’s been played for a fool. The dupe’s guilt-fuelled final vengeance ends all the villains at once, but not before Pretty Boy presses a destruct button that will cause Xanadu to obliterate itself in an atomic explosion.

Thankfully Superman and especially Sea King Aquaman have been mobilised to help find the missing Masked Manhunter but the countdown – although slow – is unstoppable…

During this sequence the severely overworked Giella bowed out and a veteran Superman illustrator took over the pitiless illustration schedule. Alfred John “Al” Plastino was a prodigious artist with a stellar career. He had been active in the early days of comic books, with credits including Captain America and Dynamic Man before serving in the US Army. His design talents were quickly recognised and he was seconded to Grumman Aerospace, The National Inventors Council and latterly The Pentagon, to design war posters and field manuals for the Adjutant General’s office.

In 1948 Plastino joined DC and quickly became one of Superman’s key artists. He drew many landmark stories and – with writer Otto Binder – created Brainiac, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes. From 1960-1969 he ghosted the syndicated Superman newspaper strip and whilst still drawing Batman, also took over Ferd’nand in 1970, drawing it until his retirement in 1989. He was extremely versatile and apparently tireless. In 1982-1983 he drew Nancy Sundays after creator Ernie Bushmiller passed away and was controversially hired by United Media to produce fill-in episodes of Peanuts when Charles Schulz was in dispute with the company. Al Plastino died in 2013.

With a new policy of introducing guest stars from DC’s pantheon, Plastino was the ideal artist successor and as the assembled champions desperately sought to find and save their missing comrade, a new tone of straight dramatic adventure largely superseded the campy comedy shenanigans of the TV series.

The search for Batman had been continually hampered by the Man of Steel’s strange weakness and loss of powers, but now that the Gotham Gangbusters were reunited they concentrated their efforts on finding out why. The deductive trail soon led to bone fide mad scientist ‘Diabolical Professor Zinkk’ (originally running March 19th to August 6th) and saw the Dynamic Duo tracking down a mercenary maniac who had found a way to broadcast Kryptonite waves and was oh-so-slowly killing Superman for a big payout from Metropolis’ mobsters…

This is a cunningly convoluted, beautifully realised and supremely suspenseful tale with the clock ticking down on a deranged and dying Metropolis Marvel as Batman & Robin hunt rogue radio-physicist Zoltan Zinkk to divine the method by which he brings low Earth’s greatest defender. It culminates in a savage, spectacular and truly explosive showdown before the World’s Finest heroes finally triumph…

Another tense thriller then sees Aquaman return to share the spotlight, beginning with determined “dolly-bird” Penelope Candy perpetually plaguing news outlets and even pestering the Gotham Police Department in a tireless quest to be put in touch with Batman. The man in question is blithely unaware: Bruce Wayne is dealing with a small personal problem. In his infinite wisdom he intends for Robin to temporarily retire whilst young Dick Grayson completes a proper education! To that end has engaged a new tutor for the strongly-protesting Boy Wonder…

With that all acrimoniously settled, the Caped Crimebuster roars out into the night and is filmed falling to his doom in a river trying to save apparently suicidal Penny Candy…

At first the heartbroken sidekick doesn’t know Batman is still alive but has actually been drawn into a Byzantine scheme devised by Penny to find her missing father. Oceanographer Archimedes Candy disappeared after working with Aquaman on a serum allowing humans to live beneath the sea. Penny is certain someone has abducted the researcher and, after Batman contacts Robin, they have the junior crimebuster send out a radio alert for the Sea King, before impatiently trying the potion together. ‘Breathing Underwater’ (August 7th – December 15th), they set off on a sub-sea search for the missing sea scientist…

Of course Penny’s fears of foul play are justified and before long she and Batman are reunited with Dr. Candy. Sadly, that’s as captives of nefarious international smuggler Cap’n Wolf and they are nearly done to death by being abandoned on a mountain in the airy atmosphere they can no longer breathe before Aquaman arrives to settle matters.

Even as Batman makes his way home, the next adventure has started. Gangster fugitive Killer Killey devised the world’s most perfect hiding place and in ‘I Want Bruce Wayne’s Identity!’ (December 15th 1968 – May 30th 1969) abducts the mild-mannered millionaire so a crooked plastic surgeon can swap their faces and fingerprints. The scheme is hugely helped by the fact that Dick has been packed off on a world cruise with tutor Mr. Murphy and his daughter Gazelle whilst Alfred has used accumulated vacation time for an extended visit to England.

When Killer captures Bruce and discovers he also has Batman, the mobster is truly exultant. However the plan goes awry as the victim escapes the death-trap which should have resulted in the authorities finding “Killey’s” drowned body, and the subsequent relocation into Wayne Manor becomes a fraught affair.

Perhaps the villain would be less troubled if he knew that although alive, the real Wayne has once again lost his memory…

Moreover, unbeknownst to anyone, neophyte crimebuster Batgirl already knows Batman’s other identity, and her suspicions are aroused by the state of the mansion and behaviour of Bruce and his new girlfriend…

As events escalate and spiral out of control, Killer – still safely hidden behind Wayne’s face – starts to crack: stupidly antagonising the one person he thought he could always rely on…

This volume’s comics cavortings end with the opening shots of ‘My Campaign to Ruin Bruce Wayne’ (which ran from May 31st – December 25th 1969) but as only seven days of that tale unfold in this volume I think we’ll leave that for the next volume and simply say…

To Be Continued, Bat-Fans…

The stories in this compendium reveal how gentler, stranger times and an editorial policy focusing as much on broad humour as Batman’s reputation as a crime-fighter swiftly returned to all-out action/adventure once Batmania gave way to global overload and ennui. That was bad for the strip at the time but happily resulted in some truly wonderful yarns for die-hard fans of the comic book Caped Crusader. If you’re of a certain age or open to timeless thrills, spills & chills this a truly stunning collection well worth your attention.

Batman: Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1968-1969 was the second in a set of huge (305 x 236 mm) lavish, high-end hardback collections starring the Dynamic Duo/Trio (and pals!), and a welcome addition to the superb commemorative series of Library of American Comics which has preserved and re-presented in luxurious splendour such landmark strips as Li’l Abner, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, Bringing Up Father, Rip Kirby, Polly and her Pals and many other immortal cartoon icons.

If you love the era, the medium or even just graphic narrative, these are great comics reading, and this is a book you simply must have.

… And maybe one day the compilers will get around to making them all available in digital edition too…
© 2014 DC Comics. All rights reserved. Batman and all related characters and elements ™ & © DC Comics.