Category: Graphic Novels

Early Strips in Full Color

By Richard F. Outcault with an introduction by August Derleth (Dover Publications)
ISBN: 0-1-486-23006-6

Richard F. Outcault is credited with being the father (fans and historians are never going to stop debating this one, but Outcault is one of the prime-est contenders) of the modern comic strip with his creation The Yellow Kid for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1895 (the feature was actually entitled Hogan’s Alley). He was legendarily fickle and quickly tired of his creation, and of the subsequent features he created for William Randolph Hearst in the New York Journal during that period of bitter newspaper circulation warfare that gave rise to the term “Yellow Journalism”.

In 1902, he created a Little Lord Fauntleroy style moppet called Buster Brown, but the angelic looks concealed a boy perpetually wedded to mischief, pranks and poor decision making. Once again he quickly became bored and moved on, but this strip was another multi-media sensation, which captured public attention and spun off a plethora of franchises.

Buster was a merchandising Bonanza. By a weird circumstance, Buster Brown Shoes became one of the biggest chain-stores in America, and in later years produced a periodical comic book Premium (a giveaway magazine free to purchasers) packed with some of the greatest comic artists and adventure stories the industry had ever seen. Outcault may have dumped Buster, but the little darling never quit comics.

In this reproduction of a collection from 1904 entitled Buster Brown and his Resolutions, featuring fifteen glorious full colour strips from the first two years of the run, we meet the seemingly angelic Hellion and his faithful dog Tige, and see that if unfortunate happenstance doesn’t create chaos in the ordered and genteel life of the well-to-do Mr. and Mrs. Brown, little Buster is always happy to lend a hand. Each lavish page, rendered in a delightfully classical, illustrative line style – like Cruickshank or perhaps Charles Dana Gibson – ends with a moral or resolution, but one that is subversively ambiguous. As Buster himself says “People are usually good when there isn’t anything else to do.”

Historically pivotal, Buster Brown is also thematically a landmark in content, and a direct ancestor of the mischievous child strip that dominated the family market of the 20th century. Could Dennis the Menace (“Ours” or “Theirs”), Minnie the Minx or Bart Simpson have existed without Buster or his contemporary rivals The Katzenjammer Kids? It’s pointless to speculate, but it’s no waste of time to find and enjoy this splendid strip.

© 1974 Dover Publications. All Rights Reserved.

By Josh Simmons (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-855-8

A young man walks through the woods, until he sees a ramshackle old house. Outside he meets two young women and they strike up a conversation. Filled with high spirits they decide to explore the dilapidated old mansion.

The place is a wreck. As they cautiously move deeper into the vast manse the boy and blonde girl feel an attraction. When they discover that the back of the house has collapsed and is under water, forming an inviting pool, all three all dive in and play in the water.

In a submerged room the boy and the blonde share a kiss. The dark girl knows something has happened, that all the relationships have shifted. With a new tension they continue to explore, but nothing feels innocent now. And then the staircase collapses…

Josh Simmons has set himself a daunting task. This entire tale is told without words. Settings, scenario and character are established and the narrative undertaken purely by making pictures and by manipulating light and dark and panel and space.

The manner in which an idyll becomes a terrifying, crushing, tragic nightmare is powerful, seductive and truly overwhelming in its delivery. Simmons has succeeded in crafting a true graphic narrative, a thrilling story in a manner and with a force that no other medium could.

Silent, compelling, wonderful: This is a book no serious reader should ignore and no budding creator should miss.

© 2007 Josh Simmons. All Rights Reserved.

MR. PUMP’S LEGACY
Part 1 of THE STRATOSHIP H.22

By Hergé, translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper & Michael Turner (Egmont UK)
ISBN 13: 978-1-4052-1245-8

George Remi, world famous as Hergé, had a long creative connection to Catholicism. He had created Tintin at the behest of the Abbot Norbert Wallez, editor of the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siécle, before moving on to such strips as the mischievous ‘Quick and Flupke’, ‘Tim the Squirrel in the Far West’, ‘The Amiable Mr. Mops’, ‘Tom and Millie’ and ‘Popol Out West’, all while continuing the globe-trotting adventures of the dauntless boy reporter and his faithful dog.

In 1935, between working on The Blue Lotus and The Broken Ear he was approached by Father Courtois, the director of the French weekly newspaper Coeurs Vaillants (‘Valiant Hearts’). The paper already carried Tintin, but Courtois also wanted a strip that would depict the solid family values and situations that the seemingly orphaned boy reporter was devoid of. He also presumably wanted something less subversive than the mischievous, trouble-making working-class boy rascals ‘Quick and Flupke’.

He needed a set of characters that would typify a good, normal family: A working father, a housewife and mother, young boy, a sister, even a pet. Apparently inspired by a toy monkey called Jocko, Hergé devised the family Legrand. Jacques was an engineer, and his son Jo and daughter Zette were average kids; bright, brave, honest, smart and yet still playful. Mother stayed home, cooking and being concerned a lot, and they had a small, feisty monkey for a pet – although I suspect as Jocko was tailless, he might have been a baby chimpanzee, which “As Any Fule Kno” is actually a species of ape.

The first adventure was ‘The Secret Ray’ which is not currently available in English. A ripping yarn of scientific bandits, gangsters, mad professors, robots and, regrettably, some rather ethnically unsound incidences of cannibal savages, this is very much a product of its time in too many respects. Although Hergé came to deeply regret (and wherever possible amend) his many early uses of that era’s racial stereotyping, the island dwelling natives in Le “Manitoba” Ne Répond Plus and L’ Éruption Du Karamako (which first ran in Coeurs Vaillants from January 19th 1936 to June 1937) will now always be controversial.

It’s a true pity that such masterful and joyous work has to be viewed with caution, read strictly in context and be ascribed subtext and values that simply weren’t intended, merely because the medium is pictorial and its meaning passively acquired rather than textual, and which can therefore only be decoded by the conscious effort of reading. I also wonder how much was a quiet, sensitive artist led by an aggressively proselytising, missionary Church’s doctrine and policy… How much Church opposition was there to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 for example? And don’t get me started on Nazi Germany and the Vatican…

‘Mr. Pump’s Legacy’ is much less culturally and commercially troublesome. When septuagenarian millionaire-technocrat, speed-fiend (that’s velocity, not pharmacology) and adrenalin junkie John Archibald Pump, the “American Collar-Stud King” dies in a car crash (at 155 mph, so he probably went surprised but happy) he leaves a ten million dollar prize: The first person or persons to fly non-stop between New York and Paris at an average speed of 1000 kilometres per hour will secure said cash. But if nobody wins within one year the money will revert to his ne’er-do-well nephews.

The contest captures world imagination in the Age of Speed, and many try for the prize, including S.A.F.C.A., the aeronautical company that Jacques Legrand works for. Very soon both the engineer and his family become the targets of skulduggery and sabotage as his groundbreaking design gradually becomes a beautiful flying machine. Assaults, poison-pen letters and threats, murder attempts, blackmail and even kidnapping, nothing can stop the project whilst the canny Jo and Zette are there to foil them. Even when the completed plane is targeted by an aerial bombardment, the resourceful children have a solution. Starting the plane, they fly away from the bomber, but become lost in the night and clouds.

With their fuel almost exhausted they spot a tiny island in a vast sea and manage to land the plane safely. How can they return the ship in time to win the Prize? Without food, water, fuel or any idea where they are, can they survive long enough to be found?

Combining all-ages thrills and slap-stick comedy with magical art and superb designs, the masterful Hergé, a creator rapidly reaching the peak of his powers, has produced in this cliff-hanging volume of adventure a lost classic, and one worthy of much greater public attention. With Christmas looming it could be the best £6.99 you’ll spend this year…

© 1951, 1979, 2007 Editions Casterman, Paris& Tournai. All Rights Reserved.
English text © 1987, 2005 Egmont UK Limited. All Rights Reserved.

By Various (Titan Books)
ISBN: 1-84023-151-3

Here’s another knowing laugh-fest culled from the pages of the Simpsons comic book (featuring material originally printed in issues# 10 and #32-35). ‘Rhymes and Misdemeanours’ (by Jeff Rosenthal, Tim Bavington, Stephanie Gladden, Phil Ortiz, Bill Morrison, Jeannine Black and Nathan Kane) is a sly and sarcastic pastiche of Beat Poets and Young Love as Lisa and portly intellectual Martin Prince are gripped in a savage war of sonnets and odes when poetry becomes a spectator sport at McBeans Coffee House.

Scott M. Gimple scripts the wonderful alternate unreality tale ‘The Great Springfield Frink-Out’ as the outlandish Professor Frink screws up the multiverse in a tale drawn, inked, lettered and coloured by Ortiz, Bavington, Black and Kane. ‘Burnsie on Board’ by Rob Hammersley, Gladden, Eric Tran, Tim Harkins, Black and Kane reveals how the parsimonious Mr. Burns develops some sporting spirit when he buys the Winter Olympics, and ‘To Live and Diaper in Springfield’ is the saga of how the monumental “Krusty’s Kids DayKare” monopoly was challenged by Mrs. Simpson’s homely little “Marge’s Charges”. The reckless baby-endangerment gags are courtesy of Billy Rubenstein, Ortiz, Bavington, Black and Kane.

The last long story is a tasteless tale of smuggling, tax-evasion and cheap gratification as Homer and family “win” a holiday from Mr. Burns. ‘Fan-Tasty Island’ is by Rosenthal, Luis Escobar, Bavington, Morrison, Robert Kramer, David Mowry, Richard Starkings Comicraft, Nathan Kane and Electric Crayon. Also included are the short features ‘Principal Skinner’s Bottom 40’, ‘Tiger-Teen’ (a magazine feature on those Barbershop heavyweights the Be Sharps) and the ‘Simpsons Supporters’ Suggestion Spin Cycle’ with Ian Boothby, Dan Studley, Jim Lincoln and Chris Ungar accompanying previous culprits in the creative mayhem. As ever Matt Groening takes the final blame for all the hilarity and offence in this sharp, funny and thoroughly enjoyable spin-off book.

© 1992, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000 Bongo Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.