The Comics: Before 1945 - Hardcover

Walker, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810949709 ISBN 13: 9780810949706

Publisher: Abrams Books, 2004

Synopsis

In their first five decades, the funnies became an essential part of American life. Comic strip characters - Mutt and Jeff, Barny Google, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, Blondie, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Li'l Abner - were everywhere. They starred in live-action and animated films, stage plays, and radio programs, and they helped market a wide range of products. Their phrases enriched the language; their adventures, which reflected societal changes, were retold in books and inspired hit songs.
Cartoonist and historian Brian Walker's comprehensive survey - illustrated with rare original art - is the most authoritative history of American newspaper comics currently in print. It documents the fascinating origins of the comics and, decade by decade, the major trends in the funnies business. In-depth biographies of twenty-one of the most important creators of the era are featured, as well as samples of many other artists' work. The Comics Before 1945 joins the author's The Comics Since 1945 to form a classic survey of American popular culture by one of the greatest authorities in the field.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Walker has written, edited, and contributed to more than thirty-five books on cartoon art and is the author of the definitive history, The Comics: The Complete Collection.

Reviews

Something of a prequel to Walker’s already released The Comics Since 1945, this volume actually surpasses its companion’s considerable beauty and charm—if only because early newspaper comics were so whimsical and imaginative. Gorgeously illustrated, the weighty coffee-table book is organized by decade, allowing it to broadly contextualize the strips into the historical periods that gave them life. There are also brief, page-long bios of their most notable creators, among them Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Cliff Sterrett (Polly and Her Pals), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie) and Chester Gould (Dick Tracy). For the most part, however, Walker wisely steps back and lets the strips tell their own stories—a good decision since the one fault of the book lies in his prose, which tends to chug along with a kind of bland lethargy that doesn’t quite rise to the verve of his subject. While informative and factually interesting, his writing often contains all the vigor of a college textbook. But the strips themselves are perfectly chosen and lovingly laid out: from the fanciful slapstick of the Katzenjammer Kids to the protosurrealist dreamscapes of Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo and the obsessively reenacted dramas of unrequited love in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Walker follows his previous book, "The Comics Since 1945," with this similarly encyclopedic and sumptuously produced volume. He asserts that comics did not, strictly speaking, start with the Yellow Kid (whose nightshirt was at first blue). Nonetheless, the spectacular success of Richard F. Outcault's grammatically inept street urchin essentially inaugurated American comic-strip culture. Walker revisits such popular titles as "Blondie," a high-living-flapper strip that subsequently became a tale about everyman Dagwood Bumstead; "Li'l Abner," said by John Steinbeck to contain some of the best writing in the world; "Secret Agent X-9," originally written by Dashiell Hammett; and the nearly forgotten "Wash Tubbs," which featured a valiant but flawed do-gooder named Captain Easy, the prototype for the modern superhero. Over the next half century, comics gradually split into the two main genres still recognizable today: improbable adventure stories and situational high jinks.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

In the first half of the twentieth century, the newspaper comic strip was arguably as important and influential as television is today, reaching millions of avid daily readers. Walker, cartoonist cofounder of the International Museum of Cartoon Art, presents a comprehensive chronological overview of the first five decades of the funnies. Emphasis isn't necessarily on the best-remembered strips, either classics that survive to this day, such as Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, and popeye, or artistic triumphs like Little Nemo in Slumberland and Krazy Kat. For Walker also spotlights lesser-known gems, such as Cliff Sterrett's visually radical polly and Her Pals and Roy Crane's groundbreaking adventure serial Wash Tubbs, and even notes deserving obscurities: Frank Godwin's gorgeously rendered female adventure hero connie, for instance, and Crockett Johnson's delightful barnaby. The text is knowledgeable and informative, but the strips, faithfully reproduced from syndicate proofs, newspaper pages, and, in many cases, the original drawings themselves, rightfully predominate. This thoughtfully assembled partner to The Comics since 1945 (2002) belongs with it in any pop-culture collection. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Abrams Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810949709
• ISBN 13: 9780810949706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336