Tag Archives: comic books

The United States of Snark: Tad Dorgan’s Indoor Sports

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Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan (1877-1929) was a master of the miniscule moment. His wildly popular Indoor Sports single panel strip (1913-1929) captured, and mercilessly chided, the small stuff: judging the new boyfriend, or the new suit, or the new office boy; impressing the boss by laughing (too hard) at his jokes; saving face when the least experienced poker player wins the big pot; evaluating the new stenographer; a barroom braggart. This was a kind of cartoon social realism that would become familiar in comics pages across the next decades, because Tad pioneered the format. These indoor landscapes typically foregrounded minor pretention with a surrounding “peanut gallery” of onlooking family, office workers, bar customers offering snide asides on the situation.

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Deep Cuts: Quick Takes on Our Golden Age of Comic Strip Curiosities

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About 10,000 different comic strip series emerged in American newspapers during the medium’s first 75 years, Jerry Robinson estimated in his 1974 history. I guess it all depends on what you count. Holtz’s magisterial 2012 “Encyclopedia” included just over 7,000 entries covering more than a century of strips. Whatever math you use, however, it is clear that a signature feature of the comics medium has been the sheer volume of creative variety. In fact, I would argue that among the competing commercialized mass media of the last century, the comic strip enjoyed a unique range of idiosyncratic, highly personal artistic visions.

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“Stop Biting!”: Cairo Jones’ Hard-Boiled Cheesecake

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The home front during World War II was a wonderful arena for gender reassignment. As we explored via E. Simms Campbell’s quick-witted and curvaceous “Cuties,” women adopted new roles with so many American men overseas, and this helped shake up, if for a while, a number of longstanding stereotypes across popular culture. Just as women were ready, willing and able to fill vacant jobs from the assembly line to management, they were just as ready to become adventure heroes.

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Exploring Pre-Code Comfort Comics: Atlas’ Weird Worlds and Bill Everett

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Reviewing Atlas Comics Library No. 9: Adventures Into Weird Worlds and Atlas Creator Collection, No. 3: Bill Everett

The Fantagraphics project of reprinting extended runs and top creators from 1950s Atlas comics continues at a breakneck pace. I won’t bother arguing whether such a completist approach to non-EC pre-code comics is worthwhile. Clearly the effort found a hardcore market of fans for exceptionally well restored, presented and contextualized output from the pre-Marvel days of Marvel. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo provides dense intros that both situate the title at hand as well as add to his ongoing history of Atlas. In this case we get the first 10 issues of Adventures Into Weird Worlds (1952), one of the better efforts to cash in on the peaking horror/weird comics craze. Some of the greats of the pre-code genres are here: Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Bill Everett, George Roussos, and even a Bernie Krigstein effort (albeit underwhelming). While all of these artists clearly are hacking it out here and working generally in second gear, there are joys to be found nevertheless.  

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World-Class Malice: 20 Favorite Comic Strip Villains – Part 2

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As we move more deeply into the 1930s and the peak years of comic strip adventure, some of the most recognizable and enduring cartoon fiends emerge. The villainy enlarges to suggest global criminal conspiracies and political power as it also becomes more sadistic. Newspaper comics are edging towards the outsized heroes and super-villains that formed the foundation of the comic books to come. [For the first installment of our valley of villains, refer to Part 1.

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Book Review: Hal Foster’s Tarzan Years – Building A Great White Father

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We could easily frame Hal Foster’s 1931-1937 run of Tarzan Sunday comics merely as a pleasant preamble to his magnum opus, Prince Valiant. By his own admission, Foster was a reluctant cartoonist. The successful magazine and commercial artist carried that world’s condescension towards the comic strip. Famously, he quipped in 1984 that being invited to replace Rex Maxon on the Tarzan Sundays was “To be asked to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.” But the Great Depression had hit advertising and print media hard, so Foster took the life raft. But as TASCHEN’s new and definitive reprint of his Tarzan years shows, Foster was doing more than warming up. Others like Frank Godwin and Nell Brinkley had already started to introduce less cartoony, more illustrative styles to comics pages. But Foster brought into the mix dynamic, realistic figure art, a remarkable attention to color, and an appreciation for spectacle that newspaper Sunday pages hadn’t seen since the earliest years of experimentation by the likes of McCay and Feininger.

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Calling Dick Tracy…Again: Shaking Up the Reprint Game

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Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy has been among the most reprinted strips of all time. The reasons are obvious, and I don’t need to rehash this site’s exegesis on my personal favorite. Tracy was the strip that turned me on to classic newspaper comics. Gould’s singular visual signature, his grisly violence, grotesque villains and deadpan hero made Dick Tracy compelling on so many levels. And now we get yet another packaging style from the same Library of American Comics group that finished its magisterial 29-volume complete Gould run, 1931-77. With new publishing partner Clover Press, LOAC has reworked some of its earliest projects, like the magnificent upgrade of Terry and the Pirates and the first six volumes of The Complete Dick Tracy. And now we get slipcased, paperback editions of prime-time Gould, 1941 through 1944. Much more affordable, manageable, and available than the original LOAC volumes, each of which covered about two years of comics, the four $29.99 books are also available as a discounted set from Clover. This new series started as a crowd-funded BackerKit project last year.

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