Tag Archives: history

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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Peg-Leg Bates Gets a Cameo in Hank

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The Weekly Weird. Coulton Waugh’s experimental adventure hero Hank was the first disabled character to lead a comic strip. Shortly after losing his leg, the veteran Hank finds inspiration from real-life Broadway sensation, Peg-Leg Bates. Bates was a sensation on the stage show circuit around the country during the 30s and 40s on Broadway. The sharecropper’s son lost his leg in a cotton gun accident at the age of 12. He was determined to overcomethe disability and eventually turned it into a dance routine. More on Hank and Bates here.

“Fake News” Hot Off the 1894 Presses

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The Weekly Weird. In 1894, Puck magazine took aim at the rising influence of increasingly sensational and less costly city newspapers. Here, Frederick Burr Opper, who would go on to be one of newspaper comics’ founding fathers, called out Joseph Pulitzer in particular as a purveyor of “fake news.” More on the full cartoon here.

A Bigger Barks: Taschen Supersizes the Duck Man

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Is a bigger Barks a better Barks? Taschen’s long-awaited Disney Comics Library: Carl Barks’s Donald Duck. Vol. 1. 1942–1950 supersizes the Duck Man, and we are all the richer for it. This is one of their “XXL” volumes, so let’s go to the tape. It weighs in, literally, at 11+ pounds: over 626 11 x 15.5-inch pages that include the longer Donald Duck stories from 15 issues of Western Publishing’s Four-Color series.  up to 1950. These include some of the greatest expressions of Barks’s quick mastery of the comic book format. In “The Old Castle’s Secret” (1948) he uses page structure, atmospherics and pace to create real suspense. His masterpiece of hallucinogenic imagination married to landscape precision surely is “Lost in the Andes” (1949). And his well-tuned sense of character is clear in creating a purely American icon of endearing greed in Uncle Scrooge in “Christmas on Bear Mountain” (1947). Of course we have seen these and many of the other stories in this collection reprinted before. So, to answer my own question, does scaling up Barks give us a better Barks?

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Elmo Gets Hairy

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Force-fed a new brand of cereal by his kidnappers that grows hair uncontrollably, Cecil Jensen’s country rube Elmo is awash in a pool of his own tresses. More on this strange late 1940s satire here.

Recovering Hank: America’s Anti-Fascist Hero

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Hank Hannigan was no Captain Easy or Jungle Jim or even Dickie Dare. In fact, he was designed by his creator, Coulton Waugh, as a deliberate antidote to the comic strip adventurer. He was a WWII veteran and amputee who didn’t want to journey (let alone, save) the world. Hank was proud to be a “plain guy,” a grease monkey who craved returning to the garage, marrying his sweetheart, and maybe making sense of the sacrifices he and his fellow soldiers just made. He was the unlikely hero of a short-lived 1945 comic strip that artist Coulton Waugh conceived as a populist corrective to the fantastic escapades of typical comic strip heroes. “To get a new character I go into the subways and actually draw them,” he told trade newspaper Editor and Publisher before Hank’s April launch. “I want the people of America to stream into the strip.”

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Markets Booming, Bullets Flying, Booze Flowing – Happy 1926!

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New Year’s Day in Chicago 1926 felt like peak 1920s. The common tropes of the “Jazz Age” congealed on the front page of Tribune: “Gay, Wet New Year’s: 11 Shot – Prosperous U.S, Forecast by 1925 Success” barked the headline. Front page stories reported that the manufacturing and consumption were driving demand-side growth to new levels. Meanwhile, casual gunplay celebrating New Year’s Eve resulted in one dead child and multiple woundings. And at the height of Prohibition, citizens and journalists openly mocked officials trying to enforce alcohol bans in the local nightclubs. According to The Trib, two barely guised Prohibition agents were assigned to each club, while revelers succeeded in hiding their hooch throughout the night. One club crowd had had enough and chased the agents out the door. The cops refused to intervene, claiming that they wanted to remain “neutral.”

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