Alley Oop by V.T. Hamlin (No. 60)

Alley Oop (1933-1971)

by Vincent Trout Hamlin 

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

V.T. Hamlin's Alley Oop (officially launched August 7, 1933) is unique among the century's cartooning enterprises: initially about a caveman and his pet dinosaur, the comic strip was transformed into a science fantasy romp through history and myth. Hamlin coupled dramatic storytelling to a cartoony style (albeit delicately cross-hatched in the manner of an 18th century etching) and told high-spirited adventure tales that bristled with action and suspense, not to mention comedy and genuine human interest. 

The fun began in earnest on April 6, 1939, when the caveman and his girlfriend. Oopla, are suddenly transported from their prehistoric haunts to the 20th century - specifically, to the science laboratory of Dr. Wonmug. Wonmug has perfected a Time Machine, and Alley and Oopla become forthwith his time travellers. Designing his daily strips as single works of art, not as aggregations of so many panels per day, Kamlin delighted in tinkering with legend and literature as he sent his troupe to ancient Troy, King Arthur's Camelot, Cleopatra's Egypt, Ceasar's Rome, the American West of Billy the Kid, and the decks of Captain Kidd's ship. 

When Oop and Ulysses escape the Cyclop's cave, for instance, it is Oop not Ulysses who blinds the one-eyed giant, and he does it by giving him a black-eye instead of driving a stake into the orb. Thus, mythology is left intact, but is deliciously modified to give Hamlin's hero the central role. 

Visually a cliche strongman with a barrel chest and bullet head, Oop is an obstreperous, truculent, club-wielding comedian caveman until the advent of the Time Machine, and then he becomes less comedic and more commanding, his skill as both warrior and tactician determining the outcome of most escapades. Unflappable in a crisis, Oop becomes a cool pragmatist, his temper honed to a fine belligerence: he is as peevish and cranky as ever but much less excitable than in his earliest days. But there is still comedy a-plenty in his adventures: when his favourite horse gives out during hot pursuit of a villain, Oop dismounts but continues the chase, now carrying the horse.

FURTHER READING:

TCJ Article: A Stretch in the Bone Age - The Life & Cartooning Genius of V.T. Hamlin

TCJ Article: The Precisely Rendered BLAM - Alley Oop in 1939

V.T. Hamlin at The Library of American Comics

V.T. Hamlin at The University of Missouri 

Barney Google by Billy DeBeck (No. 98)

Barney Google (1919-1942)

by Billy DeBeck

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Launched in June 17, 1919, Barney Google was one of the first strips to tell stories that continued from day-to-day. Initially, the strip was merely another ne'er-do-well husband and over-bearing wife domestic comedy, but on July 17, 1922, creator Billy DeBeck (1890-1942) changed all that: Barney acquired a race course named Spark Plug, and the sad-faced nag, most of whose anatomy is hidden underneath a moth-eaten, shroud-like, horse blanket, became the Snoopy of the roaring '20s. 

Barney entered the horse in a race, and DeBeck quickly discovered the potency of a continuing story for captivating readers: for most of the decade, drawing with a loose but confident line and intricately wispy shading. DeBeck kept his audience on tender-hooks by entering Spark Plug in a succession of hilarious albeit suspenseful contests, he outcomes of which were never certain (some of them, surprisingly, Spark Plug won). 

The characters were relentlessly merchandised, and Billy Rose even wrote a song about the horse and his master, Barney Google With The Goo-Goo Googly Eyes, which even the characters in the strip sang. 

DeBeck's cartooning genius was such that he seemed capable of renewing his creation again and again, each time with a more inventively comedic novelty than before, and in 1934, he sent Barney off into the hills of North Carolina, where he encountered bristly, pint-sized hillbilly named Snuffy Smith, who was so popular with readers that DeBeck stayed in the hills for the rest of the '30s, introducing into popular usage dozens of colourful expressions ("tetched in the hair", "bodacious"). 

By Word War II, the strip was called Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Snuffy joined the army, and Barney enlisted in the Navy and almost disappeared from the strip forever. DeBeck's assistant Fred Lasswell inherited the strip, and it's still running.

FURTHER READING:
Billy DeBeck at The Library of American Comics

TCJ Article: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith - Billy DeBeck, Fred Lasswell & John Rose

Li'l Abner by Al Capp (No. 77)

Li'l Abner (1934-1977)

by Al Capp 

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Al Capp extended the boundaries of permissible satire in syndicated comic strips by applying the principles of burlesque to the adventure genre, which, when Li'l Abner started in August 13, 1934, was the rage. Capp's comedic effort was not so much to end his daily strips with punchlines as it was to finish with outlandish cliffhangers. Li'l Abner Yokum, a red-blooded country boy with the physique of a body-builder and the mind of an infant, is Capp's Candide, fated to wander often into a threatening outside world beyond his hillbilly home, where he encounters civilisation - politicians and plutocrats, scientist and swindlers, mountebanks, bunglers, and love-starved maidens. By this conceit, Capp contrasts Li'l Abner's country simplicity against society's sophistication - or, more precisely, his innocence against its decadence, his purity against its corruption.

Capp ridiculed humanity's follies and baser instincts - greed, bigotry, egotism, selfishness, vaulting ambition - which the satirist saw manifest in many otherwise socially acceptable guises. And he undertook to strip away the retentions that masked those follies revealing society (all civilisation perhaps) as mostly artificial, often shallow and self-serving, usually avaricious, and ultimately, inhumane. Li'l Abner is the perfect foil in this enterprise: naive and unpretentious (and, not to gloss the matter, just plain stupid), Li'l Abner believes in all the idealistic preachments of his fellowman - and is therefore the ideal victim for their practices (which invariably fall far short of their noble utterances). He is both champion and fall guy. A protean talent, Capp invented a host of memorable Dickensian characters and introduced a number of cultural epiphenomena, all grist for his satiric mill.

FURTHER READING:

Al Capp at The Library of American Comics

TCJ Review: Al Capp - A Life to The Contrary

TCJ Article: How Lil' Abner Kayo'd Joe Palooka & Both Their Creators Came to Grief
Print Mag: Lil' Aber's Al Capp - A Monstrous Creature, A Masterful Cartoonist

Caricature by Dan Clowes (No. 82)

Caricature (1995)

by Dan Clowes

REVIEW BY BART BEATY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

At just 16 pages, Dan Clowes' Caricature is comparable to Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita for its comedic genius, psychological horror, and perfection of narrative language in a story of an older man deposed by a young girl. Published before the completion of Ghost World, Caricature officially marks Clowes' departure from a period of hilarious editorial comics and MAD-style mayhem of Eightballs past, and move into the complexity, naturalism, and depth seem in such works Gynaecology, Immoral, Invisible, and the ongoing David Boring. Though published concurrently with the fifth instalment of Ghost World, Caricature is the first complete work of the current Clowes era and defines the nature of his comics to date.

The "Humbert" of the story is Mal Rosen, the eponymous traveling caricaturist and lonely, middle-aged man who encounters young girl of indeterminate age, Theda (probably an anagram for Death, considering Clowes' penchant for wordplay), whose estranged parents are famous art world celebrities of the Jeff Koons/Damien Hirst variety. This pretentious environment marred Theda with a rebellious, post-ironic malaise that coverts lowbrow, outsider culture for its real world contact to the underclass and its humble devotion to craft. Mal seems painfully aware of a subtle degradation implicit in Theda's critical appropriation of his art, as seen in what is probably the quintessential moment in their relationship: Mal shows Theda a goofy, banal portrait of himself a fellow cartoonist had rendered of him, only to incur Theda's disdain. "He's not as good as you. He seems almost 'too' aware of what he's doing," she says, while Mal eyes her with suspicion and dismay.

It's hard to tell who's more pathetic. Mal is older and presumably more mature, yet he is deliberately at the mercy of an irresponsible, possibly insane young woman betrayed by her own overt intelligence and zeal. Dissing her mother's claim that only women can make art because of a primal 'birthing' connection, Theda argues that, "making art is more like shitting," a statement that resonates with significance when, after she disappears, Mal is left alone in his motel room staring at her day-old shit in the stopped-up toilet.

Both a powerful statement on the current role of Art (both High and Low) in society, and a haunting story of the futility of love for these two fully developed characters, Caricature realises all the themes of Clowes' comics: visceral, complex narratives that are simultaneously naturalistic and self-aware; the preoccupation with anagrams and Freudian subtext; the fetishsed pop aesthetic versus the ironic kitsch of Post-Modernism; and the sophisticated ego artfully degraded by existential dread. Caricature if the first great apotheosis of Eightball, and establishes Clowes as the American successor to, not Crumb, but Nabokov.

FURTHER READING:

Dan Clowes at Fantagraphics Books

Dan Clowes at D&Q

Dan Clowes Conversations
TCJ Interview: Dan Clowes (2020)

Dennis The Menace by Hank Ketcham (No. 93)

Dennis The Menace (1951-1994)

by Hank Ketcham

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Hank Ketcham was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and developed an interest in drawing and cartooning at an early age: on his 10th birthday, his dad made a studio for young Hank by installing "a slanted drawing board, a shelf, an overhead light and a kitchen chair." Ketcham studied Tack Knight's Cartoon Tips and signed up to the mail order drawing course W.L. Evans School of Cartooning, and was on his way. (The artists who he most admired, he wrote later, were, among others, Walt Kelly, Percy Crosby, Milton Caniff, Cliff Sterret, William Steig, Ronald Searle, Jules Feiffer, George McManus and Winsor McCay.)

Ketcham's professional cartooning career parallels that of his peer Charles Schulz: Ketcham enlisted in the Navy during WWII, after which he sold cartoons to a variety of popular magazines. He then created Dennis The Menace, which was first syndicated in 1951 (a year after Peanuts began).

Dennis began as a fairly conventional gag panel but in a short time both the humour and drawing attained a remarkable level of sophistication. (Surely the early widespread popularity of the winsome five-year-old rapscallion and his exasperated but infinity patient nuclear family had much to do with its timing at the height of the post-War baby boom.)

At their best, the Dennis gags were so visually inspired that they couldn't have existed in any other medium. The ideas behind even the best gags would not have been as pleasing if it weren't for the expressiveness of Ketcham's line, and his attention to facial nuance and body gesture, which provided exactly the degree of subtle and understated contrast to Dennis' notorious breaches of decorum.

PATRICK McDONNELL:

Each meticulously designed panel was a masterpiece of composition.

FURTHER READING:

The Guardian: Obituary by Paul Gravett (2001)

Go Visit A Comics Exhibition in October!

UNITED KINGDOM:

Quentin Blake and John Yeoman: 50 Years of Children’s Books
A celebration of over 40 books created by Quentin Blake with writer John Yeoman. More details...
Where: Derby Museum & Art Gallery, Derby
When: Now until 3 October 2021

Ralph Steadman: Hidden Treasures
The first ever public display of three never-before-seen artworks by British satirist, artist, cartoonist, illustrator and writer Ralph Steadman. More details...
Where: The Cartoon Museum, London
When: Now until 10 October 2021

Black Panther & The Power of Stories
Three iconic costumes from Marvel Black Panther film - T’Challa, Shuri and Okoye - sit alongside Marvel comics, historic museum objects and local stories. More details...
Where: Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich
When: Now until 24 October 2021

V For Vendetta: Behind The Mask
This major new exhibition invites you to step inside the story and characters of one of the world’s most iconic graphic novels: V for Vendetta. Featuring original artwork by David Lloyd. More details...
Where: The Cartoon Museum, London
When: Now until 31 October 2021

Drawing Life
A new display showcasing the very best of the Cartoon Museum collection of cartoon art, curated by Guardian cartoonist and Cartoon Museum Trustee, Steve Bell. More details...
Where: The Cartoon Museum, London
When: Now until 31 December 2021

The Political Comics & Cartoons of Martin Rowson
Featuring Rowson’s most powerful political cartoons, caricatures and comics from the past forty years. More details...
Where: Kendel, Cumbria
When: 15 October to 5 November 2021

Beano: The Art of Breaking The Rules
Come face-to-face with the Beano gang through original comic artwork and amazing artefacts, plundered from the Beano’s archive. More details...
Where: Somerset House, London
When: 21 October 2021 to 6 March 2022

NORTH AMERICA:

George Bess: Tale of Unrealism
Featuring the stunning artwork of French artist, George Bess, best known for his collaborations with Alejandro Jodorowsky. More details...
Where: Phillippe Labaune Gallery, New York
When: 9 September to 5 October 2021

Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin & The Art of War
A retrospective of the provocative work by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin about a nation’s time of war, civil rights, and social justice. More details...
Where: Pritzker Military Museum, Chicago
When: Now until Spring 2022

Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life  - 1880 To 1960
Curated by Chris Ware, and Chicago Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson, this exhibition is a historical companion to the concurrently appearing survey of contemporary Chicago comics at the MCA. More details...
Where: Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago
When: Now until 3 October 2021

Chicago Comics: 1960s To Now
Telling the story of the art form in the influential city through the work of Chicago’s many cartoonists: known, under-recognized and up-and-coming. Featuring Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Chester Gould and more! More details...
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
When: Now until 3 October 2021

Society of Illustraors: Comic Art Exhibition & Sale
Over 180 pieces of original comic book art from EC, Marvel & DC, from 1935 up to the modern era. More details...
Where: Society of Illustrators, New York
When: Now until 23 October, 2021

Marvel Universe of Superheroes
Celebrating Marvel history with more than 300 artefacts - original comic book pages, sculptures, interactive displays and costumes and props from the Marvel blockbuster films. More details...
Where: Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago
When: Now until 24 October 2021

Walt Kelly: Into The Swamp
Celebrating Walt Kelly and his social commentary through the joyous, poignant, and occasionally profound insights and beauty of the alternative universe that is Pogo. More details...
Where: Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus, Ohio
When: Now until 31 October 2021

The Legend of Wonder Woman
An exhibition celebrating 80 years of DC Comics’ iconic Amazon. More details...
Where: Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco
When: Now until 31 December 2021

Romanticism To Ruin: Reconstructing the Garrick
Focused on the lost buildings of Louis Sullivan. Co-curated by John Vinci, Tim Samuelson, Chris Ware and Eric Nordstrom. More details...
Where: WrightWood659, Chicago
When: 24 September to 27 November 2021

Hapless Children Drawings From Mr Gorey's Neighbourhood
Featuring a menagerie of youngsters who come to bad ends, and for that reason it’s suggested that you avoid establishing any emotional attachment to them. More details...
Where: The Edward Gorey House, Cape Cod, MA
When: Now until 31 December 2021

Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross
Featuring original art from his most recent book, Marvelocity, visitors will also learn about how Alex Ross developed into a great illustrator through his childhood drawings, preliminary sketches and paintings. More details...
Where: Canton, Ohio
When: 23 November 2021 to 6 March 2022

COMIC ART MUSEUMS & GALLERIES

UNITED KINGDOM:

British Cartoon Archive
By appointment access to over 200,000 cartoons and comics. More details...
Where: University of Kent, Canterbury

Heath Robinson Museum
A permanent exhibition dedicated to Heath Robinson’s eccentric artistic career. More details...
Where: Pinner, London

Orbital Art Gallery
The gallery space of an awesome comics shop. More details...
Where: Central London

Quentin Blake Center for Illustration
Soon to be home to Quentin Blake's archive of 40,000 works. More details...
Where: Clerkenwell, London

The Cartoon Museum
Celebrating Britain’s cartoon and comic art heritage. More details...
Where: Central London

V&A National Art Library Comic Art Collection
By appointment access to the Krazy Kat Arkive & Rakoff Collection. More details...
Where: South Kensington, London

EUROPE:

Basel Cartoon Museum
Devoted to the art of narrative drawing. More details...
Where: Basel, Switzerland

Belgian Comics Art Museum
Honouring the creators and heroes of the 9th Art for over 30 years. More details...
Where: Brussels

Hergé Museum
Explore the life and work of the creator of Tintin. More details...
Where: Belgium

Le Musee de la Bande Dessinee
A celebration of European comics culture. More details...
Where, Angouleme, France

NORTH AMERICA:

Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
The world’s largest collection of materials related to cartoons and comics. More details...
Where: Columbus, Ohio

Cartoon Art Museum
Exploring comic strips, comic books, political cartoons and underground comix. More details...
Where: San Francisco, California

Charles M. Schulz Museum
Dedicated to the life and works of the Peanuts creator. More details...
Where: Santa Rosa, California

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery
Bookstore and gallery space of the publisher of the world's greatest cartoonists. More details...
Where: Seattle, Washington

Frazetta Art Museum
The largest collection of Frazetta art. More details...
Where: East Stroudburg, PA

Norman Rockwell Museum
Illuminating the power of American illustration art to reflect and shape society. More details...
Where: Stockbridge, MA

Philippe Labaune Gallery
Comic art and illustration by emerging and established artists from around the world. More details...
Where: New York, NY

The Edward Gorey House
A museum dedicated to Gorey’s life and work and his devotion to animal welfare. More details...
Where: Cape Cod, MA

The Society of Illustrators
Dedicated to the art of illustration in America. More details...
Where: New York, NY

The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring (No. 71)

The Book of Jim (1993)

by Jim Woodring

REVIEW BY GIL ROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

A distillation of Woodring's quixotic magazine series Jim (a self-described "autojournal" neglected at the time of its original four-issue run), The Book of Jim melds dream comics, automatic writing, and surreal illustrations into one unsettling package. The book is fascinating, both for its constituent parts and for the suggestiveness of their interrelationships. Indeed, The Book of Jim is one of those volumes which can be reread from a hundred different points of entry, in dizzying recursions - a real tail-swallowing experience. The comics, such as the harrowing What the Left Hand Did (with its unforgettable scene of torture as spiritual epiphany) and the cryptic Invisible Hinge (which hints at, yet defers, some profound revelation), join to form one hallucinatory dream-diary, punctuated by intervals of uncanny, lucid-dreamy prose, such as When the Lobster Whistles on the Hill. It all fits together like one of those blurred, unreconstructed dreams you try to grasp just after waking.

The Book of Jim lives up to its author's contention that true horror is "not only fun, but sacred". Woodring fearlessly plumbs his own unpredictable dream-life for material, without manicuring what he finds; the result weds beauty to terror. His drawings boast a hypnotically wavy-line and an unfailing graphic brilliance; dig those garden plots, those critters, those alarming, kaleidoscopic transformations. His line is matched by the fearlessness of his prose, eccentric, and precisely descriptive, which can transform an insect's dead shell into a "fuselage" or wring sheer terror out of an empty playground swing. Art and writing run together to give The Book of Jim the matter-of-factness and disarming spiritual heft of a really good nightmare. With this work, Woodring opened up new horizons in first-person cartooning, creating work at once frightening and profoundly affirmative.

ALAN MOORE:
Jim Woodring's stories manage, by some occult means, to be at once unsettlingly alien and intimately familiar. The effect is not unlike opening a new book to find the illustrated account of a dream you had when you were five and told no one about. Cryptic and haunting, Woodring's work evokes a sense of something important and forgotten. Easily the most hypnotic talent to enter the field in years.

FURTHER READING:

Jim Woodring Official Site

Jim Woodring at Fantagraphics Books

The Mishkin Saga by Kim Deitch & Simon Deitch (No. 28)

The Mishkin Saga (1992-1994)

by Kim Deitch & Simon Deitch

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

With The Mishkin Saga, Kim and Simon Deitch manage the near impossible: an affecting story about the creative process that neither drowns in nostalgia nor avoids showing how its characters participate in their own personal tragedies. The heart of the story is animator Ted Mishkin, his family and loved ones, and their interaction with Waldo, a cartoon cat who is both a character in their successful animated series and an actual spiritual presence in the lives of Ted and his nephew Nathan. Through an impressive shorthand, The Mishkin Saga spans the history of American animation, from Winsor McCay to modern Disney, making the Deitch brothers story in many ways a cutting commentary about the nature of creative enterprise in 20th Century America.

The emotional core of The Mishkin Saga is so realistically depicted it seems almost brutal, but is the rock-solid basis from which the rest of the story emanates. Central figure Ted Mishkin is a completely stunted character - a horrific alcoholic with a naive artistic soul, who faces debilitating frustrations in both his professional and personal lives. There is no hope for redemption - Mishkin's worst and best qualities flow from the same well - and little hope for solace, but when those moments do occur, in flashes of uncompromised artistic vision, they are among the most beautiful in comics history.

Ted Mishkin's tragic personality is mirrored in the surrounding characters: his eventual wife Lilian Greer, his brother Al, even relatively minor characters like studio head Fred Fontaine and psychiatrist Dr. Milton Reinman. Similarly, each independent series in the saga covers some of the same ground, but add weight and detail to the events. When the searing insight of such writing is added to the delightful two-dimensional quality of the art, amazingly successful in depicting the relationship between the artistic enterprise and madness, what one experiences is a rare combination of great truth and great beauty.

ART SPIEGELMAN:

(from the backcover blurb to The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, 2002)
At last the general public will be allowed to discover Kim Deitch, one of the best-kept secrets in comics for over thirty-five years. He's an American Original, as spinner of yarns, whose beautifully structured pages and intricate plots conjure up a haunting and haunted American past.

FURTHER READING:
Kim Deitch at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ Interview: Kim Deitch (2019)

TCJ Article: Filing Kim Deitch (2011)

The Death of Speedy Ortiz by Jaime Hernandez (No. 22)

The Death of Speedy Ortiz (1987)

by Jaime Hernandez

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

The Death of Speedy Ortiz is a great self-contained story. It's also the beginning of a long story cycle that ends with Chester Square. And ultimately, it marked a huge qualitative leap for Jaime Hernandez. Prior to this story, Jaime was perceived as the more frivolous of the Hernandez brothers. Gilbert Hernandez did the moving and meaningful stories, Jaime Hernandez did the light, entertaining, beautifully drawn stories. The Death of Speedy Ortiz changed that equation and forced a reevaluation of the artistic achievement of Jaime Hernandez.

The Death of Speedy Ortiz is in a sense the second chapter of a long narrative which begins with The Return of Ray D. This story introduces the soon-to-be major character Ray, as well as elevating a walk-on character, Danita, to major character status. This is also the point when Hopey, Maggie's girlfriend, leaves on an extended tour with her band - perhaps the critical event in the entire story cycle. These two events set up The Death of Speedy. Speedy is the younger brother of Izzy Ortiz. He begins an affair with Maggie's younger sister, Esther. Esther, however, is also romantically entangled with Rojo, leader of the Dairytown gang. Dairytown and Hoppers (where Speedy, Maggie and the rest live) are two barrios that have a long-running violent feud. There is, at this point, a certain West Side Story inevitability to The Death of Speedy Ortiz. But Hernandez undercuts this in his storytelling technique. Hernandez almost never shows us a major plot point as it occurs - even the actual death of Speedy takes place off-panel. This subtle approach keeps the reader interested in what is an admittedly a hoary plot. It also illuminates corners of the lives of characters who are not central to the narrative at hand, but who are important in the larger cycle that The Death of Speedy Ortiz is part of. Primarily this means Maggie, but also Izzy and Ray.

This is also Hernandez's first story that doesn't take place in the milieus he had mapped out for himself - weird science fiction foreign countries (as in Mechanics and Las Mujeres Perdidas) and the punk rock world. Hernandez introduces a new setting - the barrio - with its own rules and unforgettable characters. ('Litos, for example, is never more than a minor character, but is nonetheless completely compelling as an ageing street punk who can't escape his violent life.) Family issues become more important, as the relationship between Maggie, Esther and their Aunt Vicki is explored, as well as, to a lesser extent, the relationship between Speedy and Izzy Ortiz. (It's a family party in The Return of Ray D. that introduces Esther to Speedy.) In almost every way, this is a deeper and more complex work than anything Hernandez has done before. The Death of Speedy greatly rewards rereading.

It almost goes without saying that Hernandez's artwork in The Death of Speedy Ortiz is superb. But it is worth pointing out that the story marked another step along the road that was leading Hernandez away from the flashy, details "mainstream" artwork early in the series towards the more minimal approach he now favours. To draw so cleanly requires a great deal more confidence and virtuosity than drawing with lots of feathering and pointless details. The figures, their gestures and expressions, the panels and the storytelling - all these factors must stand on their own when not given the gloss of flashy detail. Again, the more one rereads The Death of Speedy Ortiz the more obvious this becomes.

FURTHER READING:

Jaime Hernandez at Fantagraphics Books

Ernie Pook's Comeek by Lynda Barry (No. 74)

Ernie Pook's Comeek (1979 to 2008)

by Lynda Barry

REVIEW BY MARSHALL PRYOR:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Lynda Barry belongs to the tradition of James Thurber and Jules Feiffer: talented humorists for whom comics is one of several media suited to their talents. Barry, along with close friend Matt Groening, stood at the forefront of the least talked-about aspect of the 1980s comics renaissance, the rise of the alternative newspaper strip. Appearing in a number of free weeklies across the United States, particularly the Readers in Los Angeles and Chicago, Barry in some ways has achieved the alternative comics dream. Her work reached adults who might not read any other comics, adults who because of work like Barry's don't question the fact that the art form can produce sophisticated reading matter.

Ernie Pook's Comeek is most remarkable because of its voice: lonely, unremarkable children struggling with everything that is awful and over-whelming about the world. In Ernie Pook's best years, in the late '80s, Barry's strip reads like actual diaries of children. While the writing has become less convincing as the characters have aged, they are such great characters that the reader is willing to forgive the occasional off-kilter week. In an act of developmental shorthand, Barry has created characters that have earned affection it takes most cartoonists decades to build.

The second great strength of Ernie Pook lies in the veracity of Barry's observations. In a time when recognition "humour" has spread across mainstream newspaper strips like a virus, Barry manages to convey common experiences of adolescent existence without ever once crossing over into generalities and cliche. She does this by being very, very specific - even if it's not your experience, it feel authentic - and by doggedly staying in character. Several elements may draw one into a comic strip, but one takes away the characters; there are none better than those in Ernie Pook's Comeek.

FURTHER READING:

Lynda Barry at Drawn & Quarterly

TCJ #132: The Lynda Barry Interview (1989)