Sunday Funnies - A Retrospective, 5 of 5!

Richard Marshall and Bill Blackbeard's grand "The Sunday Funnies" from 1978 comes to a close this week with coverage of the 1940's.  The decade of WWII and when America truly reached maturity.  Not modernity maybe, but certainly we knew who we were then, like that "All in the Family" theme song says.

The apex of the Sunday Funnies before they started their slow decline into banality.  Sure there were still plenty of highlights to come.  "Peanuts", "B.C.", Doonesbury", "Calvin & Hobbes", "The Far Side" and a few others but for the most part, more and more mainstream guidelines and financial shifts in importance and competition from other mass media limited the gorgeous tabloid, four-color landscape from here on out.

Luckily, thanks to publication like these by Messrs Marshall and Blackbeard and mass ready inexpensive communication media like the World Wild Iintertube, we'll never lose the art these masters created.  

From just a few decades ago, but seeming so far away, here's the mastery of Chester Gould ("Dick Tracy"), Burne Hogarth ("Tarzan"), Bill Holman ("Smokey Stover"), Clifford McBride *"Napoleon"), Bill Freyse ("The Nut Bros.", "Our Boarding House"), Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster ("Superman"), Hal Foster ("Prince Valiant"), Milton Caniff ("Terry & the Pirates"), Ham Fisher ("Joe Palooka"), Al Capp ("Li'l Abner") and Walt Kelly ("Pogo") all side by side and delivered to your doorstep for mere pennies.  

There's lots of reasons that "the good 'ol days" weren't really so good.  This is one of the reasons they were great.

Talk to you soon.

Sunday Funnies - Nemo issue 22 - part 1 of 2

"Nemo: the Classic Comics Library" did it again with grand glimpses into the art of the past with issue 22...in fact, I don't believe there was a single issue published which I didn't read cover to cover.

Here's a nice glimpse into the treasures I'll be sharing this week and next...

A retrospective editorial by Richard Marschall, our tour guide through each and ever issue, and I think one all of us comic strip lovers can relate to.

The Art Deco movement of the 1920's is instantly recognizable. I think I appreciate it much more in architecture than I do as a comics of cartoon style, but one thing is sure, when it's done right it sure is easy to get instantly lost in. Such clean and easy to read graphics as exampled here with John Held's "Merely Margie" and "Joe Prep" strips.

And who doesn't love flappers?

Ham Fisher and his strip "Joe Palooka" are sometimes relegated to footnote status for comics fans as the place where Al Capp learned his chops and the lawsuit Fisher filed against Capp for supposedly lifting "Li'l Abner" from "Big Leviticuss". The honest truth though is that "Palooka" was a great strip itself. There's a reason that "Palooka" and Fisher were revered...it's good solid story telling. Inspiring a film in 1934, a series of 9 shorts for Vitaphone from 1936-37, an 11 film series from 1946-1951, a CBS radio serial, a syndicated television series and even a mountain in Pennsylvania named after the character, here's a nice little sequence of the strip that started it all from 1933.

From 1886, 100 years before this issue of "Nemo", Richard Marschall spotlights the political cartoons that helped shape the era. For further scholership tutelage on Politics from Prof. Marschall, check out the article he did here on the cartoons of 1884.

Next week I'll post the rest of this issue which includes, more "Sam's Strip" and an in-depth examination of Jimmy Swinerton.

Talk to you soon.