Yes, my friends, Wednesday is indeed new comics day, but the comics I want to talk about right now were not purchased during my weekly foray to the store. I want to ignore the current moribund state of the mainstream American comic book industry, with its Final Secret Invasion Crisis, a gimmick once designed to last the 3 long, toasty summer months when the comic-reading kids were out of school. Now it's mid-October and we have 2 or 3 more months to go on both these epic crossover events, both of which pretty much inspire a yawn from yours truly.
I've spent the last few days basking in the glory of the format that spawned the comic book, the comic strip. You know...syndicated newspaper strips. You remember newspapers, right? Big sheets of paper, with stuff printed on them? Ads? Photos? Sports?
Sigh...trust me on this, okay?
Two wonderful books have occupied my time, one an old classic, the other a new discovery. The old one is volume five of IDW's wonderful The Complete Chester Gould Dick Tracy. This new edition takes us from January of 1938 through July of 1939. It's not exactly vintage Gould, but it is a hint of what's to come. A horrible looking villain by the name of Scardol makes an appearance, a glimpse of the rogue's gallery that's to grace the strip in the 1940s. There's a number of stories here, all of them engrossing, all of them pure Gould, and all of them still showing his maturing talent. The Sundays seem to be better integrated, storytelling-wise, with the dailies. As always, IDW's production work is great, and volume five lives up to the standards of its predecessors. However...(yeah, there's always a but), this is the last volume in this format. Dean Mullaney, who edits the other Chicago Tribune volumes IDW publishes (Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie), will take the reins of the Tracy series with volume six, and increase the size and format to match those books. It's my understanding that the price point will change, also, but the editorial content will increase and the size of the Sundays (admittedly a problem in the current format) will presented in a larger, more readable size. (Amazon seems to have this change at volume seven--without a price change--and if you search "Chester Gould," you'll see a decidedly-different cover format.) I have mixed emotions about this, but as long as the series continues and IDW remains committed to the best possible presentation, I'll keep reading. Mullaney won a well-deserved Eisner Award this year for his work on Terry, which has two more volumes to go to completion.
When was the last time you read a comic strip and laughed out loud? Yeah, I don't remember either. It was probably either Mutts or Calvin and Hobbes for me, maybe a Bizarro one-panel strip. Well, here's today's sterling recommendation: if you pick up a copy of Richard Thompson's amazing Cul de Sac, and fail to laugh out loud, I'll...well, I'll do nothing except call you a humorless ass-hat. So there.
I've heard a lot about Thompson from various sources but had never actually seen his work. Upon looking him up on Amazon, I found out that the very first collection of Cul de Sac strips was published just a month ago, and I immediately walked over to my local Borders and snatched up the one lonely copy on its shelves. While I wasn't overly impressed with the original color strips (it started as a Sunday color feature in the Washington Post Magazine), which are included in this volume, once the strip starts as a daily, it's wonderful. Funny, down-to-earth, absolutely wonky and out there at times, Thompson's art is a joy, and his sense of humor is off the charts.
Cul de Sac is the story of Alice Otterloop and her family: her dad (who drives a car so small he can barely squeeze in and out of it, especially garbed in his winter jacket), her mom, her incredibly smart but neurotic brother Petey, and her friends at school, Dill and Beni. Alice goes to pre-school, where she has some incredible moments. I can't even begin to describe some of the things she does and says, but suffice it to say, this is the funniest--and most wonderfully drawn--comic strip I've encountered since Calvin and Hobbes and Mutts (not surprisingly, the reclusive Calvin creator Bill Watterson, wrote the intro to the first Cul de Sac collection).
I often recommend things on this here blog thing, and I always mean it, but seriously, folks...this is the absolute best comics-related book I've recommended this year. I love the Tracy reprints, but this is a true find, a new cartoonist doing great work in a format that's been stagnant for years. Trust me on this one: click on this link and spring for the ten bucks or so for this book. You'll thank me.
We now return you to your regular Final Secret Invasion Crisis comics world.
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