Shelf Scan 2024: Reviving Calvin, Nancy, Flash, Mandrake and Popeye…Again.
There are now generations of young adults who have no memory of daily newspapers, let alone that back page and Sunday section of comics. Without that experience, I wonder how that legacy survives and continues to inspire everyday readers and young artists. If the volume of classic reprints this year is any indication, however, we graying lovers of newspapers past can’t be the only market for decades-old dailies. Many essential strips enjoyed fresh or continuing reprint projects this year that keeps the likes of Popeye, Nancy, Mandrake and more on current store shelves. Even the most reprinted strip of the last generation got revisited in 2024.
Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium (Andrews McMeel, $21.99) Arguably the last of the great newspaper strips, the oft-redone Watterson gem underscores portability in this rendering. The large three-volume boxed edition remains a treasure, but these 6-inch by 9-inch floppy paperbacks will reprint the entire daily and Sunday run in very readable, manageable formats. Andrews McMeel compensates for the small size with extremely well resolved, clean images as well as vibrant sharp color. We are up to the 3rd of 4 two-volume packs, boxed in an admittedly flimsy light cardboard. The old saw among physical trainers is that the best exercise is the one that you will do. Likewise, the best reprint is probably the one you are most likely to snap off the shelf and peruse without requiring a Bible stand.
The E.C. Segar Popeye Sundays (Fanmtagraphics, $24.99)
As with Calvin and Hobbes, E.C. Segar’s mastery of wry tone, surreal adventure and grizzled characterization all become much more accessible in this paperback series of color Sundays. The 4th and final volume gives us the Eugene the Jeep sequence and the previous volume covered Segar’s masterpiece, Plunder Island. These 10×11 paperbacks in a windowed cardboard pocket essentially re-use the Sundays that had been reprinted in the oversized complete Popeye that Fantagraphics issued a decade ago.
Segar fans should take note (on the opposite end of the portability/affordability scale) the new partnership between Fantagraphics and Sunday Press also gave us Thimble Theatre & the Pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar: Revised and Expanded. This $100 way oversized volume mostly reproduces the book that Sunday Press published a couple of years back. Most of it selects key adventure episodes involving the Oyl family before Popeye comes on the scene in the late 1920s. But they have added to this revision pre-Thimble Theatre that illustrate the former projectionist’s love of theatricality and film – all of which informed his later strip.
This Sundays series is at least the third time Fantagraphics has reprinted Popeye. And good on them. As I have already written about at length, Segar was a singular artistic talent of 20th Century pop culture. Popeye himself was a genuine cultural phenomenon, an ancillary character the audiences recognized immediately as one of their own. His blend of anger, violence and folk morality was a perfect heroism for Depression-era America. And Segar brought a satirical nuance to this strip that really was unmatched both in ciomics and elsewhere in 30s pop culture.
Alley Oop: The First Time Travel Adventures,1939-1942 (Acoustic Learning, $99.99)
Chris Aruffo at Acoustic Learning has been reprinting both V.T. Hamlin’s original decades-long (1930s to 60s) run of Alley Oop in parallel with reprints of the 1970s strip Dave Graue. But this year he really kicked it up with an oversized book covering the pivotal introduction of time travel to the series in 1939. This is gorgeous. Like all of the books in this series, the restorations are superbly highlight Hamlin’s even thin line and expressive use of lettering.
The time travel conceit fully refreshed the strip. Rather than let the Alley Oop coast on tired stone age and tribal storylines, Hamlin has a contemporary scientist’s time travel machine inadvertently yank Alley and Ooola out of pre-history and into decades of encounters with great historical settings and sci-fi fantasy.
Like Popeye, Alley Oop’s character resonated with Depression audiences who embraced imperfect common man heroes who (usually) knew right from wrong and packed a mean punch.
Flash Gordon Classic Collection (Mad Cave, $49.99)
Alex Raymond and Don Moore’s Flash Gordon should always be in print. He defined the realist style of adventure for decades and gave us some of the most thrilling Sunday pages ever drawn. Flash has deservedly been reprinted many times, most recently in dueling series by Titan Books and the IDW/Library of American Comics. This decent edition seems to reproduce the Titan series, using the same half page oblong format as Titan. The repros are crisp enough to capture Raymond’s famous feathering, and the colors are tame enough to let that linewoirk break through. The LOAC oversized series included Raymond’s Jungle Jim topper strip. In either case these recent reprints are often scarce and pricey. The first two volumes of Mad Cave’s three book set are already out, with the third coming in 2025. Kudos to them for making good on completing a series like this in short order.
Nancy and Sluggo’s Guide to Life: Comics About Money, Food and Other Essentials (New York Review Books, $24.95)
Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy strip is to this generation of critics and artists what Herriman’s Krazy Kat was the Gilbert Seldes and e.e. cummings. Intellectual gushing over its “iconographic” style and a sort of comic strip fundamentalist aesthetic reached eccentric heights a few years ago with Karasik and Newgarden’s overwrought How to Read Nancy. On the other hand, Bill Griffith’s beautiful Bushmiller graphic biography, Three Rocks probably makes the case best for Nancy’s enduring artistry.
If you hadn’t gathered, I am not on board the current vogue of seeing Nancy as the quintessential comic strip or Bushmiller as high modernist or proto-post-modernist.
Which is not to say I don’t love Nancy. I do. Just not in that way.
Of course, as a cultural critic, I tend to recoil from formalist approaches, anyway. Frankly, I am a little more interested in the underclass Sluggo and Nancy’s mid-century consumerism. But let’s save that for another time. Anyway, The NYRB compilation of Denis Kitchen’s earlier thematized volumes are necessary and indispensable. The book is divided into themes that are as basic as the strip itself and help communicate its essentialist spirit: money, food, sleep. Denis Kitchen I think understood decades ago when he first organized Nancy this way that the strip’s central joys were simplification, abstraction, invention.
While it frames itself as “A Catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, The Nancy Show: A Celebration of the Art of Ernie Bushmiller (Sunday Press, $22.99) is really a reprint book, although much of it reproduces Bushmiller’s original art. The curation of this collection is what stands out, as always masterful editors Peter Maresca and Brian Walker highlight Bushmiller’s creative range and visual inventiveness.
Rounding out the year in classic comic strip reprints we have to recongnize Hermes Press initiating its project for Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magician (Hermes, $60). They are stepping in after Titan Books seemed to have dropped off from its reprinting several years ago. We got the first two volumes of dailies this year. It is great to have this record of the first major costumed comic strip hero. It remains an open question whether flying men in leotards is any weirder a fictional premise than an action adventurer who engages all comers in tuxedo and top hat.
I have come to appreciate the sheer weirdness of Lee Falk in recent years, as well as his barely-veiled eroticism, especially in The Phantom. Among all of the 30s adventurists, Falk’s embrace of exotic cultures and a wide range of settings, as well as his intricate plotting, tied him most closely to pulp magazine fiction of the era.
I wish the source material for the early Mandrakes were better. Both these Hermes reprints and the earlier Titan books seem to be pulling from poorly resolved newsprint that loses a lot of Phil Davis’s feathering and line work.
Next up in our 2024 book roundup – thencomic book reprints really worth getting.