The latest Sunday Press release through Fantagraphics revisits the first 20 years of the American comic strip, compiling over 200 diverse strips from over 75 artists. All of the strips are in color, with most of them full-page Sunday comics, compiled with painstakingly exacting reproduction that ensures the most robust presentation of this century-old material. The book also includes a slew of scholarly essays providing illuminating background information about the genesis of the art form, offering a valuable education for comic strip fans.
Buy Society Is NixWith no existing track record of strip production, creators naturally tinkered with the form, with each contributing touches that gradually steered the industry into its more polished 20th century heyday. Funny animal strips were big, as were mischievous kids, but anything in good taste was fair game. Cartoonists would sometimes work in tandem on jam pieces, with one particularly experimental example organized diagonally, with each of three cartoonists developing their independent strip to fit their section. Another standout strip is a 1902 look into the future possibilities of “wireless telegraphy” that accurately foresaw streaming video, gaming, cyberbullies, celebrity tweets, and sexting.
What’s missing in all the experimentation is a sense of continuity. Although the strips are organized chronologically, their sometimes one-off nature with few recurring characters results in no throughline. The book is intended to be an overview, not a compendium of each title, but the strips were usually short-lived, lasting from only a few weeks to a few years at most, with cartoonists abandoning ideas to start over with fresh approaches. As such, many strips from the earliest years seem interchangeable with the latest, aside from generally improving art quality as cartoonists moved from their cluttered fine line illustration backgrounds to the thicker, clearer definition of comics.
A few of the cartoonists gradually gravitated toward the concept of building an audience through recurring characters, but ongoing storylines were still barely a twinkle in their eyes. The prime example is The Katzenjammer Kids, two rascally young brothers whose hijinks continued from 1897 to 2006, represented here by multiple pages throughout the book. Other emerging characters in the book include Happy Hooligan, Buster Brown, and the first breakout comic star, The Yellow Kid. The king of the early days, Winsor McCay, is represented by just one strip each of Little Nemo in Slumberland and Little Sammy Sneeze, in deference to their solo Sunday Press books.
The newly revised edition updates the original 2013 release with additional material but reduced dimensions, shrinking the book from its mammoth 17” x 22” footprint to a still-massive but more manageable 13” x 17” in an effort to improve the book’s accessibility and affordability. The biggest concern with the size reduction is the legibility of the often scratchy hand lettering and small type in full-page strips originally designed for distribution solely on broadsheet newspaper pages. Thankfully, due to the meticulous reproduction of the strips from best available sources, all strips are comfortably readable, no magnifying glass required. That’s not likely to be the case with the concurrent digital edition, unless readers enjoy constantly zooming in on their screens, so print is clearly the way to go with this and all other Sunday Press offerings.
As for the revisions, the 168-page count seems to have increased by 16 over the original edition, but there’s not really clear information on which material is new, aside from a note that 25 comics were added and several fantasy strips were removed to shift to the upcoming expanded second edition of Forgotten Fantasy. If you have the original edition and you’re happy with it, there’s probably not enough fresh content to warrant a double dip. However, for new customers, the revised and expanded second edition is an absolutely essential deep dive into the fascinating origins of American comic strips.
