cover image The Comics: Before 1945

The Comics: Before 1945

Brian Walker. ABRAMS, $50 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-4970-6

Something of a prequel to Walker's already released The Comics Since 1945, this volume actually surpasses its companion's considerable beauty and charm--if only because early newspaper comics were so whimsical and imaginative. Gorgeously illustrated, the weighty coffee-table book is organized by decade, allowing it to broadly contextualize the strips into the historical periods that gave them life. There are also brief, page-long bios of their most notable creators, among them Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Cliff Sterrett (Polly and Her Pals), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie) and Chester Gould (Dick Tracy). For the most part, however, Walker wisely steps back and lets the strips tell their own stories--a good decision since the one fault of the book lies in his prose, which tends to chug along with a kind of bland lethargy that doesn't quite rise to the verve of his subject. While informative and factually interesting, his writing often contains all the vigor of a college textbook. But the strips themselves are perfectly chosen and lovingly laid out: from the fanciful slapstick of the Katzenjammer Kids to the protosurrealist dreamscapes of Windsor McKay's Little Nemo and the obsessively reenacted dramas of unrequited love in George Herriman's Krazy Kat.