Comics That Time Forgot
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on June 6, 2006 Sign up now!
by Chris Barsanti, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/6/2006
Published alongside the sumptuous art books on Harry N. Abrams's general list, rather than through Abrams Image, the publisher's recently launched graphic specialty imprint, Dan Nadel's Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, is a treasure chest of graphic visionaries. One of the more unusual publishing events of the summer, this beautiful coffee-table book is a survey of idiosyncratic, out-there work by 31 nearly unknown cartoonists.
Nadel, a visiting assistant professor at Parsons, the New School for Design, founded the niche publishing house and bleeding-edge design incubator PictureBox in 2002. Nadel told PW Comics Week that even though there were plenty of great comic anthologies and classic reprints out there, the "funky and off-beat" stuff was generally not included. Says Nadel, "To me, this sort of material represents the heart of the medium: the extraordinary visions possible on the printed page." After working with the house Abrams on 2004's Cheap Laffs: The Art of the Novelty Item, Nadel decided Abrams the house would be the ideal publisher for this project.
"I knew I'd get high-quality editing and reproduction," says Nadel, emphasizing that high production standards were crucial to the publication of the oversized, 320-page, $40 book. Nadel divided the contents into five categories, among them "Exercises in Exploration" and "Form and Style." The former category will likely raise the most eyebrows. Harry Grant Dart's The Explorigator marries Jules Verne-esque fantastic adventures with a sense of absurdity reminiscent of Lewis Carroll. In Herbert Crowley's The Wigglemuch, the puffy, big-eyed titular creature floats through a number of gleefully bizarre situations, accompanied by beautifully nonsensical ditties: "Absurd! Absurd! It's quite absurd; But Here I am, the Ding-Dong bird."
And just as fascinating, many of these lost comics ran in daily newspapers during the early 20th century. Newspapers of the time were willing to take risks on unusual comic strips because they wanted to mimic the success of the first wildly popular comic strip, Richard Felton Outcault's Hogan's Alley, which hit it big in 1895. Almost overnight, all kinds of newsmen—some with little or no artistic training—were shanghaied into comic strip duty. According to Nadel's introduction, "As a result, this first boom period produced artistic oddities and innovations that wouldn't surface again for decades."
Over the decades that followed, the medium matured somewhat, but the pressing demand for new comics strips "meant that highly eccentric stories slipped through the cracks." Some of Nadel's favorites include Harry J. Tuthill's Bungle Family comics ("the funniest, most acerbic chronicler of American middle-class life in comics") and C.W. Kahles's jaunty Hairbreadth Harry strips ("he wrote Monty Python comics before there was Monty Python").
The book comes to a close in 1969, when, says Nadel, the growing influence of alternative comics had developed enough of a popular audience to allow the medium's more unusual talents to publish and even occasionally prosper. But Nadel notes that even in today's world, its unlikely that a newspaper would publish any of the oddities collected here.
But who knows? Maybe Art Out of Time will help open audiences to the many different forms comics can take. "It would be nice," says Nadel, "but people are still getting used to the idea of Krazy Kat."
