The Comic Strip Century: Celebrating 100 Years of an American Art Form

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars May Not Be Enough
Review: If anyone out there recalls a magnificent comic-strip anthology called THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS...well, consider this the unofficial sequel. (Both were compiled by Bill Blackbeard.) Though the 2 books in this set are both 9x12, the dailies and Sundays still needed to be reduced in size to fit the page, resulting in teeny-tiny lettering...and that's the only possible quibble anyone could have over these lush, lavish, color-drenched volumes which use all of our vaunted Modern Technology to achieve glorious reproduction quality on a half-century's worth of the greatest works of this woefully-unappreciated medium: it's a staggering, colossal achievement. Reading these, one is continually delighted if not astounded less by the individual artists' narrative and rendering skills (which is considerable) than by the unbound, unfettered, totally free rein of invention and imagination our daily newspapers once contained on the comics page. COMIC STRIP CENTURY features all the giants (Segar, Caniff, Capp, King, McCay, Outcault, Willard, etc) as well as continuities of many brilliant-but-neglected strips like 'Minute Movies', 'Heiji' and 'The Bungle Family'. How I envy the Gen-X reader who picks up these books and discovers this unforgettable universe for the first time...he or she will never be satisfied with 'Dilbert' or 'The Lockhorns' again! Highest recommendation.