Another of IDW’s classic comic reprints will reach its third $49.99 volume in November, the complete reprinting of all of Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, “the first modern detective,” as it says on the cover. The second volume offered strips from December 6, 1948 through September 22, 1951. The format, 11x10-inch pages, landscape binding, with only three daily strips per page, provides ample display for Raymond’s surpassing artistry with pen and brush. Alas, the reproduction, while superb, is only as good as the source material, and in some of the sources for this volume — but by no means all — Raymond’s more fragile lines have fattened up, robbing the visuals of the high contrast between filagree fine-line and masterfully spotted solid blacks, a hallmark of Raymond’s Rip Kirby. Still, enough of the strips are reproduced from good proofs that we have more than a mere sampling of the cartoonist’s spectacular styling in black and white.
And we have the stories themselves. As in the previous volume, IDW gives credit to Raymond’s co-author, King Features general manager at the time, Ward Greene, who was an accomplished novelist. Greene and Raymond and King’s comics editor, Sylvan Byck, met weekly to fine-tune plotlines and write dialogue for the strip, as Brian Walker explains in the introduction to the inaugural volume.
For this volume, Walker again supplies an excellent introductory essay. In the previous volume, he waxed biographical; here, he offers a truncated history of the National Cartoonists Society, dwelling on Raymond’s connection to the club; he was its third president.
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