Rants & Raves

ARCHIE'S IMPENDING DEMISE

The big news of the summer is that Archie Andrews is going to die in July. The publisher has become extraordinarily—even annoyingly—adept in recent years at generating news about itself. But this was unprecedented at Archie Comics. As soon as this tidbit was released to the mainstream media, it went all gaga, naturally. CBS Evening News, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, New York Post and on and on.  But with the emphasis on the death of an American comic book icon, some reports glossed over and nearly ignored the “alternative” nature of Archie’s death.

He dies only in the Life with Archie title, the series in which he marries both Betty and Veronica. That series is  a spin-off of a 6-issue story in Archie Comics (Nos. 600-605) written five years ago by the adventurous Michael Uslan who gets Archie married to each of his highschool girlfriends.  Uslan’s ingenious story was so successful that it spawned a new Archie magazine, the aforementioned Life With Archie.  While that title was hitting the newsstands regularly, all the other Archie books continued in ignorant bliss of Archie’s new “alternative world” matrimonial fate. Now after three dozen issues, the alternative world is coming to an end. And it ends with the death of the title character.

It’s nearly impossible these days to take seriously the death of any comic book character. Superman died; then came back to life. It’s going on everywhere. But Archie’s expiration is only the latest shattering event that has distinguished the company’s books since Jon Goldwater sat down behind the desk his father had occupied when founding the company. Goldwater knew something had to change in Archie Comics. Not the characters—“the personalities, the integrity, who they are as people, what they stood for seventy years.” That, he averred, could not—must not—change.

But Riverdale had to change. The world is different now than it was when Archie first cavorted in front of Betty to attract her attention 73 years ago (Pep Comics, No.22; December 1941). “Riverdale had to expand,” Goldwater said, “it had to diversity, it had to morph, and we needed to keep the characters true to who they were but put them in a setting that is more realistic and more contemporary than what was going on in Riverdale before I got there.”

So he started authorizing changes. In addition to getting Archie married to both of his high school paramours, an openly gay highschooler, Kevin Keller, was introduced and then marries his partner and runs for political office. Mrs. Grundy dies. One girl gets breast cancer. Lately, a wheelchair-bound character arrived.

Goldwater fils is certainly more open-minded than his father. He applauded Seth MacFarlane’s spoofing of Archie Comics in “Family Guy.” What would he say (what does he say?) about the infamous Harvey Kurtzman/Will Elder spoof of Archie that prompted his father to sue in order to shut down forever? Dunno. But interesting to speculate about.

The company is keeping the exact circumstances of Archie’s death under wraps, but not the outcome: Archie Andrews will die, in both of the book's timelines (Betty-wife and Veronica-wife), which merge in Life With Archie, No.36, the series' penultimate issue, which will come with five alternative covers by five artists. The last issue, No.37 (in August), will take place a year later and will show how everyone is getting along without Archie. The title will cease with that issue, and Archie will stay dead in that alternative world.

Other funnybook characters may die and come back to life, but in Archie’s case, we’re relatively safe in assuming he’ll stay dead because he dies only in the alternative world. In the regular teenage Riverdale world, Archie scampers blithely on.

ARCHIE'S IMPENDING DEMISE

The big news of the summer is that Archie Andrews is going to die in July. The publisher has become extraordinarily — even annoyingly — adept in recent years at generating news about itself. But this was unprecedented at Archie Comics. As soon as this tidbit was released to the mainstream media, it went all gaga, naturally. CBS Evening News, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, New York Post and on and on.  But with the emphasis on the death of an American comic book icon, some reports glossed over and nearly ignored the “alternative” nature of Archie’s death.

He dies only in the Life with Archie title, the series in which he marries both Betty and Veronica. That series is  a spin-off of a 6-issue story in Archie Comics (Nos. 600-605) written five years ago by the adventurous Michael Uslan who gets Archie married to each of his highschool girlfriends.  Uslan’s ingenious story was so successful that it spawned a new Archie magazine, the aforementioned Life With Archie.  While that title was hitting the newsstands regularly, all the other Archie books continued in ignorant bliss of Archie’s new “alternative world” matrimonial fate. Now after three dozen issues, the alternative world is coming to an end. And it ends with the death of the title character.

It’s nearly impossible these days to take seriously the death of any comic book character. Superman died; then came back to life. It’s going on everywhere. But Archie’s expiration is only the latest shattering event that has distinguished the company’s books since Jon Goldwater sat down behind the desk his father had occupied when founding the company. Goldwater knew something had to change in Archie Comics. Not the characters — “the personalities, the integrity, who they are as people, what they stood for seventy years.” That, he averred, could not — must not — change.

But Riverdale had to change. The world is different now than it was when Archie first cavorted in front of Betty to attract her attention 73 years ago (Pep Comics, No.22; December 1941). “Riverdale had to expand,” Goldwater said, “it had to diversity, it had to morph, and we needed to keep the characters true to who they were but put them in a setting that is more realistic and more contemporary than what was going on in Riverdale before I got there.”

So he started authorizing changes. In addition to getting Archie married to both of his high school paramours, an openly gay highschooler, Kevin Keller, was introduced and then marries his partner and runs for political office. Mrs. Grundy dies. One girl gets breast cancer. Lately, a wheelchair-bound character arrived.

Goldwater fils is certainly more open-minded than his father. He applauded Seth MacFarlane’s spoofing of Archie Comics in “Family Guy.” What would he say (what does he say?) about the infamous Harvey Kurtzman/Will Elder spoof of Archie that prompted his father to sue in order to shut down forever? Dunno. But interesting to speculate about.

The company is keeping the exact circumstances of Archie’s death under wraps, but not the outcome: Archie Andrews will die, in both of the book's timelines (Betty-wife and Veronica-wife), which merge in Life With Archie, No.36, the series' penultimate issue, which will come with five alternative covers by five artists. The last issue, No.37 (in August), will take place a year later and will show how everyone is getting along without Archie. The title will cease with that issue, and Archie will stay dead in that alternative world.

Other funnybook characters may die and come back to life, but in Archie’s case, we’re relatively safe in assuming he’ll stay dead because he dies only in the alternative world. In the regular teenage Riverdale world, Archie scampers blithely on.

ANNIVERSARIES

The Australian Cartoonists Association is 90 years old this year, and plans are underway for a huge celebration at this year’s Stanleys weekend in November, scheduled to meet in Sydney. ... And it’s been 50 years since Ford unveiled the Mustang on April 17, 1964. ... And Tarzan is 100.

 

OH, THE PLACES HE WENT

Dr. Seuss would’ve been 110 years old on March 2nd; to make up for missing that moment, we’re posting four of his scathing World War II political cartoons. As you see, the general tenor is jocular as he goes after isolationists, Hitler, Tojo, and Il Duce with a slapstick rather than a harpoon.

DEATH OF COMICS

The New York Post has done the unspeakable. The impossible. The wholly unforeseen. It dropped its comics section on May 6, thereby jumping the shark for one of the most enduring and endearing features of the daily newspaper.

From the beginning, the comics thrived in American newspapers because they increased circulation. They sold newspapers. And they have continued even into the fraught 21^st century to be a bellwether for the bean counters’ bottom line. Readership surveys have consistently found that the comics always—regardless of age group or demographic—rank no lower than third in popularity. After the front page and, sometimes, after the sports section.

With that kind of record, no one has ever anticipated that some newspaper somewhere would discontinue its entire comics section. But the Post did. At a time when newspaper readership is declining, a major metropolitan newspaper has deliberately discarded a feature that has proven itself popular with readers.

Stupid. But then, newspapers have not recently been covering themselves with glory in the logic department.

This insidious and careless move raised two questions immediately. The first — why?

The comics section was axed without advance notice or explanation. The Post did nothing to alert its readers to the impending change. “Not even a ransom note, apparently,” said Michael Cavna at ComicRiffs.

Media-watchdog blogger Jim Romenesko first took notice of the development two days after it happened, announcing in a headline: “The New York Post Drops Its Comics Section (And Few People Notice).”

“Few people notice”? If true — and I’ve seen nothing to contradict this statement — the development bodes ill for newspaper comics everywhere, bringing us to the second pressing question: will other newspapers follow suit?

The Post’s comic section was minuscule: only seven strips — Garfield, Wizard of Id, Rhymes with Orange, Mallard Fillmore, Heart of the City, Non Sequitur, and Dennis the Menace. So skimpy that maybe nobody noticed when it disappeared? So if no one noticed, that may be an indication of how reader loyalty lapses drastically during periods of privation (that is, severely limited diet).

One hopes.

But no further news on the matter has blurted out. Yet.

And maybe — heaven forfend — no further news is forthcoming, at all. Ever. One blogger opined about why it took two days for comics watchers to notice what the Post had done:          

“There are many reasons why this story took so long to catch the attention of the comics media. All of those reasons stem from the fact that ‘comics media’ has also abandoned the newspaper strip, by and large. We don’t advocate for the comic strip format, we don’t push for stronger placement in the newspaper platform, we haven’t pushed for better visibility on news organizations’ online platforms, we have never, EVER pushed for the simple and corrective and *obvious* change of simply getting comic strips printed at a reasonable size.”

Sounds too true.

Was the decision to drop the comics made to save money? Romenesko and others, including Brendan Burford, King Features comics editor, have phoned and e-mailed the Post asking the question. As of May 8, no response. As of June 1, still response. The silence is deafening. Some think the new publisher of the Post will change his mind; others, not. This is obviously a money-saving dodge. And the new publisher seems out for bear.

How much money could be saved by dropping the comics? The low-end fee for a newspaper strip is, let’s say, $15/week for dailies; another $15 for the Sunday. So the Post might save $210-350 a week by dropping seven strips. Not much? But translated into an annual budget, that could be $11,000-18,000 a year.

Still not much. Not even enough to hire a freshman reporter.

But other metropolitan daily newspapers have 3-4 times the roster of comics. Now we’re talking real money: $33,000-73,000/year. Enough, in some communities, to pay another staff member. (And my estimates are probably low.)

Newspaper editors, who are fanatic about news—or whatever they think is news—have always vaguely resented the space they must give up to such frivolous non-news enterprises as the comics. And television program listings. If the Post gets away with dropping its comics, escapes unscathed—and perhaps reader protest, although not yet in evidence, may result in the decision being reversed—other papers are sure to do the same. 

Soon, no more newspaper comics anywhere.

No wonder the president of the National Cartoonists Society, Tom Richmond, dropped everything to write a letter of protest.

“It is with great disappointment,” he wrote, “and no small amount of confusion, that I learned of the New York Post’s recent decision to entirely drop the comics page from its publication. ... We all know the role of newspapers and print media in this electronically interconnected world has changed. ...That’s where the confusion sets in concerning your decision to drop the comics page. ... Focusing on entertainment and more than a 140-character story on topics that readers still care about seems to me to be the best hope for the continued survival of newspapers. The daily comics are one of the most popular and read sections of newspapers, yet they have been treated like an afterthought for a long time. ...

“Now, we have a major newspaper dropping the comics entirely — perhaps one of the few sections that is read by virtually everyone who opens the paper. That seems to be cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s like a restaurant dropping one of its most popular items, one that keeps people coming back to their establishment, because it costs a bit more to make than the rest of the menu.

“No one disputes that newspapers are struggling in the face of rising costs and declining readership. However, I don’t believe it is a smart business move to eliminate, in the name of cutting costs, one of the most popular and read parts of a newspaper. I hope you reconsider your decision and reinstate the comics page. It is one of the sections readers enjoy the most, and isn’t providing things your readers want to read the first priority of any publication?”

That’s what newspaper journalists always say. Do they mean it?              

 

WATTERSON REDOUX

Bill Watterson came out of his 19-year J.D. Salinger seclusion to draw four panels of Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine strip over three days during the first week of June. To even the most casual Pearls follower, those panels were obviously drawn by someone whose talent far exceeds that of Pearls’ creator (who has always dutifully deprecated his drawing ability). Many opined that the “mystery cartoonist” was Watterson, and Saturday’s strip (June 7) dispelled all doubt with Pastis’ fond allusion to the last Calvin and Hobbes strip in which the mischievous juvenile and his stuffed tiger take off on a sled down a snow-covered slope to explore the “magical world” that lays ahead of them.

Michael Cavna at his ComicRiffs column in the Washington Post reminded us that “Watterson has long eschewed most interviews and publicity photos — he once made Time magazine’s list of most-reclusive celebrities, sandwiched between Syd Barrett and Thomas Pynchon,”

But the reclusive cartoonist is making himself more conspicuous lately, beginning with drawing a poster for the documentary about newspaper comic strips, “Stripped.” Still, finding Watterson drawings on the newspaper comics page was a surprise. Even more so, to find them in a comic strip not otherwise renowned for its visual panache.

Said Cavna: “So what, exactly, lured Watterson back to the page for the first time since ending his immensely popular boy-and-tiger comic in December of 1995?”

Cavna then did the right thing: he asked Watterson, who explained:

“Several years ago, when Stephan did one of his strips that mocked his own drawing ability and mentioned my strip in comparison, I thought it might be funny for me to ghost Pearls sometime, just to flip it all on its head,” Watterson told Cavna (“offering,” said the latter, “a clear indication that he still follows the funnies”).

And Miriam Coleman at RollingStone.com adds some details: in the strip to which Watterson refers, Pastis made “a joke about picking up women by pretending to be the Calvin and Hobbes creator.” Pastis sent the strip to Watterson, “who, to Pastis' utter shock, responded with a proposal to collaborate.”

Coleman continues: “Watterson suggested a plotline in which the Pearls cartoonist is hit on the head and is suddenly gifted with improved artistic skills, with Watterson taking over drawing the strip for a few days. After some back and forth, the idea was adjusted to have a precocious second-grader named Libby (the name “nods to ‘Bill,’” Cavna notes) take over the comic after criticizing Pastis' work.”

As Cavna says, the “virtuosic art” of the Watterson renderings “is vivid testament that his talent remains undiminished. Still, Pastis summoned the gumption to offer a few editing changes.

‘It was like editing the Pope,’ Pastis says. ‘Like telling Michelangelo: David’s hands are too big.’

“Yet Pastis suggested minor tweaks to fit the tone and idiosyncrasies of his strip — including the number of ‘grawlix,’ the punctuation characters that represent cartoon profanity, he uses to match the number of letters in his curse words.”

Watterson welcomed the challenge of a limited return to the page, Cavna reports, quoting him: “I had expected to just mess around with his characters while they did their usual things, but Stephan kept setting up these situations that required more challenging drawings, so I had to work a lot harder than I had planned to! It was a lot of fun.”

Watterson told Cavna that he had conceived the collaboration as a way to raise money for Team Cul de Sac, a charity raising funds to fight Parkinson's that was co-founded by Cul de Sac cartoonist Richard Thompson, who suffers from the disease. The original Pearls strips with Watterson's work will be on display at the Heroes Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina from June 20th through 22nd before going up for auction for Team Cul de Sac. "It was generous of Stephan to let me hijack his creation, and more generous still to donate the originals," Watterson said.

The caricature of Pastis is — perhaps surprisingly — brilliantly achieved. Watterson is not known for caricature, but if we remember that he delved into political cartooning early in his career, his knack for caricature is adequately explained.

“Symbolism” in Saturday’s strip isn’t a precise description of what Pastis is doing: I’d go more for allusion. But it’s the thought that counts — even if, as with so much of Pastis’ cameo-fueled comedy, the allusion is likely lost on any but the most fevered fans of newspaper comic strips.

Anyone under thirty probably won’t remember Calvin and Hobbes, let alone the last Sunday strip in which Calvin and Hobbes sledded off into a future they imagine to be magical. But then, newspaper readership skews “old” — 55 and over. And there are doubtless a few million comics readers between the ages of thirty and 55; they remember, passionately.

Finally, the over-all message of the week’s strips is that a second-grader can draw better than Pastis. Actually, that’s not quite true: Pastis can draw better than his stick-figure depictions of Pig and Rat suggest he can — as the drawing in Saturday’s strip attests.

 

VELVET AIN'T JUST CLOTH

Ed Brubaker and his drawing partner Steve Epting are perpetuating the female spy/agent genre with Velvet in which a female undercover operative named Templeton (perhaps Velvet Templeton), whose daytime job is secretary in the spy agency, dons skin-tight leotards at night and takes on the bad guys with physical derring-do. She also sleeps around at whim and smokes pot. The story is told in the first person, Templeton’s, so we get a good insight into how she thinks — and she’s good at it. She’s also good at acrobatic combat. And Epting’s smooth and elegantly shadowed renderings make her both attractive and sexy (the latter without any of the lurid body shots that so often typify this genre; Epting concentrates on her face). Velvet also entertains a good opinion of herself, her only unattractive trait—egotism.

One of the two completed episodes in the book shows how successfully Velvet can flirt and toke; the other shows her effectiveness at fighting her foes as she begins to solve the mystery that this first issue starts with — who killed agent Jefferson? While both justify her high opinion of herself, she emerges as a little too smug to be altogether likeable. And she must be likeable before we’ll come back for No.2.

Jess Nevine, who writes prose essays on pertinent subjects for the Fatale books by Brubaker and Sean Phillips, contributes an article on the “history of spy fiction through the Cold War.” He begins with a 1684 novel and continues through Tom Clancy’s “techno-thriller” The Hunt for Red October, pausing en route for Somerset Maugham, John LeCarre, Graham Greene and Ian Fleming’s James Bond but conspicuously overlooking Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise, undoubtedly Velvet’s precursor in every respect. The idea of including such essays is, nonetheless, a good one.

OFF ROAD

Off Road
By Sean Murphy
144 6x9-inch pages
b/w
2011
IDW
hardcover
$17.99

Three teenage boys in this, Murphy’s first solo graphic novel, decide that the new yellow jeep one owns should be driven only off road: “This thing wasn’t made for driving on pavement!” Greg, whose father bought the jeep for him, isn’t so sure, but the other two, Trent, the art student, and Brad, whose father is an abusive thug, egg him on; he soon gives in, and they begin a testosterone-fueled machismo-fostering odyssey overland, through streams and over boulders—the boys cheering and hooting the whole way. Until, attempting to cross a stream, they get stuck.

For the rest of the book—most of it—they try to get the jeep out of the water. It all seems, in abstracting it like this, sort of mundane stuff.  But Murphy’s surpassing storytelling skill elevates the tale and engrosses our attention.

Nothing seems beyond his ability to render — the jeep (from every imaginable angle), landscape, the swamp, the people. But it’s his deployment of the medium’s visual components that raises this book above the everlovin’ average.

Murphy shifts camera angle and distance persistently, dramatically. He varies page layouts for timing and visual emphasis. He goes on for pages without deploying words, letting his pictures tell the tale. His drawing style is somewhat simpler than in Joe the Barbarian and Punk Rock Jesus, but we can tell the maker of this book is the same virtuoso that did the other two. And here, he’s gaining his footing, more and more with every experiment. Take a look at the samples I’ve mustered at your eye’s elbow.

And all the drawing and storytelling achieves a purpose beyond its impressive technical accomplishment: by the end of the book, Murphy’s characters have changed, matured. Greg is more daring, Brad more self-assured, and Trent gets over his infatuation with the crush of his young life.

OLD CITY BLUES

Old City Blues, Vol. 1
By Giannis Milonogiannis
126 6x9-inch pages
b/w
2011
Archaia hardcover
$14.95

This book regales us with an sf cops and robot villains tale, set in “New Athens” (on the site of historic Athens in Greece) in the years just after the flood of 2016 destroyed the old city. The chief actor through most of the two (one long, one short) tales herein is Solano, a police officer, whom we meet as he is assigned to solve a string of cyborg murders. That’s right: someone is murdering cyborgs. The supposition is that the murderer is also a cyborg. Or a robot.

The next to be murdered is another cyborg, Hayashi, the head guy of the corporation that re-built the city, and because of his eminence, the case suddenly takes on vast political dimensions when the company doesn’t want to pursue the matter at all. Suspicions aroused, Solano and his cohort Ella consult a confidential informant of hers, who reveals that Hayashi’s secrets are contained in a file that cannot be accessed — because it’s just good old ink on paper.

Solano and his entourage find the file, which reveals that Hayashi, who became a cyborg at the tender age of 18, experimented with mind uploading — transhumanism — which is illegal. They determine that Hayashi is still alive and they go after him, and he is destroyed in the collapse of his headquarters building.

Milonogiannis writes as well as draws the story, and he clearly loves drawing. Yet it is his drawing that undermines his story. The story is satisfyingly complicated, even a little convoluted: although Hayaski’s motives are not very clear, he’s broken the law, which is ample justification for being pursued. The banter among the characters — Solano and his boss, and then Solano and Ella — is lively and sometimes even humorous. But the unfolding of the plot is somewhat obscured by Milonogiannis’ drawing style.

Visually, he makes all the right motions in telling his story: he sets up for sequences with skill and panache, he paces events adeptly and varies camera angle and distance with dramatic effect. But we often cannot discern what’s going on. He deploys a scratchy penline of unvarying width, augmented throughout with gray tone and festooned with patches of black. This ought to work, but it frequently doesn’t—particularly in scenes of high action. The patches of black are distracting, and the fineline of his penwork is so copious as to turn the visuals into a blurry mesh.

In many of the action sequences, he lavishes too much detail on his pictures, and the linework, being all of the same thickness, cannot isolate, or accent, the storytelling visual elements, so we are often confronted by a crazy-quilt of lines cross-hatching or spreading, fanlike in a fine spray of movement lines, across the vista, each one as important as the others.

 

In other sequences — the numerous talking scenes, for instance — Milonogiannis relies more extensively, and more effectively, on simple outlines with gray tones modeling figures. That works. But when we cannot discern the nature of the action being depicted, our understanding of the storyline careens off into confusion.

           

CHIC YOUNG'S BLONDIE

Chic Young’s Blondie: From Honeymoon to Diaper Days
Complete Daily Comics, 1933-1935
By Chic Young
Introduction by Brian Walker
282 pages
8.5x11-inch landscape
b/w with some color
2012
IDW
hardcover
$49.99

The second volume in IDW’s two-volume reprinting of the first five years of this iconic comic strip covers the first two-and-a-half years of Dagwood’s marriage to the title character, during which years, all of the signature turns of the strip were established. This volume begins with the strip for February 20, 1933: taking up immediately after Blondie and Dagwood are married on February 17, these strips start by recording the comedy of their honeymoon. But when the happy couple  returns after the trip, Dagwood, who has been disinherited by his mogul father, must find a job. And so he does—thanks to Blondie: she “interviews” with the prospective boss to plead her husband’s case, and the boss, Mr. Kramp, thinking he’s hiring this beautiful blonde, winds up hiring Dagwood on March 11, 1933.

Kramp disappears from the strip over the next few months, and the next time we encounter Dagwood’s boss, it’s the notorious Mister Dithers, who bows onto Young’s stage a year later, on March 15, without any sort of formal introduction.

The rest of Blondie’s cast shows up in the strips reprinted here. But the big event rehearsed in this tome is the birth of the Bumstead first-born, Alexander, on April 15, 1934. Beginning July 2, he’s called Baby Dumpling for most of his early life, acquiring a formal name (Alexander Hamilton Bumstead) on November 7.

The arrival of Baby Dumpling may be the first birth recorded in an American comic strip, and the subject was a delicate one. Pregnancy was not a topic permitted in the funnies in those days. Young gets around the event by never mentioning Blondie’s pregnancy: she goes away for some mysterious reason, then a few weeks later, on Sunday, April 15, Dagwood gets word (by telephone) that “it” has happened, and he goes to the hospital to see his newborn son.

Marital sex was another taboo subject in those uptight days. If married couples were shown in bed (in movies, say, or anywhere else), it was usually twin beds, not the same bed. Young insisted that his young couple would share the same bed. He believed that twin beds were a major threat to the solidity of marriage (and, surprisingly, letters he got from clergymen agreed with him).

But at the beginning of the Bumstead marriage in the strip, Young played it coy; he eased into the situation—first showing Dagwood by himself in a bed obviously large enough for two on April 20, 1933; then having Dagwood sitting on the edge of the bed occupied by Blondie on June 13; then, finally, on August 4, they’re unabashedly in the same double bed together. Thereafter, Young routinely shows them sharing a bed (although they switch sides back and forth often).

Dagwood runs into the postman for the first time on August 16, 1935, but the postman’s name is Schwartz, not Beasley. And Dagwood raids the refrigerator for his first midnight sandwich on August 14, 1934.

Walker’s introduction, another of his customarily meticulous historical reprises, covers most of the foregoing, and he also notes others of the set pieces that are integral to the strip and its continued popularity: “Dagwood in the bathtub, Dagwood taking a nap on the couch, Dagwood running to catch the bus” and so on.

The book’s design presents the daily strips at a generous size, three to a page, with the publication dates appearing at the bottom. And the IDW standard—the ribbon bookmark. In short, the book is another in IDW’s increasingly long line of accurate and informative additions to its Library of American Comics, without which it is becoming more and more impossible to write the history of newspaper comics.