Nicole Claveloux, La Main Verte (1978)

 

La Main Verte by Nicole Claveloux (1978).

A groundbreaking psychedelic collection of existentialist stories.

The Critics: "Claveloux's pen hatching is fulsome, gathering modeled presence on the paper; her colors are bright, clashing gouache, layered in separate blotches, often defining form through a secondary, contourless outlines. Backgrounds are frequently sprayed on in gradients with airbrush. These hand-fashioned transitions lend to her horizons a kind of psychic intensity that reminds the reader of that these are internal projections." --Matthias Wivel, "The Green Hand and Other Stories," The Comics Journal, 2017.

Harry J. Tuthill, The Bungle Family (1918)

 

The Bungle Family by Harry Tuthill (1918).

Harry J. Tuthill introduced his domestic strip The Bungle Family as "Home, Sweet Home" in the New York Evening Mail in 1918. The feature starred George and Mabel Bungle as a bickering couple, and quickly established itself as one of the funniest and most sophisticated U.S. comics. Heavy on dialogue, the humour of the strip evolved out of the almost stream-of-consciousness running conversations between the characters and their minor key tribulations, neighbourhood dilemmas, and get-rich-quick schemes. Tuthill had a gift for epic insults and turns-of-phrase, and the panels of his strips are stuffed with one inventive put-down after another and proletarian cracker-barrel aphorisms drawn in a lively style that takes full advantage of the proscenium daily format.

The critics: "The Bungle Family would be a fairly generic, hastily (though charmingly) drawn domestic strip were it not for Harry J. Tuthill's biting text. His often rambling, manic prose drove the feature year after year in word balloons that must have groaned under the weight of all his verbiage. Yet that was precisely the appeal of the strip." --Dan Nadel, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969 (2006).

Frederick Opper, Alphonse and Gaston (1901)

 

Alphonse and Gaston by Frederick Burr Opper (1901).

One of the original innovators of the newspaper comic strip in the United States introduced his famous overly-polite duo Alphonse and Gaston in 1901 in the Sunday comic pages of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The great humour of the strip stemmed from the oblivious, paralyzing nature of the characters' deferring and bowing to each other in contrast to their increasingly chaotic surroundings and dangerous situations. Opper brought his trademark anarchic spirit and talent for grotesquerie to the strip, continuing to innovate formally through the increased use of word balloons to carry the weight of story as well as dialogue, which in this strip really was more than half the joke. The characters' names remain bywords for dandified courtesy even today, a century after their last adventures.

The critics: "Alphonse and Gaston (and eventually their friend Leon) became the stereotypical Frenchmen --and it was a stereotype that Opper in this strip helped define. In idiotic extensions of formal courtesy, such dialogue as "After you, my dear Alphonse!" "No, no — I insist; after you, dear Gaston!" might precede the terrible onrush of a freight train from whose tracks the pair were inviting each other to depart. Numbing disaster scarcely shook the Frenchmen from their rule-book etiquette, but occasionally there would be the lament to return to the happy days of --not Paris-- but East Paterson, New Jersey, or some such geographical non sequitur. --Richard Marschall, America's Great Comic-strip Artists: From the Yellow Kid to Peanuts, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997. 

S. Clay Wilson, The Checkered Demon (1967)

 

The Checkered Demon by S. Clay Wilson (1967)

Debuting in 1967, S. Clay Wilson's signature anarchic taboo-challenging character blazed a trail through a series of classic Underground comics, pushing the bounds of accepted taste and definitions of obscenity while also redefining the traditional comic book through psychedelic panel layouts, crowded, sex-and-violence-filled spreads, and darkly humourous surrealist storylines. After appearances in a number of key Underground anthologies (Zap, Yellow Dog), the character headlined his own self-titled strip and a comic book series beginning in 1977. This emblematic work by an influential pioneer has been collected in a variety of formats through the years, including this volume collecting three decades of work.

The critics: “It looked like folk art, like old-time tattoos, like some demented high school hot rodder’s notebook drawings. The drawings were rough, crazy, lurid, coarse, deeply American, a taint of white-trash degeneracy. Every inch of space was packed solid with action and crazy details. The content was like something I’d never seen before, the level of mayhem, violence, dismemberment, naked women, loose body parts, huge, obscene sex organs, a nightmare vision of hell-on-earth never so graphically illustrated before in the history of art. After the breakthrough that Wilson had somehow made, I no longer saw any reason to hold back my own depraved id in my work.” --Robert Crumb in Patrick Rosenkranz, "Pirates in  the Heartland: The Mythology of S. Clay Wilson, Vol. 1" (Fantagraphics Books, 2014).

Claire Bretécher, Les Frustrés (1975)

Les Frustrés by Claire Bretécher (1975).

The first collection of Bretécher's long-running weekly humour comic strip ("The Frustrated Ones") chronicling the anxieties and conflicts of the French middle class.

The critics: "Although Bretécher is on weekly display in an avowedly political (leftist) magazine in France, and although her rumpled, big-nosed, and slightly androgynous characters spend much time discussing matters political, it would be wholly false to construe her to be a political satirist. As a matter of fact, she has frequently asserted that politics bore her. Rather, as a social satirist, she examines the effect of life upon people—and politics, like pseudo- and anti-intellectualism Freud, mothers-in-law, and contact lenses, is just one more thing the human animal has to cope with on a daily basis.

Claire Bretécher’s stance is solidly individualistic. She pokes more fun at the left-wingers than at the conservatives, but this is presumably because the latter have been so thoroughly discredited in French circles that it would be tantamount to flogging a dead elephant to take them on. Besides which she, like most anyone else over there, probably navigates mostly in liberal waters and thus finds more first-hand material there to laugh at. Similarly, feminists catch a lot of flak from her, but more for their inanities and superficialities than for any deep ideological disagreements she might have with them." --Kim Thompson, "Claire Bretécher: Triumphant Despite Traitorous Translation," The Comics Journal #42, 1978.

Harvey Kurtzman, Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (1959)

Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman (1959).

This collection of four short stories by MAD Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman includes satires and parodies of Peter Gunn-style tv detective shows, the New York publishing industry, tv westerns, and small town life in the U.S. Deep South, and was an attempt to appeal to an older comics audience in the pocket book paperback format.

The critics: "the biggest 'if' in comics' history: What if it had been a success? [...] one of the artform's most stunning successes, and one of the field's most heartbreaking failures" --Kim Thompson, "The Top 100 English-Language Comics of the Century, no. 26: Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book, 1959". The Comics Journal #210, 1999.

 

Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982)

 

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki (1982).

The first volume of this science fiction environmental parable was published in 1982 and was transformed into an animated film in 1984, creating the foundation of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli animation empire. Miyazaki issued the final volume of the series in 1994, marking the completion of one of the epics of Japanese comics.

The critics: "To my mind, it's the best graphic novel ever. But then, I'm a sucker for fairy tales." --Stepan Chapman, "Nausicaä of the Manga of the Pillbugs," The Comics Journal #170, 1994.

Milt Gross, He Done Her Wrong (1930)

 

He Done Her Wrong by Milt Gross (1930)

A 300-page wordless romantic comedy that works as a sophisticated parody of the popular woodcut novels of the day, by the chief practitioner of the U.S. "Screwball" school of comic strips. 

The critics: "Artistic innovation always outruns the vocabulary of critics. Artistic forms and genres are created long before there are words to describe them. Cervantes didn’t know he was working on a great novel when he wrote Don Quixote; he couldn’t have: the novel as a distinct form didn’t exist then, nor would it exist for centuries. If you had asked Cervantes what he was up to, he might have said he was writing a burlesque of courtly romances." --Jeet Heer, "The Proto-Graphic Novel: Notes on a Form," Comics Comics, 2009.

Carel Moiseiwitsch, Flash Marks (1989)

 

Carel Moiseiwitsch, Flash Marks, Fantagraphics Books (1989).

This short story collection collects a group of blistering, alarmist comics that grew out of Moiseiwitsch's immersion in the left-wing activist milieu in Canada. The outraged pieces here are laid down with a passion made material in flurries of slashing mark-making and inky blackness in the best tradition of agit-prop.

The critics: "It's obvious that Carel Moiseiwitsch's art is overtly political, but isn't it also true that the same thing could be said about every single art work ever created? Why don't we say it then? As Ariel Dorfman so aptly put it (The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds, Pantheon Books, 1983: 192; translation by Clark Hansen): "To go against the grain is political; to flow with it is entertainment.""

--Domingos Isabelinho, "The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Carel Moiseiwitsch's This Is a True Story - Coda," The Crib Sheet, January 19, 2009.

Saul Steinberg, All in Line (1945)

 

Saul Steinberg. All in Line. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce (1945).

Collection of drawings and cartoons. Steinberg's cubism-meets-surrealism linework is in full flower here in this collection of sketches from the author's world travels. There are polished gags, street scenes, Guernica-like action tableaux, intriguingly contrasting pictures, political caricatures, half-finished ideas, and just plain old funny pictures. Steinberg was so outside of the norm for the world of magazine cartooning that his admirers sometimes have trouble labeling his work as such, but this is what he presents to us, pure cartooning.

The critics: "‘Is it art?’ Yes. No. Anyway, it’s funny and we like it."  

--Howard DeVree, “It’s Funny – But Is It Art?,” New York Times Magazine, September 8, 1946.