Reprints Reading Fast
I wonder what it says about my taste or possibly comics publishing that in the last 2 weeks or so my regular monthly order of comics (from the fine folks at Mile High Comics) was almost exclusively reprints of old comic strips. (Edit: I started this post in October and just found it again.)
One thing it says is: this is a great time for comic strips reprints. I’m sure it’s been said in the recent past, but it just keeps getting better. Just in the past 2 weeks or so the following appeared at my door: Sundays with Walt & Skeezix by Frank King (Sunday Press, this is officially the largest (height and width) book I own, HUGE); Krazy & Ignatz: The Kat Who Walked in Beauty by George Herriman (Fantagraphics, another beautifully designed Krazy Kat volume); The Complete Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1 by Milton Caniff (IDW); The Complete Peanuts 1965-1966 (vol. 8) by Charles Schulz (Fantagraphics); and Mary Perkins On Stage Volume 3 by Leonard Starr (Classic Comics Press). A quiet domestic drama, an unclassifiable comedy, an adventure serial, a subtle gag strip, and a melodrama cover a spread of genres as well as a huge variation in styles from Schulz’s simplicity or Caniff’s chiaroscuro to Starr’s realism.
Reading all these strips in these large collections, often gathering two years at a time, is an unusual experience. For some of the strips the ability to jump from one strip to the next to the next isn’t disrupting to me. I find that On Stage is not hurt by the fact that I can read weeks of continuity in a sitting. Terry and the Pirates is the same, though I am probably excising much of the tension and suspense that the authors of these strips worked to build. On the other hand, reading something like Peanuts can be very repetitive, dulling some the end effect of the strips. I finally got to my Volume 1 of Popeye this past month and I found it extremely repetitive to read in such a way. How much has the reading experience changed as a result of these collections? The slight redundancy of the last panel to first panel transition in On Stage doesn’t bother me, but reading Popeye I just got so tired of how often the story just languished in reiterating plot points. Mutt and Jeff had the same problem in that it seemed so repetitive when read in great quantities. Gasoline Alley works in large chunks, but I feel like I am missing part of the rhythm of the strip by moving through it quickly instead of matching pace with the daily movement.
In an ideal digital world, I could make my own daily comic strip section with all these reprints. A morning digital comics page that could mix different strips from different years into a new anthology.
Tags: comic_strips, serialization
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