The First Comic Strip: Hogan’s Alley featuring The Yellow Kid

The Comics
This trailblazing survey of an art form preferred by the masses was the pioneer study of the subject. It shows the evolution and subgenres of the comics from The Yellow Kid in 1895 through the first decade of the modern comic book in the 1940s. Written by Colton Waugh and first published in 1947 and long out of print, this is considered by diehard aficionados of the comics as the best book ever written on the subject, and not just because it was the first. In this far-reaching study Coulton Waugh set down information that is now common lore, that the comics are revealing reflectors of society. For general readers and scholars alike, this new edition has a comprehensive index and an introduction by M. Thomas Inge, the notable scholar of popular culture and author of Comics as Culture. Coulton Waugh, who was born into an artistic family, was one of the main artists who worked on the famous Dickie Dare strip, created by Milton Caniff. Waugh did the strip for more than 20 years - from 1933 until 1957. In 1945, he created Hank, which only ran a short time. From 1947 on, Coulton Waugh divided his time between comics, painting and teaching.
6x9, 364 pages, softcover. ... $25.00

Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips
The recent legitimization of the comic strip has brought plenty of vintage-strip reprintings and analyses of the medium. David Kunzle offers volumes of both devoted to the nineteenth-century Swiss who may have invented the comic strip. Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846), whose work remains interesting also for the insight into its era that it affords, used many devices associated with comics, as the massive Complete Comic Strips shows. Narratives consist of sequential arrays of cartoonish, simplified illustrations separated by panel borders. Topffer didn't use word balloons, but each drawing is captioned. Pictures or words alone wouldn't suffice to tell the story--and that constitutes one very recognizable definition of comics. The eight stories in the book combine wild slapstick and droll social commentary as they relate the humorous exploits of such eccentrics as Mr. Jabot, who wreaks havoc at a society ball; Mr. Crepin, who oversees the education of his brood of unruly children; and Dr. Festus, who travels the world, leaving disaster in his wake. This volume is the first English-language version of Topffer's comics work, and includes (unlike previous French and German editions) all of his eight full-length stories, plus previously unpublished fragments of stories started and abandoned, and manuscript segments omitted in the printed versions. Topffer's complete comic strip output, combined with Kunzle's annotative material and analyses, makes this huge volume one of the most significant works of comics history to be published, and reestablishes Topffer's place in the comics canon.
9x11, 650 pages, black & white, hardcover. ...WAS $65.00. ON SALE! $49.95

Little Nemo 1905-1914
This Taschen book adequately reprints the first run of Winsor McCay's seminal comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. Little Nemo is a 9-year old who drifts off to sleep each night only to be transported to Slumberland, a hallucinogenic world of circus performers, royal court attendants, exotic personages of all stripe, and animals both tame and wild. McCay worked on an epic scale. Each strip ran to dozens of dialog baloons and hundreds of clearly rendered people and things, and often involved a half dozen characters or more. The most notable denizen of Slumberland other than Nemo is Flip, Nemo's arch-nemesis, who is set on nothing more than casting Nemo out of Slumberland by tricking him into waking up. The stories are scary in the amorphous manner of dreams -- characters grow large and walk over cities, or so small they are dwarfed by raspberries, inducing a dreamlike sence of vertigo and plasticity. Another recurring dream-like theme is flight, effected by baloons, stars, giant dragonflies or even Nemo's own out-of-control bed. The strips, originally filling a 15x23 inch newspaper page, are perhaps the most intricate and well rendered comics ever to be produced. Each panel is exquisitely composed and could stand on its own as a compelling work of graphic art, drawn with a beautiful art nouveau line and a rainbow pastel palette that makes one wonder what they knew about printing comics in 1905 that's been since forgotten. Although numbered for readers at the time, McKay's control of flow leaves no doubt as to the order of panels in the mind of the modern comic entusiast; he would routinely stretch time and space, and think nothing of propelling action from one panel to the next -- tricks in the bag of every modern comic artist. 10x13, 432 full color pages, hardcover. ... $29.99

He Done Her Wrong
By Milt Gross. First published in 1930, the famously wordless He Done Her Wrong is Milt Gross' graphic masterpiece, the result of his prior collaboration with Charlie Chaplin on the 1928 silent-era film classic The Circus. Sharing the same goofy, over-the-top comic mayhem that was Chaplin's trademark, and preceding the expressive, cartoony art style of MAD Magazine legend Harvey Kurtzman, all of He Done Her Wrong's hilarious slapstick, tragic heartbreak, heroism and villainy, character development, high emotions and raucous thrills somehow manages to take place, astonishingly, without a single word of text, or conversation, or even a footnote. 7x7, 248 pages, black & white illustrations, paperbound. ...WAS $16.95, NOW ON SALE $13.95

—Back in Stock— The Complete Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger
edited and with an introduction by Bill Blackbeard. Before Lyonel Feininger turned his talents to painting and fine arts, for a period of less than a year he was a comic strip artist for the Chicago Tribune. Despite this brief period of time, his influence is still being felt today. The fantasy elements and the majesty of his art has been compared to that of Little Nemo. Now, the complete strips of his creations The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie's World are collected for the first time. The Kin-der-Kids ran from April 29, 1906 to November 18, 1906. It chronicles the fantastic adventures of a motley group of kids led by whiz-kid Daniel Webster, his dog Sherlock Bones, the ravenous Pie-Mouth, athletic Strenuous Teddy, and their mascot Little Japansky as they sail around the world in a bathtub to escape the clutches of Aunt Jim-Jam and Cousin Gussie. Wee Willie Winkie's World ran from August 19, 1906 to January 20, 1907. More lyrical than The Kin-der-Kids, Wee Willie finds himself in the midst of an enchanted universe where landscapes take on fantastic shapes and where trees and rocks come to life. "Wee Willie Winkie's is a world of fantasy and whimsy, of sweetness and shadows, of marvel and terror." Maurice Horn, The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Large format shows off the excellent art. 10¼x13, 56 pages, full color throughout, paperbound. Remaining copies are scuffed. ...WAS $16.95, NOW ON SALE $12.95

Comic Strip Masterpieces
This full-color 11" x 17" tabloid showcases some of the very finest Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, Dennis the Menace, Flash Gordon, Yellow Kid, Little Orphan Annie, Peanuts and Popeye strips. How can you go wrong? Designed like an old-time classic newspaper comic strip supplement, Comic Strip Masterpieces features superb reproductions, including many stunning full-color Sunday pages! Also included are biographical notes on the cartoonists, a checklist of classic comic strip reprints, and more. Reading Comic Strip Masterpieces will be like traveling back in time to an era when comic strips were actually good!
11x17, full color tabloid. $1.00