Sunday, October 22, 2006
COMICS PAGE MASTERPIECES
Last weekend I went to the Newark Museum to see the Masters of American Comics show, a fairly small exhibit of some of the most influential newspaper comic strip artists of the last century. I own collections of Windsor McCay's and George Herriman's strips, and I've read a lot of comics by E. C. Segar, Chester Gould, and of course Charles Schultz. I enjoyed seeing their work again--I also got an education about Milt Caniff and the current comic-archives it boy Frank King, and I found out for the first time about Lyonel Feininger. Obviously, the museum didn't have room for every single giant of the funny papers, but I was a little surprised that they had nothing by Al Capp, whose Li'l Abner was a comic strip phenomenon rivaled only by Peanuts. Li'l Abner contribued so much to U.S. popular culture, that his marriage to Daisy Mae made the covers of Life and Time.
Some other guys who should have been in the show: Hal Foster, whose Prince Valiant brought refined illustration standards to the comic strip (incidentally, Jack Kirby's The Demon was based on a mask that Foster drew in one of his strips); Burne Hogarth, Foster's replacement on Tarzan; and the co-creator of Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond.
One bit of advice; if you're heading to Newark from New York, forget the car and take the train. Trust toner on this one.
Last weekend I went to the Newark Museum to see the Masters of American Comics show, a fairly small exhibit of some of the most influential newspaper comic strip artists of the last century. I own collections of Windsor McCay's and George Herriman's strips, and I've read a lot of comics by E. C. Segar, Chester Gould, and of course Charles Schultz. I enjoyed seeing their work again--I also got an education about Milt Caniff and the current comic-archives it boy Frank King, and I found out for the first time about Lyonel Feininger. Obviously, the museum didn't have room for every single giant of the funny papers, but I was a little surprised that they had nothing by Al Capp, whose Li'l Abner was a comic strip phenomenon rivaled only by Peanuts. Li'l Abner contribued so much to U.S. popular culture, that his marriage to Daisy Mae made the covers of Life and Time.
Some other guys who should have been in the show: Hal Foster, whose Prince Valiant brought refined illustration standards to the comic strip (incidentally, Jack Kirby's The Demon was based on a mask that Foster drew in one of his strips); Burne Hogarth, Foster's replacement on Tarzan; and the co-creator of Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond.
One bit of advice; if you're heading to Newark from New York, forget the car and take the train. Trust toner on this one.
# posted by toner_low @ 4:59 PM 
