The Comics: Since 1945

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Summary: An Insider Clues Us Mere Mortals into The Comics Strip World
Review: A man who knows it all from the Inside: Creator, Writer, and Exhibition Curator, Brian Walker as a Comics Historian has every credential anyone could ask to create an interesting, informative AND knowledgeable read into the Pop Culture Core of the Comics. If he doesn't cover it, it doesn't exist in this fond retrospective of the last Fifty Years of the Comics. Great Examples, culled from Newspaper tear sheets , plus Black and White Examples of the Originals media.
Highly Recommended for Everyone interested in the Field of Comics.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Look at the Funnies
Review: I've felt for a while that the newspaper comic strip is the most ignored form of popular art, rarely looked at critically. While comic books prosper and have gone well beyond the standard superhero format, the comic strip languishes, rarely allowing new and creative strips to break through, while "institutional" strips (those that have not been amusing for years but are institutions, such as Heathcliff or Crock) dominate the paper.

In this sense, this book is not very helpful; it is a relatively uncritical appreciation of the comics. Nonetheless, it is an excellent book, a good summary of the major artists and developments in the comics since World War II. All the big strips are here: Garfield, Peanuts, Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes, the Far Side and many more, along with plenty of material from bygone eras.

This book is around 50% text and 50% comics, so there is plenty of fun stuff to read in either format. For what it is - an appreciative history - it is fantastic. The only flaw is that Walker ignores the comic strips of alternative newspapers, therefore neglecting such important works as Groening's Life in Hell (without which, there would be no Simpsons).

For anyone who has ever enjoyed the comics, this book is a great look at the field and a lot of fun.

Rating:
Summary: The best single-volume history of the comics
Review: Outstanding job. In every way, this book surpasses its precursors. I wasn't sure, at first, exactly HOW it was better than Blackbeard and Crain, Marschall, Horn, Wood, Blackbeard and Williams et. al. Then I pulled all those old volumes off my shelf. I saw the big difference at once: the layout and presentation is far and away the smartest. It's clear! It's easy to see and read! It doesn't turn the comics into a mystery and a cult; it renders this original American art form as history. Just take a look at Marschall and some of the others: the reader never knows where he or she is in time or even which artist's work is under consideration---or why. For a single-volume history, the clarity and compassion of this book, its generosity both to the reader and to the comics and to the comic artists makes it incomparable. Even a simple touch such as the artist's self-portraiture and self-caricature, carried throughout, becomes a kind of compass point for the reader. The prose is also first-rate, the research is bottom-of-the-well deep and feels deeply reliable, but the real achievement here is Walker's powers of selection. He's the David Lean of comic strip historians---bringing in the whole epic of the comics since 1945 in 325 shimmering, clear pages. I personally would have liked more of the character and personality of the comic strip artists themselves, but in fact, Walker has given us everything we need here (even Al Capp's parody of Peanuts), and, as Lean often said, the real power of the story comes from everything you leave out.