I recently read Kramers Ergot 10, Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, and Yummy Fur #1. I had a series of overlapping thoughts about these comics that I’ll try to articulate here.
I suppose it started with Rick Altergott and Johnny Ryan. I found both of their strips in Kramers 10 utterly unappealing and uninteresting. Kim O’Connor and others have made articulate comments about the lack of diversity in Kramers contributors, which is an important concern, but even without that context I would have found these two strips bizarre and off-putting. Altergott and Ryan aren’t funny. The level of craft isn’t so amazing that the strips seem somehow essential to publish.
Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, which collects the best Sunday pages in Frank King’s Gasoline Alley run, is visually stunning. I won’t say more about this because others have already written at length about the strip. But Gasoline Alley is also, like many strips of its time, replete with racist tropes. This isn’t only the (unfortunately expected) appearance of blackface caricature, but also a number of pages that rely on the broadest of stereotypes about Chinese, Native Americans, and others. Were these pages so amazing that they had to be included in this best-of collection? Were racist tropes so prevalent throughout Gasoline Alley’s run that including some examples was unavoidable (probably)? Was this an attempt by editor Peter Maresca to present Gasoline Alley in its full context, including its less appealing characteristics (probably not, given the lack of comments to this effect)?
Sammy Harkham has said in at least one interview that he feels cartoonists today, including himself, don’t have the craft of a Chester Brown or a Dan Clowes. I can tell you this from memory because I’m a big fan of Harkham’s work, and have listened to or read many interviews with him multiple times. But Yummy Fur #1 displays vey little craft! Brown was a young cartoonist at the time, of course, and I suppose he improves quickly. But I’m very confident that the work in the first several Yummy Furs wouldn’t merit publication by anyone other that Brown himself today. And would Brown have developed the same level of craft if Yummy Fur had continued to be a self-published mini? Maybe. Maybe not. But with Yummy Fur the pamphlet series, Brown benefitted from a platform and some amount of financial stability that made it easier for him to focus on comics and develop his craft. A young cartoonist today, with the same level of craft, might not have that opportunity.
I guess this is a long way of making a very simple point: that veneration of someone like Frank King, or Chester Brown, should be presented in context.
Back to Kramers 10 – I think it makes an unwitting argument about context by presenting Ryan and Altergott in the same book as Frank King and Robert Crumb. You don’t get the beautiful colors or careful layouts of Frank King without a legacy of racist caricature, etc. that carries forward into the work of Crumb, and more recently Ryan. So let’s engage with that context. Let’s think about it. Let’s also, ideally, not publish terrible work in a prestige anthology.
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The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. 4, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
Downhill All the Way, Leonard Woolf
Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Quentin Bell
The Riverside Companion #1, Kevin Huizenga
Spaniel Rage, Vanessa Davis
Kramers Ergot 10, ed. Sammy Harkham
Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, ed. Peter Maresca
Yummy Fur #1, Chester Brown