The Spirit Casebook (1990) #1-2 by Will Eisner

So — what’s this then? Kitchen Sink was doing a monthly comic-book-sized reprint series at the time, so why these albums?

Printing Eisner’s artwork in a larger format certainly makes sense, and by bundling up some stories in a book format, you can reach a bookstore market, so that makes sense.

The selection feels a bit random.

The second book centres more on P’Gell, and that makes sense.

It does seem odd that Kitchen didn’t go for colour in these books — but on the other hand, if he’s trying to reach Eisner’s bookstore audience, then keeping it black and white might make sense.

Bruce Canwell writes in Amazing Heroes #181, page 83:

The Spirit, ladies and gentlemen, is
It. The best continuing series in com-
ics history, produced by the creator
who has done rm)re to advance comics
as a legitimate artform than anyone
else. Period. For those skeptics who
demand proof of such bold assertions,
I invite you to open this superlative
volume and read..
You’ll meet Wild Rice, the spoiled
little rich girl who tried to find free-
dom from the good life in a gangster’s
arms.. .the psychopathic Reynard,
who began a behavorial experiment by
killing 10 men.. .P’Gell, eternally
sexy, eternally wily.. .the marvelous
Silk Satin.. .Quadrant J. Stet, the
portly accountant earmarked as the
fall guy in his boss’s embezzlement
scheme… Lorelei Rox of Odyssey
Road.. ewonderful, tragic Gerhard
Shnobble.. .and so many more in
these 18 classic stories spanning the
years 1946 to 1950.

This is the one hundred and nineteenth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Secret Agent X-9 (1990) by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond

Bill Blackbeard provides an extensive introduction to this collection (which collects all the Hammett/Raymond X-9 strips).

Introductions to strip collections are usually hagiographies, but Blackbeard spends a lot of time talking about just how horrible and awful the start of the strip is. He opines that Hammett couldn’t possibly be that bad a writer, so he conjures up script meddling from the syndicate, without any proof — or, as far as I can see, any other reasoning beyond “well, it sucks! So it can’t be Hammett!”.

So this is the supposedly incoherent start of the strip, and it reads quite well to me? Dropping us straight into the action without any tedious exposition seeems like a good idea to me.

That said, Blackbeard is right — this isn’t particularly good. It seems on par with most action strips of the area, though. Blackbeard says that one of the signs is the over-writing, and… it’s pretty action packed?

Blackbeard posits that the syndicate meddling stops on page 43, so the rest is supposed to be the best comic strip ever, and… I don’t see that much difference, except that the wordiness goes up.

Very odd.

But I mean, the strip is OK? Fluid storytelling throughout; many reprint collections feel repetetive, because there’s a tendency to recap all the time for casual readers. But it’s hard to be enthusiastic about this stuff.

And that starts happening towards the end of the run, and the reading experience becomes somewhat staccato.

The Comics Journal #95, page 49:

Despite Raymond’s skill as an illustrator,
his use of the comic strip medium was un-
v distinguished. His strips lack the variety of
panel composition—scuh things as varying
camera angles and distances—that would
lend visual drama to the story. Compared,
såy, to Milton Caniffs work on Terry and
the Pirates a short time later, much of Ray-
mond’s stint on X-9 seems a monotonous
parade of panels in which the characters
appear always the same size, always seen
from the same angle.
Moreover, Raymond’s people never
change expression: X-9’s grim albeit hand-
some visage seems carved in stone, and his
facial expression is repeated on the head of
every male character in the strip.
mond’s women, although -superbly drawn
and engagingly beautiful, all look alike,
and when he makes both young women in
a story dark-haried, we can’t tell one from
the other—with much resulting confusion
about the story’s plot (particularly after
Hammett had left).

Sheldon Wiebe writes in Amazing Heroes #180, page 84:

This is a true find!
Dashiell Hammett is one of Amer-
ica’s most revered mystery writers. His
novels The Thin Man and The Maltese
Falcon are literary classics as well as
classic mysteries. Now Kitchen Sink
Press has published the complete
collection of Hammett’s Secret Agent
X-9 comic strips, illustrated by the
then up-and-coming young artist Alex
Raymond.
As one might expect from the artist
of Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, X-9
is elegantly yet simply laid out. Every
figure is simple but powerful, every
scene contains only what it needs to
make it work.
As for the writing… If you are one
of those people who don’t read intro-
ductions, you may find it hard to
believe that Dashiell Hammett wrote
the first third of these strips. nere are
a number of inconsistencies and plot
holes that will undoubtedly give one
pause. Bill Blackbeard’s introduction
suggests that Hammett was heavily
edited by the syndicate. He goes into
great detail to explain how and why
this might have happened. The last
third of the first story is of much
higher quality, suggesting that Ham-
mett was being left to his devices.
The pacing is brisk and the art reflects
the writer’s zest.
The second tale, set in a sort of neo-
wild west setting, is pretty much the
best written and least edited of the
three sequences included. Whem
Hammett left the strip he was in the
middle ofa story that was finished by
Leslie Charteris (of The Saint fame).
Although there was no major drop in
the strip’s quality, there is a noticeable
loss of enthusiasm in this story.
Overall, even with the flawed edit-
ing and the writing change, Kitchen
Sink has put together an entertaining
package.
Even with the meddling of King
Features Syndicate, Secret Agent X-9
remains one of the best (and best
loved) comic strips of the ’30s and
’40s. And the Hammett written stories
are among the best X-9 adventures.

This is the one hundred and eighteenth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Owlhoots (1990) #1-2 by James Vance and John Garcia

Hot on the heels of the critical success of Kings in Disguise, Kitchen Sink publishes a new series written the same author (but with a different artist). I didn’t feel like Kings in Disguise was altogether successful, but it was certainly an attempt at doing something new and different in comics.

Just flipping through this book, it looks like it’s a bit ahead of its time: Using a single colour would become a signifier of Serious Comics a decade later, but usually not done in this way — it sits uncomfortably between being a kind of painterly wash and standard comics colouring.

And this is how the book starts out: It looks like it’s going to be a very talky book about going out west and stuff…

… but that was just a flashback, and that guy is now old and working as a night watchman for a plant.

The storytelling problems happen immediately: We have no idea who these people are, and it’s pretty hard to tell what’s going on here, because the way the characters are drawn, it’s just hard to tell who’s who and even where they are in relation to each other. I wondered whether this was Garcia’s first comic, but apparently not.

The problems are exacerbated by Vance trying to give a lot of period colour to the dialogue, but landing at abstruse incomprehension instead.

I guess he air.

The scenes also veer between attempting verisimilitude and doing set pieces that even the cheesiest TV series would shy away from. Here, Our Hero takes revenge against his place of employment for… er… degrading him by giving him a job? How dare they!

(Oh, right, the plot: It’s about an old, forgotten western hero making a movie about his life.)

In the second issue, we’re told that the series is cancelled — the surprising thing is that they even published the second issue, but Kitchen Sink is nice that way.

The storytelling is just so weak: OK, here it looks like that guy is… throwing a cup of steaming coffee up through the skylight at that guy in the bowler hat? And then it sort of makes a parabola around the guy? How does that even work from a geometry point of view? And then the guy throwing the coffee apparently has a heart attack? And the woman who was on the other side of the table, running out a door, is now suddenly back with the heart attack guy, and the table is gone?

Nothing in this blocking makes any sort of obvious sense: It’s just one badly composed panel after another that have little relation to the previous panel.

(Oh, and it’s not actually a cup of coffee: It’s a fire making er thing, and I guess he burned his hand — but only after throwing it? And that made him hurt so much that he had to crawl on the floor?)

Googling this book, it seems like it’s never been continued or collected.

But here’s a review:

A little talky, a little slow, but engaging and thoughtful. The loose, sepia-toned artwork by John Garcia is reminiscent, appropriately enough, of Frederic Remington’s cowboy-and-cavalry newspaper and magazine line work.

Russell Freund writes in The Comics Journal #144, page 46:

itchen Sink has killed Owlhoots
with the second issue, placing it (in the
euphemistic argot of network TV) ‘ ‘on hiatus”
with hopeful mention of its (unlikely) return.
While this is not a great crime against art,
Owlhoots was a work of good, modest virtues:
a period milieu carefully evoked, a solid nar-
rative, a sense of history. If the characters were
two-dimensional, that gave them one dimension
more than those peopling the vast majority Of
comics. This decent, intelligent book’s milure
to reach its intended sixth issue says nothing
good about the state of the marketplace.

[…]

Of series when even the mainstream titles
that they carry are not automatically selling out
anymore,” the reasons for Owlhoots• failure are
not entirely extrinsic. The characterizations, at
least over two issues, are thin. McAlester is a
åirly standard aging western hero, familiar from
countless elegiac, fin de siecle westerns from
Ride the High Country to The Shootist (actual-
ly, he’s stiffer than the heroes of either of those
films). Clayton Ellist, the moviemaker, is a
Coarse, modern opportunist; and Smallwood,
the Trust agent, is dignified and formidable, in
predictable contrast to his crude-talking hench-
men. These people are all types, stock charac-
ters unlikely to surprise us; and while this lack
of dimension might not be an impediment to
commercial success in a Marvel or DC book
(indeed, it is probably a must), it weakens
Owlhoots’ claims to higher status.
I also question the use of sepia tinting. This
sort of thing is usually meant to heighten the
“old time” feel of something; but its effect, to
the extent that it has any at all, is only to distance
the reader and to vitiate the immediacy of the
story.
And then there’s the title. I have no idea what
it refers to, and it sounds silly. Some works of
popular art are cursed with tides so bad that they
are an affront to commerce. Certain movies
come to mind: Cattle Annie and Little Britches,
Eegah!, A Girl, a Guy and a Gob. As a title,
Owlhoots is in this class.
Still, this book deserved a chance. If com-
ics are to claim a larger share of the popular
audience, there must be room in the medium
for superior middlebrow entertainments, and
Owlhoots showed promise of being one of those.
It was too early to tell if the historical material
would have provided any particular insights or
developed any depth, or to know if the main
storyline would have made full use of the
possibilities of its early century setting. But
the two issues of Owlhoots, briskly paced by
James Vance and agreeably drawn in a feathery-
but-substantial, neo-Severin style by John Gar-
cia, opened up a world of possibilities.
Intelligent genre fiction survives by giving
one kind of readership the payoffs it craves,
while exploring thematic territory of interest to
readers of another sort (actually, the “readers
of another sort” generally dig the lowbrow
payoffs too, or they wouldn’t put up with the
stuff). This book could have filled the bill.
McAlester’s attempt to write his life story
in shadows opened up some interesting avenues.

This is the one hundred and seventeenth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Halsted Street: Torment & Drama from the Hog Butcher (1990) by Skip Williamson

This is apparently a collection of strips that ran in a newspaper in Chicago in the 70s?

The strip starts off using a more stark style than Williamson’s usual noodly style, and with more straightforward (and groan-worthy) punch lines.

But it doesn’t take long for Williamson to revert to his usual style of cartooning, and for most of the strips to descend into chaos.

Which I like.

And, of course, towards the end Snappy Sammy Smooth takes the strip over.

The book feels very much like a thing of its time and place: I don’t think you had to live in Chicago in 1976 to enjoy these strips, but it probably helps a lot.

This is the only review of the book I can find:

Sadly, the material hasn’t retained much of its humor, dating itself and necessitating a lengthy intro (riddled with typos) explaining the politics in Chicago at that time. Even with this introduction, the material is barely worth reading.

This is the one hundred and sixteenth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.