Flash Gordon (1990) #1-6,
Flash Gordon: The Daily Strips (1992) #1-2 by Alex Raymond and Austin Briggs

As usual with these strip reprints, I’m not actually reading them (now), because I just don’t have the time. I know that that’s kinda the point of this blog series (to read the books and natter away), but 🤷🏼‍♂️.

I may, at some later point, go back and read these books in particular (and then write about them), because they look pretty interesting. Keep reloading this page! It may happen in just a few decades!

Kitchen hadn’t done many colour reprints before this, but this is all colour.

It starts off pretty rough in the mid 30s, but the artwork soon becomes rather lush.

And the artwork gets more room to breathe, and becomes ever-more Hal Foster-like.

But then it pivots and becomes something very different… was this ghosted by somebody else? It looks lovely.

Wowo, now I really want to read these books…

But then there’s dailies, too.

Er… looks nice, too?

But not as stunning as the later Raymond years.

There you go — a totally pointless placeholder blog post. Sorry!

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

Fearless Fosdick (1990)
and Fearless Fosdick — the Hole Story by Al Capp

The cover here is kinda fun — those holes in Fearless Fosdick are die cut.

These strips originally ran as a strip-within-the-strip in Lil Abner. Kitchen were collecting all of those anyway, so I guess it makes sense to do a separate collection of the Fosdick stuff (even if people who already had the Abner collections already had all these strips).

Reading these Chester Gould parodies out of their natural milieu works fine… I guess… but I’m not much of an Al Capp fan anyway, so I don’t really have anything to say.

Different periods definitely look different.

Alex Chun writes in Amazing Heroes #188, page 112:

I know that most of you
felt like you were force-fed the “Tracy
craze” (Batman this wasn’t), but if
you’re looking for something a little
different from the mainstream Tracy
junk, this anthology from Kitchen
Sink may be just the thing.
The character Fearless Fosdick is,
clean and simple, a takeoff on Chester
Gould’s Dick Tracy. Created as a strip-
within-a-strip in 1942, Fosdick was
Li’l Abner’s “ideel.” According to
Max Allan Collins, Fearless Fosdick
was initially designed as a “one-shot
throwaway affair” that evolved into a
running parody of the square-jaw de-
tective that would last into the ’50s.
Fosdick is identical to Tracy except
that his jaw was squarer, his hat was
yellower—actually, Fosdick was more
Dick Tracy than Tracy himself. SNO
gimmick was left untried; Gould’s
signature, and even Gould himself
were fair game as Fosdick’s eccentric
and slightly insane comic-within-a-
comic creator Lester Gooch made fre-
quent appearances.
Fosdick’s adventures, not unlike
Tracy’s, were done as cases, and five
of them are presented in Kitchen
Sink’s offering. And, as in Gould’s
strip, the villains are.. .well, al-
most.. *grotesque, or at least Lester
Gooch’s definition of grotesque. There
is Anyface, whose name is self-e»e
planatory; Sidney the Crooked Parrot;
the Atom Bum, who could blow up
at the drop of a pin; and the most
twisted of Capp’s villains, the Chip-
pendale Chair (you’ll have to read
this).
Capp also parodied the violence in
Gould’s strip. In fact, he parodied it
and parodied it and parodied it to
death. Capp’s one undoing is that he
didn’t know when to stop. Fosdick
killing civilians in the line of duty is
funny once, maybe even twice, but
after the umpteenth time it wears thin.
In fact, interruptions in the Fosdick
strip by Abner waxing his faith in his
“ideel” were most welcomed by me.
Then again, if you’re a huge Tracy
fan, the excessiveness might work for
you. Which brings me back to the be-
ginning: Fearless Fosdick only func-
tions and thrives in the context of Dick
Tracy, and, in this case, the movie. So
love Tracy or hate him, Fosdick could
work for you, but if yellow fedoras
don’t do anything for you, neither will
Fosdick.

Ah! That explains a lot: This book was published to cash in on the Dick Tracy (the movie) craze at the time (which I didn’t really knew existed).

Kyle Rothweiler writes in The Comics Journal #141, page 74:

As noted, in real life Fosdick would be a
monster. In a live-action movie he would be hor-
ribly menacing. But in Capp’s strip he comes
across as what he is; an abstraction, the logical
extension of a certain idea, a certain legal theory.
Thus, it is absurd to maintain that he is either
sympathetic (as Collins does) or unsympathetic.
He is neither; he is an inverted “ideel,” a
satirical construct. Of course, according to the
current critical cant, to say that a character is
an abstraction is to condemn his creator;
everybody, low-, high-, and middle-brow, wants
his characters “realistic” these days — which
is one reason why satire is practically a dead art.
On the other hand, one could argue that even
satire, no matter how abstract, presents, like
every other artform, a view of reality; and that
the “universe” presented in Fosdick is one in
which life is cheap, pointless, and meaningless.

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

Dorman’s Doggie (1990) by Frank Stack

We start off this book with an unusually informative text by Harvey Pekar, who tells us that Frank Stack is a contender for the Who Made The First Underground Comic derby.

Many of these strips were originally syndicated by Rip Off in the late 70s (but there’s also appearances from later anthologies).

I love Stack’s cartooning — all those thin lines, and the highly expressive visual language he employs. It’s cartoony, but also very real: The panels have a great sense of place; we’re definitely in this little world.

The gags are less laugh out loud funny than wistfully melancholic. It’s such a pleasant, humane read. By the end of the book, I found myself wishing the book had been at least twice as long.

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #138, page 40:

It says here on the cover that Ping, the Doggie
of the title, is “a reasonable creature in a world
run by unreasonable, thoughtless and even cruel
and selfish creatures,” so it must be true, but
from my reading Frank Stack is up to something
a little more interesting than that. The most in-
teresting thing is that for the most part Ping is
not anthropomorphized. Instead. Stack has wit-
tily assembled a human analog of canine psy-
chology. Dogs are pack animals, and within a
pack one dog will dominant and the rest
will defer to him. When a dog is domesticated
the owners assume in the dog’s mind the role
of leader. (Normally, that is. There have been
cases where the more diffident type Of humans
will acquire the more aggressive type of dog,
such as a pit bull, and the dog will wind up ter-
rorizing the household and running the humans
around like sheep.) Ping is less a reasonable
creature than a superstitious creature with an
irrational reverence for his owners, whom he
tries desperately to please within the limits of
his conception of the world. The central pro-
blem of Ping’s life is that his owners do not have
a doggie door. He is therefore at the mercy Of
his owners when he has to relieve himself, and
when his owners leave the house they seem to
expect him to be able to turn Off his biological
functions until they return. His toilet habits are
what cause him the most anxiety and earn him
the most grief from his owners. The owners’
thoughtlessness and insensitivity stem less from
cruelty than from their own proscribed view of
the world; they interpret Ping’s actions and ex-
pect him to act according to human standards.
The trouble with seeing Ping’s situation as an
allegory of man’s inhumanity to man is that it
ignores physical realities: all the civili?Æd and
humane behavior in the world will not change
the fact that Ping smells bad, from either end.
Even when they’re trying their best to be sen-
sitive, Ping’s owners can’t change their visceral
reaction. And yet it must also be said that though
they don’t seem to get much pleasure out Of his
company, Ping’s Owners still observe the ethics
of pet ownership: once you’ve taken an animal
into your house, you are duty bound to feed and
shelter him until he dies, or at least is in enough
pain to give you an excuse to do him in. In the
end what Dorman ‘s Doggie illustrates is not so
much what the world needs now is love sweet
love as how two creatures can share the same
space in a state of perfect misunderstanding.
misinterpreting each and every action within
their Own rigid frame Of reference, intimate and
perfectly isolated from each other. As we all
know, this happens as much within a species as
between them.

John A. Wilcox writes in Amazing Heroes #183, page 90:

What a dog. What a dog! Dornan ‘s
Doggie is a wonderful collection of
Frank Stack’s observational strips.
Ping, the doggie in question, is
selfless, obedient, and naively phil-
osophical. Stack has a marvelous flair
for dialogue and expression; his dogs
really do act like, dogs.
If you like a good laugh and aren’t
put off by superficial crudities (of
which there are many), buy this out-
standing book. If you’re smart, ignore
Harvey Pekar’s inane introduction.

Erm… uhm… OK…

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

Alley Oop (1990) #1-3 by V. T. Hamlin

Oops. I forgot to buy the first two volumes of this.

Alley Oop is one of those oddball series I’d see in various comic strip anthologies as a child. (Cheap reprints of American and British comic strips used to be a big deal in Scandinavia, and I think there’s still a monthly Agent X-9 going in Sweden (doing Modesty Blaise and Agent Corrigan and all that stuff).) I don’t think it was ever that popular with anybody, because while we’d get one story Rip Kirby after another, we’d get an Alley Oop serial once in a blue moon, as far as I can recall.

Perhaps one problem is the basic visual disconnect: The protagonist is a cartoony caveman, but the stories are basically sci-fi time travel adventure stories, and not zany humour things?

This book starts off with 20 pages of essays and pre-Alley Oop artwork from Hamlin.

Ah, right. The strip is very chatty — people are explaining everything to everybody else all the time, so as a reader, you get the same information over and over and over again.

There’s some fun action scenes, though.

There’s something disturbing about how Hamlin draws the cave-man characters: How does those thighs connect up to the torso anyway? The gap between the thighs is wider than the thighs themselves, and the little furry shorts are so small that there isn’t space for… anything.

Deeply disturbing!

And… reading this, it’s clear both why editors back in the 70s tried to incorporate this strip into the strip reprint collections, and why it never worked well. Because this seems like it should be a breezy, fun, action-filled series, but instead nothing happens. But in a noisy sort of way. The first sequence is 40 or 60 pages long (depending on how you count), and it’s just the same over and over again. How many times did they fight that dinosaur? How many panels did Alley Oop spend fretting about his girlfriend?

It’s just frustrating to read, and I’m not surprised that Kitchen Sink only managed to publish three of these collections before cancelling the series. Which is quite unusual for Kitchen Sink — they published thousand and thousands of pages of The Spirit, Steve Canyon, Lil Abner, and so on, but I guess nobody wanted to buy Alley Oop.

R C Harvey writes in The Comics Journal #200, page 33:

The strip Hamlin produced is unique,
unequalled in the history of the medium.
Couplingdramaticstowtellingtoa cartoony
style, he told rousing stories— high-spir-
ited adventure tales that bristled with plenty
of action and suspense, not to mention
comedy and genuine human interest. And
the greatest source of the latter is Oop
himself, an intriguing creation —a charac-
ter whose limited range Hamlin success-
fully expanded to serve the all-purpose
needs of heroic adventuring.
Alley Oop of the early strips is an ob-
streperous, truculent, club-wielding cave-
man. And if he isn’t actually looking for a
fight everywhere he goes, he nonetheless
finds one nearly everywhere. Not only does
he have the prickly disposition of a brawler,
he has the appearance of a strong man.
Hamlin gave his caveman a great barrel
chest and a bewhiskered bullet-head with
no neck (and no ears), and then he used the
same device that E. C. Segar had used in
showing Popeye’s strength. Instead Of mak-
ing OOP’s biceps bulge with power, Hamlin
bunched his hero’s muscles right behind his
fists in ballooning forearms, a graphic ploy
that gave ham-fisted a visual metaphor.
Although Oop is occasionally bested mo-
mentarily, he almost always triumphs at
feats requiring physical strength or, later,
military cunning. Pugnacious and cranky—
even somewhat peevish — he is quite un-
flappable ina crisis. Unflappable and nearly
invincible — and therefore virtually uncon-
trollable. Only Ooola can control him.
Ooola is a genuine hard case. Although
she is beautiful (and Hamlin’s treatment
Of her costumes always reveals rather
than conceals her figure). she is not at all
feminine in the traditional cringing man-
ner of an adventure tale’s damsel in dis-
tress. Ooola can think rings around Oop,
and if she can’t control him by out-smart-
ing him, she resorts to a swift right hook,
which she can deploy as effectively as Oop
can his stone-age axe.

[…]

Hamlin clearly designed his daily
strips as single works of art not as
aggregations of so many panels per
day. Sometimes one panel plays off the
next, the drawing in one crossing the
intervening gap to precipitate the ac•
tion in the second. He also frequently
achieved a panoramic effect, breaking
a single scene in two with a panel
border to give the reader two narrative
focal points in one sweeping picture.
And he was sometimes just plain playful —
the tail of a speech balloon converted to
cigar smoke when Oop, smoldering in sup-
pressed anger, mutters a dire prediction.
And the Kitchen Sink volumes show•
case Hamlin’s intricate graphic artistry
superbly. The production values are high
here (as we’ve come to expect from Kitchen
Sink): excellent reproduction from syndi-
cate proofs (loaned by Hamlin himself
while he was still alive). And running the
daily strips only two to each 8 1/2xl l-
inch page gives each strip and Hamlin’s
distinctive graphic treatment the ample
display space they deserve.

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