May 24, 2015 05:31 PM
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Walker follows his previous book, “The Comics Since 1945, ” with this similarly encyclopedic and sumptuously produced volume. He asserts that comics did not, strictly speaking, start with the Yellow Kid(whose nightshirt was at first blue).
Nonetheless, the spectacular success of Richard F. Outcault’s grammatically inept street urchin essentially inaugurated American comic-strip culture. Walker revisits such popular titles as “Blondie, ” a high-living-flapper strip that subsequently became a tale about everyman Dagwood Bumstead; “Li’l Abner, ” said by John Steinbeck to contain some of the best writing in the world; “Secret Agent X-9, ” originally written by Dashiell Hammett; and the nearly forgotten “Wash Tubbs, ” which featured a valiant but flawed do-gooder named Captain Easy, the prototype for the modern superhero.
Over the next half century, comics gradually split into the two main genres still recognizable today: improbable adventure stories and situational high jinks.?
