5 yıldız üzerinden 5,0
Can't Believe I Nearly Missed Buying This
Birleşik Krallık’ta 6 Şubat 2021 tarihinde değerlendirildi
40-odd years ago, Peter Garriock’s ‘Masters of Comic Book Art’ (1978) managed to nail four of my own favourites, including Brit Frank Bellamy. David Roach’s similarly-titled, British-focussed book scores more highly, because he lists many more practitioners overall – so many, that there are artists enthused about for whom there is no illustration in the sumptuous gallery at the back of the book. With no index, I found myself paging back and forth to check.
The work reprinted in this new book is, indeed, generally masterly. There have been too few books like this one since the late Denis Gifford laid down his typewriter ribbon at the turn of the century. While Roach proves gracious to Gifford’s legacy, David proves extremely knowledgeable in areas where Denis admitted to being weak, based on the latter’s no-more-than-cursory interest in most comics post-1959, etc.; and David adds his own ‘art appreciation’ perspective.
The size of this book was a pleasant surprise and its good-quality stock makes it almost too weighty to read comfortably. Like many modern publications, it would have benefited from proofreading, which might have ironed out the typos. Those aside, the writing flows well: David seems to eat, sleep and breathe comics and I don’t know where he’s got it all from. He has 'made his chops', both as a 2000AD-standard artist and a comics historian (working with the also-impressive Steve Holland). Roach declines to trumpet his own art among the Masters (as some lesser artists might have done), instead slipping in a couple of well-drawn panels to illustrate autobiographical text, etc. His formative era appears to have begun in the 1970s, yet his interest stretches both back and forward in time (to now), and also across the breadth of the medium, deservedly giving girls’, nursery and other titles a fairer crack of the whip than predecessors. He correctly covers both British and foreign artists working for home publications, plus British artists working for overseas comics, including having done a good job of tracking Brits who only worked in the US. I may be wrong, but he appears to have tended towards examples for which original art was attainable: certainly not a demerit in itself.
The early chapters on comic history and ‘the funnies’ skip along a path trodden by others, with David again adding information of his own. On first read-through, I sensed a gap between his perspective and mine (not so true on the second reading): in a book with ‘comic’ in its title, I was surprised not to see pages by the likes of Brian Walker and Robert Nixon, for example. Regarding the Dundee comics, Black Bob is surely an omission; and while Watkins is here, plus funny stuff from Baxendale and Reid, the strong base of draughtsmanship behind David Law’s increasingly-wild style appears not to have made much of a mark. Dennis the Menace surely belongs on this book’s (nonetheless excellent) cover design, being arguably even more of a household name than Dredd (and certainly more so than Tank Girl). In truth, there is potential for another book, the ‘comic’ comic mirror of this one; though I shan’t hold my breath.
2000AD/Judge Dredd come in for particular appreciation and scrutiny as the first British entities to flourish on both sides of the pond. Any author’s selections will rightly reflect his own perspective, and the type of art he himself is good at (though I’m not sure how Top Spot’s photographic cover fits). ‘All young boys love a war story’, we’re told. Speaking as the rule-proving exception: for decades, the library-sized war titles were so realistically drawn that I never considered them true comics; but what are they, then? A book about ‘panel’ or ‘continuity art’ would probably have failed to attract fans of that very medium. However, there are as many single illustrations in this book as comic pages. While single-panel front covers stretch back to (beyond) Ally Sloper, front covers of traditional comics on both sides of the pond have tended to present a ‘forward extension’ of their contents. Where I draw the line is where the artist doesn’t – draw lines, I mean. An influx of fully painted covers has taken effect over the years. Superb as these tend to be, many of these - like those of the accomplished Walter Lambert - are ‘as close to book illustration as to comics’. (BTW unless I blinked and missed Arnaldo Putzu, he’s a notable omission.)
However, I can’t carp about differences (by the time ‘Boys’ World’ began publication in 1963, I was already aspiring to MAD) when some of Roach’s selections chime sonorously with my own: the celebration of nursery titles is long overdue, with kudos both for Playhour and the work of Mendoza, Hutchings et al on the outstanding Gulliver Guinea-Pig (when I asked Denis G. about it in the 70s, he’d never heard of it!) ’Though… little known today… one of the great British comic strips’ the text tells us. I agree, but if a tree falls in a forest…?
While Roach seems sometimes to step outside his implied scope, this may be his only chance to see the data published. His (justified) anti-racist stance appears early on, and seems (unintentionally) to single out Roy Wilson, whereas others including Bestall are also culpable.
The chapter on newspaper strips offers another rich topic which more than deserves a comprehensive book of its own; but it’s not up to Roach to address that gap, here. He omits some of the stuff covered by Gifford's (much) earlier slim volume, but again adds a slant or two of his own. For me, he clearly appreciates Holdaway, but predictably vaults over the underrated Romeo Brown to get to Modesty Blaise; and no matter which way David explains it, I can’t see where Giles’s (nonetheless brilliant) single-panel efforts belong in here. I’d offer the Star’s Beau Peep as the best ‘purely comic’ newspaper strip of the past half-century; this, plus Horrabin’s Arkubs and even Smythe’s Andy Capp (nowadays deliberately less of an ‘unrepentent wife-beater’) lack illustrations. Others, particularly Bill Tidy, are omitted altogether. David dips into magazines but barely skims Private Eye, where the excellent Celeb is concocted by Peattie and Taylor, the team that crafts ‘Alex’ in the Daily Telegraph’s finance section, extracting gold from an admittedly-tedious topic; but, enough. While the Evening Standard’s Bristow was a fantastic example of newspaper humour, Frank Dickens would be the first to admit that he couldn’t draw. Why should he, Hugh Morren and other masters of the ‘idea over the execution’ (in humorous comics of all types) appear among practitioners who clearly can? I now have four or five new semi-favourites.
This book may seem dear, but it’s excellent value. I can’t believe I nearly missed buying it.
[Other notes (intended to be constructive, rather than critical:]
- A special mention for Joe Colquhoun’s Roy of the Rovers, whose energetic line and flair transcended real-life football of that period!
- I always felt that Tony Husband was the creative power behind the loosely-styled art of Oink!
- I was pleased to see mention (more than once) of the almost-forgotten Fred Robinson (no relation!)
- Trevor Metcalfe, for example, doesn’t get a mention.
- Simon Thorp’s brilliant contribution to the accepted VIZ ‘look’ could have received an accolade.
- It’s amazing to learn that, in addition to all his other work, Ian Kennedy painted a colour cover on average every working day for 50 years.
- A glance at a current Andy Capp strip will confirm that the writers are now Mirror staffers Garnett and Goldsmith. Roger Kettle retired a few years ago when his excellent strips were dropped by Mirror and Star. His capable artistic partner Andrew Christine sadly passed during 2020.
- Paul Trevillion’s realistic sports strips perhaps deserved more of a mention.
- I personally found The Sun’s computer-generated ‘Striker’ awful, and a step in the wrong direction for comics.
- Rupert Bear has no middle name. ‘Rupert the Bear’ stems from a 70s TV puppet show and its twee accompanying single by Jackie Lee. Alfred Bestall’s apparent love of oriental settings derives from nothing more exotic than a west end musical, ‘Chu Chin Chow’, of which Uncle Fred was a fan.
- Should the credit for David Lloyd for the design of the 'V for Vendetta' mask be shared with Messrs Skinn and Moore?
- Comic writing, by the way: in the examples reproduced, I spotted ‘by Jupiter!’, ‘by Mithras!’, ‘by my sword!’, ‘by the hammers!’, ‘by all the universe!’ and ‘by all the gods!’…
- As well as his US work and British covers, Harry North also had work inside British MAD, including ‘The Alfred E. Neuman Show’, ‘The Downing Street Car Boot sale’ and the covers for EastEnders and ’25 Years of British MAD’, all written by an unknown named David Robinson…
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