Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books by Michael Barrier (review)

Michael Barrier's Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books is a well-researched, detailed, and often excellent study of an underappreciated field—the "kid" comic books that thrived in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, it focuses on the best work published under the Dell imprint: art and stories created by figures such as Carl Barks (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge), John Stanley (Little Lulu) and Walt Kelly (Our Gang, Animal Comics/Pogo). For the field of comics studies, the publication of this book is especially significant because it helps to remedy the imbalanced focus at conferences and in scholarly venues on superhero genres. While academics have devoted countless books and articles to speculating on how Batman or Superman reflect mythic archetypes or the shifting zeitgeist of our culture, there are only a handful of monographs and a smattering of articles about the significance of humorous, kid-oriented genres. This is a shame, of course, because the massive popularity of some of the best comics for children, like Little Lulu or Donald Duck, meant that more than a million copies sold monthly, and they surely reached an even larger audience as dog-eared copies were shared with friends or parents or passed down to younger siblings. Funny comic books were a significant brand of mass culture, making a deep imprint on the collective imagination of several generations of readers.

Perhaps one of the stumbling blocks scholars have faced in taking these comics seriously is the sheer number of lousy titles that were produced and targeted toward young readers during these midcentury decades; indeed, from a distance, it seems as if the field was dominated by overworked journeyman writers and artists who showed little respect for the intelligence of children (based on the flippant and formulaic way that they executed their stories and artwork). Barrier does the hard work of eliminating that problem by serving as a discriminating curator, culling and analyzing the best artists, titles, and individual stories. He also documents the daunting challenges those outstanding creators faced in their underappreciated profession: dismissive critics, low pay, and creative burnout as they worked on multiple titles and relentless deadlines.

In exploring Barrier's narrative, a reader develops a deep appreciation for the auteur-like integrity of outstanding artists like Walt Kelly, whose creative standards seemed to operate independent of monetary rewards or critical acclaim. It is fascinating, for example, to observe how Kelly elevated and perfected the comic art of Our Gang, a strip based on the popular short film series most people know as The Little Rascals that he was assigned, in ambitious ways, effectively giving it syncretic originality. One can imagine a lesser writer/artist merely doing a watered-down, unimaginative copy of the film shorts. Barrier also introduces readers to Kelly's early iterations of Pogo, within the Animal Comics title, highlighting the creative ways he pushed past the source material from which that text's comic qualities derived (the ideologically problematic Uncle Remus trickster tales popularized in the anthologies of Joel Chandler Harris) and began to construct the brilliantly endearing characters, the playful word games, and the trenchant satire that would mark his greatest work in Pogo, the newspaper comic strip.

Similarly, Barrier helps readers to gain an appreciation for the complexity of Carl Barks's playful art and surprisingly nuanced humor in Disney titles. In the past, it was easy for Marxist-minded or high-brow academics to either ignore a creator of low-brow kids' entertainment like Barks or to oversimplify the meanings of his or her comics. Ariel Dorfman, the Frankfurt School critic, for example, published a study back in 1971 of Barks's comics that reduced their meaning to two-dimensional, capitalistic propaganda. Barrier effectively rebuts those kinds of dismissive readings in this book—much like he did in his earlier study, Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book...