All your favourite newspaper adventure comics — but not necessarily with the creators that made them your favourites.
By the seventies there was a growing appreciation and interest in the history and artistic merit of comics and especially newspaper strips, which led to various reprint projects, most notable being the The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977). Another such project was Nostalgia Comics, which started in 1970 with big ambitions to “the finest adventure strips and the most warmly-remembered (and occassionally forgotten) humor features that have a[[eared since Richard Outcault drew the first Yellow Kid back in 1895″. If this first issue is any indication however, the people behind this project had an interesting definition of what that entailed.
Because while the strips featured — Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9 and Tim Tyler’s Luck — were indeed fondly remembered and critically acclaimed features, the first two are not represented by the artists that made them great. In the case of Flash Gordon, what is reprinted is the start of the daily newspaper strip, rather than the Alex Raymond drawn Sunday pages. Drawn by Austin Briggs, a longtime assistant to Raymond on the Sundays, the dailies with their much more limited space are nowhere near as lush or interesting as the original feature could be and at this time Briggs is clearly still figuring out these limitations.
Similarly, while Secret Agent X-9 was a daily feature from the start, Charles Flanders was not its originator; he had taken it over from Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond who had left when it wasn’t quite as successfull as they had hoped for. But they had established the style of the strip, which meant Flanders was more or less stuck with it.
Tim Tyler’s Luck, created by Lyman Young meanwhile was always somewhat of a second banana, which also had some trouble finding its voice. It started out as an aviator strip, but only found its feet when Tym Tyler and his pal Spud got lost in “Darkest Africa” and joined the Ivory Patrol combatting various miscreants in some undefined region of the continent. Not really a strip I’d seen before, but it still ran from 1928 to 1996. Which is longer than Secret Agent X-9 (1934 to 1996) and Flash Gordon (1940-1944, 1951-1992 with a reboot only last year) both so somebody must’ve liked it.
Each of these strips and their creators is introduced by none other than Maurice Horn, one of the pioneering comics historians, who provides a quick overview of each feature’s history and artist’s background. Rounding off the issue are a collection of early strips by people who’d become famous for other ones late, by George McManus, Billy DeBeck, Gene Byrne, Carl Ed and Ken Kling. Slightly oversized and on nice white paper with cardboard covers as a book this looks great even if the strips themselves might be of slightly less interest.
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