When I was a kid and trying to feed my insatiable appetite for comics and information about the comics, I used to haunt the ‘741’ section of the local library. In the Dewey Decimal System, that is where the art books, including whatever was stocked for comics, would be found.
I probably read this book first in 1979 or so. After rereading it as an adult, I can guarantee I didn’t understand many of Walker’s anecdotes dealing with drinking and sex/sexual tension! The book reads as a loving roast of Walker’s contemporaries and mentors, but Walker also serves himself up as a target of stories. Someone reading this book for the first time might not even get a fair amount of the references, but as a capsule of what the newspaper strip business was like it’s a great resource.
I have a softcover edition in excellent shape that I picked up on vacation for original cover price. A great deal! You get to see the origins of Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois and the back twenty percent of the book is strip reprints. My only complaint is that some of the graphics don’t reproduce well and are hard to read.
I have a small library about newspaper strips and it was a wonderful surprise to be able to add this childhood read to my permanent library.
Even though I’m not a huge fan of Harley Quinn -overall-, there are certain takes on the character that have held my interest. The Max series is one of them. I enjoy the voice actors, and that I am reviewing it the week that episode 10’s finale dropped speaks to how much I like it.
Brad Meltzer is a very successful fiction author and also had a TV show about Lost History some years ago. Out of the show he created this series of books that all have “Conspiracy” in the title. I bought the first one, but I wasn’t that impressed with the overall read. To me it’s history-lite and I’m OK getting this series out of the library. The formula is established at this point–start with the “Conspiracy”, go back to establish a short biography of the famous person, draw it out with succinct, easy-to-read prose, and have a wrap-up.