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.
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.
When the news came out that Sharon Lee is the 2025 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award given by BSFS with support from The Heinlein Society, it marked the latest in a string of noteworthy authors that I hadn’t read. Since the writing duo of Sharon and her late husband Steve are best known for their “Liaden Universe” I figured I would start with book #1.