About the Author

Cartoonist Brian Walker is a founder and former director of the International Museum of Cartoon Art. He has written and edited more than a dozen books on the subject and been the curator of 65 exhibitions. Since 1984 he has been part of the creative team that produces the strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews

Founder and former director of the International Cartoon Museum of Art, Walker here presents a survey of postwar strips that made it to the big time of daily syndication, as well as of their creators. Strip illustrations (210 in color, 776 in all) range from Little Orphan Annie collecting scrap metal to help the war effort, to Doonesbury's Zonker parodying interactive media by losing his punchline to a computer error. Walker, who since 1984 "has been part of the creative team that produces Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois," orients the book toward hugely popular strips like the still-running Peanuts, B.C. and Garfield and cubicle-based smash Dilbert, and thus ends up giving more of a history of American taste than of the entire form. Still, readers will be happy to rediscover the likes of '80s media tweaker John Darling; genre strips like the western Red Ryder (1938-64), '50s sci-fi Twin Earths and the adventure strip Steve Canyon; and Walt Kelly's ever-influential Pogo. Proceeding chronologically, Walker notes the effects of the invention of television, the politics of syndication, and the means of racial integration, and offers biographical profiles tracking the careers of all the names less familiar to us than the characters-the cartoonists. The whole feels a little too accepting of the dictates of syndication for a mass audience, but it is a solid account of the way various artists have worked within that system. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.