Read by Joe Ollmann
There are watersheds touted by critics in every genre: in old movies, in great literature, in classic television series. Some of these actually live up to their hype. The car chase in the movie Bullitt with Steve McQueen, for instance, deserves the hype it is always afforded. But some much-lauded films are products of their time, embedded in amber, and do not survive well under modern scrutiny. Watching the film Mask recently, which was much-praised and won Oscars in the 80s that spawned it, was a truly painful experience. It did not age well. It was naive and dated and bore no kinship to the viewer in the present time.
I feel the same about many old comic strips: they are anchored forever in the spirit of the mores and the times in which they were created, and I feel little affinity with them. So a lot of the deluxe reissues of old comic strips of late, I approach with caution. For instance, I never really understood the celebration over the inane and the mundane in Bushmiller’s Nancy, which has long been touted as some kind of post-ironic genius. For me, work of this sort is merely inane and mundane. (Please, let’s be clear, I’m not referring to the Complete Peanuts reissues. I’ve stated before in these pages that Schulz is nearly the fourth member of the holy trinity in my book, and that stands).
Recently, however, two new reissues, Moomin, The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, from Drawn & Quarterly, and E.C. Segar’s Popeye, from Fantagraphics, have surpassed all the hype.
First, Popeye. I grew up with the Max Fleischer animated Popeye and as I grew older, I kept hearing about the “kitchen sink” drama, socialist gritty realism of Segar’s original Popeye strips. Reading the first volume of Popeye, I found all of this delivered in spades. Popeye is a strange hybrid of an adventure strip and a funny cartoon strip. And it actually manages to be funny to modern sensibilities without the need to laugh in context with the times.
The good-hearted, brutish Popeye prevails, in spite of his ignorance and ugliness, to come out on top morally in most instances. He may not hold the power or the money, but he has decency and physical power on his side. I can’t help but think how this kind of hero must have resonated with readers in the 30s. Popeye is incredibly violent. Really, just insane levels of physical violence on most pages. All of this in a beautiful, oversized diecut hardcover volume. Nice!
And speaking of hardcover volumes — since comic publishers have discovered the source of cheap hard-cover printers overseas, we are now being inundated with a wave of hard- cover comics collections that seem to be in hardcover format for no other reason than it is economically possible. But some books actually merit the fancy window dressing and Moomin, The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, is one of these books.
Tove Janssen writes like the smartest nine-year-old in the world, all honesty and absurdity and contempt for arbitrary conventions of society. Stylistically, Janssen is a master of the simple, clean line drawing. With perfectly balanced areas of blacks and whites, these drawings appear more like quality book illustrations than the newspaper strips they actually were.
Moomin tells the story of Moomin, the hippo-like inhabitant of Moominland, along with his parents and others. The strips are naive and sophisticated at the same time, bitter-sweet and sexy and also genuinely funny at times. Moomin falls in love with Snork Maiden, they love, they are jealous, they squander what they should save on whiskey and jewels, they seek adventure, they embrace life, they speak openly and honestly to one another. After reading Moomin, I felt like I should be living my life by asking, “What would Moomin do?”
