Who is jeet heer

In between the redesign we figured now we can go back and do the beginning strips. The reason is that the appeal of the Gasoline Alley strips is the relationship between Walt and Skeezix.

But we always wanted to reproduce the early strips at some point so it seemed like a good time to do it. You talk about this a little in your introduction to the book, but all the things that became evident a year later you can see in the strip emerging in before Skeezix arrived.

In some ways readers are in a better position to understand how Frank King evolved because we know what he ended up. We can go back to the beginning and see him putting things together. I really see part of the interest in Walt Before Skeezix is you can see an artist evolving and almost brick-by-brick building this series.

I think that alt Before Skeezix definitely gives you that. You see different directions that the strip could have gone into. One of the things we had wanted to do is to get people to take a second look at Frank King and the books do a heavy contextualization of him. It sounds like boasting but I do think that the series has done more to change the comics canon than most books of this sort have.

I think people have a much higher opinion of Frank King now than they would have in the s or s. I think that in some ways the emergence of the graphic novel as a genre has given us a new way to read Frank King because we can now see him as being a novelist in comic strip form that follows the life of a character. Gasoline Alley now reads not like a daily comic strip but as a multi-volume roman-fleuve.

I think that in some ways the strips work better as a graphic novel than they did as a daily strip. That also changes the way we read Gasoline Alley. That introduces an element of narrative and character evolution. Also I think the addition of the baby, as well, even before Skeezix is born we have the pregnancy of Amy. I reviewed that for the National Post where I was doing other writing on comics.

We knew each other and hit it off so when the time came to do the book it all came together. That book was very influential in reviving Frank King because it included six of the Sunday strips, very well selected and reproduced, which was not common in s books. Chris Ware, Joe Matt, and I all read the Smithsonian book growing up and those six pages really sparked in all of us an interest in Frank King.

Joe Matt is the real unsung hero of this. He started collecting Frank King dailies and Sundays and amassed a huge collection. Chris Ware had his own collection. I know that Bill Blackbeard died a few years ago but I always want to mention his name because he really planted the seeds that made the Walt and Skeezix books possible.

When we first started doing it I thought we were going to do the Sundays. That was something I was only vaguely cognizant of, but thanks to Chris and Joe we made the right decision. Everything is getting reprinted.

It is a huge project. He takes on assistants at a certain point so it becomes less and less his own work. After that King is using assistants a lot and the strip takes on a different feel. To get Skeezix from being born to serving in the war and returning home — that feels like a natural progression. He marries before the war and has a son after the war. That would give you a good sense of his life. But nothing is set yet. People are following it from year to year. It reproduces some of the effect of a being a comic strip you live with.

You see the cartoonist evolving and changing and reacting to the world around them. It makes for a very rich reading experience. Comics Studies is a very lively part of academia now. It used to be that University Press of Mississippi was the only one but now there are other presses—Rutgers, Ohio State, Yale University Press—that have substantial lines on comics.

I was invited to Denver Comic Con to give presentations with other academics. One, what is the role of independent scholar in the midst of this? One is R. Harvey who did a couple books with Mississippi and writes for The Comic Journal.

Now eventually his everything that he gathered these trailer trucks full of newspaper comics have been bought up by Ohio State University. Independent scholars are a crucial part of comics scholarship being built up.

I interviewed Katherine Roeder recently about her book on Winsor McCay and we talked about how most comics scholarship comes out of English departments. Before John Updike settled on writing as a career, he wanted to be a cartoonist and badgered his heroes to send him signed copies of their work. Jeet Heer recently uncovered one letter, sent to the creator of Little Orphan Annie, when Updike was John Updike, RIP. Published: 28 Jan Challenging the cult of Churchill.

Published: 1 Jul The Canadian Nixon. Published: 24 Apr The injustice of Superman. Published: 5 Apr