It's Never Too Late to
Celebrate the 100th Anniversary
of the Comics with

The Art of the Funnies:
An Aesthetic History

By R. C. Harvey

The American newspaper comic strip, a unique artifact of popular culture, was, by
general consensus, born in 1895 when Richard F. Outcault began producing the
legendary Yellow Kid series for the New York World. The comics have changed a
great deal since Outcault's day, and R. C. Harvey's book traces the ways in which
the medium developed and grew and matured over the intervening century.

Beginning with the Yellow Kid and Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, Harvey
analyzes the way the medium was shaped by its greatest practitioners--Bud Fisher
with Mutt and Jeff, Sidney Smith with The Gumps, Roy Crane with Wash Tubbs
and Captain Easy, Harold Gray with Little Orphan Annie, Chester Gould with Dick
Tracy, Harold Foster with Tarzan, Alex Raymond with Flash Gordon, Milton Caniff
with Terry and the Pirates, Charles Schulz with Peanuts, Mort Walker with Beetle
Bailey, Garry Trudeau with Doonesbury. Harvey also dwells lovingly on the
individual genius expressed in such works as E. C. Segar's Thimble Theatre
[Popeye], Walt Kelly's Pogo, and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes.