I'm not talking about the story in the book itself -- I'll get to that in a bit -- it's the story of the book that is bonkers. Frank Johnson, like a lot of kids, liked drawing and telling stories with his pictures. So he'd draw in his notebooks about whatever funny stuff he could think of. And he never stopped. He just worked in notebook after notebook for decades on end. By the time he died in 1979, he had filled over 2,300 notebook pages with his comics, most of which tell a single, ongoing story about "Wally's Gang." But that's not the really bonkers part. Not only did he never seemingly make any effort to publish any of the comics -- he never showed anybody. After he passed away, his family discovered the notebooks, with no one ever even being aware of their existence previously! Johnson had never mentioned drawing comics, never seem to have talked about any comics or comic artists, and never took any art classes as far as anyone can tell.
These notebooks all but sprung up from nothing!
That Johnson saved as many as he did is impressive in its own right. The oldest notebook dates from 1928, when he was only 16 years old. And since the notebooks seem to all be numbered sequentially, there appear to have been 90 notebooks he filled before that! He worked on these stories for over a half century on these stories for no other reason than to entertain himself! And he thought enough of the work to hold onto it for that entire time. Through the Great Depression, through World War II, through the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s... through nearly every major event in the US for much of the twentieth century. This is like something right out of Hicksville!
Bonkers!
OK, that's all well and good but how is the actual book itself? This guy didn't have any training, so is it crap?
The initial pages of "Wally's Gang" honestly aren't terrible but very amateurish. Stiff figures, not always proportioned well, with relatively bland gags that might've been copied from something in the newspaper. But when you sit back and consider that Johnson was only 16 at the time, they aren't all that bad at all! But the next notebook is from eleven years later -- we're missing notebooks #92-109 -- and there is a marked improvement across the board. The art vastly improves, the jokes land better, he starts adding shading and more detailed backgrounds. The notebooks then proceed chronologically and you can watch as Johnson improves. He experiments more with composition, depth, perspective... the reader is watching him improve effectively in real time. Some of the sequences get quite inventive, in fact! And while the techniques he used aren't unheard of today, some of them I don't recall seeing nearly as early as Johnson was trying them!
Not every page is a winner, of course. Like any newspaper cartoonist, there are good days and bad days. As good as Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson were in their respective strips, they didn't knock it out of the park every time either! But Johnson's work, particulaly as he gets into his second and third decades of working on it, is quite solid. The only roughness comes from the fact that everything is in pencil on yellowed paper and doesn't have the clean white/black delineation of being inked. But his linework and his story direction clearly show more confidence as he keeps working on it. It's a fascinating look at the borderline daily view of someone cartooning their way through the first half of the 20th century.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the reproduction quality. The pages are all scanned as is, with no apparent clean-up. The edges of the paper are bent and torn, some of the artwork bleeds through from the back, yellowed-and-probably-no-longer-even-functional tape is visible... These are very raw and direct images from the original notebooks. If not for the quality of the paper, you'd be hard-pressed to think you're not looking at the originals. Taking this approach does a few things. It offers an ongoing sense of context; these pages look like they were made a hundred years ago. And it's a constant reminder that Johnson was by no means a professional artist; this is just what he did for fun in his spare time. He was working with what materials he had, which were pencils and the lined composition notebooks of a student.
The book clocks in at a whopping 634 pages with the promise of a second coming volume to print all the notebooks after #120. This volume feels a bit steep at $49.99 US but it is an absolutely fascinating look at what is not in any of the histories of comics. Johnson really was doing some innovative work and it's a damn shame that nobody knew it during his lifetime! If you've got any sense or appreciation of comics history, it's absolutely worth checking out!
0 comments:
Post a Comment