Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
Dogpatch Revisited
By John Hollander
From Dogpatch to Slobbovia
by Al Capp, edited by David Manning White, by Al Capp
Beacon Paperbacks, unpaged pp., $1.00
The 'superior' or 'OK' comic strip, aimed at an audience that might include readers of books also, cannot be very ancient. While I was growing up, there always seemed to be at least one around. (I don't mean to include Mutt and Jeff, by the way, enshrined among the allusions in Finnegans Wake.) I always think of them as occurring in sequence, although they undoubtedly overlapped for years; at different times in my life one or another would seem worth reading. Thus, the starkly lyrical Krazy Kat appeared in the Sunday comics during my child-hood (Herriman's strip might be said to be the first of the 'OK' series), but it was not until I had been thoroughly corrupted by a sense of history and, alas, by an appreciation of archetypal paradigms, that I realized that Krazy was authentic and visionary. But the rest of the series follows historical periods clearly enough. There was Barnaby during my popular-front high school days; Crockett Johnson's hard-edge, watered-down Crock of Gold seems so inseparable now from the very format of PM that I wonder how it ever outlasted its original showcase.
Review, 956 words
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