Customer Reviews

Complete Little Orphan Annie Volume 2

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Here now is the second volume of IDW's complete reprinting of Little Orphan Annie. V2 reprints all the dailies from October 1927 thru December, 1929, along with all the Sundays from 1928 in color (more on this soon).

For myself, this is new territory. I had never had the chance to read any LOA before 1931, so I have been awaiting this volume for some time. And it doesn't disappoint. We continue to get the great drama and adventure of Annie and "Daddy" Warbucks. We once again have the Silos and the horrible Miss Asthma. And its an early story in this album that Annie gets her classic outfit.

People whose only knowledge of Annie is thru the play &/or movie will probably be surprised. The REAL Annie is very different. Gray's 'conservative/libertarian' philosophy is also part and parcel of the strip, something that is offputting to some, but which I think is of vital importance to the strip.

Also, in this volume, there is a forward speaking of the issue of the inclusion of the Sundays. What I think too many people today don't understand is that the 'standard' of having dailies and Sundays putting an interegrated storyline wasn't always so in the early days of comics (20s and 30s). Further, as some readers may only read the dailies and others the Sundays, even with integrated strips you had to take that into account.

Some strips (ex: Thimble Theater staring Popeye, Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Gasoline Alley) never intergrated the dailies and Sundays. So this is an issue for reprinting them. The first Fantagraphics reprint of Popeye had separate volumes for Sundays & dailies, the old NBM reprint of Wash Tubbs included both in the same volumes. The current Fantagraphics reprint of Popeye have the dailies and Sundays in the same volumes, but in different sections, and the upcoming reprint of Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy by Fantagraphics will have separate volumes, as will the Hermes reprint of Buck Rogers and Drawn & Quarterly's Walt & Skeezix.

Other strips first had separate continuity for dailies and sundays, and later merged them. This is true for Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates. So in the first volume of their reprint volumes from IDW, the separate Sundays are in a separate section, and when they merged, they integrated the Sundays into the dailies.

With Annie, the sundays didn't integrate into the dailies until 1931 (mid-1930 according to the article in v2). And the Sundays DIDN'T have a separate continuety, but INSTEAD were more standalone gag strips. Because the tone of the Sundays was so different from the dailies, it was decided to put all the pre-1930 Sundays in a separate volume. HOWEVER, they discovered it wasn't so simple. In the first volume, they found a half dozen or so Sundays that DID cross over, so they reprinted those. And in this volume they discovered that the 1928 Sundays (but NOT the 27 or 29) crossed over with the dailies, so they reprinted those (in COLOR) integrated with the dailies. They DO plan on going back and reprinting those skipped over Sundays in a separate volume.

This second volume in the series contains daily and Sunday comics from 1927-1929, with the Sunday funnies integrated into the body of the work since Harold Gray had begun to use occasional Sunday pages to advance the plot of the stories, though he continued to do occasional Sunday gag strips that had nothing to do with the daily plot. Portions of the stories collected in volume 1 had been reprinted in the past (the SAP story being collected by Helen Gray for the Cupples and Leon reprint "Little Orphan Annie" and only choice portions of the Mrs. Warbucks story and merged with the SAP story with none of the intervening cartoons were reprinted in the Dover book "Little Orphan Annie and Little Orphan Annie in Cosmic City") but so far as I can determine, not of the stories in volume two have ever been reprinted, making this book a must have for Annie fans and comic collectors.
In the stories in Volume 2, Harold Gray hit his stride and perfected the formula he would follow for the next forty years. He puts Annie through a roller-coaster ride of good fortune and bad, find and losing surrogate families like clockwork. Gray also begins to repeat himself - "Daddy" Warbucks takes ship (again) to try to regain his lost fortune (again) and makes inadequate provisions for the care of Annie, who is forced to make her own way in the world once again after "Daddy" Warbucks is lost at sea (again). Some of Annie's misfortune are of her own doing, however. In one story she goes out for a walk and can't find her way back to the hotel she lived in with "Daddy" Warbucks. She didn't even bother to notice the name of the hotel. We also see an emerging prankster side to Annie. In another story, she uses a counterfeit coin to "skin" a bunch of kids who are matching quarters - not the sort of behavior one expects from Annie.
Harold Gray also chose to keep Annie's history a permanent mystery. In the first stories, reprinted in Volume 1, Miss Asthma shares Annie's records with Mrs. Warbucks and implies there is a secret hidden in the records. This secret is lost when Mrs. Warbucks is lost at sea. In Volume 2, rather than tease the readers any further with this story line, Harold Gray chose to burn the orphanage - and all of Annie's records - to the ground.
Some of the strips in the story have a bit of an ominous tone when read today, especially the New Years strip from 1929. As Annie speculates what fortune has in store for 1929, we, the readers know that a great financial disaster lurks ahead, and a decade of economic depression. Harold Gray, though unaware of the disaster ahead, manages to foretell the coming collapse in the 1929 comics. Though the stories in this volume ends just before the market collapse, Harold Gray has several of his character speculating wildly in stocks and bonds - even "Daddy" Warbucks getting so involved in playing the market that barely pays attention to Annie - and Gray showed one bank going bust after the banker loses the bank deposits through market speculation: A chilling echo of the economic troubles that beset us today.
One can only hope that the current economic downturn will not prevent the Library of American Comics from continuing this valuable series.

Volume 2 of the LOA reprint parade brings us strips from 1927-1929, and, this time, a number of color Sunday pages are included. For a short period of time during 1928, Harold Gray maintained his continuity in both dailies and Sundays before abandoning the practice with the strip of Dec. 30. A few years later, he would merge the two for good. Why he experimented in this way, I haven't the foggiest. Annie starts the volume in the company of Daddy Warbucks and reunites with him once before it's through, but not before Gray drags us all through the wringer by, first, getting Annie in bad with a bunch of train robbers (who stage a vengeful kidnapping after the spunky kid has doped out where they hid their stolen loot) and then dumping her back into nasty Miss Asthma's Orphans' Home for a long, painful spell, even as Warbucks is literally tearing the town apart trying to find her. The juxtaposition of Warbucks' frantic actions, Annie's spells of misery, and colossally unfunny Sunday-page gags in which Annie, purposely or otherwise, gives Miss Asthma grief is almost too much for the reader to bear. Gray eventually tires of this game and uses the convenient medium of a fire to (1) level the Orphans' Home, (2) wipe out any trace of Annie's pre-Orphans' Home history, and (3) literally force Annie and Daddy back together. Gray lets Annie rest on her hard-earned laurels for a while, then incapacitates Warbucks in a plane crash. Soon thereafter, Warbucks is off again trying to save his fortune, and Annie -- because she can't remember the name of the city hotel where the two were staying (!!!) -- is forced back into the "madding crowd." By volume's end, she's in the town of Blunderville with a kindly seamstress and playing more or less of a secondary role in a mini-drama of unwise stock-market speculation that's far too close to the then-contemporary headlines (read: The Crash of '29) for comfort.

During this period, Gray tackles the subject of "collective worker action" -- a future bugaboo of his -- for the first time and emits decidedly mixed signals. In the town of Mayfair, Annie gets a job as a waitress at a railroad beanery, then decides to strike as a result of unfair treatment. Gray doesn't seem to have a problem with this, perhaps because the strike was called by an individual in this case. When Warbucks later argues at great length with farmer Silo about the "farm situation" -- a major issue in the otherwise prosperous 20s, and one that Gray knew quite a bit about, since he came from a farming family -- Gray appears to be advocating, if not quite a farmers' union, then certainly more effective cooperation among farmers so that they can air their grievances more successfully. Gray then counterbalances these progressive touches with a Labor Day strip in which Annie makes a comment about small-town people being able to work when they care to, since no unions are involved. Gray's views on this subject would calcify soon enough once unions became an important part of the New Deal coalition, but, here, they're very much in flux. (By the bye, the long wrangle between Silo and Warbucks over farm policy definitely dispels any illusions that Gray meant for his strip to be read primarily by kids. The juvenile-friendly version of Annie that gained popularity on radio in the 1930s must have seemed almost like a completely different character to those deeply familiar with the progression of the comic strip.)

Jeet Heer's ongoing essay on Gray -- in this segment, he discusses the debts that Gray's storytelling style and themes owed to Charles Dickens -continues to be interesting reading. A bonus of sorts is included in the form of a mock-serious summary of the continuities contained in Volume 1. The flippant tone ("They made a trapeze performer out of [Annie]. She really should have sent [her doll] Emily Marie in to perform. But she didn't. And the rope broke. And so did Annie's legs.") makes me wonder if this was meant to be a parody of Gray's habit of summarizing recent strip events in occasional "catch-up strips." If so, it was quite funny. If not, someone at IDW has a peculiar sense of humor.

Having only read the classic "Arf: The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie," the early 1970s book which collected most of Annie between 1935 and 1945, I approached these early reprints with a little trepidation.

Could they possibly be as good? Did it take Harold Gray a decade or so to reach his stride? About two weeks of strips into the first volume it was obvious my anxiety was misplaced. Harold Gray hit the ground running. These late 20s strips are every bit as good as the 30s-40s "golden age of Annie."

Of course we don't have the full cast yet. Punjab and the Asp are in our future. But Gray's story telling and artwork are exactly the quality we expect and they will be that way literally to the end. Al Capp reminded us in "Arf" that "Gray drew better pictures in his later years than Picasso did."

This is one of the most remarkable characters in American culture and these volumes may be pricey but they're priceless.

(And just FYI, I'm not the same Michael Brown who previously reviewed this book. I'm Michael E. Brown from Texas.)

In this volume Annie becomes a little wiser and a little stronger. She takes charge and cares for a family, with surprising results. "Daddy" Warbucks is helped by her as she faces one of her biggest challenges. You get Harold Gray's take on poverty, bereavement, and the problems facing farmers. By 1931 Annie would be at her peak, but she is almost there already. These are wonderful stories with many varied characters. No other strip showed life the way it really was. Gray does offer one solitary nod to childhood. It seems that our heroine still believes in Santa Claus. Outside of that, all of this rings true. Get this and other volumes while you can. What an experience.

I first discovered a slim volume of vintage Annie comics as an eight year old and have been looking for more ever since. Decades later, it was worth the wait. The Library of American Comics has done an excellent job and listens to their readers, such as to the protests over color comics missing from volume one. This second volume contains more of them (but still not the ones that don't contribute to the storyline), and in the correct place chronologically (unlike the first volume, which had them in the front of the book). With quality paper, color reprints, and even a built-in bookmark, the volumes look like they were lavishly designed by Daddy Warbucks rather than Miss Asthma.

The strips begin with Annie first being separated from "Daddy" (yet again), then continuing to help others in need, this time a newly-widowed woman and her four children. When her new friend Mrs. Pewter is seriously injured and hospitalized, Annie takes over as "mom" to her children, finding a job first selling newspapers, then working as a waitress. From there, it's on to solving a mystery and perhaps even meeting up with Mr. Warbucks again (but, for that, you'll have to read it to find out).

It's being held on a shelf to give to new grandkids when they get old enough to understand it. I read it back in the 1940s, but not lately :=))

Bob Powers