Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy of the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 1st Edition

by Peter Maresca (Author, Editor)

4 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0983550419

ISBN-10: 0983550417

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THE BIRTH OF COMICS. From the Yellow Kid to the Captain and the Kids, these are the origins of the American comic strip, created at a time when there were no set styles or formats, when artistic anarchy helped spawn a new medium. This book features the earliest offerings (1895 to 1915) from the famous and lesser-known cartoonists who where there when comics were born-over 150 creations from more then 50 superb artists, most reprinted for the first time ever. And all in the original broadsheet size and brilliant colors. Chris Ware calls Society Is Nix,"a mind-blowing portable museum retrospective of the raw, tangled ferocity and frustration that went into the making of America." Art Spiegelman exclaimed, ..."never thought anything like this could exist outside my dream life."

Editorial Reviews

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"Sunday Press has produced other must-have...It's impossible to catalogue the breadth of the aesthetic and sociological surprises packed inside this wonder cabinet of a book" -- Art Spiegelman "Artforum Magazine"

Hardcover: 152 pages
Publisher: Sunday Press Books; 1st edition (October 24, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0983550417
ISBN-13: 978-0983550419
Product Dimensions: 16.9 x 1.2 x 21.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.3 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,633,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #183711 in Books > Arts & Photography
- #293884 in Books > Textbooks

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Colorist

Full Size Format a Major Plus

December 21, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Expected more familiar and better examples of comics, and was disappointed in only a token showing of Little Nemo. The full page format was probably a problem and limited the possibilities, but it was a great pleasure seeing them the size and in detail as they were intended. All in all I am happy to have it.

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Brent R. Swanson

An Explosive Dawn

October 31, 2013

Format: Hardcover

Sunday Press has brought us huge tomes filled with the wondrous worlds of Winsor McCay, the visual poetry of Frank King, and the all-round incomparable "Krazy Kat" by Herriman. "Society is Nix," on the other hand, abandons all pretense and caution and hurls us straight into the multicolored mayhem that was the birth of the American comic strip.

As Thierry Smolderen recounts in his introduction, prototypes of the comic strip appeared in the mid-19th century, from the visual narratives of A.B. Frost to the book-length pictorial stories of Swiss illustrator Rodolphe Topffer. With the advent of the Sunday color newspaper supplements in the 1890s, the stage was set for a group of artists of radical and rambunctious creativity to produce visual mayhem and farcical satire.

In a few cases, it was glorified political cartooning, personnified by Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid who served as Hogan's Alley's interlocuter by way of chatty nightshirts. If the Kid reflected the Hearst editorial line, other characters like the Katzenjammer Kids, Little Jimmy, and Happy Hooligan raised riot just for the sheer fun of it.

Among these riotous revelers, the Katzenjammers are the least offensive, even with their vaudeville house German. And that should give you fair warning about many of Hans und Fritz's contemporaries, who included monkey-faced Irish folk, blackface caricatures with huge lips, slanty-eyed Chinese, and enough hook-noses to catch a school of gefilte fish.

The editors quote art spiegelman's warning that to expurgate such material would leave us with no comic strip history at all. Actually, it would leave us with very little popular culture history whatsoever. As the Sunday pages cut loose, the movies learned to be maniacal under the guidance of directors like Mack Sennett. Composers like Bud de Sylva wrote songs for Al Jolson that would never make it to the airwaves today.

But there was underlying beautry beneath the mayhem. Outcault and his "Yellow Kid" successor, George Luks, created stunning visual compositions. Frederick Burr Opper had been creating masterful (and funny) single panels for years; the Sunday pages gave his powers full reign--and his characters, like Alfonse and Gaston, couldn't help but stray into the adjoining panels of Dirks' Katzenjammer Kids. Johnny Gruelle and James Swinnerton were also participants in the formative melee'. And just as Chaplin emerged from Sennett's Keystone and the musical comedy took flight from the realm of "The Black Crook," so too did genius and beauty arise from the anarchy of the Sunday strip: George Herriman's inexplicable "Krazy Kat," Lyonel Feininger's expressionistic "Kinder Kids," and Swinnerton's "Little Jimmy," which, like Herriman's Kat, found its mood in the American southwest. And more wonders came from the tempered talents of Winsor McCay, Cliff Sterrett, George McManus, and Frank King.

The knockabout came first, and though some of it may make you wince at its cruelty, you'll also be awed by flashes of brilliance. This book is spectacular collection of the early comic strip, and a time capsule of popular entertainment at the dawn of the 20th century.

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Paul C. Tumey

An enormous revelation of a book

October 30, 2013

Format: Hardcover

The new large, gorgeous tome, Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 (edited by Peter Maresca and designed by Philippe Ghelmetti), opens a window in time with a cascading trove of re-discovered comics masterpieces so old they seem new again.

When the roots of a popular art form take on new life, vital new art emerges -- and with smart, elaborate books like Society Is Nix arriving at what may be the height of the current revival of the American newspaper comic strip, we just might be headed for a comics Renaissance. The greatest value of a book like Society Is Nix is that it gives us the work of forgotten cartoonists of the distant past who were so different -- and so good -- that we are shocked into meeting their work in the moment, without any cultural preconceptions.

There's plenty of amazing pages by acknowledged master sof the form: McCay, Herriman, Outcault, Opper, Swinnerton, etc. But there's a wealth of new discoveries by artists who time has forgotten, until now: Kate Carew, J. Cory Campbell, Percy Winterbottom (George Beckenbaugh), Gene Carr, Augustus Jansson, Alfred Freuh, A.B. Shults, to name just a few.

The selection is impeccable. The restoration of the pages is near perfect. And the presentation is extraordinary -- for the simple reason that the pages are presented in their original broadsheet size of 21 inches by 16 inches. This is the size these works were created for. To date, most reprints of early American comics have presented them in greatly reduced format -- and something essential has been lost. The price tag for this book is hefty, but it's worth it -- the quality and content is the best available, and exceeds any expectations.

Includes essays by Peter Maresca, Thierry Smoldern, Richard Samuel West, R.C. Harvey, Brian Walker, Alfredo Castelli, Bill Kartalopoulos, David Gerstein, and Paul C. Tumey (me).

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S M

This was a act of treasuring comics by sunday press

May 2, 2014

Format: Hardcover

This is an act of treasuring comics by sunday press, who were terrific in assisting me in answering my questions.

Essentially this book presents each page as a piece of art, better than what you would have read in a newspaper when they originally came out.

I also love Sunday Press not catering to political correctness in comments such as a comic involving a black character in the typical blackface characterization of the period, BUT accurately states that the character was treated well in the comic, something that did not always happen, thus not trying to not offend those self-righteous egotisical lazy PC types who will see a drawing, jump to conclusions without even reading the comic and make a big "I am so offended" stink about it.

Aside from this, the comments are very informative and add to the pleasure of reading them

Good on Sunday Press

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Pages with related products. See and discover other items: history comics strips, history of the comic strip, sunday comics

Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy of the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 1st Edition

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