Thursday, December 29, 2005

On the BBC Radio Site...

A half-hour spotlight on master monologist Shelley Berman. This is another one of those links that you have to get to right away because it won't be there long.

• Posted at 9:47 PM · LINK

Sergio Sez

The esteemed cartoonist Sergio Aragonés phones to say he read the website this morning and that I'm right about how someone should reprint Conchy...but the strip that really cries out for collection is Jack Kent's King Aroo. Sergio is correct.

King Aroo ran from 1950 to 1965 without ever setting the world on fire or getting in that many papers. I really know it only from its one paperback collection, which was published in '52, but if it was that good all the time, it was very good. The strip dealt with a sometimes-befuddled, sometimes-whimsical monarch who ruled over the justly-named land of Myopia...and beyond that, it's tough to describe. You kind of have to see it...and I hope that some day soon, we'll all be able to.

• Posted at 5:47 PM · LINK

Shell Game

This falls into the category of "Books I'd Like To See Someone Do." I'd like to see someone do a big book that collected the entirety of Conchy, a short-lived but wonderful newspaper strip by a man named James Childress, about whom I know relatively little. I know that Mr. Childress was a newspaper illustrator who came up with a cute little feature about a bunch of people who live on a beach somewhere. It was initially self-syndicated, beginning in 1970, and attracted enough interest that one of the major syndicates took it on. Apparently, that was not a happy association. The strip at times could get serious and philsophical, and the story we heard at the time — I can't swear how true it is — is that the syndicate felt those episodes were costing it potential clients and Childress kept refusing their requests to tone that down. In any case, he finally persuaded them to let him return to distributing it himself. In 1977, for reasons that no one seems to quite understand, Childress took his own life and that, of course, was the end of Conchy.

There were three or four paperback collections, one of which Childress published himself, but an awful lot of Conchy remains unreprinted. And it would be nice if some scholar could collect all that is known about the cartoonist and perhaps interview those who knew him and are still around. This tribute website, assembled by one of his friends, gives us a brief taste. (Click on the photo to enter.)

There are actually plenty of other newspaper strips that never attained the longevity and stature of a Peanuts or even Calvin & Hobbes that are just too good to be allowed to slide into obscurity. Most of the majors are being or will be well-preserved and presented. Let's not neglect the ones that didn't reach that status but deserved to.

• Posted at 11:09 AM · LINK