Carl Barks didn’t actually appear in the funny papers — he drew comic books — but he is one of the finest of all comic strip artists.

His style of visual narrative is deceptively simple.  His panels rarely draw attention to themselves — they’re well-crafted but straightforward — and yet his stories pop from frame to frame, with a speed and economy that are thrilling.  You might call him the Howard Hawks of comic strip artists, with a technique so masterful that it disappears in the beguilements of the tale.

Barks’s humor is gentle, more amusing and charming than funny, but the sweetness draws you into his adventure plots with Donald and his nephews and his Uncle Scrooge in an oddly powerful way.  His is a cozy and consoling art, pleasurable in ways that seem to bypass the conscious mind and return you to the innocent diversions of childhood, like pretending to be a jungle explorer in the blackberry thickets down by the river.

It’s art of a very high order.

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Prince Valiant is the most beautifully drawn of all the classic action-adventure comic strips.  Its author Hal Foster was a brilliant draftsman and just about every image he ever drew was arresting.  He employed large panels that contained lots of detail, but they didn’t work together in a dynamic way, like the shots in a movie, giving the narrative visual momentum.

The strip thus has a kind of static, or perhaps you could say stately, quality — more oriented towards the pictorialism of book illustrations than towards the cinematic energy of most action-adventure strips.  Foster relied heavily on blocks of expository text to move his tales forward from one gorgeous image to the next.

Still, it’s a delightful and entertaining strip, aesthetically compelling, and the tales themselves are satisfying yarns, full of chivalric derring-do and spectacular fantasy.

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For my money, Li’l Abner is the funniest of all the classic American comic strips.  (A couple of the episodes featuring Fearless Fosdick, a merciless parody of Dick Tracy, are the only comic strips this side of Mad Magazine that have ever made me laugh out loud.)

Al Capp, Abner’s creator, had a lively sense of the absurd, which he combined with a relentless cynicism to fashion a comic tone all his own, somewhere between slapstick farce and satire.  The hillbilly inhabitants of Dogpatch, Abner’s home town, are both wise in their ways and idiotic — Capp ridicules them even as he uses them to ridicule the more sophisticated characters they meet.

Nothing is sacred in Capp’s view of things, everyone is preposterous.  It’s an attitude that keeps the reader off balance, ready to be elbowed unexpectedly in the ribs by some outrageous gag or other.  Comedy and sentiment rarely mix well — Capp’s total avoidance of sentiment frees him up for creating laughs at will.

There are echoes in this approach of the tone of E. C. Segar’s Popeye strips, with their manic knockabout gags and omnidirectional violence, but Popeye always remains heroic in his bullheaded way.  Abner is always a boob, even when he’s doing the right thing, usually by mistake.

Capp’s strip is one of the few great ones that hit the ground running.  Abner, Daisy Mae, Mammy and Pappy Yokum appear fully fledged from the start, ready to carry the strip onwards for decades.

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