Harvey Comics Classics Volume 5: The Harvey Girls

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Harvey Comics Classics Volume 5: The Harvey Girls (Dark Horse, 2009).



Hmmmm. It's very difficult to nail down exactly what's wrong with this collection. There's a lot that's wrong with the whole series, frankly. Across five volumes, Dark Horse has reprinted close to 2400 pages of classic Harvey Comics, but the whole enterprise has been two or three steps away from an ideal bookshelf collection. It's a case where the best, most honest intentions of editor Leslie Cabarga and essayist Jerry Beck have run smack into reality's ugly wall: these weren't the best comics in the world, and Harvey Entertainment's incredibly poor service of their trademarks over the last twenty years has meant an uphill climb for Dark Horse to sell anything with these characters' names on them.

The result, for the fifth and final volume in the series, is incredibly disappointing. To be fair, after two pretty good collections (Casper the Ghost and Richie Rich), the rot set in with the third book, spotlighting Hot Stuff. I struggled through that collection last year and couldn't even finish half of it. It was so monotonous and dull that neither of my kids could enjoy it, either. Then came a fourth volume, spotlighting the baffling Baby Huey, a character that extensive anecdotal questioning has proved that nobody on the planet would admit to ever liking. I never read a Baby Huey comic in my life before the release of that book. I decided as a kid that the character looked stupid and went on with my business of having Shogun Warriors knock over dinosaurs with flying fists. A thumb through the Dark Horse release last year suggested that my seven year-old self had been right all along.

The problem is this: the Little Audrey, Little Dot and Little Lotta stories which all share space in this last 480-page book are mostly a lot more fun than anything in the Hot Stuff or Baby Huey books. I'm not saying these are high art, or even the best kiddie funnybooks around, but I was mostly entertained looking through this collection. Any one of the three characters could have headlined a far more entertaining book than either the Hot Stuff or the Baby Huey one. But after those two collections seemed to flop - anecdotally, I know of one comic shop that did not order volume five at all after poor sales of the previous two - Dark Horse really didn't seem to put a lot of muscle behind the marketing of this book.

After all, while "extensive" - you know I'm kidding when I talk like this, right? - research has turned up absolutely no fans of Baby Huey whatsoever, the same research has turned up absolutely nobody on the planet who admits to even having heard of Little Dot before our friends at Mr. Kitty turned our attention to this oversight. Clearly, the planet has been missing out. Despite her two decade run in comics, Harvey has done such a godawful job keeping their characters in the public eye that she and all of her hundreds of weird uncles and aunts have been completely forgotten. That's not how it should be: the comics are pretty fun distractions, and they went over far better with my daughter than the turgid Hot Stuff. Somebody should have spent the last thirty years putting out Little Dot reprints and toys keeping this character hot, so that a $20 480-page collection of 1950s Little Dot comics would have been a foregone conclusion.

But in this market, I don't see how Dark Horse could justify such a book, especially if the rumored low sales of the third and fourth collections are true.

Honestly, I found a lot to like in most of these stories. Occasionally, the fanciful comedy involving animals was pretty eye-rolling. At one point, a fisherman lands a sawfish, who is very grumpy and runs around the boat using his tailfin like feet, much like those godawful Walter Lantz cartoons that used to waste precious afternoon minutes on UHF channels while you were waiting for something good to come on. There's a lot more of that in this book than you'd like, as befits 1950s kiddie comics with their ancestry in Paramount theatre cartoons. On the other hand, there's plenty of Audrey waging war against boys trying to keep her out of their clubhouse, and Lotta accidentally using her superhuman strength to bring office picnics and travelling carnies down around her ears, and it's mostly really good stuff that every parent should pick up. If you've got kids between five and ten, buy an extra copy for them to beat up and love, because this is a terrific set of stories for younguns, and an extremely good value for money.

As archival material goes, however, it is very far from ideal. I appreciate Dark Horse and Cabarga making the effort, but I do feel that a better book, and indeed a better series, eluded us. Recommended with the understanding that, if you're even half as nitpicky and easily frustrated as me, you won't stop thinking about how much better some alternate universe's Harvey series turned out. It's kind of tough to enjoy funnybooks when you're Monday-morning quarterbacking everything.

Hideous Beasts Edition with Judge Death and Hot Stuff

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Judge Death: Boyhood of a Superfiend (Rebellion, 2008) and Harvey Comics Classics: Hot Stuff (Dark Horse, 2008).

Each of these books should be praised for one thing: they look fantastic and are reproduced well. They are each fine additions to any bookshelf. The Judge Death book has the nice matte cover and glossy paper that fans of the Rebellion line have come to expect, while the Hot Stuff book is astonishingly good value for money. Taking a leaf from the Essentials/Showcase playbook, this is about 400 pages of comics, but - and here's an important distinction from the big Marvel/DC books - with a mix of color and monochrome, and reproduced on wonderful paper with introductions and background material.



"Boyhood of a Superfiend" was one of the inaugural series in the Judge Dredd Megazine and it is set after the events of the "Necropolis" epic. In it, Death, licking his wounds, hides out as a lodger with a nearly-blind pensioner and tells his life's story to a journalist. Taken on its own, there isn't anything wrong with the story at all - it's full of grisly, black humor and the artwork by Pete Doherty is very good indeed - but it all seems completely superfluous. Indeed, giving Death all the page time he was getting in the early 90s was detrimental to the character and robbed him of his impact. To be honest, as amusing as this story is, I'm not sure it is a story that ever needed to be told. There's a bonus strip by Si Spencer and John McRea included, but the publisher really missed a trick by not adding "Tea With Mrs. Gunderson," an eight-page story by John Wagner and Dean Ormston that served as an epilogue to this adventure. Recommended for completists.



I normally defer to our friends at Mr. Kitty in all things Harvey, and last year they gave the Hipster Daughter the big bookshelf edition of Richie Rich that Dark Horse compiled. While I haven't read it all yet, I was impressed enough with the package to give Hot Stuff a try. Honestly, I'd never read any Hot Stuff before. I know of the character, but I never, ever saw these comics as a kid.

And you know... I don't think I was missing much. It's always difficult to tell whether you're being too critical in judging material for kids when you're not approaching it from that mindset - clearly your old pal the Hipster Dad is kinder to certain Sid & Marty Krofft shows than they objectively deserve, because he loved them as a child - but this is a downright repetitive, boring book. One main problem is that, unlike Richie Rich or Little Dot and the others, Hot Stuff doesn't have a consistent universe and regular characters to bounce off. He's interacting with medieval villagers in one episode and 1950s stage magicians in the next, then Neptune, then monkeys on some island. And he melts all the snow on top of a mountain forty times and his trident gets snatched thirty times and a volcano erupts twenty times... it's like a lifeless early 60s Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon. The only recurring-ish character in the first chunk is Stumbo the Giant, and he's the most boring character I've ever seen, although there are apparently some "Devil Kids" to be encountered in pages to come.

That said, the Hipster Daughter thinks it's a riot, and I think her opinion trumps mine. About the best I can say is that it's interesting to consider how Hot Stuff is the spiritual ancestor of both Calvin and Bart Simpson, but she'll tell you it's funny and that's all that matters. So if you've got elementary school-age kids, it comes with her seal of approval. Recommended for under-tens; I'll wait for the forthcoming Harvey Girls collection.

(Originally posted July 23, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)