Polly and Her Pals: Complete Sunday Comics, Volume 2

Polly and Her Pals: Complete Sunday Comics #2

by Cliff Sterrett, Dean Mullaney (Editor), Lorraine Turner (Designer)

Polly and Her Pals: Complete Sunday Comics, 1928-1930 reprints all of Sterrett's Sunday pages from the height of his Surrealistic Period in a large 12" x 16" Champagne Edition format so they can be fully appreciated. The book also contains Sterrett's topper strips "Dot and Dash" and "Sweethearts and Wives." The majority of the Sundays have never before been reprinted. Polly Perkins is young, blonde, and the apple of many a young man's eye. Yet while Polly is out on the town or frolicking at the beach, it's her family that creates all the hubbub! Sensible Maw Perkins can never keep her husband Paw out of trouble, and towed along in Paw's wake are Polly's cousin Ashur; Neewah, the family's tart-tongued retainer; and Paw's cat, Kitty, the pantomime wonder of the comic strip world. Edited by Dean Mullaney and designed by two-time Emmy winner Lorraine Turner, the book contains the detailed background and biographic material that has made Library of American Comics the "gold standard" in strip reprints.

Genres: Comics

176 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2015

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Polly and Her Pals: Complete Sunday Comics, Volume 2 collects all the Polly and Her Pals strips drawn by Cliff Sterrett from 1928-1930.

As I said in my review of the first volume, this is the real shit. Sterrett puts Sam Perkins, aka Paw, through ordeal after ordeal with hilarious results. Despite being a henpecked curmudgeon, Sam Perkins is a good man who loves animals.

Sterrett's skill is on display on every page. He's equally adept with word play and silent gags. Things veer surreal but there aren't as many standout strips in this volume as there were the previous. I did think it was bold to do ten linked Sunday strips in a row, something not typically done in humor comics.

The only thing bad about this volume is that there isn't a volume 3. Five out of five stars.

[Jeff Lewonczyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true joy to be able to immerse yourself in this life-sized collection of rarely-republished classic comic-strip masterpieces. If this is the sort of thing that you like, then this is some of the best you can get. Pure entertainment.

That said, I'm having a harder time than ever swallowing the casual racism that is endemic to nearly every humorous confection of this era (the sui generis Krazy Kat being perhaps the primary exception, for reasons possibly related to George Harriman's long-secret biography - and even then there are moments). You can ALMOST overlook the depiction of the Japanese family servant Neewah - despite the "honorable this and that" speech tics, he is generally treated as an actual character and member of the family, which takes a bit of the edge off. But when Sterrett introduces a Black character for the occasional strip or two, HOO-boy - the entire escapist enterprise drags itself down to the to an ugly place indeed. I don't get the impression from reading the intros to any of these books that Sterrett himself was a particularly malevolent racist - he was simply using the visual shorthand of the time, which happened to be a matter of abominable stereotype lunging into outright dehumanization. In the majority of strips that don't incorporate this racist imagery, it's easy to pretend you're in a little bubble where you can enjoy the art and comedy for what it is. But those few examples remind us that very few popular endeavors of the era were untainted by white supremacy. In this case, I choose to interpret it as Sterrett giving his (no doubt overwhelmingly white) audience what they wanted and expected, rather than it being an innate and willful character defect on his part. I wonder if I'm letting him (and myself) off the hook too much by thinking that way, because the rest of the content I do genuinely adore. Is it possible to separate the two parts? Probably not, at least in the long run, but today, for the purpose of this particular review, I'm choosing to celebrate what I love and acknowledge that which is troublesome and sad. Time will tell if I can remain comfortable doing so.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second volume of Sunday strips by Cliff Sterrett is almost as much fun as the first, but the surrealist content is diminished, as though the vision that possessed him in 1925 faded over time. The craziness here is mostly confined to the episodes that involve dreams but the waking world is still wildly animated, colorful, and fun. Having just finished Hermann Broch's novel(s) The Sleepwalkers, it's hard not to note that it was written roughly contemporaneously to the years when these comics were published. While the horror of Broch's book is a sharp contrast to Polly's lively world, some of the same theme of "disintegrating" values is notable. Sterrett's observations of the change in mores and attitudes is a comic gloss on the shift of priorities during the post-World War years, two sides of the same turning coin. There is a third volume of Polly due later this year -- the best of the dailies -- and I will definitely be reading it.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

My fascination for the 1920s is a longstanding interest of mine, so when I saw IDW Publishing's Library of American Comics series had recently released Polly and Her Pals Volume II: 1928 – 1930, I was excited. While named after a tall, slender blonde named Polly who embodied the spirited liveliness of a post-World War I society, each week's strip actually focused more on Polly's parents, Paw and Maw Perkins. The aging couple represented the prior generation, as they coped with everyday issues in a progressive (Read: modern.) American society. Within the panel frames, each character was surrounded by an abstract-induced world which was influenced by many of the various art styles prominent at the time.

Please read the rest of my review at: http://fanboycomics.net/index.php/blo...