Percy Crosby's Skippy, Volume 2 - Percy Crosby

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Résumé :
Continuing the first-ever series to reprint the legendary comic strip that paved the way for Charles Schulz's Peanuts and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, Volume Two contains all daily comics from 1928 through 1930. The introduction details Crosby's life during Skippy's transition from Life magazine to the newspaper page and those first years of the strip's wild success.

Co-edited by Jared Gardner and Dean Mullaney, designed by Lorraine Turner, and illustrated with many photographs and rare artwork from the collection of the cartoonist's daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts, and Skippy, Inc.

Biographie:
Percy Leo Crosby (1891-1964) created several comic strips before hitting gold with Skippy. These early efforts included in 1916, That Rookie from the Thirteenth Squad(which he produced from France while in the army during the first World War), and the single panel Always Belittlin'(which later morphed into a topper to the Skippy Sunday page). By the early 1920s Crosby was a mainstay drawing covers and illustrations for Charles Dana Gibson's Lifemagazine, where, in March 1923, he introduced the impish and loveable Skippy Skinner.

In the days before the separation between high art and low art became entrenched, Crosby criss-crossed the creative world, lauded by both serious art critics at major galleries and museum exhibitions around the globe, as well as the man on the street who read Skippy on the comics pages. Crosby wrote a best-selling Skippynovel, which in 1931 was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie.

Perhaps more than any other cartoonist before him, Crosby brought philosophy and politics to the American newspaper comic strip. In the end, it would be his outspoken political and philosophical beliefs that would place him increasingly outside the mainstream of 1940s American culture, ultimately leading to his exile from comics and his forced incarceration in a mental institution for the last sixteen years of his life. As a result of his tragic end, Crosby's remarkable contributions to American culture have been largely eclipsed, until now.