The story of screwball comics, with new research and rare art from some of the most hilarious cartoonists of all time. Before "screwball" became a movie genre, it was a staple of other forms of American culture, including newspaper comic strips. Emerging from the pressures of a rapidly accelerating technological and information-drenched society, screwball comics offered a healthy dose of laughter and perspective. The disruptive, manic, and surreal verbal-visual comedy of these "funnies" fostered an absurdist sensibility embraced by The Marx Brothers (who took their names from a popular comic strip), W. C. Fields, Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Ernie Kovacs, and Mad magazine. Comics scholar Paul C. Tumey traces the development of screwball as a genre in magazine cartoons and newspaper comics, presenting the work of around fifteen cartoonists, with an art-stuffed chapter on each. The book offers a wealth of previously un-reprinted comics unleashing fresh views of some of America's greatest and most-loved cartoonists, including George Herriman (Krazy Kat), E.C. Segar (creator of Popeye), Rube Goldberg (The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K.), Bill Holman (Smokey Stover), and Frederick Opper (Happy Hooligan). In addition, readers will be delighted to discover previously "lost" screwball masters, such as Gene Ahern (The Squirrel Cage), Gus Mager (Sherlocko the Monk), Boody Rogers (Sparky Watts), Milt Gross (Count Screwloose), George Swanson ($alesman $am) and others. Both humorous and educational, this book is aimed at a general audience of all ages and at university comics studies programs.

Presents the work of America's most popular and influential comic artists, and includes critical essays accompanying each artist's drawings.

Superman must battle a new villain who has invented a machine that can materialize two-dimensional figures out of the comics to rob for him.

Fourteen stories on love and reality. In Sparkle Plenty, a man marries a woman because she is so like a girl in his favorite comic books, in Popeye the same couple divorce. By the author of Gone a Hundred Miles.

Funny Papers chronicles cartoon icon Derby Dugan's beginnings in the rough-and-tumble world of yellow journalism in turn-of-the-century New York, when Hearst and Pulitzer owned tabloid America. The aptly named Georgie Wreckage, a sketch artist for Pulitzer's daily World, rockets to fame as the creator of what becomes a hugely successful cartoon franchise in this, the first book in Tom De Haven's epic trilogy of twentieth-century pop-culture America.

"Mit dose kids, society is nix!" So said the Inspector about the Katzenjammer kids, but he could have been speaking of all comic strips in their formative years at the turn of the last century. From the very first color Sunday supplement, comics were a driving force in newspaper sales, even though their crude and often offensive content placed them in a whirl of controversy. Sunday comics presented a wild parody of the world and the culture that surrounded them. Society didn't stand a chance. These are the origins of the American comic strip, born at a time when there were no set styles or formats, when artistic anarchy helped spawn a new medium. Here are the earliest offerings from known greats like R. F. Outcault, George McManus, Winsor McCay, and George Herriman, along with the creations of more than fifty other superb cartoonists; over 150 Sunday comics dating from 1895 to 1915.