Barney Google: Gambling, Horse Races and High-Toned Women!
IDW Publishing
$39.99
With eyes that jumped out of the page and into the reader's lap and also blessed with an ever-present cigar hanging out the side of his mouth, Barney Google may the perfect image for the age of prohibition. Sure there was F. Scott Fitzgerald but the people he wrote of were more often than not way too pretty as well as rich while every one of them seemed to hang back in either a state of ennui or envy. And more importantly he couldn't draw a funny horse with one-tenth the skill of Billy DeBeck. In order to appreciate Hemingway you had to hang out in France with people who, were once again suffering from ennui or still reeling from the horrible shock of The Great War. And while Hemingway may have drawn better horses than Fitzgerald, they still weren't Spark Plug.
DeBeck deserves to mentioned in the same breath as those greats for he wrote of an America that was close to the front door of millions of people, an America that a lot of people were just discovering for the first time. In the twenties our country was not only dealing with a massive amount of immigrants it was also in the process of moving from a rural-based economy to an urban setting where people lived tightly together and poverty may only be one block over. Millions flocked to this country from overseas and while many did in fact go west, a good number of them stayed behind in New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Chicago. And Barney Google lived in a city.
The city had crap games, ever-present police, wives that couldn't find their no-good husbands, restaurants, con-men, train stations, scams and hot little girls who all seemed to carry a look of innocence and baffle-eyed wonder. There was also a race track near by where there was always action to be had and always trouble to be found. This is where Barney Google lived and thrived.
Last year IDW and Yoe Studios! published a beautifully bound collected hardcover which showcases the first years of Barney Google as a strip proper. The character had first appeared in 1919 but it is more accurate to begin a retrospective of the character and strip by starting in 1922 and continuing through out that entire year. When he was first seen in 1919 inside a conventional straight multiple panel strip, Google was a tall and thin man. As time went on DeBeck modified the character until he reached his much more familiar stature as a short everyman.
For that is who Google really is, a guy just trying to get by. Sure he has a smart retort to a dumb waiter and little patience when dealing with a stupid clerk or a dumb friend, but in the end he was a lot closer to normal than many other comic characters at the time. As absurd as his appearance may be, he was still rooted in a reality that readers could understand.
He was drawn by a master-craftsman who exaggerated his physical traits in a style that only served to drive home the punch-line found at the end of every strip. In that end he had the same problems and concerns as the people reading the strip did. And this is what brought people back day after day. They saw themselves in Barney Google.
IDW has printed each strip in a full page style that reminds us how much modern readers have lost in their lives when newspapers began shrinking their comic pages about fifty years ago. The early days of cartooning (as many called it at the time) allowed for the publishing of a good-sized strip that fully captured the reader’s attention. Every strip in this volume is clear and every detail to be found in DeBeck’s wonderful art is highlighted by printing it as the artist intended it to be seen.
In his early years DeBeck kept Barney in a four-panel, punch-line-at-the end format and the style serves the character well. It helps that by the time Google appeared DeBeck was an experienced newspaper and cartoon artist. From the very start each strip sets up a nice joke at the end. Whether it is a reaction, a verbal retort or a piece of vaudevillian slapstick, DeBeck always closes with a winner.
His line is direct and never manages to overwhelm his panels with too much "artistry" while still retaining a style that, as Craig Yoe notes in his highly enjoyable introduction "ranks with such greats as Frank Frazetta, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Heinrich Kley, Charles Dana Gibson, Reed Crandall, Edgar Degas, Lou Fine, David Ingres and Milo Manara."
For me, I see a bit more of Gibson than anyone else. Especially when a flapper shows up or in some of the fashions that the older, more matronly women are seen wearing. Still, Yoe is right on the money when he puts DeBeck in the same league as those more familiar names. There is a minimalism to his backgrounds that creates the impression of a much bigger city that fills the panel while never detracting form the people in the front. When he needed to DeBeck could also create a complete environment to flesh out his storyline. In late October 1922 and into November of that same year he takes Barney and Spark Plug out to sea. The scenes on the boat are crowded but so balanced your eye never feels like it is being overwhelmed.
The book has been edited and designed by Yoe and produced by Clizia Gussoni. The love that they have for Google's history shines through ever page. Yoe doesn't miss a note when looking for as much as can be found in the evolution of both Google and DeBeck's career ands life. Especially enlightening is his recounting of how songwriter Billy Rose went about creating on of the biggest song hits of 1923, Barney Google with the Goo-Goo-Googley eyes. Rose's approach to his song-writing work was as deliberate as Neil Sedaka, Carol King or Don Kirshner and a hundred others were when they went after the top-forty teen market forty-odd years later.
Yoe and Gussoni make sure that the work of DeBeck is placed in a proper historical context which only adds to the enjoyment found in IDW’s book. Artist Richard Thomson’s introduction incorporates his own take on Google and Spark Plug while managing to cram an entire art lesson into four panels, just like DeBeck crammed an entire life into four panels.
The book also contains the first Barney Google strip from June 17, 1919 and it serves an interesting comparison to the character we see three years later. This is just one of the many features found in the introduction. There is also a good number of collectibles that remind us how important cross-marketing has been in comic history. Just like today where the Simpsons and Family guy move into a massive range of products such as figures and toys and DVDs, early cartoonists were also trying to do the same.
If you can get your character picked up by the Syndicate and into a strip the next step is toys and as the century moved forward, cartoons on the big screen. Yoe provides an overview of Google’s career on the Broadway stage and in cartoons and also finds a connection between DeBeck and Walt Disney. Hakes American and Collectibles have contributed a detailed image of a rare windup tin toy that dates to 1923-1924 and comes from Germany. The editor makes sure that the work is placed in a proper historical context which only adds to the enjoyment found in DeBeck's work.
The introduction is followed by a scrapbook of photographs and images and rare drawings form DeBeck’s life. Again they only serve to enhance the work that he did as we see DeBeck on the town in a tuxedo and at the board with his head turned towards the camera smiling.
From the colorful hardcover to the attention shown to each page in this volume, Barney Google is not only a celebration of one of comics most successful and fun characters, it is also a reference book for anyone who ever wondered what the twenties really looked like, especially if you were a gifted cartoonist.
