Million Dollar Duel

These ol' pals are allus gunnin' for each other, one way or t'other . . .

The Caves of Mystery

Here we have another wonderful chapter of The Adventures of Peter Wheat, courtesy as always of OtherEric of the Digital Comic Museum. Look for his afterwords, um, after.

OtherEric:

This is my favorite issue of Peter Wheat—it's one of my all-time favorite comic books. I can still remember just how awestruck I was when I first read it a year and a half or so ago. I'll try not to bore you with my gushing too much, but this just still amazes me.

We start with a wonderful sequence with Peter turning back into himself, with some spectacular dialogue showing Peter figuring out that he's successfully changed back. Then on page 4, we see some monsters and the gnomes—and once again I'm torn on the coloring. I think the face in the tree is a little too emphasized, but at least it shows the colorist is paying attention. I suspect this was originally drawn as another full-page panel, no idea why it was changed. Page 5: the faces in the rocks are more subtle than the tree, and we see a goblin design Kelly has used elsewhere, including Fairy Tale Parade.

The sequence on 6-8 is just amazing in how strong a sense of place it has. We know exactly where everything is. There is such a level of detail in this whole issue; from using the spears to make the stretcher, to tall panels showing the cliff being scaled.

And the expressions on the characters! The gnomes, going from practical when rescuing and moving the queen, to marvelously sad once they have her safe, but cannot wake her, to fierce when they size up Peter; then sad again when they cannot wake her. Utterly amazing work, even by Kelly standards, I think.

Then more games with scale: a human-size door with a lock at gnome level; followed by a full-panel shot of Father Time showing how huge a human is compared to Peter, the Fairy Queen, and Greybeard.

This issue doesn't necessarily have any one bit I can point to as "look at how brilliant this is", but taken as a whole, this issue is a masterpiece. Comic book storytelling simply does not get any better than this.

The Comic Strip Racket

Good morning!

Imagine! John Kennedy was alive and well when I trimmed this strip from the paper! I don't FEEL that old.

Wicked Wizard

I'm very sad that we don't have issue #25 of The Adventures of Peter Wheat to share with you at this time, to keep our sequence complete. I was hoping that the comix elves would have taken pity on us poor mortals and materialized a full set of scans.

But the gatekeeper of the realm, OtherEric, has tracked down a bit of material to keep us informed enough to keep moving ahead.

Take it from here, OtherEric:

For an issue that we don't have, we can actually say a surprisingly large amount about this issue. To quote the long-ago auction listing where we found the two low-res pages we have:

"The Fairy Queen is captured by the Wizard; the story contains a cloak of invisibility, flying boots, shape-changing powder, Ooglie-Booglies (scary Goblins), lions, the Bird of Wonderwood, etc. Walt Kelly pulled out all the stops in this issue which is notable for the unusual, great FULL-PAGE PANEL highlighting Kelly's superb rendition of fairies and trees (he was the master of the latter)."

And from the next issue, #26, we can know the cliffhanger for this issue, that it ends with the Fairy Queen captured by the Wizard and his goblin allies, and Peter is turned into a toad!

Two points of note: the character design changes on the Fairy Queen and Durrock. The theory I've heard is that Kelly didn't have reference for them when he moved onto this issue from the last. The colorist doesn't help matters, but it doesn't hurt too much now and it probably mattered far less back when kids had a month between last issue and this one.

And as I mentioned, Kelly is starting to do different things to play with scale; using a full page panel to show the tree in relation to the small characters. Even in the reduced size or the redrawn-by-somebody-else version from the coloring book, we can see just how gorgeous this page must be. I really hope I (or another scanner) can find this issue sooner rather than later. And how many of you thought my comment about Kelly playing with scale in #25—#29 was a typo, since I said we didn't have that issue? :-)

Above and below, tantalizing low-res glimpses of issue #25

The redrawn-by-somebody-else coloring book page

Thom: It's not too late if someone wants to take pity on us poor mortals and share a set of scans of #25. We have a full week until we're scheduled to show #26, and I would be thrilled to bump that back in order to insert #25.

Anybody? A friend of a friend? Comix elves?

Mozart Von Hinkerdump's Sonata

No matter how busy I am, I try to post Pogo Sundays on Sunday, cuz that's when Pogo Sundays ought to be.

Happy Sunday, Kelly Sunday!

Peter Wheat and the Fairy Queen

Once again we are indebted to OtherEric of the Digital Comic Museum for another beautiful and rare installment of Walt Kelly's run on The Adventures of Peter Wheat, this being issue #24, the first of a several part storyline.

Kelly's entire oeuvre really seems to be one big fairy tale world, and here we actually step into Fairy Land for a bit, continuing to see a variety of his mythical characterizations.

Stay 'tooned at the end for comments from OtherEric.

Post-issue comments from OtherEric:

A minor technical note: This is the only issue of Adventures I've seen that was stapled, not glued, at the spine. Again, not bad, just odd—I may be the only person who cares. This starts the "Peter Wheat and the Fairy Queen" storyline that runs for four issues (if anybody has a better idea for a title for the arc, let me know, a naming expert I'm not). While it's not quite on the scale of, say, the Monster Society of Evil, 64 pages is LONG for a comic book story back in the 40s or 50s. And this issue starts the story in somewhat subdued fashion with a mystery.

I think the colorist may not be doing the story great favors by making the door in the tree obvious, but I do think it shows the colorist is at least paying attention to the story.

Kelly's faun is an absolute delight—the range of expressions on him and all the characters throughout this storyline is just amazing. I love how he goes from happy to worried to "this isn't fun anymore, somebody got hurt." Just wonderfully expressive.

I suspect editorial interference with the large number of captions. They're not unknown in Peter Wheat stories, but they're not common, and several here are quite redundant. I suspect there were one or two bits where the action was felt to be unclear—what the marshmallow sauce was, and possibly Peter's state after the fall—and then somebody went overboard clarifying the sequence. None of this really gets in the way of the story, though. Peter's look when he wakes up is priceless, and the Fairy Queen is just beautiful.

On that note, next time we'll move on to tell you what little we know about issue #25.

Captain Freeze Icepot's Discovery

Yes! Here we are again—at Sunday, Kelly Sunday.

Good golly, Kelly was unique in his tomfoolery. Perhaps the FBI was correct in thinking that Kelly was communicating in code. Question is, to whom and why wherefore whem?