New Worlds Open Up in 4 Devastating and Gorgeous Graphic Novels

In four new graphic novels, the world is changing, and our heroes are making changes of their own.

Near the beginning of “Wally’s Gang,” the story that takes up most of FRANK JOHNSON, SECRET PIONEER OF AMERICAN COMICS, VOLUME 1 (Fantagraphics, 608 pp., $49.99), edited by Keith Mayerson and Chris Byrne, one character, George, gets caught red-handed by a man he’s drawing in caricature. Happily, the subject of the unflattering picture turns out to be a newspaper editor delighted to find such a promising new talent. In the context of the story, it’s a funny moment. In the context of the book’s publication, it’s oddly devastating.

Johnson, at various times a shipping clerk, an itinerant musician and a full-time alcoholic, never published a comic strip in his life, at least as far as we know. But he was already hard at work on Volume 91 of the “Wally’s Gang” saga in 1928, when he was 16, predating the first modern comic book by a full seven years.

Johnson has been feted as a fine artist already. Of his surviving works, 25 composition notebooks were displayed at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair, where the New York Times critic Roberta Smith noted the “robust penciling and a cumulative air of obsession.” That obsessiveness made him a fascinatingly dutiful chronicler of mid-20th-century life; in this hefty omnibus, tidbits of a bygone way of life accumulate into something sad and strange and huge.

The visual grammar and situational comedy in “Wally’s Gang” are the stuff of old “Bringing Up Father” and “Blondie” strips, while the down-and-out drunks of “The Bowser Boys” evoke the grim observational humor and slick newspaper-comic tropes of later underground heroes like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. And at least as interesting are the introductions by Byrne and Mayerson, chronicling the work’s creation and its journey out of obscurity.