Dark Horse: Alley Oop: The Complete Sundays Volume 2, 1936-1938 HC

Writer/Artist/cover artist  V. T. Hamlin

Full Colour

128 pages

HC, 12” x 16”

Genre: Humor, Fantasy, Action/Adventure

Publication Date:

September 03, 2014

ISBN-10:1-61655-465-7

ISBN- 13: 978-1-61655-465-1

Price: $75.00

You can save 10% so the book costs $67.50 by ordering online here:

http://www.tfaw.com/Profile/Alley-Oop-The-Complete-Sundays-Volume-2-HC---1936-1938___452726

Presenting the second in a series that collects, in chronological order, all the full color Sunday pages of the classic newspaper strip! Go back in time to the prehistoric kingdom of Moo, and follow the strange, hilarious and outlandish Stone Age antics of V. T. Hamlin’s intrepid caveman, Alley Oop! This oversized volume collects every Alley Oop Sunday strip from 1936 through 1938!


* After over ninety years, Alley Oop is still in publication!


* The strip has been commemorated in a hit song, a comics award statue, and a US postage stamp!

Whoah! This really is a big book and the production on it is superb. Being British I never saw Alley Oop, barring the odd glimpse of a US Army newspaper while in Germany as a kid.  Of course, the song “Alley Oop!” by the Hollywood Argylles is a classic of the Rock ‘n’ Roll era…though thinking through my senility I think I may have mentioned that while reviewing volume 1!

 

This is not a super hero book and for that reason, no doubt, some are going to ask “why” they should be interested.  Well, if that’s what you are asking right now please leave.

 

As I’ve noted, I never saw these Alley Oop strips though, after my review of volume 1, I did ask a couple of people I know who are true comickers and collect newspaper strips.  They scanned (without cleaning up) pages for me so that I could see the quality of the source as it were.  Oh boy, grubby (we’re talking 1930s newsprint) and very –VERY- “brittle” I was told.  The pages were, coincidentally, the same as some of those reproduced in this book.  What a difference –crisp and clean!

 

The problem is that if you are a pop culture collector or just a newspaper strip collector getting hold of original samples is going to cost you a lot of money! If you are a comic fan/collector the same applies.  What the Dark Horse team has done is gather all the parts of the strip, cleaned them to a near new quality and put them in a big volume that ought to take pride of place in any collection.  Added to the first volume this has already become indispensible to comic culture historians and $75.00 comes to around £46.00 so it might seem a bit pricy but look at what you get!

 

Adding an extra shelf with the space to put these is at your own expense –you can argue with your wife or mum about where the shelf can go!

 

I’d highly recommend this (and volume 1) to any collector.