Review by Win Wiacek

Buy Barnaby Volume Three – and all the rest – right now. It’s one of the five best newspaper comic strips of all time and this lavish hardcover/digital compilation is packed with fascinating extras. If you harbour any yearnings for the lost joys of childish wonder and the suspicious glee in catching out adults trying to pull a fast one, you would be crazy to miss this book.

However, if you need a little more time to decide…

Crockett Johnson’s outlandish four panel daily was the product of a perfectionist who didn’t particularly care for comics, but who – according to celebrated strip historian Ron Goulart – just wanted steady employment. His idea was that one dark night, during an air raid drill, a little boy wished for a Fairy Godmother and something strange and disreputable fell in through his window.

Barnaby Baxter is a smart, ingenuous and scrupulously honest pre-schooler and his ardent wish was to be an Air Raid Warden like his dad. Instead he’s adopted by a short, portly, pompous, distinctly unsavoury and wholly discreditable windbag with pink pixie wings. Installing himself as the lad’s “Fairy Godfather”. Jackeen J. O’Malley is a lazy, self-aggrandizing, mooching old glutton.

Despite looking like a fraud – he’s almost never seen using his magic and always has one of Dad’s stolen panatela cigars as a substitute wand – O’Malley is the real deal: he’s just incredibly lazy, greedy, arrogant and inept. He does – sort of – grant Barnaby’s wishes, but never in ways that might be anticipated. He also knows a succession of bizarre characters who baffle and bewilder poor Barnaby and Jane Shultz, the sensible little girl next door also privileged to perceive the pompous pixie.

This third treasury resumes the whimsical wonderment with strips spanning January 1st 1946 to December 31st 1947. The serialised silliness begins with O’Malley’s desire to become a movie mogul, involving a radio quiz show pastiche, a novel, and Hollywood mayhem. Over the course of the remaining strips a mere sample have O’Malley taking umbrage with higher education, becoming a baseball coach, a housing project that spreads into a civic scandal and a decision to open the O’Malley school. If you’re of a historical mien, during this strip, Johnson’s assistants Ted Ferro and Jack Morley began signing strips even as the teaching tale migrates into a canny poke at progressive methodology and bean-counting civic administrators seeking to save cash and instigate cut-rate education. And a further eighteen months of strips follow!

Intellectually raucous and adorably absurd, the razor-sharp whimsy of Barnaby is instantly captivating, and the laconic charm of its writing is irresistible. However, the lasting legacy is the sparse line-work that reduces images to near-technical drawings, unwavering line-weights and solid swathes of black that define space and depth by practically eliminating it. Almost every modern strip cartoon follows those principles.

For far too long Barnaby was a lost masterpiece. It is influential, ground-breaking and a shining classic of the form. Introduced by Jeff Smith, and liberally illustrated throughout with sketches, roughs, photos and advertising materials as well as Credits, Thank Yous and more, this big hardback book of joy is a welcome addition to 21st century bookshelves -most especially yours!