Product Description

Little Orphan Annie - the original female comics hero - takes on chiseling business men and a gang of thieves, armed only with her sharp wit and a good left hook. Then she helps her surrogate parents by nursing "Daddy" Warbucks to health and helping save the Silos' family farm. And only that little chatter-box could become a cross between Robinson Crusoe and Dr. Doolittle when she and Sandy are shipwrecked on a deserted island. Enjoy all the unique adventure and earnest charm of Volume Two in The Library of American Comics presentation of Little Orphan Annie, containing nearly 1,000 comic strips from October 1927 to November 1930.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89535 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 321 pages

Customer Reviews

Reprint of this classic comic strip continues
Here now is the second volume of IDW's complete reprinting of Little Orphan Annie. V2 reprints all the dailies from October 1927 thru December, 1929, along with all the Sundays from 1928 in color (more on this soon).

For myself, this is new territory. I had never had the chance to read any LOA before 1931, so I have been awaiting this volume for some time. And it doesn't disappoint. We continue to get the great drama and adventure of Annie and "Daddy" Warbucks. We once again have the Silos and the horrible Miss Asthma. And its an early story in this album that Annie gets her classic outfit.

People whose only knowledge of Annie is thru the play &/or movie will probably be surprised. The REAL Annie is very different. Gray's 'conservative/libertarian' philosophy is also part and parcel of the strip, something that is offputting to some, but which I think is of vital importance to the strip.

Also, in this volume, there is a forward speaking of the issue of the inclusion of the Sundays. What I think too many people today don't understand is that the 'standard' of having dailies and Sundays putting an interegrated storyline wasn't always so in the early days of comics (20s and 30s). Further, as some readers may only read the dailies and others the Sundays, even with integrated strips you had to take that into account.

Some strips (ex: Thimble Theater staring Popeye, Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Gasoline Alley) never intergrated the dailies and Sundays. So this is an issue for reprinting them. The first Fantagraphics reprint of Popeye had separate volumes for Sundays & dailies, the old NBM reprint of Wash Tubbs included both in the same volumes. The current Fantagraphics reprint of Popeye have the dailies and Sundays in the same volumes, but in different sections, and the upcoming reprint of Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy by Fantagraphics will have separate volumes, as will the Hermes reprint of Buck Rogers and Drawn & Quarterly's Walt & Skeezix.

Other strips first had separate continuity for dailies and sundays, and later merged them. This is true for Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates. So in the first volume of their reprint volumes from IDW, the separate Sundays are in a separate section, and when they merged, they integrated the Sundays into the dailies.

With Annie, the sundays didn't integrate into the dailies until 1931 (mid-1930 according to the article in v2). And the Sundays DIDN'T have a separate continuety, but INSTEAD were more standalone gag strips. Because the tone of the Sundays was so different from the dailies, it was decided to put all the pre-1930 Sundays in a separate volume. HOWEVER, they discovered it wasn't so simple. In the first volume, they found a half dozen or so Sundays that DID cross over, so they reprinted those. And in this volume they discovered that the 1928 Sundays (but NOT the 27 or 29) crossed over with the dailies, so they reprinted those (in COLOR) integrated with the dailies. They DO plan on going back and reprinting those skipped over Sundays in a separate volume.

Arf! Arf!
This second volume in the series contains daily and Sunday comics from 1927-1929, with the Sunday funnies integrated into the body of the work since Harold Gray had begun to use occasional Sunday pages to advance the plot of the stories, though he continued to do occasional Sunday gag strips that had nothing to do with the daily plot. Portions of the stories collected in volume 1 had been reprinted in the past (the SAP story being collected by Helen Gray for the Cupples and Leon reprint "Little Orphan Annie" and only choice portions of the Mrs. Warbucks story and merged with the SAP story with none of the intervening cartoons were reprinted in the Dover book "Little Orphan Annie and Little Orphan Annie in Cosmic City") but so far as I can determine, not of the stories in volume two have ever been reprinted, making this book a must have for Annie fans and comic collectors.
In the stories in Volume 2, Harold Gray hit his stride and perfected the formula he would follow for the next forty years. He puts Annie through a roller-coaster ride of good fortune and bad, find and losing surrogate families like clockwork. Gray also begins to repeat himself - "Daddy" Warbucks takes ship (again) to try to regain his lost fortune (again) and makes inadequate provisions for the care of Annie, who is forced to make her own way in the world once again after "Daddy" Warbucks is lost at sea (again). Some of Annie's misfortune are of her own doing, however. In one story she goes out for a walk and can't find her way back to the hotel she lived in with "Daddy" Warbucks. She didn't even bother to notice the name of the hotel. We also see an emerging prankster side to Annie. In another story, she uses a counterfeit coin to "skin" a bunch of kids who are matching quarters - not the sort of behavior one expects from Annie.
Harold Gray also chose to keep Annie's history a permanent mystery. In the first stories, reprinted in Volume 1, Miss Asthma shares Annie's records with Mrs. Warbucks and implies there is a secret hidden in the records. This secret is lost when Mrs. Warbucks is lost at sea. In Volume 2, rather than tease the readers any further with this story line, Harold Gray chose to burn the orphanage - and all of Annie's records - to the ground.
Some of the strips in the story have a bit of an ominous tone when read today, especially the New Years strip from 1929. As Annie speculates what fortune has in store for 1929, we, the readers know that a great financial disaster lurks ahead, and a decade of economic depression. Harold Gray, though unaware of the disaster ahead, manages to foretell the coming collapse in the 1929 comics. Though the stories in this volume ends just before the market collapse, Harold Gray has several of his character speculating wildly in stocks and bonds - even "Daddy" Warbucks getting so involved in playing the market that barely pays attention to Annie - and Gray showed one bank going bust after the banker loses the bank deposits through market speculation: A chilling echo of the economic troubles that beset us today.
One can only hope that the current economic downturn will not prevent the Library of American Comics from continuing this valuable series.

So good, so fast
Having only read the classic "Arf: The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie," the early 1970s book which collected most of Annie between 1935 and 1945, I approached these early reprints with a little trepidation.

Could they possibly be as good? Did it take Harold Gray a decade or so to reach his stride? About two weeks of strips into the first volume it was obvious my anxiety was misplaced. Harold Gray hit the ground running. These late 20s strips are every bit as good as the 30s-40s "golden age of Annie."

Of course we don't have the full cast yet. Punjab and the Asp are in our future. But Gray's story telling and artwork are exactly the quality we expect and they will be that way literally to the end. Al Capp reminded us in "Arf" that "Gray drew better pictures in his later years than Picasso did."

This is one of the most remarkable characters in American culture and these volumes may be pricey but they're priceless.

(And just FYI, I'm not the same Michael Brown who previously reviewed this book. I'm Michael E. Brown from Texas.)