White Boy in Skull Valley: The Complete Sunday Comics 1933-1936 Hardcover – August 4, 2015

This book is a stunning display of artistic design. The page composition is ahead of its time. I can't recommend this book enough. If you are a fan of the old newspaper adventure strips- check this out!

Äs a reprint of a 30s comic-strip this has to be close to a perfect job. A beautifully designed hardcover book, printing the sundays at the proper size, overall looking very good, plus a nice introductory essay with plenty of Price's other artwork.As for content, well, I don't usually comment much on content, assuming the fan knows what these reprints are about. But a word of caution. Price was not a great draftsman in the illustrative school. In fact the strip looks as if an 8 year old draw it. You could say it's the "naif" style, I guess. But this can be charming, since the strip's protagonist is a boy.The strip was called "White boy" for about a year and a half. Stories are set in the tribe's camp or the surrounding nature. The protagonist is the only white cast member. There seems to be an effort to divulge the american-indian lifestyle, albeit from a boy's point of view, with plenty of silly humor. There is some experimenting with layouts, and some big panels with pictorical ambitions. The use of color is sometimes striking.Then the strip was renamed "Skulll valley" and the action moved to some ranch, with plenty of visitors. A whole new caucasian cast is introduced, with many guests, like a circus. It becomes a more conventional adventure/comedy melodrama. There's even a super-hero type, The masked gaucho, and a "lost valley" episode with dinosaurs. It's kind of all over the place. The visuals are usually poorer.

Beautiful collection of a truly classic strip, printed close to the original newspaper size! The only flaw was the lack of a spine on the left side of the book. Great biographical material on Garrett Price as well, highly recommended!

A beautiful, lovingly produced book (like all publications from Sunday Press). Highly recommended!

interesting

While I had heard of White Boy In Skull Valley my exposure had been limited to seeing on occasional strip every once in awhile. But now Sunday Press has collected every single week of this beautiful Sunday newspaper strip and printed in one massive oversize volume. The art is all fully restored so it looks crystal clear.The Book is in full color with each of the 153 Full Color Sunday pages printed on one massive 11 x 15 inch page. The pages are composed of a pulpy newsprint and closely resembles the experience of reading the strips in their original incarnation. You also get a background articles about both the strip and creator Garrett Price. Plus many choice examples of Garrett Price's other art.Garrett Price spent his boyhood in Wyoming a fact that he draws on often for his resource material. Around the time he started this strip he moved to New York and did over 100 covers for New Yorker Magazine. He also did even more cartoons and interior illustrations for the New Yorker and other national magazines. Garrett Price was never particularly proud of his work on the strip and was relieved when it was finished.The strip started in October 1st 1933 and ended on August 30th 1936. The first several years are the best when it focuses on White Boy living among the Indians. The strip went through several other incarnations which possess more excellent art and some strange experimentation.White Boy is Caucasian youth who's parents have been killed but the Sioux Indians and now he is taken in by a friendly tribe. He is never referred to by his Christian name but is simply White Boy. While 1933 was really at the beginnings of the Western Genre with it's mythical "Cowboys & Indians" Garrett Price claims unfortunately he was blessed with actual historical knowledge. So we see a touching and heart warming stories told from the American Indian perspective.The target audience is clearly young boys and we get strips that alternate between high adventure , American Indian Slice of Life and Humour. The Romance between the young Indian girl Starlight and White Boy is subtle, sweet and understated.The strips never touches on White Boy's tragic past but starts with his introduction to the tribe. The other major characters are White Boy's portly Native friend Woodchuck and Trapper Dan. Trapper Dan is the only regular Caucasian character we meet. While he is a friend of White Boy's he is never fully trusted by the tribe.These early strips all run three tiers and have highly inventive art and unique individual logos. While some strips focus on Legends and Lore and are complete in one week. Others stories ran multiple weeks with the longest arc towards the end of the first incarnation and involved Woodchuck being abducted by the Totem Tribe and the strange Parasol Woman.After about a year and a half of these excellent stories the strip drastically changes in the April 1934 strip. Gone are entire cast as the strip previously titled just White Boy becomes White Boy in Skull Valley. The story moves from an unstated past to current 1935. It starts over as a pretty traditional Western with young teen cowboy Bob White and his gal pal Doris Hall. It seems like Garrett Price is not happy with the traditional stories because the stories get wilder and wilder. We soon get stories about Rabid dogs and run away circus animals and a masked man with a whip. And then finally a lost world story with cavemen and dinosaurs. On August 20th 1935 Price starts a very small gag strip called Funny Fauna which runs in very small cartoony panels beneath the three tiers of Skull Valley strips. These ran for 28 weeks eventually becoming larger panels and reducing the lead Skull Valley story to two tiers.On April 19th 1936 the strip drastically changed for a third time. Now it was simply called Skull Valley. It is now just two tiers wide and is about Nan , a supporting charter from earlier incarnation and Nan's dude ranch. Nan was an adult character and this is now written for adults with weekly humour and no adventure. While Bob White and Doris are still around, they are mere supporting characters. This experiment ran for only a few months before the strip was discontinued.This book is certainly not for everybody , but for those interested in the origins of Comic Art this is a rare treasure. Beautiful Art from 80 years ago that can now be fully appreciated.My Highest Recommendation.

A stunning presentation of a lost, and now recovered, treasure. Reprinted in the original half newspaper page size, this large book presents the complete run of Garrett Price's White Boy trilogy of strips in a flawless presentation, with additional pages of rare art and informative essays. Sunday Press's book are the Criterion DVDs of comic strip reprints. For me, this is the book of the year. A few of the White Boy pages have appeared in some other collections, enough to place a complete reprinting high on my want list for decades. Price’s only comic strip is extremely unusual, capturing delicate moments and striving to convey how things feel, rather than being overly concerned with telling a story (although there are plenty of narrative twists and turns in these pages). Price creates effects in White Boy I’ve never experienced before in comics. He presents an Indian story from the point of view of the Indians -- an unusual sympathetic portrayal for 1933. Price went on to become one of the great New Yorker cover artists, and a gallery painter -- his work hangs in several museums. If you are a fan of old comic strips, this book will be a treasure.

La version complète américaine est très supérieure à la version abrégée française, mais attention aux frais de douane à prévoir !

This is book I've been waiting over thirty years for, having first seen a few sample pages reprinted in The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, where they stood out amidst the heavyweight competition seen elsewhere in its pages.White Boy was a short lived newspaper comic strip from the 1930s, one that underwent several incarnations. It's the creation of Garrett Price, better known as an illustrator for the New Yorker.Its earliest episodes are extraordinary, and concern a boy whose family has been killed by the Sioux and is brought up by a rival Native American tribe. Depicted primarily from the tribe's point of view, it mainly bypasses the stereotypical depictions of its time, and also features resourceful, convincing female characters, another rarity for its period. The strips themselves nominally fall into the adventure genre, but also feature elements of humour and whimsy. If it was dependant on the writing alone, it would be a curiosity, but it's accompanied by astonishing art of almost hallucinatory clarity, with its slow pacing, minimalist line and groundbreaking use of colour.This first incarnation turns into something more whimsical, more fantastic and, ultimately, less successful, as the central characters fall in with another tribe run by an eccentric matriarch. It is still compelling, but something of its dream-like quality has been lost.Then, in a complete change, White Boy becomes White Boy in Skull Valley, a contemporary period, utterly run of the mill Western strip that only has the Garrett's art to recommend it, though that too changes into something more conventional and more grounded in its style, apparently attempting to emulate the likes of Chester Gould. Finally the title is truncated to Skull Valley, a humorous strip focussing on a ranch run by Nan, and her various eccentric guests. It regains some of the strip's charm, but can't recapture the unique flavour of the earliest work.White Boy's many changes in direction were driven by poor circulation, and this led eventually to its cancellation. Had it kept its original direction, and maintained its quality, it would be one of the greatest of all comic strips, up there with Krazy Kat, Thimble Theatre and Polly and Her Pals. As it is, only its earliest incarnation is essential.This book collects of all the strips, in their original size format and colours. It's beautifully presented, and is clearly a labour of love. Five stars for the earliest episodes alone.