Wondermark #1

Plot

Dark Horse Comics is proud to present this handsome hardbound collection of David Malki's Ignatz-nominated comic strip Wondermark. One of the Internet's new generation of self-syndicated comic creators, Malki repurposes illustrations and engravings from 19th-Century books into hilarious, collage-style comic strips.

The current spate of comic strip collections here descends from the empyrean of Peanuts and Popeye to a more plebeian ambit by gathering the first two years of Walker’s lighthearted look at military life. For the first six months, the strip’s eponymous hero was a college student, but sagging syndication led Walker to enlist his happily indolent protagonist in the army. Walker is obviously finding his way with a set of original Beetle platoon mates who disappeared after a few years (only Killer remains today), and a General Halftrack and a Sarge unrecognizably different from their latter-day incarnations. And such now-mainstay characters as Zero and Plato haven’t mustered in yet. Walker’s drawing, somewhat angular and fussy, hasn’t evolved much toward the boldly simple “bigfoot” style he would later employ. While Beetle lacks the artistic heft of other recently restored vintage strips, it’s still going, still popular (more than 1,800 newspapers carry it). Which means that this book may circulate briskly, making relative wallflowers out of rarefied classics like Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley. --Gordon Flagg