Leslie Cabarga, ed., Dark Horse

Unlike some of the other children’s comics that are currently being reprinted–notably Carl Barks’s Duck stories and John Staley and Irving Trip’s Little Lulu–the Casper comics are not good in any traditional sense. They are perfectly serviceable children’s stories, but there’s no reason for a grown-up to read them. Comparing Lulu to Casper is like comparing Edward Lear to Stan and Jan Berenstain.

This is not to denigrate Casper’s quality as a children’s comic. The stories are fast-moving and fun, and further–what makes the series stand out–Casper consistently presents kindness as a subversive act. With authority figures and indeed all of ghost society pressuring Casper to be “bad” (a concept pretty much limited to scaring people and kind of being a general jerk), Casper stands alone like an existentialist hero and rebelliously does what he thinks is right. What he thinks is right is behaving in a saccharine and cloying fashion, singing, at one point, this paean to insipidness:

How sweet the violets smell,
How nice the birdies sing,
How good to be under nature’s spell,
How nice is everything.

Isn’t it pretty to think so? So Casper’s rebellion is somewhat sickening, but small matter. For his infernal niceness he is made an outcast from ghost society, which nevertheless keeps him around to abuse and exploit. This is heady stuff for a child! Some years later Archie’s Sabrina would mine the same territory, but here it was a fairly explicit attempt by publishers to redirect teen rebellion towards bourgeois norms. Casper’s kindness remains (to preserve the existential reading) absurd, and is always tinged with sadness, especially in the earlier stories, before word got around to the forest creatures that Casper was a friendly ghost, when Casper is literally friendless and often weeping.

But none of this actually makes the Casper stories good. Yet there is one reason why an intelligent adult might want to pick up this collection. Simply put, Casper featured some of the best art ever to grace a comics page.

Howie Post has a loopy, enegetic style he deserves to be celebrated for, but the true hero here is Warren Kremer. At a certain point in the 1950s, Kremer brought the cartoony style to a kind of apotheosis, where every line is both in and of itself an esthetic object and also a building block of an exquisitely composed and rendered drawing. The three-part story from The Friendly Ghost Casper #11 (reprinted in the Dark Horse volume) is one of the best-drawn stories I’ve ever seen. The plot is essentially a watered-down rehash of “Duck Amuck,” as a mischievous penciller messes with Casper’s world, but the cartoonist’s complex facial expressions, the expressive poses of Casper in flight, and the varied line weight between the cartoonist’s “real” world and the world of the comics page he is drawing make this a story worth savoring regardless. Usually the claim that black and white reproductions of color comics serve to showcase the artwork looks like a feeble excuse to justify a cheap printing decision, but for once the claim is true; I would hate to see the linework in this story obscured by color. Kremer is here at the height of his powers.

Or at least I assume it’s Kremer. One of the weaknesses of Dark Horse’s collection is that it fails to give any credits on any stories. While I understand that Harvey’s archives probably lack credits, surely someone could have been found to identify the artists at least. Does Harvey’s most famous artist, Ernie Colon, appear in this volume? I didn’t spot his style, but I’m no expert, and can only say maybe.

This is one of the few defects in the book (the other main one being that twice it has pages reversed), which is otherwise pretty much all any Harvey reader can want. It features an informative if workmanlike introductory essay, a generous color section, over 400 pages of stories culled from twenty-five years, and a beautifully-designed cover to boot–and it’s a rare day that I single out for praise book design not by Seth or Chris Ware. Fans of the familiar art style of “heroic realism” won’t find much to their liking, here, but anyone whose art tastes are more catholic may make one of the great esthetic discoveries of his life, and on these grounds alone I cannot recommend the book too highly.

Also, if you’re six years old and reading this column, get someone to buy you a copy.