Welcome back to a Hemlock Bazaar Product Spotlight. This is a semi-regular feature on our blog where we highlight interesting or noteworthy items from our collection. Today, we’re talking about the following item: Frank Johnson, Secret Pioneer of American Comics.
What’s a Secret Pioneer anyway?
Frank Johnson drew comics starting in 1928 and continuing through to the end of his life in 1979. He did a single weekly series over most of that time, and two concurrent series with slightly different art styles from 1946 – 1950. Over the course of his life, his main series “Wally’s Gang” accumulated more than 2300 pages of material.
These facts would not be remarkable on their own. George Herriman, for example, drew Krazy Kat from 1913 until his death in 1944, producing over 3,000 pages of Krazy Kat, as well as other less well known series. But George Herriman was published. Cartooning was his career. Newspapers throughout the country carried Krazy Kat.
Johnson was a self described “weekend cartoonist.” During his lifetime, his work remained a secret, discovered only upon his death and still basically unknown until this collection published in early 2024.
The work is wonderful. The jokes work really well (most of the time) and the characters are a delight. This volume is presented in facsimile notebook pages, scans of Johnson’s original notebooks. This choice drives home the amateur nature of the production, and brings a kind of otherworldly feeling to the whole affair which would, otherwise, feel almost exactly like a newly discovered Sunday strip.
It’s a delightful volume, showcasing several hundred pages from this Secret Pioneer.
Frank Johnson, Secret Pioneer of American Comics Vol. 1: Wally’s Gang Early Years (1928-1949) and the Bowser Boys (1946-1950) – Frank Johnson
When Frank Johnson, an itinerant musician and shipping clerk, died in 1979, he left behind a startling discovery: more than 2,300 notebook pages of comics and 131 unbound drawings, among them a massive, continuous story line beginning in the earliest surviving notebook dated 1928 — before the existence of comic books! — and following the exploits of his own cast of characters across 50 years until Johnson passed away. During this lifelong project, Johnson invented in private many of the conventions and tropes that define comics storytelling, effectively enacting an alternative secret history of the comics medium.This debut publication of Johnson’s work is the first of two 600+ page volumes that will collect the best 1200 pages of his comics, including Wally’s Gang, his 50-year magnum opus chronicling the humorous, cliff-hanging adventures of a group of bachelor friends; The Bowser Boys, a seamy, darkly slapstick depiction of bohemian street life that could be considered the first underground comic series; and, coming in Volume 2, Juke Boys, absurd, self-reflexive graphic experimentation.Curator and historian Chris Byrne and fine artist and graphic novelist Keith Mayerson have brought this astounding work into the light of day and provide historical background and analysis.