082 The DeBenedetto Classics Vol. 3: The Essential Strips

This is the third part in my series on the “comics canon”– or anyway, my proposal for said canon (here’s part one where I discuss the original masters, and part two where I discuss their heirs.)

As I said in my first post I’m far from an authority; rather, I think the main purpose of a canon is to spark discussion, and to give ideas to those who may not be as up on the medium. And there is perhaps no more universally approachable format in comics than those serialized stories printed in newspaper, the comic strip. Dating back to the turn of the century the “funny pages” predate even the earliest printed mainstream comic books, and provide a great starting point for any historical study of American sequential art.