Mitch's Blog

Tom De Haven’s Funny Papers trilogy is a sprawling, picaresque romp through the lives and neuroses of the men responsible for creating a wildly popular comic strip over a period spanning more than a century.

The first novel in the series, “Funny Papers” tells the story of Georgie Wreckage, a dour but oddly likable illustrator for the yellow scandal newspapers of 1890s New York. In the era before newspapers could publish photos, Georgie rushes to the scene of grisly crimes and disasters and draws them for the benefit of readers. The work suits Georgie’s gloomy demeanor and he loves it.

One day, Georgie finds an odd-looking boy at the periphery of a murder scene, a bald kid wearing a derby hat and nightgown, with a dog named Fuzzy. Georgie draws the boy and dog and suddenly the artist finds himself a celebrity cartoonist — rich, famous, and miserable. The boy, whose name is Pinfold, is baffled, meanwhile, to find that a fictional version of himself is now famous.

There is nothing cute about Pinfold in real life. He’s bald because a gang of boys set him on fire for sport and he’s wearing a nightshirt because his street clothes were soaked in blood during the murder.

Despite the grim events, Funny Papers is joyful and energetic, exploring the streets of 1890s New York and its denizens, easily following a dozen colorful characters.

The sequel, “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies,” jumps 40 years in the future, to 1936 New York. Each book in the series stands on its own — I read the second book first, unaware that was part of a series, and I’ve reread it several times over the past 30 years.

The boy in the derby hat now has a new name, Derby Dugan, and new creators. Al Bready, the first-person narrator of the novel, writes the scripts for the strip, with another man serving as boss, artist and the public face of the team. They are close friends, though Bready denies it and claims he doesn’t even like his boss. Bready certainly has no reason to like the artist, who has achieved fame and fortune from Derby Dugan, goes to fashionable parties, beds beautiful women and lives in a mansion, while Bready toils in anonymity, lives in a one-room apartment and only owns one pair of shoes. And yet Bready is happy, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s young, healthy and a prince of the city.

The story is reminiscent of Damon Runyon — or a comic strip — filled with colorful characters and told in Bready’s snappy, street-smart voice. He’s a pulp writer and an autodidact but he knows how to use a semicolon

I reviewed Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies in 2010: A talking dog and puckered shoes: Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies

Gotta admit I didn’t care much for the third novel, “Dugan Under Ground,” which jumps ahead 30 years to the early 60s and 70s and then jumps ahead again to the year 2000. Derby Dugan has been canceled due to poor circulation, but revived in an unauthorized underground comic. He’s now the Imp Eugene, whose X-rated adventures have a cult following of maybe about a dozen people. Like the first two novels, the main characters of “Dugan Under Ground” are the comic’s neurotic creators, but unlike the first two novels I just didn’t enjoy spending time with these sad sacks. “Dugan Under Ground” leaves midcentury New York — a place and time I have a lifelong romantic attachment to — and follows the characters from suburban New Jersey to late 60s hippie San Francisco and back.

The author, Tom De Haven, has also written a novel about Superman, “It’s Superman,” which alters the core mythology in intriguing ways that I think work even better than canon. “It’s Superman” is based on the comic strip’s very early days. He’s also written a history of the Superman character, “Our Hero: Superman on Earth, which sounds almost like another volume of Derby Dugan; it’s high on my to-be-read list.