The history of Dell's Disney comics

Arkansas Online reviews a book by Michael Barrier called Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books, about the history of Dell's Disney comics, and how artists like Walt Kelly and Carl Barks deserve far more credit than they get for their contributions. And, surely the most valuable question Barrier asks is:

Are these comics from 60 and 70 years ago still worth reading? Made to be thrown away, were they really that good?

Five years of research and countless comic books later, he is ready to report. In a word, "yeah," good comics -- sometimes great comics.

The best, he says, "are worth reading by my 70-year-old self as much as when I was a teenager and younger."

Of course they're great stuff, worth our children's reading both for the humor and the history of what kind of jokes everybody liked years before. It's the same with a lot of superhero and fantasy comics that are well worth reading for learning what kind of ideas everybody found thrilling in adventure fare decades before, and to get a taste of decent adventure, far more convincing than what we've seen since the turn of the century.

And that's why reading older creations is important.