Alley Oop

Alley Oop (Kitchen Sink Reprint) #1

by V.T. Hamlin

Book by Hamlin, V. T.

Genres: Comics

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 28, 1983

Reviews

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alley Oop is one of the great comic strips, and this first volume in an unfortunately defunct reprint series offers a great sampling from the strip's long run of entertaining humorous adventures from the 1940s. It's a good beginning place for anyone unfamiliar with the strip--especially since the editorial material explains the stuff you need to know--in that it includes both prehistoric adventures in Moo (as was the focus for the first few years of the strip) as well as some fun (though not my favourite) time travel stories, notably Oop ending up in Napoleon's France and meeting both Napoleon and Josephine. There's also an Old West adventure. The strip doesn't really exploit the possibilities of time travel for paradox and so forth but instead uses it to open up an infinite array of narrative possibilities, always depicted with visual verve and humour. Hamlin's art is dynamic and expressive, his characters clearly delineated, and his narraties constructed at a breakneck pace. He's one of the few continuity cartoonists who mostly avoids the problem of repetition. If you missed a few days of this strip, you might find yourself somewhere completely different from where you were. The pace and action allows one to overlook the occasionally desultory plotting (e.g. the Moo adventures rather abruptly drop the Cro Magnon invaders once their leader is dispatched, and later Hamlin seems simply to abandon the current plot to get Oop back to the future, though maybe a subsequent volume will resolve the threads left dangling there). Mostly, though, Hamlin seems to have thought things through fairly well. Some might also object to the treatment of women mostly as window dressing, though admittedly Ooola can hold her own in most situations--except when the plot requires Oop to be the saviour of a damsel in distress. However, any fan of adventure comic strips really needs to invest in some Oop.

[Charlie Eckhaus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having had this on my To-Read bookcase for the past 12 years, I decided to knock off this series. This starting volume recaps the history of Hamlin and his strip, and explains the reasons for starting a decade plus into it. Art is intriguingly semi-realistic and cartoony, with attractive display lettering for effects, and will withstand further scrutiny. Stories are convincingly paced, but one wonders at how quickly the characters adjust to being catapulted into history without a wow factor (maybe a case of been-there done-that via the earlier stories?)