Skippy Volume 1: Complete Dailies 1925-1927 : Complete Dailies 1925-1927

by Crosby, Percy; Crosby, Percy

• ISBN13: 9781613772843
• ISBN10: 161377284X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-24
• Publisher: Diamond Comic Distributors

Summary

Volume 1 of includes every Skippy daily strip from the beginning - June 22, 1925 through the end of 1927 - as well as the start of an extensive, ongoing biography of Percy Crosby by Jared Gardner, complemented by many photographs and rare artwork from the collection of the cartoonist's daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts.

Author Biography

Percy Leo Crosby (1891-1964) created several comic strips before hitting gold with Skippy. These early efforts included, in 1916, That Rookie from the Thirteenth Squad (which he produced from France while in the army during the first World War,) and the single panel Always Belittlin' (which later morphed into a topper to the Skippy Sunday page). By the early 1920s Crosby was a mainstay, drawing covers and illustrations for Charles Dana Gibson's Life magazine, where, in March 1923, he introduced the impish and loveable Skippy Skinner.

In the days before the separation between "high art" and "low art" became entrenched, Crosby criss-crossed the creative world, lauded by both "serious" art critics at major galleries and museum exhibitions around the globe, as well as the man on the street who read Skippy on the comics pages. Crosby wrote a best-selling Skippy novel, which in 1931 was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie.

Perhaps more than any other cartoonist before him, Crosby brought philosophy and politics to the American newspaper comic strip. In the end, it would be his outspoken political and philosophical beliefs that would place him increasingly outside the mainstream of 1940s American culture, ultimately leading to his exile from comics and his forced incarceration in a mental institution for the last sixteen years of his life. As a result of his tragic end, Crosby's remarkable contributions to American culture have been largely eclipsed, until now.