#2219: American Splendor Windfall #2 (1995)

At the end of 2017, I donated all of my "comic books", by which I mean standard-sized American comic book pamphlets, to Special Collections in the University of Calgary Library to create the beginnings of a comics collection there. Well, almost all of them. The day before the library staff came to pick them up, I rummaged through them and grabbed every comic book that I owned that also appeared in the What Were Comics? corpus. Disappointingly, it actually wasn't that many. It should have been two per cent, but I think it was probably slightly less. In some ways I felt a bit bad about breaking up runs of some series, but, on the other hand, all of the comics in our corpus will someday also be housed in Special Collections - we're just not finished using them yet. 

American Splendor Windfall was one of a series of American Splendor limited series at Dark Horse and Vertigo in the 1990s and 2000s. They are the only American Splendor comics in our sampling frame because the Overstreet Guide, one of our three datasets, does not index the earlier, more valuable and collectible self-published comics. This is the only American Splendor comic to make it into the corpus, and it is one of a fairly small number of "alternative comics" included. It will stand out in other ways, of course, not the least of which being that there are only a few black-and-white comics in the corpus.

This comic book is a weird one for me because it has four artists (Scott A. Gilbert, Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, and Frank Stack) and I believe that I've had dinner with three of them (I have never met Stack, and, actually, I never met Harvey Pekar either). My guess is that a lot of people might assume that it will be anomalous in the mid-1990s for being an anthology comic, but having gone through the corpus I'm beginning to think that multi-story titles persist in the comics world a lot longer than generally assumed.

0009: Knock Knock (1936)

File this one under "you learn something new every day". 

Bob Dunn is reasonably well known in the world of comic strips as the cartoonist who took over Jummy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time after Hatlo's death in 1963. Dunn won several awards from the National Cartoonists Society at the end of the 1960s. Long before that, however, he produced this book for Western Publishing in 1936. It is a collection of more than fifty single-page gag strips - each one a knock knock joke. They are all in black-and-white, and most are five or six panels since, well, knock knock jokes have five parts (the sixth panel is generally one in which the jokester gets a punch in the nose for telling such a poor joke). The work in here is pretty accurately reflected by the card stock cover - they are minimal, sketchy drawings. Not a lot of detail, not a lot of craft, not a lot of wit. Lots and lots of racist imagery, which (sadly) almost goes without saying for the period.

When I looked up Dunn, I found that Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons credits him as the inventor of the knock knock joke. That surprised me. Partly because you never really anticipate that anything as simple as a knock knock joke has an "inventor" (though, of course, it would have to), and partly because I would've thought that the knock knock joke would have been around longer than eighty-two years.

Looking up the knock knock joke, seems to give some credence to the claim. Wikipedia traces the form back to Macbeth, but, well, please. They cite a couple of examples from before 1936 that are akin to knock knock jokes, but which lack the precise five-part form. Then, all of a sudden, they have a surprisingly large number of examples from... 1936. The most interesting of these, to me, is the fact that Fred Allen complained about the "negative craze" in his 1936 year-in-review broadcast. So it evidently was a new idea.

More interestingly, the knock knock joke seems to have faded away and then been revived by Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, suggesting that the form faded away, and then was revived by a terribly smart tv show with an ironic and retro tone, and that it then stuck in our culture. As the father of a still-young son, I can assure you that knock knock jokes still have currency and still haven't improved very much.

Horn called Knock Knock "a million selling book". I have no idea if that's true. It wasn't terribly hard to locate nor was it expensive for a comic book from the 1930s, so it may well have been ubiquitous.