I confess it was I who chose this comic, and I really did choose it at random. It looked like my notion of an old school British comic and I wanted to see what it was like. It's certainly a change from standard American comics. The mix of serialized text stories, one-pagers, and serialized strips comes off as a bit chaotic. Let's dig in...
"Deed-A-Day Danny": not an auspicious beginning.
"Lost in the Pacific": It's okay for a typical boys' adventure story, although the prose style is a bit remote. It's crazy that you get only one page a week. I think I would've saved a dozen episodes and read them together. Spoiler: the natives are indeed cannibals, and the serial ends abruptly as Pip and Fred become part of a nutritious breakfast.
"The Gremlins": I didn't think I'd like this but as I worked my way down the page the puns got funnier. I like bad puns anyway...my favorite here is "You'll find yourself outside."
"Billy Bunter": I got frustrated trying to read text and panels together, so I started by reading just the panels, and got a complete story. Then I read the text and got a similar story, one panel out of sync with the pictures. It's fair to middling. The art is fun but Bunter looks like an adult.
"Two Sheriffs for Salt Springs": Better written than the first story, but in places it's tougher to read Johnny's authentic Western palaver than it is to read Sam's Negro dialect. At least Sam has normal intelligence. The author's misuse of "dollars" jumps out at me. He should have used "money" or one of its slang equivalents. You can say, "I have a fistful of dollars" but unless you're quoting an amount ("I have five thousand dollars") the word usually implies a group of $1 bills. "What happened to my dollars?" sounds like something translated from Italian.
"One-Eyed Joe etc." What the heck is this? They get in a jam, they rub the button, and all their problems are solved. What kind of story do you call that? "Daffy": Well, at least this one makes sense...it just ain't funny.
"Westward Ho!" I've never heard of Charles Kingsley's famous book. I like the art. The panels only hit the high points of the story; one must read the text to get the whole thing. More aggressive Africans...if they work for a Spanish noble why do they run around half-naked?
"Jack, Jill, and the Jollikins" is excruciating. It makes me think of an insufferable aunt who gives you a saccharine reading of a first-grade primer even though you already read at sixth-grade level. Its saving grace is the wonderful drawing of the Grizzler.
"Handy Andy:" It's an amazing joke that's outrageously padded when it's only six panels long.
"Sexton Blake:" Another frustrating two-page fragment of a story. The art is rather hasty and almost everyone keeps his head turned away from the camera.
"Son O' the Circus": This makes up for the unemotional storytelling style of the first story. A full-out, brutal description of a fist fight. How do you like these apples, Jollikins and Skrimper-Squawk?
"Our Ernie": What, more cannibals? Counting the Spaniard's men that's three throngs of menacing Africans in just sixteen pages. I like the artwork, though. The expendable rhyming captions pile odd slang expressions one upon the other...I hope you Brits understand what's being said!
"Stonehenge Kit, the Ancient Brit": I like the title. And the story gets points for a unique trap. They never stuck Batman in strawberry Jell-O. Not so crazy about the cartooning.
In the long run I like Knockout more than I dislike it, but the package is so unlike my accustomed comics that it takes a lot of getting used to. And the super-short chapters drive me crazy.
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Topic: Week 107 - Knockout #418 (Read 4017 times)
