Admit it: Every red-blooded American male who’s ever read the comic strip Beetle Bailey has thought, “I wonder what Miss Buxley looks like naked?” Creator Mort Walker no doubt thought the same, because he drew her that way, and Craig Yoe has the proof in CLEAN CARTOONISTS’ DIRTY DRAWINGS.
This one-of-a-kind collection gathers up the R-rated cartoons and sketches — most never intended to be seen — by the squeaky-clean creators of the country’s favorite comic strips and characters. Now you can see the men behind Nancy and Prince Valiant draw nipples and pubic hair.
It’s definitely bawdy, but mostly pretty good-natured. Maybe this stuff would be shocking in 1950, but today, it’s tame. (Still, I’m not going to leave it out where my kids could thumb through it.) That doesn’t mean it can’t be sexy or amusing or funny, because plenty here qualify. Only a handful fall into the OMG realm, and Wally Wood provides a majority of those, particularly a sketch of Ming the Merciless taking Dale Arden from behind, while Flash Gordon watches helplessly behind bars.
Artists include Charles Schulz, Bob Kane, Al Jaffee, Johnny Hart, Walt Kelly, Alex Raymond, Dan DeCarlo, Alex Toth, Chuck Jones, Jack Kirby, Milton Caniff, Carl Barks, Rube Goldberg and even Dr. Seuss! These mean loved their curves, and exercised that love on art that the general public wasn’t meant to digest. DIRTY DRAWINGS works both as a cultural artifact and in providing ribald ticklers of the rib (not to mention the unmentionables). —Rod Lott
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Charles Schulz! Chuck Jones! Man, talk about tainting my childhood….