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Russ Manning, one of the great California cartoonists whose work, like his mentor Jesse Marsh‘s, stands apart as a West Coast alternative to the more chaotic New York-based artists, made a case for Dell as a key 20th century comic book publisher in Richard Kyle’s brilliant Wonderworld #9, (1973). The two-page article is below. One thing I enjoy about Wonderworld is that it offers an entirely different point of view on comics history — mostly avoiding superheroes and advocating for other genres and approaches in comics. Some of the artists who loomed large for Kyle, like Dan Spiegle and Hermann (whose two-volume Survivors album series was an early Fantagraphics project), seem largely forgotten today, but the samples published in Wonderworld offer a look at another course for character-based comics in the 70s. By the way, you can see an entire early issue of Wonderworld, when it was called Graphic Story World, over at the Jack Kirby Museum. Look closely for the amazing photo of Jaunty Jim Steranko.

Russ Manning text copyright Estate of Russ Manning.

Russ Manning text copyright Estate of Russ Manning.