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Rants & Raves
SKIPPY VERSUS THE MOB
 Skippy vs. the Mob: The Fight for Vesey Street and the American Soul (208 12x6-inch pages, b/w; Rosebud Archives, paperback, $24.95) collects, the publisher's press release divulges, "the only continuity Percy Crosby ever drew in his widely-syndicated Skippy strip, and features a comprehensive essay by the artist's daughter, chronicling an astonishing history of fraud, persecution, and betrayal." Crosby took on organized crime, and organized crime turned on the upstart cartoonist, effectively destroying him through the corporate machinations of the Skippy peanut butter people, who had adopted Crosby's character's name and the strip's iconic fence as the label on their product. The peanut butter aspect of the operation (as well as the history of the strip and Crosby's spectacular artistry) is discussed in Harv's Hindsights for April 2004 at the Usual Place; and the continuing saga of the fight is taken up in Rants & Raves, Ops. 70, 123, 172, and 272.
 In the book at hand, Crosby's daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts, examines the peanut butter battle in the context of her father's 1930s crusade against "Al Capone" and his ilk. Engaging (even terrifying) as that narrative is, the Skippy strips tell an equally daunting tale. One of the astonishing things about the volume is that it reprints some of the 1930 sequence from original art (August through mid-November), where Crosby's sketchy pen flies across the panels with all the energy of the kid whose actions he's depicting. A treat on every page.
Posted on August 18, 2011
For more Rants & Raves with its comics news and reviews, gossip and cartooning lore, visit http://www.rcharvey.com/
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