Joe Tallarico works at the Ryerson & Burnham Library. He was able to take some time out of his busy schedule to show me a few examples of comics from the collection with strong ties to Chicago. I was given more or less a chronological run-down of the works that he pulled from the Ryerson’s collection, starting with comic strips from the turn of the century and working up to today’s big names like Daniel Clowes and Jeffrey Brown.

If you know the name Lyonel Feininger, you may be familiar with his expressionist paintings (The Art Institute has several) or his role in the group of artists known as The Blue Rider, but if your great grandparents were Chicagoans, they would probably be familiar with his short-lived comic strips that ran in the Chicago Tribune. The Kin-Der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, two comic strips by Feininger only ran from 1906-1907, but looking at the anthology of Feininger’s work in the Ryerson Library, I can imagine they left a lasting impact on anyone who picked up a copy of the newspaper 104 years ago in Chicago.

Joe showed me Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, a strip that ran in the Tribune that had an intentionally Midwestern feel. The strip followed Walt, initially a confirmed bachelor, and Skeezix, the baby who was left on Walt’s doorstep in the first few years of the still-running strip’s life. Interestingly, Skeezix was the first character in the comics to age in real time, a tactic adopted similarly by Chris Ware for his Jimmy Corrigan storyline.

We didn’t look at any of Chicago-based artist Chester Gould’s well-known Dick Tracy strip. The strip is undoubtedly iconic, but the purpose of my visit to the Ryerson Library was to see the experimental and rare works that might be hard to find elsewhere.

The 1960s and 1970s were pivotal eras for comics as self-publishing led to bolder experiments within the genre. According to Joe, many of the artists working in the field which would come to be known as “Underground Comix” grew up with and were influenced by Mad Magazine and horror comics. With the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, a clear divide developed between comics produced in accordance with the code and those which fell “below” the code’s standards.

One really amazing example of these underground comix that Joe showed me was Bijou Funnies – published in Chicago by Jay lynch who briefly taught at the Art Institute. Bijou was similar to the slightly more famous Zap Comix, but with more jokes about the first Daley administration. Bijou featured art and stories by most of the giants of underground comix. R. Crumb, Skip Williamson, Art Spiegelman, and Jay Kinney among others, all contributed to Bijou Funnies.

One of the groups of artists most strongly associated with Chicago is the The Hairy Who. One of the highlights of this whole experience for me was seeing an incredible program produced by The Hairy Who for an exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1973. The program was interesting to see within the context of comics. The Hairy Who were clearly influenced by images from comics and were also experimenting with the genre by producing an exhibition program in the format of a self-published comic. As an interesting aside, Joe gave me a few examples of contemporary comic artist, both in Chicago and beyond, who are making comics with a similar aesthetic to that of The Hairy Who.

The comic we looked at with the most obvious connection to Chicago was Skip Williamson’s Halsted Street, a strip originally published in the Chicago Daily News about living in Chicago circa the late 70s and early 80s. The comic was politically charged and highly critical of several of the city’s institutions, including the media.

Once we started looking at examples of comic artists I was familiar with, Ivan Brunetti, Archer Prewitt, Chris Ware (all of whom were working in Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s), I started to really understand the role Chicago has played in the history of comics. A very early example of Chris Ware’s work is included in the Ryerson’s collection. The art and story are pretty dissimilar to Ware’s later work, but it is an obvious building block. Elements of what would eventually become a distinct and easily distinguishable style are evident even in this early example.

Getting to see these building blocks, both for individual artists and for comics in general is part of why I love that libraries like Ryerson are committing more and more effort to collecting the published work of comic artists.

As Joe began to put away the selections he had pulled for me to look at, I became semi-obsessed with the special archival boxes created to preserve the comics in the collection. The brightly colored folios are constructed with precision, but they also convey a bit of whimsy and nostalgia, sort of like something Chris Ware might design.

As with most libraries that collect rare publications and works from small presses, these comics are non-circulating and primarily accessed by researchers and art historians. Even if these comics sit in their beautiful boxes for another ten years before someone decides to write a paper on the parallels between The Hairy Who and the contemporary art collective Paper Rad, it’s nice to know that they’ll have some pretty good resources at the Ryerson & Burnham Library.

– Anthony D. Stepter; photos by Thùy Ngô

The Ryerson & Burnham Library is located just south of the Grand Staircase near the main entrance in the Art Institute of Chicago at 111 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60603. The hours open to the museum visitors are Thursday, 10:30 am–8:00 pm and Wednesday & Friday, 1:00-4:00 pm. Please note, that as the Ryerson & Burnham is a non-circulating library with many rare and delicate materials, visitors are not admitted to the book stacks. Consult their Reading Room Policies and Archives Access Policies for more information on how you may view their special collections.

Joe Tallarico has kindly submitted a piece to our Comics Sunday. Check it out here.

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Tags: Anthony D. Stepter, Art Institute of Chicago, Comics, Joe Tallarico, library, print media, Printers' Ball 2010 Blog-Down, Ryerson & Burnham Library, special collections

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