Our Gang Comics Collection Out Now

Fantagraphics Press is releasing a series of trade paperback collections of the classic OUR GANG comic book stories done by Walt Kelly in the 1940's. Kelly, best known for creating the classic comic strip POGO, worked on the series for years, and the comic continued running even after the OUR GANG series folded. In a sense, this freed him up a little. By the time they got around to doing a comic book version of the Gang, they were in the doldrums of the series, those last, dismal things with Mickey, Froggy, Spanky, Buckwheat, and Janet. Kelly started off with these five, but his stories were far more lively and fun than the shorts were at the time, and since he wasn't limited by the actors, he could make the characters a little more complex. Janet, for example, was an annoying, simpering Darla knockoff in the series, but in Kelly's stories, she was a likable, inventive type who more than held her own with the boys. Similarly, Buckwheat became Bucky and while his appearence and speech was somewhat caricatured, he was never the butt of the sometimes racist humor that, sadly, sometimes turned up in the shorts.

As the series continued, Kelly began having Gangers 'grow up' and leave the Gang, bringing in his own characters to replace them. There's a trace of that in the first collection: The stories start out with Spanky, but the real Spanky left the series shortly afterward, so Kelly just changed the design a little, re-christened the character 'Happy', and kept going.

The collection that's out now features the first eight issues of OUR GANG comics, with additional collections to follow. It's a chance to see a rarely explored off-shoot of the OUR GANG/LITTLE RASCALS franchise.