When we interviewed Bruce Canwell, the Associate Editor of the hardcover book series The Library of American Comics back in October, we described the work of the organization as a "rescue mission" because they toiled diligently to recover lost and forgotten comic strips, digitally restore the artwork where necessary, and present them to today's audience – many of whom had never seen the classic strips except perhaps as an array of random samples.

Never has the term "rescue mission" been more appropriately applied than to the latest volume to come from the Library of American Comics: Polly and Her Pals volume 1 by cartoonist Cliff Sterrett (180 pp, $75, available now). Polly is a strip that was popular in its day, but is all but unheard of to today's audience. Polly and Her Pals was created by cartoonist Cliff Sterrett for the William Randolph Hearst chain of newspapers and first appeared as a daily on December 4, 1912 under the title Positive Polly, and a Sunday version followed a year later on December 28, 1913.

The strip originally focused on the comedic adventures of Polly Perkins, who, as we see in the very first Sunday strip, is never at a loss for a gentleman caller. As a character, Polly could be considered a proto-flapper whose slangy speech, dress, and attitude anticipated the approaching Jazz Age and the new social freedoms for society, and particularly women, that it ushered in. However, as the strip matured and fully came into its own, Polly's father, Sam "Paw" Perkins, emerged as the true star of the strip. Paw's domestic misadventures, and the strips eventual incorporation of expressionistic and cubist elements into the artwork delighted audiences for decades. Of course, Polly was still on hand, as were her "Pals" – simply an alliterative way to refer to her parents and her growing cast of extended family that were added to the strip.

...a not-to-be-wasted opportunity to see one of the early comedic masters develop into one of the true giants of popular art.

With but a brief sabbatical in 1925, Sterrett drew all of the Polly Sunday strips from their inception in 1913 until its demise on June 15,1958, representing an almost unbroken 46-year body of work. However, although Polly had a devoted fan following, it never became the merchandising bonanza that other comic strips of the era did, and so it never seeped into the larger American pop culture landscape that other strips, such as Chic Young's Blondie – also originally a strip chronicling the adventures of a flirty flapper-type protagonist – did.

However, among cartoonists and illustrators, Cliff Sterrett's work has become justly admired and even revered. Sterrett was one of the comic strip pioneers who thought outside the box – in this case, the restrictive oblong format of the Sunday newspaper – and brought new potential and expanded the graphic vocabulary of what a newspaper comic strip could convey visually. Sterrett's influence and bold experimentation stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Winsor McKay (Little Nemo in Slumberland) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat), but contribute something new.

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POLLY AND HER PALS, November 24, 1918 [Photo Credit: Library of American Comics]	POLLY AND HER PALS, June 12, 1927 [Photo Credit: Library of American Comics]

The team at the Library of American Comics has done its usual outstanding job in assembling this book. Luckily, they were able to gather together crystal clear syndicate proofs to use as their starting point. Strips that are 85 to 100 years old look brand new. The thick, matte paper stock allows each strip to be read without overhead lighting creating a glare on the pages. Best of all, the Sunday pages are presented pretty much at their original size as the book measures an enormous 16 inches high with the strips taking up more than 13 inches of the page size. What with the bright white paper and today's advanced coloring techniques, this is undoubtedly the best the strips have ever looked. For any collector of classic comic strip material, this represents a great opportunity to own the early years of the strip in a pristine archival format. Supplementing the strips themselves is an invaluable front section of in-depth background material in the form of an essay of no less than 8,000 words by comic strip historian, Jeet Heer. Included in this section, beyond a wealth of biographical material, are vintage newspaper ads promoting Cliff Sterrett and Polly, and samples of early strips by Sterrett including For This Have We Daughters, which is to Polly and Her Pals what Li'l Folks is to Charles Schulz's Peanuts.

The strips included in the book span the years from 1913 to 1927. However, the book doesn't really start its chronological reprinting until the strip dated Sunday, November 30, 1924. The book includes all the Sterrett strips from then until the close of the year 1927, but skipping his sabbatical period of April 19 to November 15, 1925 when his strip was done by ghost artists. However, a few representative samples of this 7-month period are included. And for those who are familiar with Polly and are wondering – yes, each page does contain the topper strips that ran above Polly starting with Dot and Dash (originally called Damon and Pythias) beginning on February 21, 1926. A preview of the next planned volume in the series shows that it will contain the Sundays from the period 1928 to 1930 along with the topper, Sweethearts and Wives (later renamed Belles and Wedding Bells).

Why does this book truly begin in earnest from the post-sabbatical period of late-1925 rather than as a complete chronological reprinting from day one as many of the other series in the Library have done? The answer is simply that, while the early strips are not without merit and are quite enjoyable forays into domestic situation comedy that Sterrett all but pioneered alongside fellow cartoonist, George McManus (Bringing Up Father, also available from the Library of American Comics), Polly and Her Pals did not truly become the strip that audiences loved and critics lauded until he returned from sabbatical with a new outlook and a bold new art style, the beginnings of which can be seen in this first volume. It has yet to be uncovered exactly why this sabbatical led to such a dramatic change in Sterrett's approach to his cartooning, but with his return, slowly but surely, came the abstract art style for which he became justly famous. Gone were the faithful representations of reality and in its place stood a world of slightly-out-of-whack architecture and matter-of-fact surrealism. Doorways looked like arches; windows seemingly hung in midair on a wall of black (as shown on the cover shot above); Entrances to rooms could easily be a large hole in the floor; floor tiles were a shape unknown to geometry, and the ground itself always seemed to slope upward as if it were a knoll. Then, too, light and shadow are played with to create additional mood and effect. Sterrett's self-imposed vacation seemed to begin the process whereby he would come into his full powers as a cartoonist. It's as if Steve Ditko's Dark Dimension or Bob Clampett's Wackyland were the source material for the architectural blueprints of this cracked mirror take on small town Americana – but remember, Sterrett did it first.

Reading Polly and Her Pals gives one the same thrill that an archeologist must feel as he or she dusts off an antiquity: the thrill of discovery – the sense of origin – the knowledge that one is witnessing the birth of new artistic techniques rather than the tenth generation knockoffs of those techniques. Seeing the strips presented sequentially gives the reader further understanding as we can chart the progression of Sterrett's emerging new sensibilities and watch him experiment, discard, and refine the elements of the style that would become so identified with the artist and with Polly and Her Pals. By following the progression of each week's strip, one can experience a vicarious charge out of imagining that one is witnessing Sterrett's own mind open up bit by bit as he began to understand the full depths of his own talent and the possibilities that existed on that blank sheet of paper. Perhaps most thrilling is the knowledge that, in 1925, Sterrett was injecting elements of cubism and surrealism alongside and concurrent with those movements in the larger art world, championed by such artists as Picasso and, later, Salvador Dalí, when the movement was still so fresh and full of unexplored possibilities rather than as an ain't-I-clever throwback to another era's art form studied in art history class.

Oh, and as an added bonus? The characters are engaging; the situations are relatable, and these strips are just damned funny. Sterrett was a master humorist whether it be through situations, dialogue, or most famously, through pantomime – as many of the best and most famous strips contain no dialogue.  There's no tradeoff between style and substance here.

Polly and Her Pals volume 1 is the first book in the new "Champagne Format" of the Library of American Comics, and is a not-to-be-wasted opportunity to see one of the early comedic masters develop into one of the true giants of popular art.

For further information about the Library of American Comics, visit their website at www.libraryofamericancomics.com and listen to our interview with Bruce Canwell, Associate Editor for the Library right here.

Considered something of a Rock god among comic book fans, publisher and artist Jim Lee is a true American success story.  Immigrating to the United States from South Korea at the age of four, Lee grew up right square in the American Heartland – St. Louis, Missouri. Excelling in school, Lee was on the pre-med track at Princeton with a major in psychology when an art class rekindled his childhood loves of drawing and comic books. The year was 1986, and with comics evolving and growing up thanks to such game changing series as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, Lee made a deal with his parents to try for one year to break into comics. If unsuccessful after that time, he would go forward with his education and attend medical school.

Lee never looked back because, by 1987, he had broken in to the comics industry drawing the Alpha Flight series for Marvel Comics as his first regular assignment, debuting with issue #51, dated October of that year. Lee's star continued to rise at Marvel, as he became the penciler on the first Punisher spinoff book, Punisher War Journal with the first issue, dated November 1988. On the fourth issue of that series, Lee's pencils were inked by Scott Williams for the first time, beginning an artistic partnership that continues to this day more than 20 years later.

However, it was a fill-in issue he did on Marvel's top-selling series that would change Jim Lee's life forever. Dated September 1989, Uncanny X-Men #248 introduced Lee's art to a far wider audience, and his successful pinch hit on that issue and three others led to Jim receiving the plumb assignment of regular penciler on Uncanny X-Men beginning with #267, dated September 1990. Within a few months, Lee's artwork on that title re-energized the series and drove sales even higher, and his earlier issues were fetching top dollar on the back issue market. Now firmly ensconced on one of Marvel's best-selling titles, Lee joined the ranks of other fan-favorite Marvel Comics artists, Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld, who had been enjoying similar successes on Spider-Man and New Mutants, respectively.

A year later, Jim Lee one-upped himself as he became the artist on what is still the best-selling comic book of all time, October 1991's X-Men #1, which has sold over 8 million copies – a feat confirmed by the Guinness Book of World Records. Not bad for someone who had just been hoping to get his foot in the door of the comics industry a scant four years earlier.

Success followed success for Lee as, in 1992, he broke away from Marvel along with its other top artists to form the upstart Image Comics where Lee created his signature series, WildCATS. 1996 brought him back to Marvel, by then struggling with bankruptcy, to take on their Iron Man and Fantastic Four titles for about a year.

In late 1998, Lee stunned the comics industry by leaving Image Comics and taking his intellectual properties, organized under the WildStorm Productions banner, and selling them to DC Comics, making WildStorm an imprint of DC where Lee continued to serve as Editorial Director. The comics industry had entered a major slump in mid-1994, and by the late-1990s, the lofty sales once held by any title published with an Image Comics logo were no more. Selling WildStorm to DC allowed Lee to keep his characters alive and published by a stable company with a superior presence in the trade paperback bookstore market – a combination that no other comics company had at the time.

One of Lee's wishes in selling WildStorm to DC was to concentrate more on his artwork. He didn't quite succeed in that goal as his artistic output has been scattershot over the last decade. However, he has illustrated a few significant stories for DC including the twelve-issue story arcs, "Batman: Hush" and "Superman: For Tomorrow." More recently, he penciled Frank Miller's controversial, hard-edged – and more than slightly unhinged – take on the Caped Crusader in All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder. Upcoming projects include painted art in Batman: Europa #1 and his spearheading of DC's online gaming presence as the Executive Creative Director of DC's MMORPG, DC Universe Online, set for release sometime in 2011.

In February 2010, a company reorganization at DC led to Jim Lee's appointment as Co-Publisher of DC Comics. Later in the year, the WildStorm imprint was scuttled and its characters will be folded into the mainstream DC Comics titles.

So how does one even begin to showcase the career of a man who has risen to the top of his field and whose influence has extended over no less than three different comic book companies? Titan Books may just have the answer with its breathtaking new coffee table tome, Icons: The DC Comics and WildStorm Art of Jim Lee (ISBN: 978-1845765194), written by William Baker, whose text informs and gives context to the artwork, but is wisely used sparingly in order to let the pictures speak for themselves.

Weighing in at almost 300 pages, Icons, by necessity, leaves out Lee's non-DC owned work, but what it includes should be more than enough to satisfy the cravings of any fan of Jim Lee's dynamic comics art. No stranger to producing high quality art books, Titan adds yet another impressive title to its roster. The production values on this book are superb as each page of Lee's drool-worthy art is rendered on a generous 12.2-by-9.4 inch page in sharp detail using heavy paper stock.

The book is divided into several sections: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, DC Heroes, WildStorm, Vertigo, and DCU Online. Given that Lee's DC art has been heavily weighted toward Batman, it should come as no surprise that a full 85 pages are devoted to the Dark Knight and his extended family such as Robin, Nightwing, and Batgirl. At the opposite end, Wonder Woman receives the comparatively short shrift, but Lee's insights into creating different looks for Diana for various projects, ranging from All Star Batman to Just Imagine Stan Lee and Jim Lee Creating Wonder Woman, are interesting as he admits to having some difficulty with interpreting the character.

Like Neal Adams before him and Alex Ross after him, Jim Lee became a fan favorite on the strength of relatively few projects. It might surprise some that, in his entire career through Marvel, Image, and DC, Lee has drawn fewer than 150 complete comic books, yet his influence in the medium and on the next generations of artists far outstrips his artistic output – a sure sign of a great artist. If it's true that familiarity breeds contempt, scarcity seems to have had the opposite effect as, 20 years on, Lee's name attached to any project sends waves of anticipation and excitement throughout comics fandom and catapults said project to the top of the sales charts.

What makes Icons such an important book is that it not only has lots of splashy images of Lee's most memorable scenes from the comics he's drawn, but through the use of pencil sketches, thumbnails, concept art, as well as narration from the artist himself, we get a glimpse into Lee's artistic process and gain an understanding of how Lee approaches character design and staging a scene. Lee is meticulous and detail-oriented in his work even when taking on characters that are familiar worldwide such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman – the so-called "trinity" of the DC pantheon. Readers will surely enjoy seeing the concept sketches that Lee put together before tackling Batman in "Hush" or Superman and Wonder Woman in "For Tomorrow." The section on All Star Batman and Robin is surprisingly revealing as we see how Lee approached the development of these characters from the ground up, and we get to see proposed new costume designs for both Batman and Robin that were quite different from the classic looks that actually saw print.  This meticulous approach also extends to Lee's work in creating the art from which many DC statues are made, samples of which are also evident throughout the book.

The section on WildStorm is particularly instructive as the brand was home to Lee's artistic and editorial input from its inception in 1992 as a unit of Image Comics until the present day as a unit of DC Comics, so while these characters will be less recognizable to the more casual comics reader, WildStorm does represent Lee's longest and most consistent work in comics. Readers can meet, or reacquaint themselves, with, among others, WildCATS, Gen13, Divine Right, Stormwatch, and Deathblow – characters that could only have come from the 90s – in all their gritted teeth, sword-wielding, gun-toting, shoulder-padded glory. Even readers who think they've seen it all will raise an intrigued eyebrow over the juicy tidbits of new information that are revealed by the copious amounts of unpublished art and rejected conceptual drawings taken directly from Jim Lee's sketchbooks and uninked artboards. Did you know that names such as M-Force, N-Force, World N-Forcers, and Multinational Force were considered for the United Nations sponsored team of superhumans that eventually became known as Stormwatch?  You do now, and there are many more such bits of trivia and insight to be found within these pages.

A further bonus is Jim Lee's first work on a story of DC Comics' first Silver Age superhero team, The Legion of Super-Heroes.  This story was produced especially for Icons and rounds out the book and ends things on a high note. Lee is clearly a fan of the 1970s Dave Cockrum designed version of the Legion as that era is where Lee's story (written by Paul Levitz, longtime Legion scribe and Lee's predecessor as Publisher of DC Comics) takes place.  In an odd way, this brings things full circle somewhat as Cockrum gained his greatest fame in 1975 by co-creating the new X-Men.

In summary, Icons: The DC Comics and WildStorm Art of Jim Lee makes a great gift during this holiday season, and is mandatory reading, not only for comics fans, but for those who aspire to enter into a career in art whether it be comic books, commercial art, or movie storyboarding. Regular folks who just like to look at eye-popping images from a consummate craftsman will surely get hours and hours of enjoyment from this book as well.