When I was a child, one of the first comic strips that totally enthralled me wasn’t anything I read in the pages of the Rome News-Tribune or the Atlanta Journal. Instead, it was a strip that was published decades before I was born. I found J.R. Williams’ “Out Our Way” in a collected volume on my parents’ bookshelf; it was the only book they had that seemed to be entirely comic art, so I was instantly hooked. I fell in love with Williams’ meticulous line work, and was intrigued by his view of the not-so-Old West… a view that stripped away the mythic Western elements and pointed out the mundanities and ironies of life in the West.
It’s funny–I haven’t seen this book in forty or more years, but I can still see Williams’ lovely linework (an ink style that seems to have influenced Frank Frazetta’s work, in fact). There are no mass-market collections of Williams’ work that I know of–but there should be. He’s too good to be forgotten, as this one panel so aptly illustrates.
August 11, 2009 at 1:41 am |
The brushwork on the clothing reminds me of Frank Godwin.