STRIPPER'S GUIDE

THE END

 Yes, it’s time once more for the annual Stripper’s Guide Christmas strip. If you’ve been following this series for the past decade or so you may have noticed that while I can often dig up a Christmas strip with good art, the stories can be, well, to be charitable let’s just say they’re not quite Christmas miracles. 

That formula — great art, pungently aromatic story — is alive and well in our 2022 Christmas strip, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates. It was originally NEA’s 1984 Christmas story, one of four produced by the Joe Kubert art school from 1982-85. You’ve got the transcendent art of Joe Kubert, who may claim his students at the Joe Kubert School did this, but you’re not fooling anyone Joe. Kubert’s sense of the dramatic shot, the panel bursting with energy, makes me wish that he spent more time doing newspaper work instead of all that funnybook stuff. Well, not really — his style and sensibility are tailor made for the comic book form. If he’d had full pages to work with back in the golden age of newspaper comics, that would be one thing, but to hobble Kubert’s brush with a teeny-tiny 4-column daily? That’s just crazy talk, Jerry. 

The sloppy storytelling is really a matter of choosing the wrong source material for a very short 20-strip run. Though Hans Brinker isn’t exactly War and Peace by any means, there’s enough going on that to try to tell the story in that short space is practically impossible. Kubert should have pared the story down to the absolute bare bones, but he inadvisedly tried to hit on some subplots and ended up with a mess. If you already know the story the strip works because you can fill in all the details; if you don’t, the story seems disjointed and just plain ridiculous.