Richard's Poor Almanac by Richard Thompson for May 23, 2019

Transcript:

In Barney Google, Billy DeBeck created a comic strip that stands as the finest example of high Bigfoot cartooning. Bigfoot was the dominant style and American comic strips of the first third of the 20th century. As its name suggests, Bigfoot is a clownish style. The lumpen everyman it describes is an antique stubblebum in baggy pants and tell code all polkadots and windowpane checks. His fortune our ever shifting; he's a hobo then a toff, but always a buffoon and usually a fool and a patsy. Barney Google and the Bigfoot style by Richard Thompson Such masters as Opper, Herriman, Goldberg and Segar all worked in the Bigfoot style to varying degrees. But in DeBecks picturesque tales of big eyed Barney and knock kneed Spark plug, Bigfoot reached its finest, most grotesque flowering. Like all art styles, Bigfoot divided any fault. It became a path back to naturalism in the great adventure strips of Roy Crane. By the 1950s, Mort Walker et al had simplified it into Bigfoot moderne. In the 60s R. Crumb launched a Bigfoot renaissance and Philip Guston began to paint big anxious feet. Today Bigfoot has spread far, it's footprints leading to both the loving parodies of Patrick McDonnell and the more doltish of Homer Simpson's exploits.