(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
SNAPSHOT
A visual celebration of one of the most dynamic and imaginative comics since Calvin and Hobbes, this deluxe hardcover treasury celebrates includes every Wallace the Brave Sunday comic strip from 2018-2024, featuring original watercolors, character art, maps, and an introduction by the author.This book celebrates the artistic achievement of Will Henry and presents the Wallace the Brave universe in vivid color, the first ever book edition that presents his Sunday comics in their original, large format. Henry’s illustration and storytelling in the daily Wallace the Brave comic strip and books have earned multiple Eisner Award nominations and Reuben awards for the Best Newspaper Comic Strip and Cartoonist of the Year. As NPR’s Glen Weldon writes, “The world of childhood depicted in the strip is a timeless, outdoorsy one reminiscent of strips like Calvin & Hobbes and Cul De Sac, both of which Henry cites as influences.” (courtesy Simon & Schuster)
One of the greatest joys of childhood is the innate sense that anything is possible.
If you dream it, it can happen is the driving force of every breathing moment and it means that a plastic lawn chair could be the seat in a rocket-to-the-moon’s cockpit or a big bush in the backyard, with a cosy hollow tucked inside a cascade of tumbling leaves could be a palace for a king and queen.
There are simply no limits to where imagination can take you, and it means that every waking moment, even the ones where you’re trapped at school or doing something you don’t like, has the propensity to be wholly and transcendently magical.
Every last gram of the imaginative magicality is captured by Will Henry, whose Snug Harbor, Rhode Island-set Wallace the Brace comic strip has celebrated the great joys of childhood ever since it debuted in newspapers in 2018 (the strip technically launched in 2015 when it debuted on the GoComics website of its distributor, Andrews McMeel Syndication).
While we have been gifted with the collected joy of five Wallace the Brave collections in print to date – Wallace the Brave, Snug Harbor Stories, Wicked Epic Adventures, Are We Lost Yet? and The Great Pencil Quest – Sunday Funday Wallace is the first grouping of the strip’s full-colour Sunday strips which, as Henry aka William Henry Wilson observes in his entry to the hardcover book, tell “a self-contained story that must be independent from the daily comics”.
It might be a bold move to say that having all the Sunday strips from 2018 to 2024 in one handsomely presented collection gives a whole new perspective to Wallace the Brave, but as you immerse yourself, and immerse yourself you will in the most deliciously escapist of ways, in 190 pages of nothing but full-colour comics, you get a feel for the world of Wallace that the weekday efforts, glorious though they are, simply don’t afford.
Snug Harbor always comes across as very cosy and wondrous place to live, populated by idiosyncratic souls, with Wallace, best friend and chronic worrier Spud, and mutual friends no-nonsense Amelia and order-is-everything Rose, able to create adventures where a blinded-by-reality adult mind might not see adventures to be had.
So great is Wallace’s capacity for seeing the possible and the madcap imaginative that he imagines in one of the first strips in the collection, published on 1 April, 2018, that his dad’s life as a lobster fishermen, which later strips show is all grunge and hard graft (though not without its compensations), is all about sailing the seven seas, finding lost treasure and fighting sea monsters.
His mum, who is one of the coolest mothers out there and who encourages her son’s capacity for wild imaginative musing (within reasonable limits though), gently cautions him that “You might be romanticizing [sic] it a bit, Wallace” – I love the way she talks him down gently; she’s a good parent, balancing keeping his imagination alive while leavening it as necessary – while we see Wallace’s dad bunkering down on the boat in torrential rain.
The thing about Wallace, quite apart from the fact that his parents actively work to keep the kid in him alive and kicking while ensuring he knows life isn’t quite as magical as he thinks it is (more for his own good than anything), is that he sees something truly incredible things in the mundane.
Where you and I might see an old fisherman sitting on a bridge, hoping for a good catch, Wallace sees a man protecting the town in which he lives by feeding the hobgoblin under the bridge a bucket of scup heads (a type of fish), or while you might think a butterfly can’t do much beyond flutter colourfully all around you, which is its own particular kind of magic, Wallace is convinced that if he can catch enough of them he can ride on a canvas chair high in the sky which will get him to “Tahiti by lunchtime”.
That imagination is on verdant show in the daily strips of course, but there’s something about the richness and colour, of the bigger, more artistic template of the Sunday comics – and artistic they are with Sunday Funday Wallace featuring original full-page artwork that brings the world of Wallace alive in gorgeously expansive ways – that makes it seems all the more magical and alive.
When Wallace, who drags poor Spud into all kinds of situations he simply doesn’t want to be in to hilarious results (for us, not so much for Spud) imagines his summer away from school, he sees himself atop a bright red biplane, juggling flaming torches while he walks a tightrope held taut by monkeys atop dog; one slip-up by Wallace though and he will tumble into a kiddy pool full of man-eating sharks.
He admits to his teacher that he doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe it all, but that doesn’t matter because Henry’s vivaciously colourful and details-filled artwork brings it alive in ways that have it close to leaping off the page.
It’s a pattern repeated when Vikings row fast enough in their boats to best gravity and go into space, and we see them shooting the moon in full action-packed glory, or when Wallace and his classmates group themselves together, with their teacher’s active involvement, to project a dragon onto a wall.
The capacity of Henry’s mind to conjure some truly fantastical things up is more than matched by artwork which is full of all the imaginations swirling mischievously around Wallace’s head.
Sunday Funday Wallace is an exuberant, anything-is-possible collection that is full of artwork that is sublimely beautiful and evocative of a world we’d all have liked to live in as kids, but which elevates imagination as the sweetest and most endless rewarding gifts of all, and lets us live in its technicolour wonder for 190 wondrously full and captivating pages.