Take a break from calling your reps. For just a few minutes, stop doomscrolling and gloomposting. As you watch me open a box of books, you are also witnessing the successful completion of a 15-year-project… the publication in full and for the first time of Crockett Johnson’s classic comic strip Barnaby!
That’s right, Barnaby Volume 5 — designed by Dan Clowes, co-edited by me and Eric Reynolds, published by Fantagraphics — is now available. So, for the first time since February 1952, you can read how Johnson decided to end his strip. He takes the unusual step of writing a narrative conclusion to Barnaby — referenced on the book’s cover.
Volume 5 also features a foreword by director Ron Howard — who played Barnaby in the 1959 TV adaptation, alongside Bert Lahr (aka the Cowardly Lion) as Mr. O’Malley, and Mel Blanc as the voice of McSnoyd the invisible leprechaun. You’ll also find some photos from the production in our book, along with an introduction by Eisner-Award-winning comics scholar Susan Kirtley, an essay by Johnson on children’s “Fantastic Companions,” and an Afterword and notes by me.
UPDATE • 13 Feb 2025
In The Comics Journal, you can now read “Boredom, blacklisting or new beginnings? Why Crockett Johnson ended Barnaby“ — an excerpt from my Barnaby 5 Afterword, specially adapted as a stand-alone essay.
⬆️ FREE CONTENT! ⬆️
In the video and the first paragraph, I claim that the publication of these five Barnaby books has been a 15-year journey. But I just checked. It’s actually been 17 years. In February 2008, Chris Ware introduced me — via email — to Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds and the late Kim Thompson. In December of 2009, the late George Nicholson and I met the Executor of Ruth Krauss’s Estate — Stewart Edelstein — at the law firm of Cohen & Wolf in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
My biography of Johnson and Krauss came out in 2012 (see Chris Ware’s gorgeous wrap-around cover, above), and the first volume of Barnaby appeared in 2013.
It’s been a long time coming, but you can at last read all 10 years of Crockett Johnson’s comic strip — a dream project for Eric and me. And, in case you are curious, quite a bit of work. It’s not like there’s an archive of all of these strips. We had to find them. For the final volume, I got some by photographing strips in Johnson’s scrapbook (a photo of which is also included in my Afterword).
I’m grateful to Fantagraphics for seeing this project through to the end. It’s been a labor of love which, like the Barnaby strip in its heyday, has won more critical praise than sales. Indeed, if you would, perhaps you might ask your library to order these? They’re a must-have for any library that collects comics, or for any fan of classic comics. But don’t just take my word for it. Consider the words of some of the strip’s prominent fans:
“… [Barnaby] radiates human warmth and whimsy…. The artist’s brilliantly-written characters… keep their feet planted in the all-too-real world of 1940s America while flying off on pink wings into one of the greatest fantasy strips ever made.” — Art Spiegelman
“I think, and I am trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American arts and letters in lord knows how many years. I know that they are the most important additions to my heart…. I think Mr. Johnson must love people. I know darned well I must love Mr. Johnson.” — Dorothy Parker
“[Barnaby is] the last great comic strip. Yes, there are dozens of other strips worth rereading, but none are this Great; this is great like Beethoven, or Steinbeck, or Picasso. This is so great it lives in its own timeless bubble of oddness and truth…” — Chris Ware
“Barnaby by Crockett Johnson is a gentle, intelligent, funny, and ridiculous masterpiece.” — Jeff Smith
“No comic strip was more whimsically humorous than Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby.” — Time magazine
“Barnaby is my favorite comic strip of all time.” — Daniel Clowes
“Crockett Johnson is best known today for his children’s books… but his paramount creation was the celebrated if obscure newspaper strip Barnaby. This effort is the first to collect it in its entirety. Even Mr. O’Malley couldn’t conjure up a more welcome endeavor.” — Booklist, on our Fantagraphics series.
“A series of comic strips which, laid end to end, reach from here to wherever you want to go just once before you die.” — The New York Times
“Barnaby was one of the great comic strips of all time.” — Charles M. Schulz
“There’s no way Jack Kerouac, along with every other self-consciously cool person in New York wasn’t reading this. O’Malley turns into Neil Cassady, the guy who’s not quite human, who never shuts up, who drives you crazy, and who can make anything happen, just like that.” — Greil Marcus, in The Believer
“Strikingly minimal was Barnaby, whose characters appeared in profile and whose talk belloons were lettered not by hand but by mechanical typesetting. In my love of cartoons, I sent away to [Crockett Johnson], begging for a free original strip.” — John Updike
For a brief introduction to Johnson’s comic-strip masterpiece, take a look at my “Crockett Johnson and the Invention of Barnaby“ (The Comics Journal, 22 April 2013).