Stuff and Nonsense Book

An anthology of comics by one of the all-time great illustrators in American history. This is the first extensive reprinting of stories by the celebrated American illustrator A.B. Frost (1851-1928). Although recognized as one of America's greatest illustrators and painters, he was also a pioneer of the comic strip and a major influence of Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Fredrick Opper (Happy Hooligan), and many other cartoonists. Stuff and Nonsense collects the three albums of sequential graphic stories (comics) he published in his lifetime. The book includes a variety of stories that highlight Frost's extraordinary skill at caricature and slapstick humor. "Carlo," for example, is a long tale chronicling the exaggerated devastation that ensues when a bunch of country ragamuffins tie tin cans to the tail of a dog named Carlo. "Deacon Smith Takes a Short Cut Across the Hardguy Golf Links" is the funniest golf sketch since W.C. Field's Golf Specialist. It is remarkable, in fact, how Frost's humor anticipated cinematic slapstick: his work is the graphic equivalent of Arbuckle, Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd. Much of the work is "silent," allowing the pictures to do the heavy lifting with its broad, histrionic strokes, but Stuff and Nonsense also contains over 60 illustrated limericks in the vein of the great Edward Lear, making the book uniquely suited to children as well as adults. Frost is perhaps best known for the illustrations he provided for Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit books, but over a career of more than 50 years he created innumerable drawings and paintings for such authors as Theodore Roosevelt and magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Scribner's, and Life. He was known for the utterly convincing detail of his illustrations. The poet Robert Frost was a distant cousin.Read More