TERRY AND THE PIRATES: Big Little Book
I don't know how many fans these days are familiar with Big Little Books. They began in 1932 and survived until the late 1960s, sold mostly in chain stores rather than on newsstands. They were odd little ducks. I'm looking at one, it's maybe four inches by four inches, with stiff cardboard covers, and 424 pages.The thing is too thick to shove into a hip pocket like a paperback or roll up like a comic, so that might have worked against the format in the long run. Every left-hand page is a block of text, more or less matching the black and white illustration which takes up the right-hand page. So, as you read the left page, you look over to see the art on the facing page. To be honest, I find it a rather clunky and awkward way to read, as compared to either comics or the pulps (which had a few full-page illustrations scattered throughout. It's hard to get a flow. There's only a few paragraphs of story, then a drawing, then more story. Maybe if I had grown up with Big Little Books, I would be more used to them.
The illustrations here are from !935's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, "by Milton Caniff." It follows closely the first episode of the classic strip (which I read lo, these many years ago). I have a lot of questions. Who wrote the text? It incorporates dialogue and captions from the strip but the bridging material isn't Pulitzer-worthy. Are all the illustrations taken from the strip? I'd doubt that, since it would mean the strip would proceed at the glacial pace of today's snoozefest decompressed comics. If there are lots of supplementary drawings, did Caniff bat them out or did some assistant do them in the Caniff style. How perplexing. I suppose my next step is the find a volume reprinting the first few months of TERRY AND THE PIRATES and do some comparisons.