Ball deserves a better run

Cover of Six of the Best by Murray Ball. Photo / Supplied

Snoopy gets all the breaks. The Complete Peanuts reprint series is up to the mid-1970s now, faithfully transferring every last one of Charles M. Schulz's newspaper comic strips into enduring, acid-proof, beautifully designed hardbacks.

Two reasons in particular to love these books: they give us the strip as it was written, so we can watch the characters evolve and the extended storylines play out. And they're in landscape format, neatly presenting three strips to a page, yet small enough to hold in one hand. You can read them anywhere.

This, by no coincidence, was also the format used for the cheap-as-chips annual collections of Footrot Flats. If you don't have a few of them around the place, your parents do: much read, much loved and, in my case, either falling to bits or long since fallen. (I still find the odd page floating loose in my children's rooms).

These floppy, foot-long paperbacks were exactly the right shape for strip cartoons. Compare and contrast Hodder Moa's "collector's trilogy", the massive three-volume sampling of the life work of Murray Ball which has appeared over the past three years. "Massive" is a good word insofar as it means we get lots and lots of Ball's enduringly funny strips. It's a bad word when it turns out to mean a tabloid format tome heavy enough to stun one of Cooch Windgrass' Clydesdales - if you could lift it high enough to drop it on them, which would be a major test of strength.

The list of places you can't comfortably read these books is annoyingly long, and anyone who thinks that doesn't matter should be doing something other than designing cartoon collections for a living.

Murray Ball is not a coffee table artist, he's a storyteller. I want to be able to read him wherever I happen to feel like it. The word which really gets up my nose, though, is "sampling".

Strip cartoons are a form unto themselves, with their own conventions and logic. We all know how they work. One of the many things they do is develop characters over time, often by way of stories which run for a week of strips, or two weeks, or longer. Is it too much to ask of a "collector's edition" that we get these stories in full? Apparently it is.

The third volume in the series brings together six of Ball's pre- and post-Footrot creations: Stanley, The Prophet, Bruce the Barbarian, The Doctor, Nature Calls, and The Kids. Of these, Stanley is the big one. It ran for years in Punch and was deservedly a hit; and it gets two-thirds of this huge volume to itself. But Ball's mild-mannered loser caveman had his own paperback collections once upon a time, which I owned as a teenager and more or less memorised, so I can tell you that this is not the complete Stanley. It isn't even his greatest hits.

The full cast of characters is here - Moll the witch; Errol the womanising artist; Herb the mammoth; the gorgeous Stanley-despising Moira; Tychosaurus, the world's smallest dinosaur - and it's worth going out of your way to meet them. But as with the Footrot volumes, the ongoing storylines - and there were many of them - are here only in partial form. Why? To save on space, I suppose: space occupied by Ball's lesser strips, which are chiefly of historical interest.

Who thought that was a good idea? Someday, perhaps, we'll get a Murray Ball reprint series which actually deserves to be called a collector's edition.

Six Of The Best
by Murray Ball (Hodder Moa $99.99)
Reviewed by David Larsen

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer