Nor does Detention exactly resemble the Classics Illustrated of the 1950s, which adapted works like The Red Badge of Courage into pages of sharp-edged frames interspersed with round impact panels Hensley uses rectangular frames with round edges, sometimes dropping in photographic backgrounds that appear to be collaged from multiple sources (which might also describe the whole adaptive project). Hensley does not adopt the form of 1890s cartooning for his adaptation, though he employs an especially rich and detailed variation of his own style, eschewing the restless format swapping of Sir Alfred (which jumped from stacked gag strips to multi-page narratives to one-page goofs and back again) in favor of handsome seven- or eight-panel pages, with larger frames added for moments of particular note. Notably, Crane's Maggie is set in the New York City Bowery, then a disreputable neighborhood similar to those depicted in Outcault's Hogan's Alley and other cartoon portrayals of NYC slum life. Outcault notably decamped from the former to the latter with his popular character, the Yellow Kid, amidst both papers' promotion of dazzling color print processes. The latter year will immediately ring a bell in the head of the comic strip lifer, as 1896 was also when Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal began a fierce circulation war, in which the cartoonist Richard F. Maggie was first published privately and pseudonymously in 1893, then revised for professional publication in 1896, following its author's rise to fame. 2 is devoted to an adaptation of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a short novel by the American writer Stephen Crane, a scandalous and innovative figure best known for The Red Badge of Courage (1895). You won't need to look far to spot the modern progeny of these 'educational' comics on the Graphic Novels shelf of your local bookstore, although, in the eyes of Detention, the whole effort might be best kept after class. But Detention has a different set of concerns: it is a timely riff on comics-style literary adaptations, ostensibly in the Classics Illustrated mold. 3-an homage to goofy celebrity branding comics of the '50s & '60s a la The Adventures of Bob Hope that also functions as a cracked biography of Alfred Hitchcock, his complexities and contradictions presented as a series of sly cartoon gags-matching the earlier work in size (13" x 10"), length (40 pages) and tongue-in-cheek packaging (there is no issue #1, any more than there is a Sir Alfred No. 2 is a sibling book to 2015's Sir Alfred No. This new release from Tim Hensley is probably his most straightforward comic to date, although you'd be missing some of its charm by leaving it at that.
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