In the late 1970s, Mark Alan Stamaty was a respected cartoonist and illustrator, with multiple books for children behind him (and more to come) and a burgeoning gig making big, complicated posters for The Village Voice. The Voice, which basically invented the idea of the indy-weekly cartoonist in the '50s with Jules Feiffer, asked Stamaty if he wanted to do a regular strip in the paper.
Stamaty agreed, and started Garbel Dee Goo.
No, wait - the title of the book is MacDoodle St., isn't it?
Yes. Garbel was a smaller, one-tier high strip, which apparently appeared in some lesser, back page of the Voice - there are seven installments reprinted here, with a note that implies these were chosen from some larger number. (But that's vague, so the larger number could be, say, ten, or it could be just the way Stamaty phrased it.) In fact, the last Garbel strip here specifically mentions "I'd like more space. I hear there's a vacancy on Page 6." and has a street sign for MacDoodle.
MacDoodle, itself, was two tiers tall, like Feiffer's work, and the bulk of this book reprints what seems to be the entire run of the strip in 1978-79, in seventy-nine installments each presented on a single page. (This, plus a Feiffer intro, and probably the Garbel strips, was originally reprinted in a paperback edition in 1980.)
Then, just like the end of Garbel, the main cast of MacDoodle gets on an airplane, saying they're going to take a leave of absence. In this 2019 hardcover, there's then a twenty-page Addendum - also in a two-tier format - from modern-day Stamaty, explaining what happened after the end of MacDoodle (he had what seems to be a short-lived, more personal strip in the Voice, which could have been reprinted here but is not, for whatever reason, and then went on to Washingtoon and other things) and something of his artistic/personal state at the end of MacDoodle (to be blunt: not good).
Right: that's the material included in this book. But what about the story?
Those MacDoodle strips do actually form a complete narrative - I won't say "coherent," since Stamaty bounces around a bit deliberately, and plays with some conventions of the strip for drama and humor. But it does tell a story, from beginning to end, and basically plays fair with the reader as it goes.
We begin in the Cafe Fizz, where Malcolm Frazzle, poet for Dishwasher Monthly, is working on deadline. This is a Village kind of place, where ties are forbidden and beards (available for rental) mandatory. So of course the Conservative Liberation Front attacks the café, demanding both a place for ties and regular playing of Wayne Newton records.
Malcolm is chased down the street by crazed Newton fans, meets grumpy old-lady visionary Helga Parsnip on a bus, and finds himself in a mesh of circumstances that will end with his saving the world. (Via a fight on a burger-joint sign somewhere out in New Jersey with a fiendish madman who was once his high-school geometry teacher, to be precise.)
There's a lot of events, some of them seemingly random, in between those two endpoints, but it all comes together in the end. It is quirky and weird, but that's the kind of creator Stamaty is, and, besides, it was the '70s and this strip was made for a hip, downtown, Village kind of crowd.
Stamaty's visually inventive, crammed-full-of-stuff style is great for that kind of kitchen-sink story; the eye and the mind never get a chance to rest in a Stamaty story, giving a sense of tension and uneasiness throughout, shot through with whimsy and silliness.
I don't know if this is exactly a lost classic, but it was semi-lost and it's a lot of fun, so it gets at least 80% of the way there. I kind of wish Stamaty, or his editors, had collected all of his work from the Voice from this era - all of the Garbel strips, assuming there are more, and whatever the thing he did in 1980 was called - but then it wouldn't be a reprint of the 1980 MacDoodle St. book, I guess.
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