The Great Pencil Quest by Will Henry

Dependability and consistency are underrated as virtues - often even seen as faults. But a creator who can do good work, over and over again, in the same style and with similar results should be treasured. Dependably inventive and consistently amusing are wonderful things.

Will Henry, creator of the daily strip Wallace the Brave, is both of those: he has a strong, mixed cast that lets him do different kinds of jokes, a penchant for longer continuities rare these days, and a detail-filled, unfussy art style that sells all of the wild ideas and antics. Wallace is both dependable and consistent - but still manages to surprise, regularly, with a grace note or goofy concept.

The Great Pencil Quest is the new book collecting the strip; it came out about a month ago, I think, and follows four previous collections. (All of which I recommend - Wallace the Brave, Snug Harbor Stories, Wicked Epic Adventures, Are We Lost Yet? - and, in the way of a good daily strip, any of which could be a good way to start reading.)

This time out, it seems to be all daily strips - the previous ones included Sundays as well - but I could be mistaken, since the strips are somewhat reconfigured in the books to fit onto taller-than-wide pages. Each page has generally three or four panels, which always look like a single strip. (Henry does one-long-panel strips every so often, too - usually wordless, usually with multiple characters reacting to a single situation - and those are collected here in small clumps and shown uncut. I think in the physical book they run vertically to fit on the pages; I read this digitally, where space can reconfigure from page to page.)

There are 167 pages of comics here, so my guess is that it's about half a year of strips. Some of them were familiar, but some weren't - but Rose, a fairly new character, is in the book consistently, so it's mostly recent. It might well be a run of six specific months, maybe last winter or 21-22; these all take place during the school year, since Wallace takes its rhythms from the lives of its mostly grade-school cast.

And I've already written about this strip, at length, four times. I pretty much agree with all of that, though I see I was more tentative about my praise of Wallace the first couple of times. Well, I wanted to see if Henry would be dependable and consistent, I guess. He's proven that he is, with about five years of regular strips since Wallace hit newspapers. Even better, that's formed a solid base for his inventiveness to leap from - Wallace is always funny, always drawn with verve and enthusiasm, but some days and for some sequences it's more exciting and inventive and just fun than that.

To my mind, Wallace is the great traditional newspaper strip running today, the heir to things like Peanuts and Cul de Sac. It's wonderful to see that level of energy and joy on the comics page regularly, and it makes me think, just maybe, the American daily strip is not doomed, so long as Will Henry is working there.