The Collected Neil the Horse

This Neil the Horse collection arrived today. It was something that is been looking forward to ever since pre-ordering it in March. I am so impressed with the presentation. The weight and texture of the paper feels great to touch. The Neil stories are beautifully reprinted and every one of them is here in this solid trade collection. The stories look lovely, gentle, funny, and exciting. I flipped through the book for an hour and was so happy. I will be visiting this book for the next few evenings with great pleasure. Thank you Katherine for your long journey and for sharing you life and you love in Neil The Horse!

It is a joy to see Neil the Horse in print again after all these years. This is a great collection of the 15 issues that were printed back in the 1980s, along with comic strips and stories that appeared elsewhere. Even better news is the possibility of new material appearing. I treasure my original “Revolution is not a tea party” strip acquired long ago, and I will treasure this collection.

I feel like I’ve always known Neil the Horse. I’ve never read it before, I may have seen a few issues back in comic shops back in the day, but I’ve literally never read a line. Yet somehow, it is as warm and familiar as slipping on an old pair of slippers. A feeling of nostalgia surrounds me on every page, and somehow I get a comforting feeling for things past, even if all the material is new to me.This is because the influences that shape Neil the Horse come from early childhood (from everyone’s childhood at this point). They are bright spangly cartoons (half in black and white, half in color) that danced about in the 1930s. The old ones from early Disney or Fleischer studios , Betty Boop, early Popeye the Sailor, Koko the Clown, all of which often had music to pad up the experience. These early visions of a cartoon universe gave birth the Neil the Horse and his companions. The entire book is an ode, a love letter, to the masters of the past, which obviously infected the author’s imagination.These are static characters placed in different time periods as is needed by the story. If you’re looking for some world building, or a mythology this is not the book for you. This doesn’t mean the stories are bad, on the contrary, but remember this is simply light hearted fare. Wonderful, whimsical, and silly.A few of the stories don’t work. Some of the illustrations lack polish, the framing indicates an amateur on the verge of becoming a professional. The black and white often hamper the frivolity of the comic. I don’t often say this, but color would have really helped to sell the magical nature of the world. There’s something about a rainbow done in greyscale that is so depressing. And musical numbers do not translate well at all to a comic medium.