Set in the world of 1930’s newspaper comics publishing, Dugan chronicles three or more affairs of various sorts: platonic/romantic, as hack writer Al Bready worries about his friendship with a married woman; platonic/creative, as Bready pairs with disagreeable, lecherous comic strip artist Walter Geebus to produce a work (the “Derby Dugan” of the book’s title) greater than either man could have accomplished on their own; and the very real love affair that America once had with newspaper comic strips.
The relationships that he writes about are difficult ones, all bound up in a four-colored thread of endurance, faith, love and aspiration. Like the relationships between characters in the best comic strips — the Kats and Mice, the orphans and billionaires, the sailors and old maids — they mean something that is not easily defined. This is not a novel about the funnies, but a novel about the people who made them, the contradictory nature of the human heart, and “the better angels of our nature” that sometimes find fruition in populist art. ( )