It used to be true of most forms of media, and certainly comics of a certain era, that if you missed them, they were gone. You might see an old movie in a repertory cinema. If you missed a TV show, there might be re-runs, and then again there might not. Records and books remained available in theory — they were made to last, and they might be in stores if they remained popular, or in libraries — but in practice things went out of print all the time.
And comics? Comics were ephemera.
That was starting to change by the ’80s, as graphic novels started to really become a viable form, as independent creators and smaller publishers began compiling serialized, periodical comics in larger collected volumes. But there were lots of comics, through bad luck on the part of the creators or publishers and the vagaries of the market and distribution, that never got that far.
The black and white indy comics boom of the 80s was short-lived and left a lot of titles that never got that far. So, by the time I was getting involved with independent and self-published comics a few years after that, in the early 90s, there were titles that were… well, not lost per se. But they were really hard to find. You might see them written about, or hear of them in conversation, but never actually see a copy.
One of those became a bit of a personal Holy Grail.
Well, I found my comics Holy Grail, at the 2017 Toronto Comics Arts Festival, where I met the creator and was able to purchase a then-brand-new complete collection of the comic. It was a funny-animal comic, influenced by classic comic strips and really classic — like, pre-Warner Brothers — cartoons. A comic by a Canadian creator. A comic that was… a musical comedy?!
Let’s talk about Neil the Horse.
(Note: This review contains spoilers, to the degree that a series of short adventures about a singing horse that loves bananas can even be spoiled, which is not really.)
The Collected Arn Saba’s Neil the Horse: Making the World Safe for Musical Comedy
By Arn Saba (now Katherine Collins since 1993)
With the invaluable collaboration of David Roman and Barbara Rausch
(Companions in Fun and Frolic and Insanely Hard Work)
Published by Conundrum Press
Edited by Andy Brown
Production Assistance by Noah van Nostrand
Introduction by Trina Robbins
Neil the Horse ran 15 issues in the 1980s. With its tagline, “Making the World Safe for Musical Comedy” it is the world’s only musical comic book
It is a totally original hybrid influenced more by Carl Barks and Fred Astaire than by the underground comics of the time. Originally produced under the name Arn Saba, Neil’s creator transitioned to Katherine Collins after the last issue.
Neil and his friends Soapy and Mam’selle Poupée are a struggling song-and-dance act. Neil is a happy go-lucky horse with a mania for bananas. Mam’selle Poupée is a romantic and lovelorn living doll from France, whose wooden body is jointed with hinges. With red circles on her cheeks, curly blonde hair, and large bust, Poupée appears to be a cross between Raggedy Ann and Dolly Parton. Soapy is a street-wise and cynical (with a heart of gold) orange alley cat, a cigar smoker and a drinker, who serves as the brains of the operation.
Their magical and absurd adventures take them to outer space, the past, and the future in a mix of slapstick, romance and show business. The book includes brand-new commentary by Collins, rare art, sheet music to accompany the stories, and reprints of early syndicated newspaper strips.
I should probably make it clear right from the start of this review: Katherine Collins, as is clear from the publisher’s summary above, is a trans woman, and has been out since her transition in 1993.
Normally, I wouldn’t use or refer to her previous name. But Collins herself uses that name extensively in this book. Clearly, she’s doing so intentionally; it’s not just in the credits above (which are directly quoted from the book) but also on the cover. I don’t think it’s my place to second-guess her choices. I’ve respected her wishes, by accurately quoting the material she wrote and drew. But I’ll only use the name Katherine Collins in my own writing about her work.
I’ve now talked a bit about the creator of Neil the Horse, and about how it felt to be able to read her comics at long last, and about the market forces that made that almost impossible for a long time, but I haven’t yet talked about Neil. The Horse. What is this comic about?
Well. Neil is a horse. He loves to sing and eat bananas. Soapy is a cat. He loves cigars and being cynical. Mam’selle Poupée is a doll. She desperately wants to be in love, but lets dreams of perfection be the enemy of the good. Together, they… well, they don’t exactly make the world safe for musical comedy, but they don’t not do that, either.
Although the summary describes them as a “struggling song-and-dance act”, that’s entirely nominal. What the trio really do is wander through a variety of places and even times, enjoying themselves and getting into trouble. It’s like Dungeons & Dragons & Vaudeville. Again, the model to keep in mind here is classic animated shorts, where Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse might be in the Wild West for one episodic adventure, get launched into space in another, and be living a conventional suburban life in the third. The stories compiled in this collection include Neil and Soapy being sentenced to Hell for being too happy, an extended sojourn in colonial New France (mostly told in illustrated text), Mam’selle Poupée’s love life, getting involved in a war between fairies and video game antagonists, and Neil drinking too much coffee.
What matters here is consistency of character, not continuity of narrative.
And yes, it’s a musical comedy. Virtually every installment includes a song, presented as dialogue within the comic. Sometimes as a solo, sometimes as a duet, occasionally as an ensemble piece. Following the chapter (at what would have been the back of a single issue) the song appears again, as sheet music.
It’s been a while since my piano lessons, and I was never much of a singer, but I found an online piano emulator and fumbled though enough to confirm that yes — it’s real sheet music, of real songs, that work as music and can be played and sung.
There are dance numbers as well — again, in comics form — and while I wasn’t going to even try to duplicate those, it’s clear that Collins was drawing heavily from a deep love of dance to try to depict actual, danceable choreography, inspired by her love of Fred Astaire.
Neil is the title character, and it’s arguably his emotional tenor that sets the tone of the comic — cheerful, good-hearted whimsy without too much overthinking, or indeed too much thinking at all. Soapy is the wisecracking sidekick. But it’s probably fair to say that Mam’selle Poupée is the real protagonist. As even my brief summary of their personalities and roles above implies, Neil and Soapy are broad types. Poupée is far more complex. Her search for perfect love is forever stymied by her fear of settling for anything less than perfect, and by the lack of permanence implicit in giving her heart to anyone.
Neil wants a banana. Poupée has existential angst. It’s a powerful contrast and strikes an important balance. Collins notes in her afterward (whimsically entitled ‘The Backward’) that all three characters are different aspects of her own personality. It’s perhaps fair to say that Collins was channeling something deeper and sadder with Mam’selle Poupée — her kindness and love, and loneliness and yearning. That depth shows, even in a story about battling video game antagonists to save the fairy kingdom.
So, Neil the Horse is charming, and fun, and formally inventive and occasionally deep and heartfelt, and also you can sing along with it if you’re so inclined. You may have noticed that I’ve been sort of tip-toeing around the question of whether it’s good, and if you should read it.
Yes, it’s good. It’s also very much of its time. Independent comics in the 80s were shoestring affairs, labours of love. That means that individual issues of Neil the Horse were much less polished in terms of their production values, and less consistent in the style of their art, than a comparable comic today would be. Read as a single volume, the effect can be jarring.
To springboard off the musical comedy angle, Neil the Horse is community theatre — achieving amazing things despite a minimal budget and having to rehearse in the church basement.
Similarly, the format of Neil stories means that they don’t necessarily stand up as well when read a bunch at once in a longer-form, collected volume like this one. The nature of these stories, as I said, is episodic. They weren’t meant to be binged. The humour and the conflict come from the consistency of the characters across settings and situations. They are, intentionally and deliberately, variations on a theme, and too much of the same theme can be wearing no matter how much one enjoys it. Maybe, unlike me, don’t try to read it all in one sitting. Space it out, over time, the way you’d have read the stories when they were first published.
That being said, with those caveats to manage your expectations, I recommend this book. It’s historically significant. It’s Canadian. It’s a way to celebrate the work of a trans elder who’s still with us. And it’s fun. It’s also very much niche, to be sure. A musical comedy comic book rooted in love of classic animated shorts, Barks’s Duck comics, and Fred Astaire! But it’s a niche that works for me. If your heart skips a beat — and your toes tap — at the thought of making the world safe for musical comedy, then I bet it’ll work for you as well.
Disclosures: I have no personal or professional relationship with the creators. I purchased my own copy of the graphic novel for review.
