The Complete Charles Dana Gibson, Vol. 1— A Widow and Her Friends (1899-1901)

Reviews William Schwartz | August 13, 2026 Decades before Action Comics, the austere, highly dignified personages of Charles Dana Gibson's incredible artwork adorned the pages of weekly magazines in the United States and Europe, looking as serious as can be while maintaining a wry sense of humor in the captions that feels more at home with highbrow literature than the nascent comic industry which Gibson inspired. the Gibson Girl In a strange irony, I don't hear Gibson come up too often in discussions of comic history, considering he was such an important cultural figure, but likely it would not have occurred to any of his contemporaries to pigeonhole him with such a label. The austere Gibson Girl is symbolic of the late Gilded Age, an aspirational beauty that dominates every composition, cool and composed as men fall to pieces around her. The Gibson Girl as actually drawn by Gibson is posed not just to provide an appealing image, but to exert her strength on the world around her by sheer force of will. Even holding onto her fashionable hat in the face of a powerful wind is enough to make men swoon around her. It's a testament to Gibson's range that the first of the three stories li...