A wizard perches on a rock above a rainbow and negotiates with his weather-making sprites about the payroll; a sorcerer prepares to devour Frankenstein's monster, slathered in mustard and lying on a hot-dog bun; an elongated superhero named Stardust suddenly begins releasing his powerful retarding rays — these are some of the surreal images permeating Dan Nadel's anthology of long-obscure comic artists.

Nadel edits the annual art-comics collection The Ganzfeld and runs the Grammy-winning "visual culture" studio PictureBox. Here, he has assembled samples from 29 forgotten four-color masters, some well-known to enthusiasts and some plucked from obscurity by archival research. The results are both revelatory and genuinely strange.

In his brief notes and introductory essays, Nadel makes a convincing argument that these yellowing artifacts demonstrate that comics are a hybrid form with malleable aesthetics and storytelling conventions. Rather than present the work chronologically, Nadel offers thematic rubrics, such as "Exercises in Exploration," "Slapstick," and "Words in Pictures," to explore different aspects of cartooning. These categories are not rigidly defined, however. Regardless of which heading the strips fall under, however, readers can find affinities between, say, Herbert Crowley's 1910 rhyming fantasy The Wiggle Much and Gustave Verbeek's proto-Sendakian The Terrors of the Tiny Tads, from 1913.

The variety of artistic styles on display, from Jack Mendelsohn's purposefully primitive scrawl to Walter Quermann's delicate line, bolster Nadel's contention that the alternative comics of the 1960s were hardly sui generis and should instead be seen as a continued part of a long-standing and ongoing investigation into the formal properties of a limitlessly expressive medium.

-Gregory Zinman