Our fairy godfather: Crockett Johnson's brilliant Barnaby is back in print.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

There isn't a model in all of political science that could have predicted the process by which J.J. O'Malley was elected to Congress. The saga began with an extremely garbled press account of O'Malley foiling a robbery, transforming the poker-playing, cigar-chomping layabout into a folk hero. His ambitions sparked, O'Malley made a large donation to the local political machine, hoping it would propel him into office. The party boss intended to double-cross him and elect his opponent, but his plan backfired when he didn't notice O'Malley had paid him in Confederate dollars. When the machine used the cash to bribe a bunch of voters, they responded angrily to the funny money by revolting against their instructions and electing the wrong man.

I'm skipping a few steps along the way, including the part where a radio station airs a political speech delivered by a dog. The point is, the story ends with the voters sending a man to Congress without realizing he's a two-foot fairy with pink wings.

J.J. O'Malley was the co-star of Crockett Johnson's Barnaby, a comic strip of the 1940s and '50s that is now being reprinted in a series of books from Fantagraphics. (Two volumes have been published so far, covering the years 1942 to 1945.) The title character is a 5-year-old boy who wishes one night for a fairy godmother. Instead he gets a fairy godfather: Mr. O'Malley, a W. C. Fields-esque con man of a sprite who alternates between bragging about his alleged powers and finding excuses not to use them. (He does commit actual magic from time to time, often without realizing it, but he prefers to focus on a card trick that he can never quite pull off properly.)

The adults in Barnaby's life insist that O'Malley is merely Barnaby's imaginary friend, setting up a dynamic that is likely to remind the modern reader of Calvin and Hobbes. But unlike Hobbes the tiger, whose relationship to reality is ambiguous, there's no chance that O'Malley is just pretend. He is constantly intervening in Barnaby's world, and in the process he wreaks havoc not just in small-scale environments such as a summer camp but in the vaster worlds of politics and high finance. It helps that the grown-ups, unwilling to believe in fairies, keep imagining that O'Malley is something else--a heroic citizen who should be elected to Congress, say, or a business genius whose investments should be emulated.

Barnaby thus belongs to a tradition of strips, from Pogo to Bloom County, that mix...