Grimes’s Goat, that is!

William Steinigans is already represented here at Barnacle Press by the sublime The Bad Dream That Made Bill a Better Boy and the adorable Pups strips; they’re joined today by a very funny strip with a very odd premise.

Grimes’s Goat is centered around a publicity stunt for the Blue Front Clothing Store, owned by the titular Grimes. He’s set his goat loose in town, and if you can catch it and bring it back to the store, you win a new suit! Each strip is centered around an attempt to “get his goat” and win the prize. At first, the would-be goat wranglers were drawn from a variety of vocations–cowboys, escaped prisoners, football players–and they’re a lot of fun, to be sure. But eventually the strip settles in on the repeated tries of an unkempt sailor, and these are my favorites of the batch. The cat-and-mouse (tar-and-goat?) interplay between the single-minded swabbie and the rascally ruminant would make for terrific animated shorts, if only the idea had come along twenty years later…

Starting off with a genuine origin story (below), there are forty-six strips in the complete run, all accounted for here.

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