The new generation of print-on-demand (POD) platforms, most notably Lulu, has inspired several ambitious strip aficionados to become one-man reprint publishers. And so, our cup runneth over. In just the last six months the zone is flooded with all manner of lost, obscure or woefully overlooked strips of old. I find it hard to keep up with what is available, let alone decide how much of this largesse I want, need or can afford. But in the video below I share just a taste from this ever-expanding buffet of cartoon treats.
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From Oaky Doaks to Bruce Gentry: Behind CSAG’s Reprint Rush
Among several self-publishers in the reprint space, Stefan Wood and his Comic Strip Appreciation Group are far and away the most prolific. His Lulu Bookstore boasts about 25 titles as of this writing. And judging from our conversation with him this week, that library will be growing weekly. Recently retired from the exhibit design team at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., Stefan brings to his comic strip mission a familial and professional background in the arts, digital skills and a penchant for tight deadlines. He keeps himself on a disciplined schedule, and has developed an efficient workflow that produces such a fast-growing library. But as we also discussed, there is also a method for selecting titles for reissue. Stefan is drawn to artists who used this medium to express personal experience, a unique perspective and exceptional artistic style. He is not only resurfacing old strips but also calling attention to an aspect of comics history often missed by standard histories and the familiar canon of “greats” they have established.
Quips and Curlicues: Mopsy’s Stylish Return
Gladys Parker was among the most recognizable and well-reported cartoonists of the 1930s and 40s. It was hard to miss her. She was the spit-curl image of her avatar Mopsy, the sharp-tongued and stylish star of her own single-panel comic (1937-1966). It is hard to say which came first, Parker’s cartoonish look or Mopsy’s, but they shared the same shock of black curlicues, sharply lined brows and eyes, and a precisely “sticked” set of lips. And since Parker was also a noted, audacious clothes designer, Mopsy was a working girl with a seemingly endless closet of ultra-modern fashions.
Continue reading“I Shot Him In the Ass!” John Held Jr.’s Lewd Linocuts
John Held Jr.’s highly stylized, fine line cartoons are identified with “The Jazz Age” of Fitzgerald’s 1920s for good reason. His imagery on the covers of Fitzgerald books, in his Oh, Margy and Merely Margy comic strips and especially in his work for the early New Yorker and other humor magazines pretty much defined that decade visually. He found a way toi make privileged youth look even more air-headed and frivolous than they prbably were. It made him enormously wealthy, for a time, and in constant demand. Yet, for all of his identification with modernity, Held was deeply nostalgic. Many of his other illustrated works departed radically from his signature flapper stylings and used instead a pre-modern linocut technique that gouged an image into a linoleum surface to effect a primitive woodcut-like effect. Rob Stolzer recently posted the full run of Held’s Civilization’s Progress series from Liberty magazine (1931-32), where Held contrasted the Gay Nineties with contemporary life by juxtaposin his flapper and linocut styles.
Continue readingCalling Dick Tracy…Again: Shaking Up the Reprint Game
Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy has been among the most reprinted strips of all time. The reasons are obvious, and I don’t need to rehash this site’s exegesis on my personal favorite. Tracy was the strip that turned me on to classic newspaper comics. Gould’s singular visual signature, his grisly violence, grotesque villains and deadpan hero made Dick Tracy compelling on so many levels. And now we get yet another packaging style from the same Library of American Comics group that finished its magisterial 29-volume complete Gould run, 1931-77. With new publishing partner Clover Press, LOAC has reworked some of its earliest projects, like the magnificent upgrade of Terry and the Pirates and the first six volumes of The Complete Dick Tracy. And now we get slipcased, paperback editions of prime-time Gould, 1941 through 1944. Much more affordable, manageable, and available than the original LOAC volumes, each of which covered about two years of comics, the four $29.99 books are also available as a discounted set from Clover. This new series started as a crowd-funded BackerKit project last year.
Continue readingComics at Scale: Checking In With Peter Maresca at Sunday Press Books
In our ongoing series of interviews with publishers who are keeping comics history alive, we go oversized this week. Since it started publishing reprints of classic newspaper comics 20 years ago with Little Nemo, Sunday Press reimagined what a reprint could be. These massively oversized books try to immerse us in the original scale and rich color of the earliest Sunday pages. Sunday Press has applied its format to Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Milt Gross, Gasoline Alley, among others. Peter Maresca is founder of Sunday Press Books. We spent an hour with Peter recently recalling his background in comics and tech, the origins of Sunday Press Books with the Little Nemo project, and his thoughts on keeping comics history relevant for a new generation of readers and creators.
Continue readingThe Year in Pre-Code Comic Book Reprints, 2025
I am an EC chauvinist. I should cop to this before rounding up the notable pre-code comic book reprints from the last year. For decades now I have been devouring the many crime, horror, sci-fi, and romance comics that were part of the glut of adult titles after WWII, in part because they represented the unrealized potential of the comics format in post-war America. This was a real pop culture moment. War veterans ate a steady diet of comic books “over there” and seemed primed to follow the medium into more nuanced and adult storylines in the 40s and 50s. Likewise overseas, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées were on a similar path towards the popular, if not literary, mainstream. But in the U.S. that evolution was derailed and slammed into reverse by anti-comics crusades and the industry’s own “Comics Code Authority” in 1954. Self-censorship effectively arrested the medium in pre-adolescence, focused the industry on anodyne morality tales and pubescent fantasies of super-human prowess for at least a couple of decades.
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Panels & Prose 