I have a book collecting Caniff's run on Dickie Dare (The Complete Dickie Dare - Nemo Bookshelf/Fantagraphics) just prior to his launching of Terry & The Pirates. It starts off as daydream fantasies with storybook and historical characters but then at one point a Pat Ryan sort of guy comes along and Dickie starts having 'real' adventures. It's quite good in it's own right, but then stalls fairly abruptly when Caniff leaves to start his own strip.
Not a regular reader, but now and again I'll binge on xkcd. One of my favorites is ancient: I loved the way that seemingly isolated episode ended up unexpectedly intersecting with the "boy floating in a barrel" sequence: ...and here's one (also ancient) that I kept posted in my cube at work for when I needed a smile:
A couple of days ago I saw that Dickie Dare book listed on ebay for.....(sit down)....$3,500.!! My head exploded... and then I just figured it was another one of those clueless sellers who offers something at an astronomical price in hopes that they'll find an equally clueless buyer. Anyway, I just saw the listing again: $35.00. So it was a typing error after all. The final volume in the IDW series reprinting Steve Canyon was released last year. Sadly, it stops at 1970. Now what can I look forward to??
Unfortunately, I think the great era of comic strip reprints is over. Fantagraphics is still hanging on with Pogo, Prince Valiant, and the larger format of Krazy & Ignatz. But, that’s about it. IDW no longer publishes the Library of American Comic - LOAC is now subscriber funded & published by Clover Press. Personally, I’m scrambling around trying to grab volumes that I missed when initially released. I just completed my LOAC Superman collection (Sundays and dailies) - which I found surprisingly good & ended up enjoying much more than I expected. I hope to one day grab the last two Fantagraphics Segar Popeye volumes at a reasonable price. I’m buying the Clover Press large format Terry & the Pirates and the Fantagraphics large format Krazy & Ignatz as they are issued. As for Steve Canyon, I have the first 3 volumes but missed everything else. I couldn’t afford to buy everything when it was first issued and I already owned a complete run of the Kitchen Sink Steve Canyon magazines, so I put it on the back burner…which I now regret.
I suspect comics reprints may migrate to online platforms like Comixology. They already have, but digital-only could be the future. On Comixology, I have a few Krazy Kats, a few Peanuts, and the full runs of The Far Side and the original Bloom County (before Brethed restarted it).
Any recommendations for specific collections of great '30s era Felix The Cat strips? I've admired individual Sunday pages by Otto Messmer (though signed Pat Sullivan) but had some confusion looking through various books last time I was curious.
I think they have done a great job on the Steve Canyon books--so I hate to mention this--but in Volume 5 (which currently fetches some very high prices on Ebay) they botched the reprinting of the Nov. 18, 1956 strip. I first saw this page reprinted in the book Comic Art In America some 50 years ago, and it stuck in my mind as an example of comic storytelling at it's best. It's one of my favorite examples of Caniff's work, and was the beginning of me becoming a fan. For some reason, the version of the strip they used cropped some information from the memo shown in the first panel, and even worse, destroyed the punch line in the last panel by cropping out the Band-Aid on Canyon's knuckles! It wasn't just a matter of using the half-page instead of the full-page. (The Kitchen Sink reprinting did not have this error). Like I said, overall they have done such a wonderful job that I'm sorry to point it out. But when I saw it I felt like I had bought a Criterion Citizen Kane, only to discover it featured an old TV print that faded out before "ROSEBUD" was on the screen!
I loved the old 70's Doonesbury, and still have a collection of the paperback books from that period. I don't much care for it after that. I still read Beetle Bailey, Zits, Mutts, Pearls Before Swine, and Luann. A lot of the old ones I used to like are gone, or just not in my paper, or just not the same. B.C., Wizard of Id, Hagar, Snuffy Smith, Lil Abner, Andy Capp, etc...
I used to love Broom Hilda and Tumbleweeds as a kid. I'm not exactly clear when either of those strips ended. They might be a minefield perhaps today as far as political correctness goes. Did you ever get Herman? A single panel by a creator named Jim Unger Sort of like the current Mister Boffo in some ways. It was really big around here 'back in the day'...
Anybody remember the Steve Canyon Sunday strip that showed Poteet getting tortured in the nude? It was pretty over top, for real. Got il’ Steve discontinued in the Des Moines Register. I can’t find anything about that now on the internet.
Robert Harvey's biography of Caniff talks about the 1979 torture sequence with "Convoy"--not Poteet--that got the strip written up in the Des Moines Register editorial page, and led to cancellation in several other newspapers.
A lot of comic strips took their inspiration from current trends in the art world, including Krazy Kat; Polly & Her Pals; and Gasoline Alley
One I remember from my early childhood is The Strange World of Mr. Mum. Originally published from 1958 to 1974, it was a surreal one panel strip featuring a silent character (Mr. Mum) observing all these oddball happenings and situations around him. Sort of an ancestor to Bizarro or The Far Side. When I was 12 we moved to a place where the newspaper didn't publish it so I forgot about it many years until a couple years ago I walked into a second hand bookstore and on the front counter was a small paperback collection of strips! Of course I bought it and was surprised to see a lot of the humor stands up. G[d I'm surrealism!
Really is odd about Comic Strip collections that Physical Graphic Novels , TradePaperbacks , Manga books are selling better then ever every year is upward I saw an interview with Jim Lee and he stated Watchmen (had its best year, since the year of the movie), the 1st Dark Knight (had its best year since the 2nd Nolan film) likewise the same thing with The Killing Joke I am guessing with comic strip collections , a lot of the characters do not register with people anymore
For me it's Krazy Kat (the greatest) Peanuts Calvin and Hobbes (tremendous news about Bill Watterson, by the way) Cul de Sac Great thread, so many marvellous strips throughout the years.
Has no one mentioned Bizzaro yet? If so I missed it. Definite runner up to The Far Side as one of my favorites.
Comic strips were created for newspapers…and people don’t read newspapers anymore. I’m 62 years old and grew up reading comic strips. It was something I shared with my Dad…he grew up reading them too. Every Sunday, we would share the comic pages. I doubt that my grandkids even know what a Sunday comics section is. They get their news online. The golden era for comic strips was pre-WWII. Sunday comics were printed in glorious full page and comic strip creators like Milt Caniff; Alex Raymond; Hal Foster; and Roy Crane were household names who were paid extremely well. When Milt Caniff left Terry & the Pirates to create Steve Cayon, it made a cover story for Time magazine. After WWII, newspapers began reducing comic strip pages & size. Adventure strips died off. Prince Valiant and The Phantom are the only ones left…and Prince Valiant is only printed at 1/3 page. The last great era of comic strips was probably the late 1980s when Calvin & Hobbes; Bloom County; & The Far Side ruled.
I got more interested in comic strips when I ran across a number of non-fiction books about them and their history which included readable example going back to the 1890s! I learned of how they used to be larger and that the first 'comic books' were collections of newspaper strips. How even humor strips often had a continuity to them (especially Gasoline Alley). I read the Seven Lively Arts book somewhere along the line as well which had comic strips rubbing elbows with jazz music (Seattle's main library had an original 1923 edition of that book). It might be the lack of a framework for modern readers that keeps them away? I found the captions only format of Prince Valiant (and Rupert The Bear) off-putting when I was younger.
good point , there are a couple of DC /Marvel / Manga titles in that format , but only a handful...I Wolfman/Perez's History of the DCU from the mid 80's...might be the only title that stays in print or receives new editions
On a side-note a friend that owns a comic book store told me the Peanuts books need to be kept in print people ask about them every week and whenever he can get inventory they sell-out in a few weeks no matter , how many he receives
I love the "photo-realistic" comic strips especially by master artists such as Stan Drake and Leonard Starr, so it's no wonder I have the Classic Comics Press collected volumes of Drake's "Heart of Juliet Jones" and Starr's "Mary Perkins On Stage." I highly recommend these (though I understand that some volumes are out of print now). Do you recall the titles, or authors, of any of these books?