Paul_SD

Oh absolutely...maybe even more so than Timm as Cooke has a lot more sequential work under his belt. Love Cooke.
I see it especially in the Hex work

hanshotfirst1138

Didn't Cooke work for Timm on the DCAU as a storyboard artist because his style wasn't popular at the time and he couldn't get into comics?

davidh777

Interesting combination of talents, and apparently not the same thing as the later incarnation, Secret Agent Corrigan X-9.

Neil M.

LOAC has been doing a fantastic job. I'm finding myself buying most of their releases. They just announced a new Polly and her Pals Sundays book. And the Marvel deal should produce some great releases as well.

Charlie_Saylor

I loved Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. Especially because it's about normal people leading normal lives and not superheroes or anything out of the ordinary. This makes us believe that comics can deal with average people just as well as they can with people who can stick to walls upside-down.

Nick Danger

I'm really enjoying Pogo volume 3 Evidence to the Contrary. I must not be the only one who's been looking forward to getting it, because it was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for graphic books.

davidh777

I never got into Pogo. It was in my Sunday comics and seemed pretty wordy. I might have to give it a try someday.

Trevor

I've loved the bits of Pogo that I've read.

But every time I think about committing to really getting into it (and you know my OCD compels me to get every bit and in order) they seem to come out with new formats. I haven't researched it much in years, but the choices just confused me to the point of putting it out of my mind.

Nick Danger

Pogo is complicated.

It started out as a children's comic book during the war. That was reprinted by Eclipse starting in 1989. I have a couple of those.

Walt Kelly took the characters and made it into a daily comic strip in 1948. That was reprinted by Fantagraphics in slender paperbacks starting in 1992. Volume 1, the only one I have, has the strips from before it became nationally syndicated. Some recycling was done when syndication started in 1949.

The syndicated strip was a hit and was reprinted in trade paperback by Simon and Schuster starting in 1951 and continuing until the 1970s. Most artists take the money and concentrate on their new material. Kelly redrew and re-ordered the panels to make them better suited to book form. Since he was brilliant, they worked great. As he got older the strip became less popular and the later books are more expensive on Ebay. I'm missing a few of the later volumes, but those years aren't as much fun anyway.

Fantagraphics is currently publishing the daily strips in large hardcover volumes. They hold two years per volume. Number 3 was just released. So far they've been excellent.

Walt Kelly wrote the daily strips for adults and the Sunday strips for children. Simon and Schuster printed them in separate books. The new hardcovers print the Sunday strips in the back half.

In the mid-50s he was including political commentary in the daily strips. This started when he became one of the first to attack Joseph McCarthy, which shows up in Volume 3. By the 1960s he drew a complete separate week of strips that shipped at the same time as the political strips, featuring cute bunny rabbits. If the local newspaper editor didn't like the political jokes, he could print the bunny rabbit strips instead.

If you want to get a feel for Pogo, either get the new hardcover books or buy some of the early Simon and Schuster paperbacks on Ebay.

Bronkster

My copies of Pogo volumes 2 and 3 arrived today! I picked up the first one a few years ago and didn't start reading it until last week. Besides the comic being really awesome, all the notes and intros and information included in volume 1 is very interesting! I was particularly fascinated by the amount of work (and rework and adjusting and shuffling!) that goes into the Sunday strips to accommodate all the possible formats!

davidh777

Thanks for the Pogo info! I feel like I've learned more about it from this thread than over the rest of my life combined.

New "best of" Captain Easy collection:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Rw1e0PQJIq8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Paul_SD

For various reasons, I've been disappointed with the Rick Norwood edited collections of Easy Sundays and Buz Sawyer dailies, so I wasn't too keen on him overseeing a Wash Tubb's series.
However the video answers one of my complaints about Buz- the size of the strips. Looks like the strips will be printed larger than some of the IDW series (like Terry & The Pirates). Can't really gauge the reproduction quality, but size alone is a positive development.

Even though I have a bunch of the NBM softcovers, I've always wanted a nice HC for this strip. I have no problem with doing a 'best of' either. It took many years for the strip to find it's groove, and even then the best of it was still to come.

Nice trade dress too. Will be looking forward to this one.

davidh777

When I posted that, I was totally thinking it was Buz Sawyer, I guess because of the size of the book. I forgot that Captain Easy has been released in those huge Sunday-strip collections that have to lie flat on the top of my bookshelves. So these are daily strips that haven't been released in this kind of format recently? I guess it makes sense to do a best-of since, as you say, it can take this kind of title a while to get its footing. Heck, even the Mickey Mouse Gottfredson volumes started out rough and I haven't picked them all up. For something like Captain Easy that doesn't have the power of the Mouse or Gottfredson, you may go broke releasing multiple early volumes that no one's going to want. Just do one best-of to get it out there, then see if there's demand for more.

bmasters1981

I've been collecting (albeit out of order) some of Fantagraphics' volumes of The Complete Peanuts by Charles Schulz; I have two volumes covering 1969-72, and 5 more covering 1979-88. I have really very much enjoyed them, and am definitely planning on getting more.

Neil M.

I have all the Easy sundays books and haven't even cracked them open yet. I think I might hold out in the hope that someone will do a full run down the road. There's just way too many full run series that I'm invested in right now and I'd prefer to support those titles.

Paul_SD

The NBM series started in the late 80's finishing in the early 90's, so it's due for a re-packaging/re-release.
Unfortunately, Amazon seems to have some of the interior pages shown and it looks to be more broken line, several generations removed reproductions. Which seems to be par for the course with the Norwood books.
It looks like it's going to start with Easy first appearance in the strip- at which point Tubbs had another partner, Gozy.

To be clear, it's not so much that the strip needed to improve as it went on. All of Crane's work I've ever read is highly entertaining and accomplished. It's just that the Easy era is what most people associate with the strip. Prior to his introduction the focus was on Wash, who was a girl crazy ne'er do well who would get into one picaresque adventure after the other, usually with another comedic sidekick. The presence of Captain Easy steered it more in the direction of a straight ahead adventure strip- though it was always a lot more fanciful than something like Terry & The Pirates or the post war Buz Sawyer.

Nick Danger

I have a bookshelf tall enough for Captain Easy, Prince Valiant, and Popeye.

But that darn Flash Gordon is lying flat.

bmasters1981

Just yesterday purchased from Barnes & Noble:

Paul_SD

My bookcases are basically all DIY crates, so it was relatively easy to modify them to accommodate the larger size IDW books like Flash Gordon (and DH's Alley Oop which I dearly hope they won't stop after just the two volumes).
However the books I have to keep in the closet flat are the Artist Editions.
With Jack Davis seeming to announce his retirement- since rescinded- I was motivated to buy one of these again after a long hiatus. It's almost impossible to keep these anywhere for casual perusal.

I think this guy came up with the best idea I've seen yet.


I may have to start getting those Peanuts books. I missed the hardcovers, which I would rather have. But a slipcase definitely makes the softcovers a more attractive option than not. Anyone care to opine on when the strip really hits it's stride?

bmasters1981

Per Wikipedia, I believe the 1960s was the "golden age."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanuts

Nick Danger

I re-read Peanuts 1957-1958 a few weeks ago. It was excellent.

If you have the time, space, and money, I recommend that you start with the first volume. It starts off good, and keeps getting better. I had fun watching an ambitious Schulz develop his ideas. You get to see the first time Snoopy talks, the first Snoopy fantasy, the first time real music notation is put in a comic strip, and how the strip takes off like a rocket when Lucy and Linus move in next door.

It declines into formula some time in the 1970s. It's a good formula, and Schulz is smooth as can be, but I thought it stopped being funny and I stopped buying books after the 1979-1982 box set.

Nick Danger

My bookcase.



Photobucket resized it smaller, so now it's hard to see the titles.

robin2099

So whats the best way to go about picking up some old Dick Tracy and Phantom comic strip collections? I checked Amazon but there are so many different ones it got kind of confusing.

Nick Danger

The Dick Tracy books published by IDW are very good.

bmasters1981

Here are the other Peanuts books I have: