I almost subscribed but couldn't reconcile the reformatting/resizing of the panels.

See Bronkster’s post #348. They’re different from what you may have seen before, but it’s what Caniff intended.

I get it.

Just ran across this article on the rising cost of pulp product

Got me wondering if LoAC is going to honor their subscription price for the Terry series, or if those of us who signed up for it, are in for the inevitable price increase.

I gave my Peanuts collection a second chance. I stopped buying the books as they were released because I stopped enjoying them, but I thought I'd take another look.

I like to read a few pages a night in bed before I turn out the lights. I started with the 1970 volume. I enjoyed what I read. I thought that maybe I hadn't liked them before because I had been in a bad mood or something. Then I got to the late 1970s and I hit a brick wall. I got curious and I put a bookmark in the last joke that had made me laugh out loud and kept pushing through.

These are the approximate dates of the strips that made me laugh:
July 1977.
May 1978.
May 1979.

I didn't laugh for nearly two years of material.

After that, the humor started to slowly pick up again, but it was sparse. I think made the right decision to quit buying them with the 1979-1982 box set.

Just received Pogo volume 8! Looking forward to digging right into this tonight.

Clover/LOAC’s next project is reworking Dick Tracy 1-6 to match the rest.

POGO volume 9 has a release date of July 16, 2024. Once again looking forward to this!

So how's this for retro:

Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics
https://boingboing.net/2024/02/06/wh...published.html

"When shipping clerk and former musician Frank Johnson died in Chicago in 1979 at the age of 67, his family was shocked to discover 2,300 pages of comics in bound notebooks that apparently nobody knew about"

He began writing/drawing them in 1928.

"the comics themselves, unlike most outsider art, are actually quite commercial and palatable for a general audience; they are mostly gag-oriented stories about a group of men, "Wally's Gang," who get into various misadventures"

First 600-page collection (of two planned) just released yesterday from Fantagraphics, SRP 49.99.

The release date keeps getting pushed out. It's now January 2026. I hope Fantagraphics doesn't give up on completing this series.

Bummer about Pogo.

Some good news from Fantagraphics is they're getting back on the horse with Buz Sawyer vol. 5, coming in May. I know we previously discussed a quality drop in volume 4, but I pre-ordered #5 anyway to support the release.

Also, I received my last shipment of Terry and the Pirates from Clover Press. I'm still way behind in reading it, but it's a great set that I'm glad to have.

Now the release is pushed out until May 2026. Fittingly enough, the title of this volume is: A Distant Past Yet to Come.

I read Barnaby volume 5 from Fantagraphics, the last of the set. I think it shows that Crockett Johnson was tiring of it. There are a few brilliant stories: Mr O'Malley decides to re-route the new highway right through town and upsets everyone, Barnaby and Mr O'Malley go to summer camp and disrupt a whole new cast of characters, and the story of a neighboring boy is into TV westerns who is thrilled when the hero starts hanging in person, which outrages Mr O'Malley. But there is also a lot of the same old thing.

The strip has a proper ending. Barnaby turns six, and is excited to go to school, which means he's grown too old for a fairy godfather. It was genuinely touching.

The introduction is by Ron Howard, who played Barnaby on TV. The book ends with an interesting essay on how comic strip authors end their strips.




Now I have the full set, plus the two hardcover books published by Henry Holt in 1943 - 1944.

Three and a half years between when they solicited my order and when they plan to ship the book. I hope Fantagraphics isn't going to give up on Pogo before they complete the series.

Yeah, I'm following it on Amazon - but haven't pre-ordered it. The continual pushing out of the date is concerning. This book will cover 1965-66. The strip ran until 1975, so there's still a few books to go after this. I hope I live long enough ...

A couple significant developments:

Clover Press (basically the people behind Library of American Comics) has done two crowdfunded comic-strip projects, Dick Tracy and The Amazing Spider-Man. They're releasing these as softcovers in cardboard sleeves. I received Dick Tracy 1941-1944 earlier this year, and the four volumes are coming out separately in regular retail Feb through July. List price is $30, slightly discounted in crowdfunding. Their plan is to release a lot of volumes, and the first installments went well.

Some comic-strip publishers are releasing stuff on Lulu dot com. That's long been the place of print-on-demand public-domain stuff from publishers like Gwandaland, but Classic Comics Press has moved their publishing there, including The Cisco Kid, Rusty Riley, and Casey Ruggles. This is the company that released stuff like The Heart of Juliet Jones but couldn't keep them in print. Moving to print-on-demand would solve the problem of spending money to print and hold them in stock. There's a company (one person, I think) called The Comic Strip Appreciation Group that's cranking out a ton of these, mostly forgotten stuff but also post-Noel Sickles Scorchy Smith. I've ordered several Lulu titles, and they feel like good quality to me.

There are also individuals cranking out strips as a labor of love, like Chris Arrufo with Alley Oop. I've bought a bunch of these as well.

There have recently been some retrospectives on Beetle Bailey and Hagar the Horrible from established publishers.

Not sure if this is posted somewhere, but it showed up in my Facebook feed as an ad just now, and it's a great deal. The complete Peanuts comic collection in pdf format for $25
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/c...graphics-books