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The latest addition to Fantagraphics’ award- winning classic comic strip reprint series.
A funny thing happened on the way to comic-strip immortality. For many years, Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, with its odd-looking, squat heroine, nearly abstract art, and often super-corny gags, was perceived as the stodgiest, squarest comic strip in the world. Popular with newspaper readers, true — but definitely not a strip embraced by comic-strip connoisseurs, like Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy or Terry and the Pirates.

But then those connoisseurs took a closer look, and began to realize that Bushmiller’s art approached its own kind of cartoon perfection, and those corny gags often achieved a striking zen quality. In its own way, it turned out Nancy was in fact the most iconic comic strip of all. (The American Heritage Dictionary actually uses a Nancy strip to illustrate its entry on “comic strip.”)

Charter members of the Nancy revival include Art Spiegelman, who published Mark Newgarden’s famous “Love’s Savage Fury” (featuring Nancy and Bazooka Joe) in an early issue of RAW; Fletcher Hanks anthologist Paul Karasik; Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith; underground publisher Denis Kitchen, who released several volumes of Nancy collections in the 1980s; Understanding Comics’ Scott McCloud, who created the “Five-Card Nancy” card game; Joe Brainard, who produced an entire Nancy book of paintings in 2008; and Andy Warhol, who produced a painting based on Nancy.

Beginning in the Winter of 2011, fans will be dancing with joy as Fantagraphics unveils an ongoing Nancy reprint project. Each volume contain a whopping full four years of daily Nancy strips (a Sunday Nancy project looms in the future), collected in a fat, square (what else, for the “squarest” strip in the world?) package designed by Jacob (Popeye, Beasts!, Willie and Joe) Covey.

This first volume will collect every daily strip from 1943 to 1946. (Fantagraphics will eventually release Nancy’s first five years, 1938-1942, but given the scarcity of archival material for these years we are giving ourselves some extra time to collate it all.)

This first Nancy volume will feature an introduction by another stellar Bushmiller fan, Daniel Clowes (from whose collection most of the strips in this volume were scanned), a biography of the artist, and much more. 432 pages of black and white comics

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This volume collects the years 1951-1952 dailies of the popular comic strip, with extras such as an introduction by Stan Freberg.
In November of 2011, Fantagraphics released the first volume of its much-anticipated, long-promised series reprinting in its entirety the syndicated run of Walt Kelly’s classic newspaper strip, Pogo. Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder immediately became the company’s best-selling book of the last five years. Exactly one year later, the second volume, Pogo: Bona Fide Balderdash, will be released, featuring all the strips from 1951 and 1952. With sources found for the more elusive strips (in the past, our scheduling downfall), we’re confident that these collections will become an annual affair. Even though Pogo had been in syndication for less than two years as this volume begins, Kelly’s long professional experience (including seven years creating Pogo stories for comic books) had him at the peak of his powers, and this book features page after page of gorgeously drawn, hilarious vaudevillian dialogue and action among the swamp denizens, as well as Kelly’s increasingly sharp-tongued political satire — especially on display during the 1952 election season. Kelly was famous for his prolific creation of recurring characters, and by the end of this second volume, the count will already have topped over one hundred. New arrivals include Tammanany the Tiger, the voluble P.T. Bridgeport, the sinister Sarcophagus MacAbre (with his funereal speech balloons), Uncle Antler the bull moose... and Bewitched, Bothered, and Bemildred, the adorable trio of bats. The two years of daily strips in this volume have been collected before but in now long-out-of print books; and even there they were not as meticulously restored and reproduced as in this new series. Bona Fide Balderdash also reprints, literally for the first time ever in full color, the two full years of Sunday pages, also carefully restored and color-corrected, shot from the finest copies available. This second volume is once again edited and designed by the cartoonist’s daughter, Carolyn Kelly, who is also handling much of the restoration work. It includes a new introduction by the legendary author, recording artist, and satirist Stan Freberg, who was not only a friend of Kelly’s but the voice of Albert the Alligator in the I Go Pogo: Pogo for President movie. There will also be more extensive annotations by comic strip historian and expert R.C. Harvey, as well as additional historical information from writer Mark Evanier. 344

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A few panels short on Pogo Volume 2!

Written by Kim Thompson

We're coming down the home stretch on the second volume of Walt Kelly's Complete Pogo, and the good news is that we've got literally 99% of the never-beforere-reprinted, full-color Sundays from the two years covered in this collection. The bad news is that we're missing a half dozen panels still.

How can we be missing panels and not strips, you ask? Simple: the Pogo Sunday was put together in an odd configuration in which of the three possible formats -- full page, half page, and third page -- only one, the third page, contained the complete strip. The third page was missing the full top tier, and the full page was missing one square panel in the middle of the strip that was designed to be removable so that the strip could be assembled in this format.

So if we've got the half-page we're fine. If we've got both the full and the third page we're also fine because the two "complete each other" (to be romantic about it).

However, in the case of the following four strips:

July 8, 1951
December 9, 1951
September 14, 1952
October 12, 1952

We have only the full page, which means we're missing that little square. (We actually have a black-and-white version of all except December 9, 1951 hanks to a book reprint, so if push comes to shove we can colorize them and insert them -- but December 9, 1951 is the tricky one, we've only got a bad microfilm version of that panel.)

There is also August 19, 1951, for which we have only the third (meaning we're missing the entire top third of it) -- here again we have access to a black and white version (which seems to have been edited for the book version, another problem) but nothing else.

So we're sending out a call to collectors: If you know of or can find or can put us on the track of HALF or THIRD page versions of the first four strips, and FULL or HALF page versions of that final one... do let us know!

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Tom Batiuk was a junior high school art teacher in Elyria, Ohio, when he created a comic panel aimed at teens for the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram. That panel was the precursor to what became Batiuk's award-winning comic strip Funky Winkerbean.

Since its debut on March 27, 1972, Funky Winkerbean has chronicled the lives of a group of students from the fictitious Westview High School. This volume, which presents the strip's first three years, introduces the strip's title character, Funky, and his friends Crazy Harry Klinghorn, Bull Bushka, Livinia Swenson, Les Moore, Holly Budd, and Roland Mathews. Principal Burch, counselor Fred Fairgood, and band director Harry L. Dinkle also make their first appearances.

Funky fans will relive Le's misadventures in gym class and his unintentional attendance at the homecoming dance as he remains stuck on a climbing rope high above the gymnasium floor. They will remember Crazy Harry's ability to play pizzas like records and his air guitar virtuosity, and majorette Holly who never removed her costume. They will recall the school's winless football team, and Harry Dinkle's attempts to win the Battle of the Bands despite the contest always coinciding with a natural disaster.

Volume 1 contains a charming autobiographical introduction by Tom Batiuk that shares his early attempts at cartooning, discusses his teaching career, and explains the genesis of Funky. Subsequent volumes will each contain three years of Funky comic strips and will be published annually. Batiuk has been recognized for his humorous and entertaining portrayals of the students and staff at Westview and acclaimed for his sensitive treatment of social and educational issues.

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Re-presenting the classic Popeye comic book series that debuted in 1948 by Bud Sagendorf, the long-time assistant to creator E.C. Segar! Carefully reproduced from the original comic books and lovingly restored, Volume 1 contains issues #1-4, with stories such as "That's What I Yam," "Ghost Island," and "Dead Valley." Also includes all of Sagendorf's gloriously funny one-pagers.

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Our first full-color Mickey Mouse comic strip collection guest stars Donald Duck and features many never-before-reprinted strips.

We’re jumping from black and white to classic color—as Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse series makes its 1932-35 Sunday strip debut! Bright hues highlight our hero as he enjoys four years’ worth of wild weekend epics... taking him from Uncle Mortimer’s Wild West ranch to the icy peak of frigid Mount Fishflake! And in this volume, Mickey is joined by a famous co-star: Donald Duck! Floyd Gottfredson, artist of the Sunday Mickey Mouse from 1932-38, created the most famous Mickey tales ever told in print. These Sunday specials—many never before reprinted—also feature the work of later Donald Duck master Al Taliaferro. Collectively, they form a collection that fans have been seeking for a lifetime! Highlights include “Mickey’s Nephews,” introducing Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse, and “Dr. Oofgay’s Secret Serum,” which turns Horace Horsecollar into a brainwashed wild mustang! Classic gag stories round out the book, offering manic Mouse mischief at a fever pitch. Restored from Disney’s art sources and enhanced with a meticulous recreation of the strips’ original color, Call of the Wild also brings you more than 30 pages of chromatic supplementary features! You’ll enjoy rare behind-the-scenes art, vintage publicity material, and fascinating commentary by a prismatic pack of Disney scholars.

NOTE: Mickey Mouse Color Sundays: Call of the Wild contains cartoon violence and historically dated content presented in context.
Full color illustrations throughout

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One of the truly great Sunday action/adventure newspaper strips of the 1940s is finally being reprinted in a deluxe archival edition. Frank Robbins' masterpiece, Johnny Hazard, set the standard for action and adventure, and remains unequaled. Comics historian Ron Goulart observed that with Johnny Hazard, Robbins, "... staged his action like the movies. He had a lushly inked style, rich in black." The Sunday version of the strip which ran different story lines from the dailies (also being offered by Hermes Press) features non-stop, wartime action with stories which are exciting today as they were when they were created.

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THE COMPLETE SKIPPY continues the first-ever series to reprint the legendary Skippy comic strips by Percy Crosby. Volume two contains all daily comics from 1928 through 1930. The introduction details Crosby's life during Skippy's transition from Life magazine to the newspaper page and those first years of the strip's wild success. "Percy Crosby's Skippy might well be the great forgotten comic strip of the 20th century."-Chris Mautner, CBR "Cartoonist Percy Crosby has long been acknowledged as one of the great early cartoonists, both for his precision draftsmanship and as the first cartoonist to place philosophical ideas into the mouths of children."-The Comics Journal Co-edited by Jared Gardner and Dean Mullaney, designed by Lorraine Turner, and illustrated with many photographs and rare artwork from the collection of the cartoonist's daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts, and Skippy, Inc.

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With the success of the Buck Rogers TV show the New York Times Syndicate decided to revive the classic Buck Rogers newspaper feature and to give it a contemporary sci-fi treatment. The feature, which was unrelated to the television show, offered the artwork of Gray Morrow with scripts by Jim Lawrence. Volume One offers a full two years of the strip with the black and white dailies and full-color Sundays. This material has never before been offered in its original version.

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