Four Color Comics

The San Francisco Chronicle has a fantastic article on how vintage comic strips have seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to the combined efforts of progressive publishers and devoted collectors.

[Joe] Matt is not unique among collectors. Peter Maresca, whose day job is creative director of GoComics/uClick Mobile, self-published his own collection of “Little Nemo” Sunday tearsheets as “So Many Splendid Sundays.” Fantagraphics’ “Popeye” and “Krazy Kat” series are made possible by the archivist Bill Blackbeard, and IDW’s “Complete Dick Tracy” relies on a legion of fans, because no single run is known to exist.

Their compulsion to own an artist’s every strip — sometimes 15,000 or more — and to clip, preserve and organize them all, has helped rescue a disappearing corner of American popular culture. After decades in which comic-strip syndicates and libraries have been purging themselves of paper archives for microfilm, their collections are often all that’s left.

“We couldn’t do it without them,” said Kim Thompson, co-founder of Fantagraphics, the publisher of popular graphic novels like Daniel Clowes’ “Ghost World.” Fantagraphics began issuing “complete” projects in the 1980s, with multivolume collections of “Popeye” and “Prince Valiant,” and currently with George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (as “Krazy & Ignatz,” for licensing reasons), an improved “Popeye” and Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts.”

Thompson has resorted to making pleas on the Internet for rare strips, and fans turned up what he needed: “Even with ‘Peanuts,’ where Schulz maintained an archive, we have one fan, Marcie — yes, same name as the ‘Peanuts’ character — who compiled a database on her own that lets her plug in the date of any strip, and it tells her wherever that particular strip has ever been reprinted.”

The article notes that the recent archival projects are helped by the presence of big-name modern graphic novelists, who often design the books, or contribute historical essays. I am a huge fan of these books — they’re the highlight of my collecting right now. I purchase all of them that I can find: Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Peanuts, Flash Gordon, and, especially, Gasoline Alley. The Walt & Skeezix books are treasures.

[San Francisco Chronicle: Preserving best vintage comic strips - publishers introduce a new generation to newspaper genre]