Fantagraphics Rocks My World
As some of you are well aware, I am a comic dork. Yeah, yeah, shock to those who didn’t know, but moving on…
Fantagraphics has been doing a wonderful job in collecting all fifty years of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts in nice hardbound volumes of two years each. These books are released on a somewhat annual basis (supposedly annual, but I believe two came out last year) and are a nice addition to the bookshelf. They’re up to book five (which just recently came out):
Fantagraphics is also in the process of giving collected treatment to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. But coming this September they’re also going to begin releasing a collected version of E. C. Segar’s Popeye in six hardback volumes:
Six volumes, hardcover. Same size, more or less, as the original Fanta books from long ago (the big Sunday ones). Each book contains half dailies (six to a page) and half Sundays (in color), except for the first which is 3/4 dailies (because Popeye was a co-star in the dailies for more than a year before he showed up in the Thimble Theatre Sundays). Dailies in the front of the book, Sundays in the back (since there is no cross-continuity.) One every six months. We’ve got all the Sundays for the first volume scanned and are working our way through the dailies even as I speak. Introduction and annotations by Bill Blackbeard. A later book will contain a non-strip Segar POPEYE sequence that so far as I know has never been reprinted.Nice. It’s easier to collect comics when they’re so neatly presented.
