Reprint This! Update on Doonesbury

It isn't quite the news that we're looking for, but the publisher Andrews McMeel has announced an October 26 release date for 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective. Here's the press release for the book:



Andrews McMeel will publish 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, a massive anniversary collection packaged by the same team that did The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and The Complete Far Side. The book will street on October 26th, the 40th anniversary of the appearance of the first Doonesbury strip. To give some idea of the scale of cartoonist G.B. Trudeau’s body of work, the 1800 strips reprinted in this massive hardcover volume are only around 13% of the over 14,000 strips Trudeau has penned since that first strip in 1970.

The strips and accompanying features in 40 examine the characters of the strip in depth. Trudeau contributes 18 original essays, including an introductory piece and contemplations of individual characters and groups of characters. A four-page fold-out centerfold charts the character’s connections in a “family tree.”

The 664-page, 9-3/4” x 13-1/2” hardback will retail for $100. First printing is 100,000 copies.

Doonesbury is currently syndicated in over 1,400 Sundays and daily newspapers.

It's certainly not as ideal as a full collection would be, but it's a good start, and the eighteen essays sounds like good reading. Maybe Santa Claus will be nice to me.



For more reading, see this blog's original feature on Doonesbury, from back in 2007, and also Walden College Library, my blog about the reprint collections already released.

Reprint This! The Daily Star Judge Dredd strip

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is the JUDGE DREDD newspaper strip which originally appeared in the pages of The Daily Star. Various teams worked on the series, initially John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ron Smith, and later Ian Gibson. Three samples from the Wagner-Grant-Gibson team are included here. The strip ran for about sixteen years under various teams, concluding in the late 1990s, but it's the first few years of material which is most crying out for a reprint.



Judge Dredd was, of course, created by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra in 1977 for the pages of Britain's new sci-fi comic anthology 2000 AD, debutting in the second issue. He's a gruff, impartial, impatient policeman-plus who patrols the mean streets of the lunatic future megalopolis of Mega-City One, located on what's today the eastern half of the US. Thirty-one years and 1600 issues later, Dredd is still going strong, with a very nice reprint program going to keep his regular weekly adventures in print. But Dredd has appeared in several other outlets over the years. In 1981, the Daily Star commissioned a weekly episode of the strip. These were produced by Wagner, Grant and Smith and many, but not all of them, were collected in an annual series of five slim Judge Dredd Collections published by Fleetway, and many of these were then recompiled into a hardcover Judge Dredd Mega-Collection in 1990.

After a few years, Dredd was transitioned into a regular Monday-Friday continuity slot, typically telling tales across nine to fifteen weeks. Gibson began alternating with Mike Collins in 1988 before Collins became the regular artist. In time, the strip lost its regular team and a large number of different writers and artists contributed - Andy Diggle, Gordon Rennie, Mark Millar and Carlos Pino all put in time telling stories of Dredd and his world.



The weekly Star Dredd was pretty entertaining, but the daily version is the real treat. Admittedly I'm incredibly biased - even moreso than usual - because it combines two of my favorite things about comics: reading daily strip sequences and Ian Gibson's artwork. Readers never got the idea that Wagner and Grant were just hacking this out while saving their best ideas for 2000 AD. There's a great one that deals with the stupid Mean Machine Angel trying to convince some criminals who have built robot replicas of his dead criminal family that no, really, there never was any lost Angel Gang loot; they really did spend it all. Another features the talking horse from the classic "Black Plague" story getting Dredd's help to deal with some Cursed Earth slavers, and it's all done with that classic tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top mix of black comedy and violent melodrama that nobody does better than John Wagner.

Rebellion has been doing some really wonderful collected editions of 2000 AD series, but the slightly smaller dimensions of these books wouldn't flatter the material as well as something a little larger. Titan Books has, of course, been earning praise for their large-format collections of classic British newspaper strips like James Bond, Jeff Hawke and Modesty Blaise. I suggest that something in that format, with supplemental interviews and background material, as well as a complete "stripography" in the back, would be exactly what the daily Dredd needs. With a decent page count, Rebellion could conceivably reprint all the Wagner and Grant episodes in two books before evaluating whether to continue with the other material. I'm enough of a completist that I'm all in favor of seeing everything, but two's a good starting point. How about it, Rebellion?

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Before I leave you this week, I do have a couple of other notes about some reprints my readers might find interesting.

I first heard of Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas's 1960s feature Sam's Strip - a comic strip about comic strips - in Walker's book Backstage at the Strips, a great book which I obtained and read years ago and did not realize was missing from my shelves until a couple of weeks ago when I went looking for it. Anyway, Fantagraphics will have a complete collection of this oddball and charming strip, which ran for less than two years, on your shelves in December. Read more about Sam, and the current fad of prestige reprints, over at Westfield Comics.

Also, had a pretty good suggestion at his Let's Anime blog: the long-running 1970s-80s crazy future ESPer action of Chojin Locke. I'd like to see more of that, too!

And, I probably didn't do Richard Bruton justice when I mentioned The Uncollecteds a couple of months back, but if you enjoy people talking about rare old comics that need new editions, you'll really like this series over at Forbidden Planet's blog, so check that out!

(Originally posted October 21, 2008, 05:43 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 24. The World's Greatest Superheroes

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected a couple of dozen titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

At last we come to the final installment-of-this-length of this series, and not before time. This entry is a subject near and dear to my nostalgic heart. I've shied away from most superhero titles in this feature. I guess it's part of my growing disinterest in capes-and-fisticuffs fiction, but also because Marvel and DC seem like they're on a track to reprint all their superhero stuff before long anyway. However, there's one title they might overlook. When I was a kid, THE WORLD'S GREATEST SUPERHEROES was, for a couple of years, among the most important parts of my day, but it doesn't look like it's set for a reprint anytime soon. This newspaper strip, written initially by Martin Pasko and illustrated by George Tuska and the often-maligned Vince Colletta, was a serialized adventure pitting DC's superhero crew against a number of nefarious villains.



The World's Greatest Superheroes, which began in 1978, could be compared to a daily strip version of DC's long-running Justice League of America comic, in which some of Earth's mightiest defenders, operating from an orbital satellite, match wits against evil supervillains. The first serial featured Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman against the immortal Vandal Savage. The second sidelined Aquaman, and Batman and Robin joined the others in a battle with Dr. Destiny, master of dreams. The third and fourth serials also featured Black Lightning.

In mid-1979, the series was retitled The World's Greatest Superheroes Present Superman, and the Man of Steel got the strip, now written by Paul Levitz, all to himself for a few more years. I lost track of it when my dad stopped going into his office every day and bringing a copy of The Atlanta Constitution home. Nor would my folks change their subscription from the afternoon Journal to the morning paper, despite all the good comics like Peanuts running in the morning. In 1983, the strip went to Sundays-only, and it was cancelled in 1985.

When I was a kid, I was incredibly aggravated that the strip became a Superman-only serial, because I enjoyed the other characters, especially Wonder Woman and the Flash. At the time, I figured that they reworked it due to the Christopher Reeve Superman film, which was released at Christmas, 1978. Since I tracked down some scans of the series online, and got hold of some 1980 episodes from the UGA library, I'm still certain that's the case, but I'm also struck by how unusual a drama serial with multiple characters feels. Pasko must have found it a great challenge to hop back and forth between the heroes in their individual situations with only three panels a day. In the first serial, Wonder Woman gets caught in a trap at the Empire State Building, and then the action shifts to the Flash in the Arctic, and then to Superman in Egypt. Two months later, Wonder Woman is still tied up in New York City!

In 1980 or so, DC released a digest-sized collection of the first serial, with the panels rearranged to fit two or three per page. Evidently it didn't sell well enough to follow up, so these stories haven't been seen in more than 25 years except by afficionados. Serial newspaper strips are incredibly fun to read in collected editions, though. Titan's been proving that with their addictive James Bond 007 and Modesty Blaise books, with Jeff Hawke newly joining their lineup. Marvel US is thought to be planning a collection of their Stan Lee-scripted Spider-Man strip later this year - there's an edition already out in England via Panini. Marvel always seems to execute the good ideas before DC can get theirs ready, so even if DC got started now, it would be months before we could see any such collected edition. However, these are incredibly fun stories which are sure to spark fond memories from readers, and the growing market for trade collections and reprints would surely have room for these strips. Presented right, as, say, a three-volume collection, you'd have a winner... or it might even work as a Showcase Presents. So how about it, DC?



Many thanks to Jared Bond for providing these nice scans from the series. Most appreciated!

Next week, Reprint This! wraps up with five other features I'd like to see again, but didn't feel like subjecting everybody to longer essays about for one reason or another.

(Originally posted January 18, 2008, 06:10 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 8. Doonesbury

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected two dozen titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One gem which isn't actually missing but is very poorly served in bookshelf format is DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau. Almost all of the strips have been reprinted at one time or another, and are available on CD-ROMs and in the archives of the website, but much of the material is no longer available in print editions. That which can be tracked down is in a variety of formats and sizes, begging for a consistent design and approach.



Doonesbury began its run as a syndicated strip in October, 1970. Within four years, it had won a Pulitzer Prize and introduced a gigantic cast of fascinating and funny characters. Well, mostly; Doonesbury may be second only to Peanuts as my all-time favorite comic strip, but my eyes certainly glaze over whenever Zeke and Mike's damnable ex-wife show up.

I think that Doonesbury is one of those strips that you either love absolutely or you just don't get it. At the time of this writing, Uncle Duke is the central character in a story about "Berzerkistan," and it's the first thing I look at when I get to my desk at work. I've been totally taken in by the characters and their world since I discovered The Doonesbury Chronicles collection when I was in middle school. It was through Trudeau's eyes that I first started paying attention to news and politics. Frankly, I don't know how anybody can make any sense of our government in the 1970s without Doonesbury to help them out. (And more on making sense of the 70s in a forthcoming feature...)

The problem, apart from simply getting the material back in print in a good, consistent format, is that so much of Doonesbury's current events focus is hardwired to its time that future readers could use some annotations and commentary along with the old strips. Heck, even current readers looking back at the books of the 1980s may not remember what the fuss was with USA Today's graphics-heavy content, or why some of the principals stand around a desolate tree for a week waiting for Mario Cuomo to show up. Twenty years from now, will Dick Cheney's bizarre notion of government having more than three branches be as lost to time?

I don't believe that Doonesbury is nearly as impenetrable as some of its critics make out, and the incredibly reader-friendly website is full of helpful FAQs and example strips to refresh readers' memories about the continuity of the strip itself. All that's needed is a fresh approach to the bookshelf format, consistent design and annotations. Previous Doonesbury editions have been handled by Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, but these mass-market efforts have been done with such a slipshod approach that maybe somebody different should take over. Fantagraphics has done such an amazing job repackaging Peanuts, Dennis the Menace and Love & Rockets recently that everybody is confident their forthcoming collection of Pogo will be unmissable, sight unseen. If anybody should be in charge of restoring Doonesbury to bookshelves, it's Fantagraphics. Or possibly Drawn & Quarterly. Either way, thirty-five years of brilliant strip cartooning needs to be given much better treatment than it has, and there are far better options out there than the one that's been in place. So how about it, Trudeau?



(Originally posted August 17, 2007, 05:55 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 3. Axa

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I will talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. You might consider it a companion to my Weekly Comics Hype, which is taking a short summer vacation, except while that's preaching to a potential audience, this is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected two dozen titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is AXA by Enrique Badia Romero. This is a science fiction serial where, following a global catastrophe, a woman tired of regimented life inside a domed city breaks away to discover the bizarre fates of small pockets of survivors on the outside. And get naked. Frequently.



Axa appeared as a daily newspaper strip in The Sun from 1978 to 1986. It would be foolish to suggest that the principal draw is anything other than the fabulous artwork. Romero, who was taking a sabbatical from the Evening Standard's Modesty Blaise strip, draws absolutely gorgeous women. Donne Avenall, who actually scripted the series from Romero's plots, finds plenty of excuses for most of the cast to wear little more than loincloths and bikinis, and strip out of those as often as is plausible. Newspaper standards are a little different in the UK than in America; adult-themed T&A like this has a long history, and attracts some very good artists. Even the science fiction setting is unusual by our standards, where continuity strips rarely get more fantastic than Dick Tracy or the infrequently-seen Spider-Man strip.

The stories themselves are pretty good. Installments are clearly inspired by most of the usual, pre-Star Wars suspects: Logan's Run, The Survivors, The Land That Time Forgot, Planet of the Apes, I Am Legend and so on. You've got communities trapped between armies of dinosaurs warring against robots in one story, and families where the women are barren, so Axa gets kidnapped in order to provide an heir in another. An ongoing subplot in the first couple of years, it might have been resolved beyond the point I've read, features an old boyfriend of Axa's sent into the wilderness to return her to the dome. So there's nothing incredibly original in the series, but it's incredibly fun to read.

Axa was collected, while the strip was still running, by a firm called First American Editions. These are flimsy little 64-page things with some dodgy reproduction. They're long out of print, but older comic shops might have some in stock. What's needed are some proper, large size collections, with better page count and reproduction. I do not know who holds the rights, but since Titan is currently doing such a nice job on Romero's other major series, Modesty Blaise, they might be the best choice to give Axa a proper collected treatment. So how about it, Titan?



(Originally posted June 27, 2007, 10:59 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)