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THE FIRST DECADE
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THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS C
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In the ’80s and early ’90s, Eclipse Comics was an
influential publisher of
independent comics,
including titles by Clive Barker (Tapping the Vein), Max
Allan Collins (Ms. Tree), Neil Gaiman (Miracleman),
Scott McCloud (Zot!), Alan Moore (Brought to Light,
Miracleman), Tim Truman (Scout), and many more.
Eclipse’s Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species was
the first American original graphic novel, pre-dating
Will Eisner’s A Contract With God by two months. Ted worked for Dean Mullaney and Eclipse Comics in the mid ’80s, and Eclipse’s eclectic mix of titles influenced IDW’s approach to publishing. Ted and Dean discuss comic-strip reprints and the genesis of The Library of American Comics. • • • • TA: When did you you first start reading comics? DM: The first comics I remember reading were Zorro in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and the Dick Tracy
reprints from Harvey Comics. I later found out that Zorro was drawn by Alex Toth, and that all the violent sequences in Tracy had been edited out by the Comics Code Authority. TA: Were you also reading comic strips in your daily paper? DM: Of course. The New York Sunday News had Dick Tracy on the front page of the paper and I always read that even before I turned to the sports pages to see how many home runs Willie Mays had hit the day before. ____________________________________ Terry and the Pirates, art by Milton Caniff.
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THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS C
H
A
P
T
E
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In the ’80s and early ’90s, Eclipse Comics was an
influential publisher of
independent comics,
including titles by Clive Barker (Tapping the Vein), Max
Allan Collins (Ms. Tree), Neil Gaiman (Miracleman),
Scott McCloud (Zot!), Alan Moore (Brought to Light,
Miracleman), Tim Truman (Scout), and many more.
Eclipse’s Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species was
the first American original graphic novel, pre-dating
Will Eisner’s A Contract With God by two months. Ted worked for Dean Mullaney and Eclipse Comics in the mid ’80s, and Eclipse’s eclectic mix of titles influenced IDW’s approach to publishing. Ted and Dean discuss comic-strip reprints and the genesis of The Library of American Comics. • • • • TA: When did you you first start reading comics? DM: The first comics I remember reading were Zorro in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and the Dick Tracy
reprints from Harvey Comics. I later found out that Zorro was drawn by Alex Toth, and that all the violent sequences in Tracy had been edited out by the Comics Code Authority. TA: Were you also reading comic strips in your daily paper? DM: Of course. The New York Sunday News had Dick Tracy on the front page of the paper and I always read that even before I turned to the sports pages to see how many home runs Willie Mays had hit the day before. ____________________________________ Terry and the Pirates, art by Milton Caniff.
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TA: How did you learn about the older strips? DM: Growing up in New York, it was advantageous because there were comic shops early on, and there was a comics fan, Ed Aprill, who was the pioneer in comics fandom for reprinting old strips. He reprinted selected sequences of Buck Rogers, Rip Kirby, Secret Agent Corrigan… he did a lot of strips. That was my first introduction to most of those strips. At Phil Seuling’s comic conventions, back when conventions consisted mainly of dealers selling old comics, people would have clipped newspaper strips for sale and I would just pick up anything that looked interesting.
maybe even as many as twenty books, with Hyperion. Again, not complete collections but good samplings, a year or two of each strip to introduce us to classics such as Barney Google, The Bungle Family, Polly and Her Pals, and others. TA: The Hyperion edition of Barney Google reprints strips from 1919 to 1920–it’s more like a taster than what we’re doing today. DM: Yeah, today we’re doing comprehensive complete collections. The market’s completely different now.
TA: Around that same time, Bill Blackbeard started doing some of his books. DM: That was a little bit later. Ed Aprill began in the late ’60s, and Bill’s books started coming out in the ’70s. Bill had a deal with Hyperion Press. We all owe the biggest debt to Bill because he virtually singlehandedly saved the history of newspaper strips by collecting so many of them. He went all around the country collecting newspaper strips and getting them from newspapers–from their archives and their bound volumes. Bill did probably at least a dozen, 240
One interesting side note on the books that Ed Aprill did was that he had this really beautiful thick paper–really heavy, good quality paper–and fantastic reproduction. I think he might have been using syndicate proofs. I emulated the paper stock he used when I published Sabre, which was the first graphic novel, in 1978.
it and distributed it, and then we started the Krazy Kat series. We published the first nine years of Krazy Kat. The design of those
TA: Which brings us to the ’80s and Eclipse. You were certainly at the forefront of publishing comic strips reprints. DM: Well, just like IDW now, at Eclipse I liked having a really diverse line of publications because my interests are all over the place. When the comicshop market started maturing, I saw there was an opportunity to do strip reprint books. In the ’80s, Eclipse was doing them, NBM was doing them, Dennis Kitchen, and then a little while later, Fantagraphics started. TA: I think the first one you did at Eclipse was the Jiggs is Back book. DM: Yeah, I co-published that with the Celtic Book Company in Berkeley. We did all the production on
_____________________________________ Barney Google published by The Hyperion Library of Classic American Comic Strips..
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__________________________________ Above: Dick Tracy art by Chester Gould.
_________________________________________________________ Jiggs is Back published by Eclipse and the Celtic Book Company.
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TA: How did you learn about the older strips? DM: Growing up in New York, it was advantageous because there were comic shops early on, and there was a comics fan, Ed Aprill, who was the pioneer in comics fandom for reprinting old strips. He reprinted selected sequences of Buck Rogers, Rip Kirby, Secret Agent Corrigan… he did a lot of strips. That was my first introduction to most of those strips. At Phil Seuling’s comic conventions, back when conventions consisted mainly of dealers selling old comics, people would have clipped newspaper strips for sale and I would just pick up anything that looked interesting.
maybe even as many as twenty books, with Hyperion. Again, not complete collections but good samplings, a year or two of each strip to introduce us to classics such as Barney Google, The Bungle Family, Polly and Her Pals, and others. TA: The Hyperion edition of Barney Google reprints strips from 1919 to 1920–it’s more like a taster than what we’re doing today. DM: Yeah, today we’re doing comprehensive complete collections. The market’s completely different now.
TA: Around that same time, Bill Blackbeard started doing some of his books. DM: That was a little bit later. Ed Aprill began in the late ’60s, and Bill’s books started coming out in the ’70s. Bill had a deal with Hyperion Press. We all owe the biggest debt to Bill because he virtually singlehandedly saved the history of newspaper strips by collecting so many of them. He went all around the country collecting newspaper strips and getting them from newspapers–from their archives and their bound volumes. Bill did probably at least a dozen, 240
One interesting side note on the books that Ed Aprill did was that he had this really beautiful thick paper–really heavy, good quality paper–and fantastic reproduction. I think he might have been using syndicate proofs. I emulated the paper stock he used when I published Sabre, which was the first graphic novel, in 1978.
it and distributed it, and then we started the Krazy Kat series. We published the first nine years of Krazy Kat. The design of those
TA: Which brings us to the ’80s and Eclipse. You were certainly at the forefront of publishing comic strips reprints. DM: Well, just like IDW now, at Eclipse I liked having a really diverse line of publications because my interests are all over the place. When the comicshop market started maturing, I saw there was an opportunity to do strip reprint books. In the ’80s, Eclipse was doing them, NBM was doing them, Dennis Kitchen, and then a little while later, Fantagraphics started. TA: I think the first one you did at Eclipse was the Jiggs is Back book. DM: Yeah, I co-published that with the Celtic Book Company in Berkeley. We did all the production on
_____________________________________ Barney Google published by The Hyperion Library of Classic American Comic Strips..
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__________________________________ Above: Dick Tracy art by Chester Gould.
_________________________________________________________ Jiggs is Back published by Eclipse and the Celtic Book Company.
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_____________________________________________________ Krazy + Ignatz: The Komplete Kat Komics published by Eclipse.
books by Dennis Gallagher was a complete departure from what had come before. Dennis was not a comics fan; he was the Art Director for the San Francisco Chronicle and brought a whole new sophisticated sensibility to the design, which I think has influenced, consciously or unconsciously, the look of many of the strip reprint books today. TA: Fantagraphics then started collecting them... DM: They began where we left off, and with beautiful new designs by Chris Ware. TA: In the ’80s when you were doing these strip books, the primary distribution was still comic shops. DM: It was all comic shops. The only thing available to us outside the
comic shops were library sales and, of all the books I published, Krazy Kat definitely had the highest percentage going to libraries–about 10% of the hardcover copies went to libraries. Bookstores were not available, which limited what could be released because the market was smaller. TA: As we start to go into the early 2000s, Fantagraphics was starting to publish their The Complete Peanuts series. They really set the bar high for modern-day strip reprints–with both the design and production, but also because they were reprinting larger amounts of material at a time. The books that had come before were a lot thinner and had a lot less strips. So, Fantagraphics really opened the door for all of us because they came out with these great books that were well designed and were a big commercial hit. DM: Certainly. They did a great job and they really started the whole new movement–and now we’re in a golden age of comic strip reprints.
_______________________________________________________ Covers of The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy collections.
already being reprinted, but then I came across the Dick Tracy originals and I thought that might be something to consider since nobody was doing it. So, I contacted Tribune Media and ended up working out a deal that allows us to reprint the entire run of the strip.
very broad distribution. The comic shops are a really important home for these books but we’ve also been able to sell them in more traditional bookstores, both brick-and-mortar and online.
DM: It was great because Tracy had been reprinted haphazardly over the years but never in a complete way and never in a beautiful book packaging.
DM: Sure, and there are a lot of people who have an interest, even a passing interest, in comics, and may have heard about these strips but because they haven’t been in a comics shop, had no opportunity to see the books.
TA: We were lucky because Fantagrahics had shown that there was an interest in this kind of material so we were able to get
TA: So, I worked for you at Eclipse back in the ’80s and you were a mentor to me–a lot of the things that we do at IDW I learned from working for you. As you mentioned earlier, I like a diverse publishing
TA: Absolutely. Around that time, late 2005, I attended the Masters of American Comics Exhibit that was running at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. They had originals from all of the classic strips–there were Krazy Kat pages and Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates and Little Nemo and Peanuts and more. I was walking around the museum looking at these beautiful pages and many of these strips were 242 243
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_____________________________________________________ Krazy + Ignatz: The Komplete Kat Komics published by Eclipse.
books by Dennis Gallagher was a complete departure from what had come before. Dennis was not a comics fan; he was the Art Director for the San Francisco Chronicle and brought a whole new sophisticated sensibility to the design, which I think has influenced, consciously or unconsciously, the look of many of the strip reprint books today. TA: Fantagraphics then started collecting them... DM: They began where we left off, and with beautiful new designs by Chris Ware. TA: In the ’80s when you were doing these strip books, the primary distribution was still comic shops. DM: It was all comic shops. The only thing available to us outside the
comic shops were library sales and, of all the books I published, Krazy Kat definitely had the highest percentage going to libraries–about 10% of the hardcover copies went to libraries. Bookstores were not available, which limited what could be released because the market was smaller. TA: As we start to go into the early 2000s, Fantagraphics was starting to publish their The Complete Peanuts series. They really set the bar high for modern-day strip reprints–with both the design and production, but also because they were reprinting larger amounts of material at a time. The books that had come before were a lot thinner and had a lot less strips. So, Fantagraphics really opened the door for all of us because they came out with these great books that were well designed and were a big commercial hit. DM: Certainly. They did a great job and they really started the whole new movement–and now we’re in a golden age of comic strip reprints.
_______________________________________________________ Covers of The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy collections.
already being reprinted, but then I came across the Dick Tracy originals and I thought that might be something to consider since nobody was doing it. So, I contacted Tribune Media and ended up working out a deal that allows us to reprint the entire run of the strip.
very broad distribution. The comic shops are a really important home for these books but we’ve also been able to sell them in more traditional bookstores, both brick-and-mortar and online.
DM: It was great because Tracy had been reprinted haphazardly over the years but never in a complete way and never in a beautiful book packaging.
DM: Sure, and there are a lot of people who have an interest, even a passing interest, in comics, and may have heard about these strips but because they haven’t been in a comics shop, had no opportunity to see the books.
TA: We were lucky because Fantagrahics had shown that there was an interest in this kind of material so we were able to get
TA: So, I worked for you at Eclipse back in the ’80s and you were a mentor to me–a lot of the things that we do at IDW I learned from working for you. As you mentioned earlier, I like a diverse publishing
TA: Absolutely. Around that time, late 2005, I attended the Masters of American Comics Exhibit that was running at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. They had originals from all of the classic strips–there were Krazy Kat pages and Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates and Little Nemo and Peanuts and more. I was walking around the museum looking at these beautiful pages and many of these strips were 242 243
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________________________________________ Terry and the Pirates, art by Milton Caniff.
line. I like having the freedom to do all kinds of things. Around the time that we did the first couple of Dick Tracy volumes you reached out to me with the idea of doing The Complete Terry and the Pirates.
standpoint. We have the ability today to do things with the computer that you couldn’t do before. DM: Oh, it’s so much easier. I can sit in my office and work on the pages, whereas when we did, for example, the Jiggs Is Back book, we got color photocopies of the tear sheets from Bill Blackbeard and sent them to our color separator to shoot. The separators actually had to go in on the film and clean out the whites for the gutters and for the balloons. Now we can do all that with Photoshop–it’s just fantastic.
DM: I first saw Terry in the ’70s. I picked up strips here and there, Sunday pages particularly, at the conventions in New York. In the late ’70s, Woody Gellman published three or four volumes of Terry, just from the early years, and from that point on, I was absolutely sold. I was actually going to publish the complete Terry in the early 80s and then NBM ended up doing it so I had to wait. Luckily, I’m still around TA: So, the production side and I was able to hook up has gotten more conducive with you and 25 years later to this sort of thing and get the chance to do it. I there’s a much broader actually designed the whole ___________________________________________ distribution model today Cover of The Complete Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1. then there was 20 or 30 format back in the early 80s. I wanted to do it as a landscape book with the color years ago. Sunday on one side, three dailies on the opposite side DM: And 30 years ago, we’d never even dream of and that’s what we’ve done. getting reviews like we have for Terry in The New Yorker or USA Today or the American Airlines TA: It’s also lucky because we’re at a point in time in-flight magazine or any place like that. where everything works from a production 244
TA: The Complete Terry and the Pirates, Vol. 1 won an Eisner award last year and I think that’s a testament to your editorial approach, including production and design. What is your editorial approach to these books? DM: Because we’re selling so many copies outside of the comics market, to people who may have just a passing knowledge of Terry and the Pirates or the other strips, I feel it’s important that the books have informative editorial material up front. Readers don’t need any specific knowledge coming in because we provide the biographical and background material to get them up to speed very quickly. TA: How do you choose the writers of the introductory material? DM: Bruce Canwell, who’s my associate editor and who wrote all the text for the Terry books and for the Scorchy Smith book, was someone I remembered from comics fandom in the ’70s. We had never met and didn’t
know each other, but I saw an article by him on a Web site and I really liked it. So, I sent him an email and we just really hit it off. We’ve become fast friends and we both have very similar views about how to present the material for a more general audience. Even with something that comics fans may feel like they know everything about, like Terry and the Pirates, we found so much phenomenal material at Ohio State that comics fans haven’t seen. But we still write the introductions so they’ll be accessible to a general audience. For Little Orphan Annie, Jeet Heer is acknowledged as the expert on Harold Gray. He’s done a tremendous amount of research in the Harold Gray archives at Boston University and I loved what he’d been doing with the Walt and Skeezix books for Drawn and Quarterly. So I approached him about writing the material for our Annie books. TA: In the Annie books, you’ve been showing a lot of the merchandise. Did that come from Boston University? __________________ Dean’s Eisner award. 245
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________________________________________ Terry and the Pirates, art by Milton Caniff.
line. I like having the freedom to do all kinds of things. Around the time that we did the first couple of Dick Tracy volumes you reached out to me with the idea of doing The Complete Terry and the Pirates.
standpoint. We have the ability today to do things with the computer that you couldn’t do before. DM: Oh, it’s so much easier. I can sit in my office and work on the pages, whereas when we did, for example, the Jiggs Is Back book, we got color photocopies of the tear sheets from Bill Blackbeard and sent them to our color separator to shoot. The separators actually had to go in on the film and clean out the whites for the gutters and for the balloons. Now we can do all that with Photoshop–it’s just fantastic.
DM: I first saw Terry in the ’70s. I picked up strips here and there, Sunday pages particularly, at the conventions in New York. In the late ’70s, Woody Gellman published three or four volumes of Terry, just from the early years, and from that point on, I was absolutely sold. I was actually going to publish the complete Terry in the early 80s and then NBM ended up doing it so I had to wait. Luckily, I’m still around TA: So, the production side and I was able to hook up has gotten more conducive with you and 25 years later to this sort of thing and get the chance to do it. I there’s a much broader actually designed the whole ___________________________________________ distribution model today Cover of The Complete Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1. then there was 20 or 30 format back in the early 80s. I wanted to do it as a landscape book with the color years ago. Sunday on one side, three dailies on the opposite side DM: And 30 years ago, we’d never even dream of and that’s what we’ve done. getting reviews like we have for Terry in The New Yorker or USA Today or the American Airlines TA: It’s also lucky because we’re at a point in time in-flight magazine or any place like that. where everything works from a production 244
TA: The Complete Terry and the Pirates, Vol. 1 won an Eisner award last year and I think that’s a testament to your editorial approach, including production and design. What is your editorial approach to these books? DM: Because we’re selling so many copies outside of the comics market, to people who may have just a passing knowledge of Terry and the Pirates or the other strips, I feel it’s important that the books have informative editorial material up front. Readers don’t need any specific knowledge coming in because we provide the biographical and background material to get them up to speed very quickly. TA: How do you choose the writers of the introductory material? DM: Bruce Canwell, who’s my associate editor and who wrote all the text for the Terry books and for the Scorchy Smith book, was someone I remembered from comics fandom in the ’70s. We had never met and didn’t
know each other, but I saw an article by him on a Web site and I really liked it. So, I sent him an email and we just really hit it off. We’ve become fast friends and we both have very similar views about how to present the material for a more general audience. Even with something that comics fans may feel like they know everything about, like Terry and the Pirates, we found so much phenomenal material at Ohio State that comics fans haven’t seen. But we still write the introductions so they’ll be accessible to a general audience. For Little Orphan Annie, Jeet Heer is acknowledged as the expert on Harold Gray. He’s done a tremendous amount of research in the Harold Gray archives at Boston University and I loved what he’d been doing with the Walt and Skeezix books for Drawn and Quarterly. So I approached him about writing the material for our Annie books. TA: In the Annie books, you’ve been showing a lot of the merchandise. Did that come from Boston University? __________________ Dean’s Eisner award. 245
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_________________________________________ Opposite Page: Pages from Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles.
DM: Some of it came from them. The game board I used on the end papers for the first volume of Annie came from my collection. I’m as bad as every other collector. I’ve got boxes of things. TA: Let’s talk about your editorial approach for Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles–the book is as much a biography as it is a collection of strips. DM: I think that’s a unique book in the history of books about newspaper strips. Everyone has admired Sickles for years but very little was known about him other than things like: he was Milton Caniff ’s best friend, he did Scorchy Smith, he did some backgrounds for Terry, and then he became an illustrator for Life magazine and places like that. We found so much material in his archives at Ohio State University that what was going to be a 60-page introduction ended
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___________________________ Cover of Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles.
up being a 140-page biography. So, it’s really two books in one–a full biography of Sickles, with so much new information and original research, plus the complete strip. And no one’s really ever seen the complete strip until this publication. Each section of the book would stand well on its own. TA: He was so influential to the artists of his time and now he may be influential to the artists of today. DM: As you know, we get so many letters from professionals in the business who thank us for publishing the book. Sickles was an influence from the very beginning on adventure-strip artists, and then in the early ’50s people like Frank Giacoia and Alex Toth were passing around stacks of Scorchy Smith dailies. John Romita, Sr., told us that everybody at DC was passing them around and copying them.
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DM: Some of it came from them. The game board I used on the end papers for the first volume of Annie came from my collection. I’m as bad as every other collector. I’ve got boxes of things. TA: Let’s talk about your editorial approach for Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles–the book is as much a biography as it is a collection of strips. DM: I think that’s a unique book in the history of books about newspaper strips. Everyone has admired Sickles for years but very little was known about him other than things like: he was Milton Caniff ’s best friend, he did Scorchy Smith, he did some backgrounds for Terry, and then he became an illustrator for Life magazine and places like that. We found so much material in his archives at Ohio State University that what was going to be a 60-page introduction ended
246
___________________________ Cover of Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles.
up being a 140-page biography. So, it’s really two books in one–a full biography of Sickles, with so much new information and original research, plus the complete strip. And no one’s really ever seen the complete strip until this publication. Each section of the book would stand well on its own. TA: He was so influential to the artists of his time and now he may be influential to the artists of today. DM: As you know, we get so many letters from professionals in the business who thank us for publishing the book. Sickles was an influence from the very beginning on adventure-strip artists, and then in the early ’50s people like Frank Giacoia and Alex Toth were passing around stacks of Scorchy Smith dailies. John Romita, Sr., told us that everybody at DC was passing them around and copying them.
247
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_______________________________________________________________ The Complete Little Orphan Annie, Vol. 1. __________________________________ Little Orphan Annie, art by Harold Gray.
TA: From a production standpoint, there are two ways to approach comic-strip reprint projects. There’s the “artifact” method where you reproduce the strips with the imperfections of the source material that you’re working from… DM: And that’s a valid approach. My approach is simply that–it’s my approach. I was never a fan of Roy Lichtenstein or any of that “Pop Art” crap, pardon my language. If there is a model for the Library of American Comics, it’s “Art not artifacts.” I feel it’s our duty, not just to the reader but also to the cartoonist who originally created the strip, to present the work in as pristine a manner as we can. For example, Milton Caniff spent four hours coloring each Sunday page. So, we put a lot of time into restoring the strips so they look like they were when originally published. After 60-70 years, the newsprint turns yellow and it affects all of the colors, they become dull and muted, so we spent a lot of time restoring it back to what it was supposed to look like in the first place.
248
TA: The last thing I wanted to ask you about was your design approach to the books because that’s clearly another thing that really makes them special. DM: I like a lot of white space in books. I feel it makes the books easier to read and you can use that negative space to place emphasis on certain pieces of work. I don’t like cramming in every square inch of the page with either text or art. I try to balance the pages so they’re attractive and easy to read. A good comic-book artist will manipulate the reader’s eye from panel to panel with a close-up or a long shot or a down shot. I try to do the same thing with the placement of the text and the art in all the books. I remember someone once asked Alex Toth, “How do you decide when the storytelling is right?” He said (and I paraphrase), “There’s no way you can teach it. There’s no way of explaining why it happens. You just know when it’s right.” And it’s the same with me. I usually come up with a design when I’m driving in the car–I design one page in my head and then the whole book falls into place from there.
TA: I just finished reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success and one of the things he argues is that to become really good at something you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it. I think it’s safe to say that you’ve put in your 10,000 hours.
We’ll also be doing the first-ever collection of Neal Adams’ Ben Casey. Neal got the job when he was 18 and it’s just amazing looking at his artwork for this strip. He already had all of his chops at the age of 18. It’s just phenomenal work.
DM: Yeah. I look at some of the books that I edited and designed in the early ’80s and I wish could go back and redo them. But what I’m doing now is just a culmination of what I’ve been doing since the ’70s. I have a lot of experience. Whether it’s good or bad is up to the readers. I’m just doing the best I can.
Then we’re going to be doing Rip Kirby–collecting the complete Alex Raymond strips. The general consensus is that the three best comics artists of all time were Milton Caniff, Harold Foster, and Alex Raymond. So, now that the Terry and the Pirates series is over, we’ve put Rip Kirby on the schedule. Rip Kirby was really the first modern photo-realistic strip. It influenced everybody from Al Williamson to Neal Adams to Stan Drake to Leonard Starr and more.
TA: What’s on the horizon for 2009 and 2010? What projects can we look forward to reading? DM: Well, after 20 years, we’re going to get back to Bringing Up Father. We won’t do it from the beginning because McManus got better and better as he went along so we’re going to start in the 1930s when he has these absolutely spectacular Sunday pages. We’ll do the Sundays in color and the dailies in chronological order. From there, we’ll start working our way back to earlier strips.
And in keeping with my interests running the gamut, we’re working on Jack Kent’s delightful King Aroo, which is one of the great obscure classics. TA: Sounds great! Lots of books I look forward to reading. IDW
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_______________________________________________________________ The Complete Little Orphan Annie, Vol. 1. __________________________________ Little Orphan Annie, art by Harold Gray.
TA: From a production standpoint, there are two ways to approach comic-strip reprint projects. There’s the “artifact” method where you reproduce the strips with the imperfections of the source material that you’re working from… DM: And that’s a valid approach. My approach is simply that–it’s my approach. I was never a fan of Roy Lichtenstein or any of that “Pop Art” crap, pardon my language. If there is a model for the Library of American Comics, it’s “Art not artifacts.” I feel it’s our duty, not just to the reader but also to the cartoonist who originally created the strip, to present the work in as pristine a manner as we can. For example, Milton Caniff spent four hours coloring each Sunday page. So, we put a lot of time into restoring the strips so they look like they were when originally published. After 60-70 years, the newsprint turns yellow and it affects all of the colors, they become dull and muted, so we spent a lot of time restoring it back to what it was supposed to look like in the first place.
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TA: The last thing I wanted to ask you about was your design approach to the books because that’s clearly another thing that really makes them special. DM: I like a lot of white space in books. I feel it makes the books easier to read and you can use that negative space to place emphasis on certain pieces of work. I don’t like cramming in every square inch of the page with either text or art. I try to balance the pages so they’re attractive and easy to read. A good comic-book artist will manipulate the reader’s eye from panel to panel with a close-up or a long shot or a down shot. I try to do the same thing with the placement of the text and the art in all the books. I remember someone once asked Alex Toth, “How do you decide when the storytelling is right?” He said (and I paraphrase), “There’s no way you can teach it. There’s no way of explaining why it happens. You just know when it’s right.” And it’s the same with me. I usually come up with a design when I’m driving in the car–I design one page in my head and then the whole book falls into place from there.
TA: I just finished reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success and one of the things he argues is that to become really good at something you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it. I think it’s safe to say that you’ve put in your 10,000 hours.
We’ll also be doing the first-ever collection of Neal Adams’ Ben Casey. Neal got the job when he was 18 and it’s just amazing looking at his artwork for this strip. He already had all of his chops at the age of 18. It’s just phenomenal work.
DM: Yeah. I look at some of the books that I edited and designed in the early ’80s and I wish could go back and redo them. But what I’m doing now is just a culmination of what I’ve been doing since the ’70s. I have a lot of experience. Whether it’s good or bad is up to the readers. I’m just doing the best I can.
Then we’re going to be doing Rip Kirby–collecting the complete Alex Raymond strips. The general consensus is that the three best comics artists of all time were Milton Caniff, Harold Foster, and Alex Raymond. So, now that the Terry and the Pirates series is over, we’ve put Rip Kirby on the schedule. Rip Kirby was really the first modern photo-realistic strip. It influenced everybody from Al Williamson to Neal Adams to Stan Drake to Leonard Starr and more.
TA: What’s on the horizon for 2009 and 2010? What projects can we look forward to reading? DM: Well, after 20 years, we’re going to get back to Bringing Up Father. We won’t do it from the beginning because McManus got better and better as he went along so we’re going to start in the 1930s when he has these absolutely spectacular Sunday pages. We’ll do the Sundays in color and the dailies in chronological order. From there, we’ll start working our way back to earlier strips.
And in keeping with my interests running the gamut, we’re working on Jack Kent’s delightful King Aroo, which is one of the great obscure classics. TA: Sounds great! Lots of books I look forward to reading. IDW
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