COMICS REVUE GUEST EDITORIAL "The Golden Age of Comic Strip Reprints" by Todd H. Goldberg, MD Rev. 2008 I have been collecting newspaper comic strips since around 1971 when I was 12 years old. Now I am a 48 year old physician. I also still love the Beatles music which I grew up with in the 60's and still listen to all the time, so I guess I basically just never fully grew up. But I am also an Ivy League graduate, university professor, husband and father and I've traveled all over the world and love all kinds of art, music, food and wine. So I like to think I have some intelligence and good taste. And one of the most enjoyable things in life is still the comics, all kinds in all formats, but especially newspaper strips which to me have always had the best, most mature and realistic, stories and art (after all it is not kids who buy the newspapers). My favorites as anyone who knows me or my writings or web site well knows, include Prince Valiant, The Phantom, Mandrake, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and LOA (all published in CR or by Manuscript Press -- thanks Rick!). But other than Comics Revue since the 1980's, how best to collect such an ephemeral art form? At first and for many years I tried to clip daily and Sunday strips from the newspapers, subscribed to out of town papers, had mailing arrangements with guys in other cities, etc., but this quickly became unwieldy. Loose strips are too hard to obtain, organize and store. Not even including Peanuts, MAD and Pogo paperbacks which date back to the 50's, a few comic strip reprint books have been published in paperback or hardback since the 1970's,including great volumes of Dick Tracy, Buck Rogers, and Little Orphan Annie which I still have. Peanuts and Doonesbury and Pogo and some other humor strips have always had numerous paperback collections for years, but not always complete and in order as collectors would want. In the 1970's, we also had the late lamented Menomonee Falls Gazette, which reprinted all the best complete adventure and humor strips weekly for several years then unfortunately went out of business in 1976. Since then there have been a few other intermittent great comic strip reprint magazines and books from Fantagraphics, Dragon Lady Press, Ken Pierce, etc. But still storing and collecting anything in magazine or newspaper format, as with loose strips, is just a mess. When I left home for college, I sold off most of my old loose comic strips (to Rick as he will recall). As I've grown up and now have a nice home and family I need nice books that look nice on shelves in the family room, or electronic versions for the computer. Fortunately that's exactly what we have now. Truly we are now living in "The Golden Age" for newspaper comic strip collectors. Just a brief survey of what is now available is incredible. SPEC productions prints magazine sized reprints of several classic strips including Alley Oop and Gasoline Alley (as well as stocking numerous other publishers comic strip reprints magazines on their web site). Tony Raiola's Pacific Comics Club, Bud Plant, Mile High and Ken Pierce also have a incredible selection of great comic strip reprints on their web sites. And of course you can buy almost any book or collectible ever made on Amazon or Ebay or Barnes & Noble etc. But the biggest boon to collectors is an incredible new series of complete, archival quality, "from the beginning" series of beautiful books now being issued reprinting several of the greatest strips of all time. Dick Tracy, LOA, Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Popeye, Pogo, Mutt & Jeff, On Stage. So although there actually were plenty of comic strip reprints available to buy and read for many years, the best ones of all time are coming out NOW. Fantagraphics is doing new deluxe reprints of the complete Segar Popeye, and Pogo, as well as the complete Peanuts and Dennis the Menace. Classic Comics Press is doing a BEAUTIFUL series of reprint books of Leonard Starr's great ON STAGE (a long time favorite, highly recommended!) and is also doing Dondi, Juliete Jones, and possibly Tarzan I am told. Another new outfit IDW is doing a new series of the complete Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie, and Dick Tracy all of which are FANTASTIC! All these books are the best looking, most beautifully and completely reprinted collectors sets of these strips EVER! Not cheap but anyone interested in comic strips who doesn't get them all is CRAZY even if you already have some earlier editions. My problem continues to be finding enough space, money and time to read all these fantastic books!!! Titan Books also continues to re-reprint the complete Modesty Blaise, another one of the world's great adventure strips, though their latest editions do NOT reprint the artwork as clearly as their earlier editions. They're still great, but not as great art-wise as they should have been. Curiously, my single most favorite recent comic strip reprint book of all is a new book received recently (Oct. 2007) reprinting recent daily and Sunday strips of FUNKY WINKERBEAN, "Lisa's Story, The other Shoe", the recent breast cancer series in which Les's wife Lisa unfortunately died. This received alot of criticism in the press and on the web for being a "not funny" strip, but I think it was brilliant and affecting. At the end of the book (Oct. 2007 in real time) the strip jumps ahead 10 years to cover a new generation of kids. While reboots and retcons are not uncommon in Marvel and DC comics, I think it is unique in newspaper comics, and this is the second time author Tom Batiuk has done this! Finally, another astounding development is of course the Internet. You can now read basically every newspaper in the world free online and I suscribe to several web sites and/or email services which cumulate all the comic strips and print even the dailies in color every day. You can select any and all you like and have them sent to you automatically every day by email for a very modest fee. I've been subscribing to Daily Ink and Comics.com for a while and love it. For the first time since the MFG days I can keep up with every current adventure strip I care about, automatically. But still not all old strips are available, some have never been seen anywhere since originally printed, hopefully they still exist in some corporate files. Ultimately what all collectors and art lovers hope to see is EVERY COMIC BOOK AND STRIP EVER PUBLISHED available on the Internet for instant viewing/collecting/printing whenever you're interested. Free would be nice but a paid subscription (like they are starting to have in limited form with Daily Ink) would be ok too. This would be the ultimate efficient personal collection taking up NO STORAGE SPACE AT ALL! DVD's or similar type of media (flash memory cards?) holding scans of an entire run of comic strips would also be nice (like the Spider Man and Fantastic Four collections recently published by Marvel). (Some fans have unofficially put together DVD collections like this which I have of The Phantom and Flash Gordon, but these while wonderful are incomplete and unauthorized). Hopefully King Features will someday publish a set of nice collector DVD's of the complete runs of The Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon, and their other classic strips, as will the other syndicates. And while we're at it, I'd like to see every book, movie, tv and radio show ever made available "on demand" over broadband TV and/or Internet as well. Probably someday this will really exist. Hopefully in my lifetime so I can enjoy it. Well I can dream, can't I? Best, Todd Goldberg Note: An expanded HTML version of this article is available on my web site, http://www.geocities.com/tgoldberg