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Post by Deleted on May 24, 2020 1:58:08 GMT -5
I remember opening the newspaper one day in the late 70s and discovering a World's Greatest Super-Heroes strip featuring the DC heroes (the JL of A in particular)...  it only ran briefly in our local papers and I am not sure if it has ever been collected, but because of that it is one of those strips I have always wanted to read. I think it is the elusive unattainable quality of its circumstances rather than the quality of the actual strip that has drawn me to it over the years. -M |
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Post by electricmastro on May 25, 2020 0:31:56 GMT -5
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Post by codystarbuck on May 25, 2020 11:39:44 GMT -5
Oh I forgot to mention Comics Revue, the now sadly defunct magazine that featured comic strips...  any time I see copies of these at shows or shops I snap them up. It's a great way to sample a lot of different strips. I recently got one of their Modesty Blaise collections, which is another strip i am curious about, but haven't had a chance to dive in yet. Calidore I have a bunch of the 70s paperback strip collections of B.C> and the like I used to have a bunch more (a lot of Beetle Bailey as that was a favorite of my dad's) as a kid. I've mentioned this before, but reading the Sunday funnies with my dad, especially the adventure strips like Tarzan and the Phantom, but also stuff like Peanuts and the like, was my introduction to comics as a kid and where my love of comics comes from. If it weren't for the Sunday papers, I am not sure I would have wanted to get my first comic book. And those 70s papaerback sized strip collections were a wonder for me, and when I first got Son of Origins, for me it was an extension of that kind of reading experience, which had a big impact on the way I like to experience comics, and part of why I was an early adopter of trade paperbacks and collected editions for comics. -M I had the Ken Pierce editions of Modesty Blaise, plus the Titan Books collections (much better format for reading them). One of the Titan editions had a feature article on the novels, that helped me identify all of the titles, to go looking for them, allowing me to eventually get them all (Pieces of Modesty, a short story collection, was the hardest to find, at the time). I had one of the NBM Tarzan volumes, as they were pretty pricey, for the time frame. There were 19 total; volumes 1-5 feature Hal Foster, and #6 has the end of Foster and the beginning of Hogarth. 7-18 are all Hogarth. Volume 15 was split between Volume 15A and 15B.                    |
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Post by tonebone on Sept 18, 2020 10:57:49 GMT -5
I love a lot of classic strips. Stuff I am trying to put together or have... There's 4 oversized treasury volumes of E.C. Segar's Popeye Sundays, I have 2 of them and I am always on the look out for the other two... I am tempted to pick up the L'il Abner collections of the time Frazetta worked on the strip. My Amazon wish list is filled with things like, Kirby's Skymasters, the IDW collections of the Star Trek strips form the late 70s/early 80s, Secret Agent Corrigan X-9, etc. I am sure there's stuff I am forgetting at the moment as well. -M The oversized Popeyes from Fantagraphics are awesome... there are 6 of them and can be found easily on ebay and amazon. Lil Abner is great, with or without Frazetta. Some sharp writing and satire. Sometimes I'm amazed by what Capp got away with. The IDW Star Trek collections are great. Most of the art and writing is top notch. The second volume, however, shows how little Paramount cared about the franchise at the time. The art at times is below amateur level. Like High-School-Art-Class-level. Most disturbing is that the downgrade in art happens around the time of Wrath of Khan... It gets better, but was eventually cancelled.  EDIT: Also there is a third volume of UK newspaper comics. |
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Post by dbutler69 on Sept 21, 2020 13:32:28 GMT -5
My all-time favorite comic strips are Calvin & Hobbes and Bloome County, but I was also a big fan of Peanuts, Far Side, Garfield, Heathcliff, and Dilbert, plus also read (and had the occasional paperback collection of) B.C., Wizard of Id, Shoe, Outlnd, Dilbert, Opus, Herman, Hagar the Horrible, and Mother Goose and Grimm. I never got into the serialized stuff like Prince Valiant much.
For me, the best years for comic strips were 1985-1992, and to narrow it down a little bit more, 1985-1989 (since Bloome County ended in 1989, to be replaced by the good but not as good Outland-though Dilbert did come along in 1989 to pick up some of that slack).
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Post by brutalis on Sept 21, 2020 14:34:23 GMT -5
I truly miss the old days of comic strips collected in cheap/affordable paperback collections for kids and adults to enjoy. I grew up with sporadic newspapes as my folks would buy a cheap 1 month subscription and then go months without during the year.
Much of my exposure to strips was yellowed and used paperbacks from yard sales or the thrift shops. Peanuts. Wizard of Id, Pogo, Marmaduke, Family Circle, Dennis the Menace, B.C., and the like. Dragging those with me during family trips/gatherings, vacations, doctor visits and to school as quick, easy, funny entertainment was part of my youth.
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Post by dbutler69 on Sept 21, 2020 15:07:11 GMT -5
I truly miss the old days of comic strips collected in cheap/affordable paperback collections for kids and adults to enjoy. I grew up with sporadic newspapes as my folks would buy a cheap 1 month subscription and then go months without during the year. Much of my exposure to strips was yellowed and used paperbacks from yard sales or the thrift shops. Peanuts. Wizard of Id, Pogo, Marmaduke, Family Circle, Dennis the Menace, B.C., and the like. Dragging those with me during family trips/gatherings, vacations, doctor visits and to school as quick, easy, funny entertainment was part of my youth. I had tons of old Peanuts paperbacks from garage sales. I think a lot of them were from the 60's and even 50's. 've been reading through The Complete Peanuts a bit recently, and it brings back goo memories when I come upon a strip that I actually remember reading from one of of those old paperbacks from many years ago. And yes, I also had the first eight Garfield books (bought new) as well as a bunch of other paperback collections of comic strips. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 21, 2020 15:08:49 GMT -5
My all-time favorite comic strips are Calvin & Hobbes and Bloome County, but I was also a big fan of Peanuts, Far Side, Garfield, Heathcliff, and Dilbert, plus also read (and had the occasional paperback collection of) B.C., Wizard of Id, Shoe, Outlnd, Dilbert, Opus, Herman, Hagar the Horrible, and Mother Goose and Grimm. I never got into the serialized stuff like Prince Valiant much. For me, the best years for comic strips were 1985-1992, and to narrow it down a little bit more, 1985-1989 (since Bloome County ended in 1989, to be replaced by the good but not as good Outland-though Dilbert did come along in 1989 to pick up some of that slack). It was definitely a good time for comic strips. I actually spent the money to get a newspaper subscription as an undergrad (when I had other uses for money) so I could read Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side. |
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Post by tarkintino on Sept 21, 2020 17:04:09 GMT -5
There was a time when the daily Spider-Man strip was on fire. Arguably the best adventure strip in the business when it started in the late 70s--  |
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Post by tarkintino on Sept 21, 2020 17:12:47 GMT -5
The IDW Star Trek collections are great. Most of the art and writing is top notch. The second volume, however, shows how little Paramount cared about the franchise at the time. The art at times is below amateur level. Like High-School-Art-Class-level. Most disturbing is that the downgrade in art happens around the time of Wrath of Khan... It gets better, but was eventually cancelled. EDIT: Also there is a third volume of UK newspaper comics. That Star Trek strip art....horribly amateurish. That's what happens when the PTB want to go cheap, as there is likely no other reason to have lowballed a major property in that way. I would have paid Tom Sutton--the artist for DC's first Star Trek title (1984-88) the bigger bucks to illustrate the strip. He was accurate and popular on the title, so it might have been possible to draw monthly readers over to the strip--assuming the strip lasted into the monthly's era for the association. |
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Post by beccabear67 on Sept 21, 2020 20:27:32 GMT -5
It might be Garfield that really brought in those long-length collections of strips, I remember there being half a dozen or so Garfield books on the best sellers lists for paperbacks circa 1979-82. I had some of the regular paperback format collections for Peanuts, it seemed to work well in the format, Don Martin too, but a lot of other strips just weren't as adaptable.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 21, 2020 22:05:30 GMT -5
It might be Garfield that really brought in those long-length collections of strips, I remember there being half a dozen or so Garfield books on the best sellers lists for paperbacks circa 1979-82. I had some of the regular paperback format collections for Peanuts, it seemed to work well in the format, Don Martin too, but a lot of other strips just weren't as adaptable. Peanuts had some tabloid books, as did Pogo. The mass market paperbacks were fairly exclusive to the gag strips, though a few adventure strips did get some. There have been various book colelctions, going back to the turn of the 19th Century. The larger size reprints came in around the late 70s. Garfield wasn't the first; but, it was one of the newer strips that greatly benefited from it. Andrews McMeel, which is also a syndicate, were the ones who were mainly putting out those collections. There were collections of Shoe and For Better For Worse around the same time or before Garfield. While I would agree that there were some terrific strips in the 80s, there was a lot of great material, in a wider variety, in the 70s. It was a transitional decade, as some older strips bowed out or fell out of favor and new ones entered. When I was a kid, we had Peanuts, Doonesbury, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, The Wizard of Id, BC, Cathy, Alley Oop, Mike Nomad & Steve Roper, Steve Canyon, Captain Easy, Tiger, Frank & Ernest, Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, Dennis the Menace, Apartment 3G, Andy Capp and larger papers had things like Prince Valiant, The Phantom, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Secret Agent Corrigan and some other classic adventure strips, plus other humor and soap opera strips. A lot fo the adventure strips were pushed out, with the shrinking comic page ad soap opera followed. Gag strips became simplified. While I loved getting Calvin & Hobbes when I was in college (the Chicago Tribune was an early carrier of it and people on my floor used to post it and I then bought the first collection, when it came out, at the campus bookstore), I missed Alley Oop for humor and adventure, as well as Short Ribs, a humor strip that bowed out when I was in junior high. The 80s strips, fr me, were Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, occasionally The Far Side (I find it a bit hit and miss, at times), Foxtrot, For Better For Worse, and Shoe (especially the summer, when Skyler would end up at boot camp instead of summer camp), Peanuts (though the glory days were the 60s and early 70s). I did like Kudzu and Funky Winkerbean, and LuAnn had moments. I stumbled into Brian Bassett's Adan, in the early 90s and it was fun, while it lasted, but not as widely syndicated. Rose is a Rose is a good one that came along later. Love Get Fuzzy, for the modern era. |
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Post by tarkintino on Sept 22, 2020 5:56:16 GMT -5
It might be Garfield that really brought in those long-length collections of strips, I remember there being half a dozen or so Garfield books on the best sellers lists for paperbacks circa 1979-82. I had some of the regular paperback format collections for Peanuts, it seemed to work well in the format, Don Martin too, but a lot of other strips just weren't as adaptable. Peanuts was one of the first to have such collections--in hardback, such as the series titled Peanuts Classics published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970. My family had a couple of the books and they contained daily and Sunday strips, giving any reader a very deep dive into all things Peanuts from the classic period.
You mentioned Don Martin--he and other artists from MAD had a number of novels based on original work, or reprints from the magazine, most notably the Dave Berg and Al Jaffee novels, which were quite popular. MAD had work reprinted as collections as early as 1958's MAD for Keeps, so they might be among the earliest, most consistent comics or strips to be collected/reprinted.
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Post by dbutler69 on Sept 22, 2020 11:49:40 GMT -5
I remember opening the newspaper one day in the late 70s and discovering a World's Greatest Super-Heroes strip featuring the DC heroes (the JL of A in particular)... it only ran briefly in our local papers and I am not sure if it has ever been collected, but because of that it is one of those strips I have always wanted to read. I think it is the elusive unattainable quality of its circumstances rather than the quality of the actual strip that has drawn me to it over the years. -M I don't remember ever seeing that back in the day, and I only learned about this strip a few months ago. I tried to find out if it had ever been collected, but couldn't find any evidence of it having been. |
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Post by beccabear67 on Sept 22, 2020 12:13:35 GMT -5
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