Talented and ground-breaking comics creator/editor/historian Trina Robbins has passed away, at age 85, on Wednesday, April 10, 2024. At LOAC, Trina is best remembered for curating our two-volume reprinting of the Miss Fury Sunday-page series, featuring the first newspaper comics female costumed hero, as written and drawn by Tarpe Mills: Click each image for an isolated view More recently, she teamed with artist/inker extraordinaire Steve Leialoha to produce a page of Dragon Lady paper dolls as part of our program for Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection (you can see the result of Trina ..read more

Bill Chadbourne, that stout friend of LOAC, gave us a broad range of material from his personal collection that we’ve been sharing with you in recent months through this series. Last time, we explored Will Eisner’s P*S magazine, produced for the U.S. military. It seemed sensible to do a slight shift, to a more generalized patriotic theme, though one that still contains a military flavor, as you’ll see below. Let’s start with a handful of items Chad provided that are connected with America’s Cartoonist in Chief, Milton Caniff. First up (at right, below): a quick note Milton penned to Chad relat ..read more

There were pleased cries and exclamations among Library of American Comics personnel at the tag-end of February with the release of this year’s Eisner Awards Hall of Fame inductees. While four inductees remain to be determined in April voting, there are nineteen talented persons who will enter the HoF in 2024, with a half-dozen of them connected in various ways to comic strips or their preservation. In the ranks of publishers, Gary Groth‘s Fantagraphics Books has a decades-long history of reprinting newspaper features, from the understated humor of Peanuts to the swords-and-chivalry of Print V ..read more

Yes, indeed, we do! In fact, for a couple different reasons, 2024 is a comic-strip-history banner year for birthdays. Ninety-five years ago the adventure strip era began in January 1929, with the advent of the Nowlan/Calkins Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. and Hal Foster’s debut depicting Edgar Rice Burroughs’s immortal Tarzan! We reprinted that first Foster work as an LOAC Essentials volume in 2015: Today, it’s not always easy to understand that “darkest Africa” was still a mystery to most Americans, and Tarzan was so popular he would spend decades conquering every mass medium; this bal ..read more

Had to share this with you! Today a package arrived on my snowy doorstep — it contained the final two volumes of our reformatting of the earliest books in the Dick Tracy series. Woo-hoo! I still have the original, smaller sized IDW-produced Tracy volumes standing right next to their new, full-sized LOAC counterparts. This is how it looks on my bookshelves, with our six re-releases now in place: Here’s a tip of the Red Sox cap to LOAC’s guiding light, Dean Mullaney — notice how he mimicked the color scheme of the spines of the IDW books in our new releases. He’s a wily one, that Mullaney! With ..read more

A year ago we began this occasional feature with What Came Next (Scorchy Smith). The goal of each installment is to provide a look at the strips that came immediately after the last ones printed in some of our Library of American Comics volumes. It seemed fitting to begin this new year following up what we started three hundred sixty-five days ago, and we decided to feature an enduring favorite (our collection of 1946-48 strips was a 2011 Eisner Award nominee!), Bob Montana’s Archie. We produced a pair of volumes featuring Riverdale’s most familiar faces during the 1960s, covering th ..read more

We don’t often ballyhoo news from other areas within the comic strip universe — we know that the folks originating a new project are effective at getting out their word — but we just received this from our friends at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICL&M), and we think it’s so exciting, we wanted to make sure you’re in-the-know. Here’s the scoop, just as we received it: Upcoming exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum: Depicting Mexico and Modernism: Gordo by Gus Arriola // Representando México y el modernismo: Gordo de Gus Arriola  (Columbus ..read more

LOAC’s longtime friend, Bill Chadbourne, has provided us with a wide range of material from his personal collection, and we’ve been sharing samples throughout this series. Last time we explored some of the comics-related books Bill provided to us. Now we’ll continue that exploration, including one extra-special book you may have never seen before. Chad provided us with his first edition, Simon & Shuster copy of Stephen Becker’s 1959 Comic Art in America. Unlike Martin Sheridan’s light-hearted Comics and Their Creators – which we previously sampled in this space – Becker seeks to put a more ..read more

Let’s continue our occasional series – begun here and continued here, here, and here – spotlighting material shared with us by that longtime Friend of LOAC, Bill Chadbourne. In our fourth installment we spotlighted some of the books Chad had shared with us related to the silver screen, but of course he’s sent a variety of books focusing on comic strips and their creators. The slimmest of these volumes, and visually the most delightful, is a slim 2006 hardcover from our friends at Fantagraphics Books. Top Hats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson features scores of color and black-and-whi ..read more

With the Spooky Season hard upon us, we thought you might enjoy a Hallowe’en-themed fantasy comics page. We opted to go back seventy-four years, to October 31, 1949. The adventure and soap opera strips of the day were too busy unfolding their ongoing stories to pause and mark the holiday — with, as you’ll see, the exception of The Adventures of Patsy, which found a way to weave a holiday feel into the narrative — but several gag-a-day strips got into the (heh-heh-heh) spirit, including stalwarts such as The Berrys and Priscilla’s Pop, as well as lesser-known strips like Honey and Hank, by Bern ..read more