As newspaper comic strips continue to lose presence because of their host organism’s decline in readership, we’ve decided to ramp up our efforts to preserve the classics of the form. We previously announced LOAC Essentials, our new series that will reprint, in yearly volumes, the rare early daily newspaper strips that are essential to comics history, seminal strips that are unique creations in their own right, while also significantly contributing to the advancement of the medium.
Advance copies of the first volume—Baron Bean 1916 by George Herriman—arrived today and we’re thrilled with how it printed. Here’s Art Director Lorraine Turner holding the book in front of the shelves where it will eventually sit.
We’re happy with the book for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it has the “feel” we were shooting for. One of the inspirations for the format (11.5″ wide by 4..25″ high) was seeing Harold Gray’s personal set of proofbooks for Little Orphan Annie. Instead of the strips being 6-up on a sheet (the entire week of dailies), as is so often the case with syndicate proofs, Gray had his dailies bound in yearly volumes—one strip per page. It’s an enticing format that helps us at least in some small way to have an experience similar to what newspaper buyers had when the strips were new and part of their daily routine.
We chose a high-quality newsprint for LOAC Essentials so that the book has the”feel” and “look” of reading a bound collection of comics that were clipped from actual newspapers. It’s a sensory thing. If this is indeed the Golden Age of Newspaper Strip reprints then we’re going to have as much fun with it as we can.
We think you will, too, when this first Essentials is on sale in about a month.