PW: Golden Age comic strips make a comeback

Return to Gasoline Alley - 6/18/2007 - Publishers Weekly: "From Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to Patrick O’Donnell’s Mutts, comic strip reprints have been a healthy category for over half a century, with such comical perennials as Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side among the all-time bestsellers of any kind. Interest in handy collections of current newspaper strips remains strong; Andrews McMeel, long the home of Doonesbury and Cathy, continues its reign as the dominant player in the market with such current hits as Scott Adam’s Dilbert and Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy. But the current boom in graphic novels has created a “perfect storm” of both commercial and historical interest, where smaller publishers are taking advantage of an expanding market for legendary but long unavailable comic strips that had their heyday 40 or even 100 years ago.

The classic strip reprint trend probably started in 2004 with The Complete Peanuts from Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books, best known as a house for cutting-edge alternative cartoonists such as Dan Clowes. But today, 30%–40% of Fantagraphics’ publishing output consists of vintage comics material, most notably classic comic strips including Peanuts, Popeye and soon Pogo."