In our ongoing series of interviews with publishers who are keeping comics history alive, we go oversized this week. Since it started publishing reprints of classic newspaper comics 20 years ago with Little Nemo, Sunday Press reimagined what a reprint could be. These massively oversized books try to immerse us in the original scale and rich color of the earliest Sunday pages. Sunday Press has applied its format to Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Milt Gross, Gasoline Alley, among others. Peter Maresca is founder of Sunday Press Books. We spent an hour with Peter recently recalling his background in comics and tech, the origins of Sunday Press Books with the Little Nemo project, and his thoughts on keeping comics history relevant for a new generation of readers and creators.
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The Year in Pre-Code Comic Book Reprints, 2025
I am an EC chauvinist. I should cop to this before rounding up the notable pre-code comic book reprints from the last year. For decades now I have been devouring the many crime, horror, sci-fi, and romance comics that were part of the glut of adult titles after WWII, in part because they represented the unrealized potential of the comics format in post-war America. This was a real pop culture moment. War veterans ate a steady diet of comic books “over there” and seemed primed to follow the medium into more nuanced and adult storylines in the 40s and 50s. Likewise overseas, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées were on a similar path towards the popular, if not literary, mainstream. But in the U.S. that evolution was derailed and slammed into reverse by anti-comics crusades and the industry’s own “Comics Code Authority” in 1954. Self-censorship effectively arrested the medium in pre-adolescence, focused the industry on anodyne morality tales and pubescent fantasies of super-human prowess for at least a couple of decades.
Continue reading2025 Comic Reprints: Rediscovering Lost Classics
We have already reviewed some of the major 2025 comic reprint releases from major publishers: the reissue of Sunday Press’s Society is Nix, the anniversary celebrations of Peanuts, Hagar and Beetle Bailey as well as Cathy, and the resurfacing if Rea Irvin’s The Smythes. But this year saw a number of self-publishers bring back everything from Sky Masters of the Space Patrol to Milt Gross. I wanted to devote one round-up that highlights these laudable efforts and the often-obscure treasures they have unearthed.
Continue readingShelf Scan: Celebrating Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Hagar and Donald
Before Thanksgiving and the shopping season overcomes us, let’s make sure we start our annual Panels & Prose quick takes on recent books for comic strip fans. The pile of new releases is high and teetering, so let’s break this down into several posts this week and next. Today, we handle the celebratory and anniversary collections involving Peanuts, Hagar, Beetle Baley. For a hands-on look at these books, look for the video “Quick Flip” at the end.
Continue readingAlley Oop’s BFF: Chris Aruffo Reanimates the Caveman
Chris Aruffo may not have planned to be a publisher, but somehow he managed to accomplish something that others couldn’t. In just a few years he published the full run of V.T. Hamlin’s Alley Oop dailies as well as Dave Graue’s run. More than that, he made the series affordable and used pristine source material for best possible rendering of this beautifully designed strip. Chris sat down with me recently to reflect on that experience. We discuss his history with Alley Oop, locating good sources, why this series comes in so many different dimensions, and can reprinting old comics make business sense? But with this interview we launch a series of interviews with reprint publishers where we brainstrom ways that 20th Century comic strips can be made relevant and inspiring to the next generations of comics fans and creators.
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Panels & Prose 