IDW reprinting US newspaper comic strips

[8of5]

I don't think this has been mentioned here yet: A couple of days ago I was browsing Amazon and found a new listing for a book from IDW titled Star Trek Volume 1. It's not the omnibus of the ongoing series with the same title though.

Listed as the authors are Thomas Warkentin, Sharman DiVorio, and Ron Harris - All of which worked on the 1979 to 1983 (Star Trek: The Motion Picture era) Star Trek comic strip, which was published in newspapers in the US. IDW's Chris Ryall has confirmed this is indeed a omnibus of those strips (and will have a better title), part of IDW's Library of American Comics archive series.

Excited? I am! It's great that these are finally being rescued form obscurity. Now we'll just need IDW to start up a Library of British Comics to get the old UK strips out as well!

 

[ALF]

Yeah, that sounds great. Newspaper comics used to be really fun.

 

[bok2384]

That's wonderful news, I'll certainly be getting them. It might also explain why that excellent website with all the US and UK comic strips has gone down. A real shame as I loved that site, though you would have thought that the UK strips would be allowed. Hey-ho.

 

[8of5]

That's wonderful news, I'll certainly be getting them. It might also explain why that excellent website with all the US and UK comic strips has gone down. A real shame as I loved that site, though you would have thought that the UK strips would be allowed. Hey-ho.

Well if we're optimistic we could take as a sign they Are working on the UK strips too I'd be even more excited if they were, as the UK strips had some fantastic art. They're also a bit more interesting as an artifact of early Trek tie-ins; the early stories share the same design teleportation chamber as the first few gold key comics.

 

[Therin of Andor]

IDW's Chris Ryall has confirmed this is indeed a omnibus of those strips (and will have a better title), part of IDW's Library of American Comics archive series.

I have the Nostalgiaworld (incomplete) paper collections and Rich Handley's CD-ROM, which he created after collecting them all, but will enjoy have a complete print version.

What is extremely cool is that the multi-racial crew of TMP is so well represented. As I posted when Christopher's "Ex Machina" was due:


Rec deck aliens by Therin of Andor, on Flickr

 

[Fer]

Those were great! I'm looking forward to it.

 

[bbailey861]

This is very good news. I will be getting this one - and am also hoping the UK strips will be given the omnibus treatment as well.

 

[BillJ]

Hopefully those having their work reprinted will get paid this time around...

 

[Christopher]

Amazon's entry has a typo. The second author's name is Sharman DiVono, not DiVorio.

Hopefully those having their work reprinted will get paid this time around...

Yes, that will be the best reason for those who have the CD-ROM (or who've downloaded them from the Internet) to pay for them in book form.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I'll believe in the publication of this book when I have it in my hands and not one minute before. I recall John Ordover explaining that he'd investigated reprinting the comic strips but that it proved impossible to sort out the legalities because some contracts had been lost and some creators couldn't be found.

 

[mindx2]

Looking forward to these as well. I have the Nostalgia World editions as well, except for issue #4. I really enjoyed reading these and was never sure how many strips I missed reading. Hopefully, this will be comprehensive and complete.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I am about to add Rich Handley's update on this exciting project! I suspected he was helping it along, and he's been adding to my Facebook discussion about it.

Watch this space!

Here we go, reprinted with his permission:

Rich Handley says:
From 1979 to 1983, the Los Angeles Times published a daily Star Trek comic strip that ran four years to the day. A decade prior, a British Trek strip had run overseas from 1969 to 1973, in the pages of three magazines: TV21, Joe 90 and Valiant. Despite the popularity of the various Star Trek comic books published in the years since, these eight years' of material have remained largely overlooked. I spent a decade tracking it all down, throughout the '90s, and am probably one of the only people in the world who has a complete set of both runs (and I say that without engaging in hyperbole--in 20 years of being an active geek, I've never met another person who could say that).

I wrote an article on the subject for Star Trek Communicator magazine a number of years ago, followed by another article for Star Trek magazine, which brought the strips back onto fans' radar--or, in many cases, onto their radar for the first time, as I've had a lot of people tell me they never even knew the strips existed. As a result, fans have since been trying hard to find copies of these lost gems, many of which are quite good.

I've tried a number of times to convince publishers with Trek licenses (Pocket Books, Wildstorm Comics, GIT Corp.) to reprint the entire series, offering to provide them my strips for scanning, and to write introductory material for the project. Each time, the project looked good... and then fizzled, for a variety of reasons.

But now, Dean Mullaney, at IDW's Library of American Comics, is reprinting the entire series, starting with the U.S. strips, and I'll be writing some sort of introductory material for at least the first volume. Now that the project has been revealed publicly by Amazon and is being discussed by fans, I can finally say that. I've been sitting on it for a while, so as not to alienate Dean or IDW.

The plan is for four volumes--two for the U.S. strips, followed by two for the U.K. strips. As someone who spent all those years tracking down the entire set (more than 1,440 pages of material), I'm especially pleased. Finally, IDW is pulling off what others failed to do--and given Dean's determination to give these books the treatment they deserve, I'm very glad that it took this long. The material's in good hands, and it was worth a decade of hearing "sorry, we can't reprint them after all" to see the reprints handled by the right people.

With pics: http://www.hassleinbooks.com/IDW_star_trek_warkentin_voilume-1.html

 

[Relayer1]

I just hope that if they blow up any panels to make it visually more interesting than pages full of rows of newspaper 'clippings' they take the trouble to get the enlargements re-inked so that you don't just get a blow up with really thick lines looking like it's been drawn with a giant wax crayon.

Just a pet peeve of mine...

 

[Therin of Andor]

so that you don't just get a blow up with really thick lines looking like it's been drawn with a giant wax crayon.

The colour Sunday strips are larger than the b/w dailies.

I thought most of the early LA Times strips reprinted very nicely in the Nostalgiaworld compilation issues, and in Rich's various magazine articles and the CD-ROM. It was before the day of strips being shrunk down to fit more advertising.

 

[Christopher]

Still, some of the strips available online reveal flaws in the source material, like the occasional panel being lower in quality than the rest as though it were pasted in from a separate source. And not all the Sunday strips are available in their full, half-page form. So if the books are printed from those same files, the quality won't be as good as if they'd recovered the original masters (or whatever they're called in print).

 

[Therin of Andor]

Still, some of the strips available online reveal flaws in the source material

I see no real problem there. That's part of their charm.

Rich said, over on my FB page, re the CD files he created: "Those were EXTREMELY amateurish compared to what IDW has planned."

the quality won't be as good as if they'd recovered the original masters (or whatever they're called in print).

Of course, some of the original masters were supposedly damaged at Nostalgiaworld while on loan in the 80s. Or was the "warehouse fire" debunked?

 

[Christopher]

Been thinking... although on the one hand I definitely want to see these strips preserved in their exact original form for archival purposes, on the other hand I wouldn't mind seeing some editing/adaptation for book form. After all, since not every newspaper carried both the daily and Sunday strips, there was a lot of redundant storytelling; a lot of the Monday strips were just truncated recaps of the Sunday ones. So it might be nice if, along with the straight-up reprinting, there were also a version that edited the stories into smoother comic-book narratives -- maybe even colored the daily strips.

 

[Relayer1]

I'm still hugely in favour of redoing, improving and tweaking the originals of most things with the developments in technology.

Even after having seen what George did to Star Wars...

 

[Plaristes]

Very excited by this news!

 

[timothy]

This is why I love IDW.