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The LOAC Road to 200: February’s LOAC Wheel of Fortune

By on February 17, 2019 in General News, LOAC Essentials

As promised when we announced the drive toward our two hundredth release, we’ve loaded a handful of our previous books into the LOAC Wheel of Fortune, given it a spin, and will offer a few thoughts and recollections regarding the book selected by the wheel.

There are a number of ways to view a backlist as robust as ours: last month we spun the wheel based on only our superhero releases. This time we’re taking a different approach by spinning on all the books previously released in the month of February. Since we have our backlist captured in a table, it was a simple matter to sort on the second month, yielding this list:

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Episode 013 with special guest Don McGregor

By on February 4, 2019 in Caniff, Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, The Library of American Comics & EuroComics Podcast

Dean Mullaney and Kurtis Findlay are back for another episode of the Library of American Comics & EuroComics Podcast!

In this special episode, Dean and Kurtis invite Don McGregor to talk about this favorite classic comic strips, including Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon and Dick Tracy!

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The “LOAC 2018 Year in Review” Sandwich: A Ten-Book Filling Between Two CANYONs

By on January 28, 2019 in “Cap” Stubbs & Tippie, Baron Bean, Dick Tracy, For Better or For Worse, King Features, Little Orphan Annie, Skippy, Star Hawks, Star Wars, Steve Canyon, Superman

Early in each new year we look back at the prior twelve months in LOAC-Land. It provides our readers with a handy one-stop checklist of our most recent books — and it helps remind us of what we were up to all those months ago!

As we tallied 2018’s Library of American Comics output, we were surprised to see we had both begun and ended the year with a book of never-before-repeated Steve Canyon comics. We kicked off January, 2018 with the release of Volume 8 …

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LOAC Road to 200 #1-5

By on January 24, 2019 in Little Orphan Annie, Scorchy Smith, Terry and the Pirates

By the end of 2019, The Library of American Comics will have 200 books under its belt! If you have been following us on social media, we have started a retrospective of all 200 of our books, starting with our premiere effort—Terry and the Pirates, Vol. 1.  Every day or so, we will post a new image online, but we will also be collecting them here in small installments.

I could think of no better strip to launch the Library of American Comics than Milton Caniff’s masterpiece. Terry is the most influential strip in the history of the medium and, needless to say, my personal favorite. And to win the Eisner Award for our first release — it doesn’t really get any better than that! —Dean

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Our Double Feature: The LOAC Road to 200 and The LOAC Wheel of Fortune!

By on January 12, 2019 in Batman, General News, Miss Fury, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman

As you may have seen if you visit our various social media platforms, during 2019 The Library of American Comics is on pace to release its 200th volume. We call this the “LOAC Road to 200,” and we plan to celebrate our fast-approaching milestone in a number of ways as this still-new-year unfolds.

One new feature we’re adding to this space to mark the LOAC Road to 200: our very own LOAC Wheel of Fortune! Each month we’ll load an electronic wheel with a selection of our past titles, give it a virtual spin, see which title the wheel selects, and spend a bit of time discussing it.

The arrival of the “big” 2018 Christmas gift I received from my siblings (as discussed here) put superheroes in my mind for two reasons. Reason the First: Without those 1970s Marvel Comics letters pages, in which Dean and I regularly appeared, offering words of comment about the Marvel mags of the day, the chain of events that helped create The Library of American Comics may have never come to pass. Reason the Second: Roughly ten percent of our two-hundred-title output is devoted to such characters — from the comic-strip versions of DC’s “trinity” (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman) to the long-running newspaper feature headlined by Marvel’s most popular character, the Amazing Spider-Man, to the Bell Syndicate’s Miss Fury (the first lady costumed hero created by a female cartoonist, Tarpe Mills). Factor in that one of our first 2019 releases on the LOAC Road to 200 will be the fifth volume of Spider-Man and it made lots of sense (to me, at least) to load the LOAC superhero books into the wheel …

… Give ‘er a spin, and see which book came up! In this inaugural spin, it was —

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Notes on the Canwellian Holidays

By on January 5, 2019 in General News

A Happy 2019 to all our readers and visitors to this space!

Later this month, as separate postings, we’ll be giving the LOAC Wheel of Fortune its first spin and we’ll present our annual Year in Review feature, as well. But first (which is a funny way to enter a room), here’s a little show-and-tell about how I spent my waning days of December, 2018 …

My wife, Krista, and I alternate years in terms of with whom we spend the holidays: odd-numbered years it’s with her family, even-numbered years with mine. In this case we packed our bags and jetted south to the Sunshine State for a week with my mother, also seeing my Florida-based sister, her husband, and their daughter in the process. Krista is the daredevil in our family — I adhere to a line by Ray Bradbury I read long ago. I’ll paraphrase it as: “Why do they call it terra firma? Because the more firma, the less terror” — and as a Christmas present, my sister arranged a meeting in Kissimmee so my wife and niece, Haley, could try a ride known as The Slingshot. The operators claim, “This innovative Slingshot amusement device is by far one the most exciting vertical amusement rides available today. Slingshot passengers are catapulted vertically at over 100 miles per hour …” It looks like this, from a distance:

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Six Decades of Christmas in the Comics

By on December 23, 2018 in For Better or For Worse, General News, Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates

We could think of no better way to wish all our readers Happy Holidays than to share the Christmas offerings from a half-dozen strips, each representing a decade of newspaper comics.

 

Leading off, from the tag-end of 1939, our favorite of favorites, Terry and the Pirates, with this Yuletide entry from the story in which Pat, April, and Captain Blaze first meet Singh-Singh.

Representing the 1940s, from 1948, Little Orphan Annie spends yet another Christmas away from her beloved “Daddy.”

And the young married Yokums get the hint of bad news, as only Al Capp can deliver it, in this December 25th 1952 installment of Li’l Abner:

A run of Christmas strips wouldn’t be complete without visiting the Peanuts gang. Here’s everyone’s favorite beagle, in a wryly charming 1962 outing from Sparky Schulz:

Here’s a more acerbic take on the season from Johnny Hart in this 1973 B.C. daily:

And we close in the 1980s, with one of our more contemporary favorites: here’s Lynn Johnston, clucking up a storm in For Better or For Worse from Christmas Day, 1985:

And if these strips alone don’t put you in the holiday mood, we’ll close with this old favorite from postings past, brought back by popular demand:

Best wishes, one and all, ’til we meet again in 2019!

 

–Dean, Lorraine, Kurtis, and Bruce

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