Press Release
Terry and the Pirates: the George Wunder Years: Volume One 1946-1948; ISBN# 978-1-61345-041-3; now for the first time George Wunder’s first two years of the Terry dailies and Sundays continuing the stories and characters immortalized by Milton Caniff; 9 x 12 inches, landscape format; deluxe hardcover; black and white and color; dust jacket, printed laminated cover and end leaves, fully digitally restored; historical essay; $60.
(San Diego, CA; January 30, 2009) — IDW’s successful Complete Dick Tracy series is getting bigger…and better. CEO Ted Adams, who initiated the series and edited its first six volumes, has announced that Tracy is being folded into IDW’s Library of American Comics imprint, alongside Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie, and other classic newspaper strip titles.
Eisner award-winner Dean Mullaney is assuming the helm of the series with volume 7 of Chester Gould’s masterpiece, covering more than 600 chronological dailies and Sundays from 1941 to 1943. “This is a dream come true for me,” says Mullaney. “Dick Tracy was the first newspaper strip I remember reading as a child. Over 46 years, Chester Gould’s bold stories and iconic, diagrammatical drawing style created a unified whole that put Tracy in the pantheon of classic comic strips.”
Last night at the Baltimore Comic-Con, the Harvey Awards – the industry’s oldest and most respected – were handed out for outstanding achievement in 20 different categories. It’s the morning after (or afternoon depending on what time zone you are in), and Major Spoilers has the rundown of the winners.
The big winners of the night came from DC Comics, with All Star Superman bringing in three awards and The Perry Bible Fellowship bringing in two. Congrats go out to all the winners!
One of these days I would really love for this little site to win an Eisner Award – that would be a most awesome achievement. Until that day, congrats to Newsarama for winning the award in the Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism, and congrats to everyone else who picked up one of these coveted awards last night.
IDW Publishing has announced plans to publish the entire run of Noel Sickles Scorchy Smith series that ran in newspapers from 1933-1936.
During the three years that Noel Sickles wrote and illustrated Scorchy Smith, he revolutionized the field when he moved away from the heavy black outlines predominant in the comic strips of the day. He adopted storytelling techniques from the motion pictures, while relying on brushwork to create a looser, chairoscuro representation of people, action, and scenery. Pete Hamill observed, “Sickles was the first artist to use the brush boldly, in an impressionistic way.”
“Scorchy Smith became a primer from which a multitude of comic book and strip artists cribbed mercilessly for decades,” writes Jim Steranko in his introduction to the book. Longtime Spider-Man artist John Romita Sr. says, “The whole industry was copying from Sickles.”
One of the joys of visiting my grandparents as a kid was going through the huge collection of old comic strip reprints and devouring each and every page. I never saw Scorchy Smith, but the art of Noel Sickles is pretty cool.
This collection is being put together under the watchful eye of Dean Mullaney, who was the editor and designer behind The Complete Terry and the Pirates collection that earned Mullaney two Eisner Award nominations.
Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles is scheduled to be released on July 20, 2008.
The Executive Committees of the Harvey Awards and the Baltimore Comic-Con have announced the nominees for the 2008 Harvey Awards.
Named in honor of the late Harvey Kurtzman, one of the industry’s most innovative talents, the Harvey Awards recognize outstanding work in comics and sequential art. They will be presented September 27, 2008 in Baltimore, MD, in conjunction with the Baltimore Comic-Con.
Take the jump for the complete list of nominees.