Talented and ground-breaking comics creator/editor/historian Trina Robbins has passed away, at age 85, on Wednesday, April 10, 2024. At LOAC, Trina is best remembered for curating our two-volume reprinting of the Miss Fury Sunday-page series, featuring the first newspaper comics female costumed hero, as written and drawn by Tarpe Mills: Click each image for an isolated view More recently, she teamed with artist/inker extraordinaire Steve Leialoha to produce a page of Dragon Lady paper dolls as part of our program for Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection (you can see the result of Trina ..read more

Bill Chadbourne, that stout friend of LOAC, gave us a broad range of material from his personal collection that we’ve been sharing with you in recent months through this series. Last time, we explored Will Eisner’s P*S magazine, produced for the U.S. military. It seemed sensible to do a slight shift, to a more generalized patriotic theme, though one that still contains a military flavor, as you’ll see below. Let’s start with a handful of items Chad provided that are connected with America’s Cartoonist in Chief, Milton Caniff. First up (at right, below): a quick note Milton penned to Chad relat ..read more

Yes, indeed, we do! In fact, for a couple different reasons, 2024 is a comic-strip-history banner year for birthdays. Ninety-five years ago the adventure strip era began in January 1929, with the advent of the Nowlan/Calkins Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. and Hal Foster’s debut depicting Edgar Rice Burroughs’s immortal Tarzan! We reprinted that first Foster work as an LOAC Essentials volume in 2015: Today, it’s not always easy to understand that “darkest Africa” was still a mystery to most Americans, and Tarzan was so popular he would spend decades conquering every mass medium; this bal ..read more

Bill Chadbourne, that longtime friend of LOAC, provided us with material from his personal collection that we began sharing with you last year. Amongst these articles was a single issue, from April, 1971, of P*S, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly. As comics fans, the odds are good you know why Chad would have kept this digest-size Department of Defense publication for over five decades: it’s a representative sample of the magazine that contained Will (The Spirit) Eisner’s artwork from 1951 through 1971. While P*S launched almost a year after the start of the Korean War, its roots extended ba ..read more

If you read our Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim Champagne Edition series, you may remember reading my longtime friend Doug Thornsjo’s excellent article about the Universal Studios Flash movie serials. Doug has forgotten more about those classic old Hollywood chapterplays than I’ll ever know, so when the time came in the Champagne series to cover Flash’s original big-screen turns, Doug was the perfect person to lead that discussion. What you may not know about Doug is that he’s a writer and artist who has occasionally turned his attention to creating comics of his own. His first forays into comics ..read more

A year ago we began this occasional feature with What Came Next (Scorchy Smith). The goal of each installment is to provide a look at the strips that came immediately after the last ones printed in some of our Library of American Comics volumes. It seemed fitting to begin this new year following up what we started three hundred sixty-five days ago, and we decided to feature an enduring favorite (our collection of 1946-48 strips was a 2011 Eisner Award nominee!), Bob Montana’s Archie. We produced a pair of volumes featuring Riverdale’s most familiar faces during the 1960s, covering th ..read more

It’s that time once again, with the holiday season fast upon us and hopes riding high for prosperity and pleasure throughout the New Year. Everyone here at The Library of American Comics is wishing our readers, visitors, and social media friends the happiest of holidays! As a gift to you, here’s a Fantasy Comics Page from Christmas Day, 1948 — a mere seventy-five years ago! (Click on any multi-panel strip for an isolated view of it.) We hope to see you again early in 2024 ..read more

We don’t often ballyhoo news from other areas within the comic strip universe — we know that the folks originating a new project are effective at getting out their word — but we just received this from our friends at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICL&M), and we think it’s so exciting, we wanted to make sure you’re in-the-know. Here’s the scoop, just as we received it: Upcoming exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum: Depicting Mexico and Modernism: Gordo by Gus Arriola // Representando México y el modernismo: Gordo de Gus Arriola  (Columbus ..read more

LOAC’s longtime friend, Bill Chadbourne, has provided us with a wide range of material from his personal collection, and we’ve been sharing samples throughout this series. Last time we explored some of the comics-related books Bill provided to us. Now we’ll continue that exploration, including one extra-special book you may have never seen before. Chad provided us with his first edition, Simon & Shuster copy of Stephen Becker’s 1959 Comic Art in America. Unlike Martin Sheridan’s light-hearted Comics and Their Creators – which we previously sampled in this space – Becker seeks to put a more ..read more

Let’s continue our occasional series – begun here and continued here, here, and here – spotlighting material shared with us by that longtime Friend of LOAC, Bill Chadbourne. In our fourth installment we spotlighted some of the books Chad had shared with us related to the silver screen, but of course he’s sent a variety of books focusing on comic strips and their creators. The slimmest of these volumes, and visually the most delightful, is a slim 2006 hardcover from our friends at Fantagraphics Books. Top Hats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson features scores of color and black-and-whi ..read more