The 2019 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominations have been announced and we are delighted to let you know that two of our books are on the list!
Goat Getters, Star Wars Get Eisner Nominations
Rest Easy, Soldier
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Harry Grant Guyton, nephew of Milton and Esther (“Bunny”) Caniff, at age 94.
Harry was the executor of the Caniff Estate and did so much to make both the Steve Canyon comic strips and the short-lived TV series available for modern-day audiences. He was also a tremendous raconteur, and this seems a fine time to share with you a couple stories Harry shared with us during an interview a few years ago:
The LOAC Road to 200: The LOAC Wheel of Fortune is Stupefyin’!
We’re Cadillacin’ toward our 200th release, and we thank you for riding along with us! It’s time once again to spin the LOAC Wheel of Fortune to see which past release gets spotlighted for the month of April.
Before we continue our focus on the year 2014, begun last month, a tip of the Dick Tracy fedora to those readers (you know who you are) who corrected us after last month’s “LOAC Wheel” feature appeared. In March we truthfully mentioned that 2014 was our busiest year ever. We went on to point out that we released twenty-three books that year.
“Nay, nay,” said those Ol’ Eagle Eyes who visit this space, “your list is one short! Wonder Woman also appeared in 2014, and it’s not on the list you presented!” What can I say? They were right, and we had fat-fingered the year-of-release for Princess Diana as 2015, not 2014. Here’s a corrected list of our 2014 releases:
Goat Getters Gets Honorable Mention at New York Rights Fair
We are thrilled that our friend Eddie Campbell received an honorable mention at the New York Rights Fair as part of the TALKING PICTURES: Selected Books program.
The LOAC Road to 200: March’s LOAC Wheel of Fortune
It’s that time again — as we move toward our two hundredth entry in The Library of American Comics, we’re spinning that LOAC Wheel of Fortune to see which of our past releases gets spotlighted for the month of March.
We wanted to focus on the year 2014, which was the busiest in our almost-twelve-year history. A whopping twenty-three — yup, that’s 23! — Library books were released that year:
At Last! The Dick Tracy Series Has Gotten to the Good Stuff!
Long time fan Russ Pfister sent us an email after reading the latest book in our Dick Tracy series, Vol. 25: 1969-1970. Included in the email are pictures of a very special Dick Tracy book that Russ made himself when he was nine years old that contain these same stories! With his permission, here is what Russ wrote us, accompanied by his photos.
If you have your own home made comic strip book, we would love to see it! Send us some pictures and your story to kurtis@loacomics.com!
Ad-dicting & En-LIFE-ening
We continue our look at comics-related ads that appeared in Life Magazine, previously begun here. This time, just for fun, we’ll go in reverse-chronological order and start at the tag-end of the 1950s. I was but a wee bairn of two months and twenty-five days old (and Stevenson B. Canyon was once again crossing paths and trading barbs with “The Copperhead,” Copper Calhoon) when this ad for Teacher’s Scotch, starring the one-and-only Milton Caniff, appeared in Life‘s October 12, 1959 issue:
Ad-ing LIFE to the Comics
In various LOAC books we’ve shown (and discussed) examples of the intersection between comics and the world of advertising, yet it’s not a topic we’ve lingered over in this space. I decided to change that just a bit recently, when going through the contents of a bunch of Life Magazines. (One of the perks of this job is being able to sift through old magazines and newspapers, to get a look at — or in some cases, remember — The Way It Used to Be.) These Lifes had a variety of comics-based advertisements, so I snagged a batch of them to share with you.
The earliest Life ad I found with a comics connection was in the magazine’s April 15, 1940 issue. I knew Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff were popular, but until I saw this I had no idea they were experts on digestive difficulties …
The LOAC Road to 200: February’s LOAC Wheel of Fortune
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:
