Broken Frontier

Sundays with Walt and Skeezix. Frank King. Designed by Chris Ware with an Introduction by Jeet Heer. Sunday Press Books, 2007.

You really have to be in the same room as Sundays with Walt and Skeezix to understand just what a treasure this book is. It’s enormous, at 16 x 21 inches, and in itself that would make your jaw drop, but what you really can’t comprehend without turning its pages yourself is just how glorious this strip is. Colorful and inventive, mesmerizing and welcoming, comforting and transfiguring, Gasoline Alley belongs in that exceptional class of comic strips that are living things, still growing and changing even though the presses fell silent long ago. You can see a set of preview pages here, and they will whet your appetite, but trust me. Sunday Press publications are like the Grand Canyons of comic books. A photograph just can’t do justice to the actual experience.

Sunday Press Books is dedicated to reprinting selected newspaper strips from the early days of the form in the original size and colors. This gives the rest of us access to an important part of our history, and exposes us to honest-to-God genius. Publisher Pete Maresca spoke with Broken Frontier about his unique business.

BF: When you published your first book, Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, how did you get your hands on a complete set of the original art?

Pete Maresca: I’ve been collecting these things for almost 40 years. I collected comic books like most other people my age in the 60s. In the early 70s, a fellow I was working with said I should go see this guy who was a farmer. He lived in an old farmhouse by himself. The farm wasn’t working out, so he was selling. He was like the lost Collyer brother. He had saved decades of comic strips, and the day I went to see him (1971 or 1972), he was still reading them. And he wanted them to have a good home. We sat up in his attic for a couple of days talking about comics.

He sold me a run of 50 years of comic strips from New York newspapers, 1920-1970. It was about 90% complete. That included Little Nemo from 1924-1927. That was my first introduction to Little Nemo. I was sad that most people who had been introduced to Little Nemo had seen it in small reprints in black and white or in bad colors, and no one had ever seen them the way they had really been made. In the original size, in the original colors. Now the technology is there to reproduce them in their original form.

BF:  So that is what led to doing So Many Splendid Sundays!

PM:  I wanted to reprint Little Nemo in the original size and colors in time for the 100th anniversary of its first Sunday (1905).  My originals were falling apart as they went in the scanner.  In another 100 years, they would have been lost.

BF:  How did you fund it?

PM:  I took Nemo to half a dozen major international publishers, and they all thought it looked really nice, but that the size would make it expensive to produce and hard to distribute.  Art Spiegelman said I should publish it myself, and I did.  Since I did all the work myself, it was affordable, since my ideal is to pay all the bills for producing it, and pay myself ten dollars an hour.  I printed up as many as I could afford to without taking out a mortgage. 

I planned to have them for several years, but it turned out to be a surprise success.  Steven Heller, art director of the New York Times, gave it to writer Sarah Boxer, who planned a feature on the day of the anniversary of Little Nemo, in 2005.  They put it on the first page of the Arts section with a teaser on the front page of the newspaper.  And that sold out the first run.  They were gone in about two months.  Now it’s in its second printing.

That started calls from people to reproduce some of their favorite strips.  I would get wish lists from people.  I got such a positive response, and so many people were so astounded at seeing these things in their original size and color.  I became an accidental publisher.  I didn’t set out to be a publisher, but to make sure that a nice book about Nemo was made.  I had no plans to make more than the one book. 

BF:  Why did you do Sundays with Walt and Skeezix?

PM:  Joe Matt and Chris Ware had always wanted to see a reprint of the Walt and Skeezix Sunday strips.  Chris had been doing the daily strips with Jeet Heer at Drawn and Quarterly.  Chris got Art Spiegelman to ask me to do it, and Art told me I didn’t want to be known as the guy who just did Little Nemo.

I’d had some other ideas, but I thought this would be a good book to do, so I put it on the top of the list.  It gave me a chance to work with Chris, which was a real thrill for me.  I was able to fund it with proceeds from So Many Splendid Sundays!

BF:  And now you’ve published Little Sammy Sneeze as well.  What else is forthcoming?

PM:  This is a good story.  I didn’t know anything about publishing when I started.  I only knew two people I could get help from, and they both live in France.  So I took the book over there for a week, and we got the files ready for the printer.  Then the designer turned to me, and said, “Okay, I have to do the credits page, so what is your ISBN?”  I said, “What is an ISBN?”  [laughing]  Thanks to the web, I was able to get one immediately.  But I had to buy a block of ten.  The designer said, “Now it looks like you’re going to be a publisher, since you have nine more ISBNs.”

BF:  So the first ISBN went to So Many Splendid Sundays!, the second went to Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, and the third to Little Sammy Sneeze.

PM:  Right, and the fourth will go to Volume 2 of Little Nemo.  The fifth will go to the first volume of an approximately 7-volume anthology that reprints the best comics from 1896-1914.  It will collect the best of children’s fantasy and adventure.  1914 is a good break-off point because that’s the year that the whole new world of comics syndication began.  Before that, every newspaper had its own strips.  Since there were so many independent strips that were only in one or two papers, there are so many strips that no one has seen since they were published.

BF:  That will be huge!  In more ways than one. [laughing]  Sundays with Walt and Skeezix is the largest book I own, by a lot.

PM:  People always tell me they don’t know where to put this.  I tell them to slide the book under the sofa, and slide it out to read on Sunday morning.  I do my best to give people a complete experience of reading the Sunday comics.