Fantagraphic Books and noted comics historian Rick Marschall have announced a new imprint, Marschall Books that will be devoted to comics, cartoons, and graphic humor.  The Marschall Books line will draw upon Marschall’s extensive collection of comic strips, and cartoons. The new imprint will launch this coming fall with plans to publish 4-5 volumes a year.  Marschall also plans to publish a series entitled Cartoon Masters, which will include monographs on major artists, as well as a series called Cartoon Masterworks, which will consist of anthologies based on themes, eras, and topics.

 

The first volume from the new imprint will be Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising, which will be published in November.  Drawing Power is the first book length celebration of the nexus of cartoons and commerce.  It will cover the use of cartoon characters in advertising from Outcault’s The Yellow Kid to Chic Young’s Dagwood, who was pushing nuclear power in the 1950s.

 

Marschall Books’ second release, which is slated for February of 2011, Mr. Twee-Deedle: Raggedy Ann’s Sprightly Cousin, celebrates the forgotten art of Johnny Gruelle, who won a nationwide contest to create a comic strip to replace Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland in the New York Herald.  Mr. Twee-Deedle, which won the contest for Gruelle, appeared in the Herald's Sunday pages from 1911-1914.  It is the kind of volume that could be expected from Marschall who edited Nemo, the best magazine ever published in English on the history of the comics.  Note how fluid Gruelle’s art is in the cover illustration, a strong hint that this oversize volume will be a revelation.

 

Other volumes in the works include Krazy Kat’s Birthday Party: A Celebration in Song and Dance, which will be a multi-media disc and book set covering the Krazy Kat jazz ballet and the rare Krazy Kat animated cartoons, Of Extraordinary Interest: Sherlock Homes’ Vital Evidence, which will collect original book illustrations, theatre and movie posters, Sherlock Holmes comic strips, comic books, and comic parodies, and Mail Order Geniuses: The Cartoon Correspondence Schools, a survey of the major correspondence courses that gave so many artists their initial training.

 

Many unjustly overlooked artists will get their due in future volumes from the Marschall Books imprint including Rose O’Neil—The Fairy Tale Bohemian: The Life and Work of a Pioneering Cartoonist.  Another oversize color volume, The Big Book of the Teenie Weenie World, will showcase the work of Chicago Tribune cartoonist William Donahey and plans call for books on Santa Claus and Uncle Sam in cartoons along with collections of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoons, radical cartoons, and cartoon histories or World War I and World War II.