A new generation of upscale collections of newspaper strips was inspired by Fantagraphics' Peanuts series, and now a number of publishers are finding sales success with new hardcover series.
We talked to three publishers that have recently launched new strip reprint series to better understand the phenomenon: IDW (Dick Tracy, see 'IDW's Dick Tracy Revealed'), NBM (Mutt & Jeff, see 'NBM Reprinting Mutt & Jeff'), and Drawn & Quarterly (Moomin, see 'Drawn and Quarterly to Publish Moomin Collections').
Sales were good on all three launch volumes, but it was surprising to us to find that the best-selling volume of the three was the first volume of Moomin, which was Drawn & Quarterly's second fastest-selling hardcover volume ever, selling around 15,000 copies vs. 16,000 copies sold of the hardcover edition of
IDW has sold around 10,000 copies of the first volume of Dick Tracy, about 75% to bookstores.
And NBM has sold around 5,000 copies of the first volume of Mutt & Jeff.
It's unclear who the customers are for this new wave of strip reprints, but the best theory we heard was that they are new readers being exposed to this material for the first time. The first wave of strip collections for collectors was driven by nostalgia for the material felt by readers who had read them in newspapers, Terry Nantier of NBM Publishing told us. 'But now,' he said, 'there are younger readers buying these books and seeing the material for the first time.'
That may be only partly true for Moomin; a Drawn & Quarterly spokesperson told us that the company attributed the strong sales on the title at least in part to the large audience that had been exposed to the property in its newspaper life.
Regardless, it's clear that there's a substantial market, larger in bookstores than in comic stores, for collections of classic newspaper strip material.
