IDW Publishing has announced that starting with Volume 7 of its reprints of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy covering 600 consecutive dailies and Sundays from 1941-1942 the Tracy reprints are being folded into IDW’s “Library of American Comics” under the editorship of Eisner Award-winner Dean Mullaney.  Mullaney, who edits Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie for IDW, has increased the size of the volume to match the format of the Terry and Pirates collections.  Each Sunday panel will be 40% larger in the new Dick Tracy reprint volumes.

 

Mullaney is also expanding the scope of the introductions to provide readers with a fuller and more complete history of the strip.  Each volume will now include a biographical and historical essay by Jeff Kersten of the Dick Tracy Museum, who has access to rarely seen art and photographs.  In addition Max Allan Collins will continue to provide his insightful analysis of Chester Gould’s classic strip, which during the period covered in Volume 7 moved into one of its greatest decades the 1940s during which Gould introduced one classic villain after another—The Mole, B.B. Eyes, Pruneface, Laffy, The Brow, and Flattop.

 

The Complete Dick Tracy Vol.7 will be released in late April with subsequent volumes released on a quarterly basis.