San Diego Comic-Con News:  IDW Publishing has announced the inclusion of Peter Maresca’s Sunday Press Books into its publishing family.  Sunday Press is a specialty publishing house best known for its beautifully restored reprints of classic newspaper comic strips in their original size and color.  Sunday Press books such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Krazy Kat, and Thimble Theatre have garnered 17 Eisner Award nominations over the past thirteen years.

The partnership with IDW and Sunday Press will preserve Maresca’s independence, while bolstering the distribution of the Sunday Press line.  IDW plans new printings of acclaimed out-of-print Sunday Press books (many of which are selling way over cover price on Amazon and other resellers), and IDW will also launch a digital publishing program for the Sunday Press books.

The Little Joe comic strip was reprinted in comic book form by Dell in the 1940s
IDW is no stranger to reprinting classic comic strips (thanks to its ongoing partnership with Dean Mullaney and his Library of American Comics) as well as archival-quality reprints of key comic book titles, such as its Eisner Award-winning Bill Sienkiewicz's Mutants and Moon Knights Artifact Edition.  The first Sunday Press collection to come out under IDW’s auspices will be Little Joe, a western comic strip that debuted in 1933 and resembled Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (due to Gray’s uncredited work on the strip that was ascribed to Gray’s assistants).  IDW plans to publish the Sunday Press edition of Little Joe in late 2019.