Fantagraphics has announced that they will be publishing a Complete Pogo series that will be designed by cartoonist Jeff Smith, according to Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter. Fantagraphics had previously published 11 soft-cover books covering five and a half years. This new volume will be published annually with about two years of material per book.
Tom Spurgeon:
This announcement is interesting for a few reasons: one, it adds to Fantagraphics’ roster of high-profile strip projects; two, Pogo is one of the few strips I think could have been successfully published in that complete slip-cased format, which I would imagine is now off the table; three, the major push behind the strip should allow for the resources and access to be applied that circumvent one problem with post-War strips like Pogo: finding re-publishable originals from which to shoot the new copies, like syndicate copies, or really good newspaper copies. It’s been my experience that sometimes with late 1940s and 1950s strips a lot of papers ran them occasionally shaved off at the end or on the bottom. And don’t forget reason four, which isn’t very interesting but worthy of a note: over the next several years we get to read Pogo in nice-looking volumes.
First volume to hit book shelves in October of this year.
Hopefully, this will come out better than the previous attempt at this.
It’s about darn time! That last attempt was a joke. And Jeff Smith being on the project makes this an absolute dream.