the complete peanuts (or fantagraphics: S/D)

https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1973/10/23

that's a great one

https://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/unloved.jpg

One of my favourite depressing Peanuts has a similar “gag”

^^ me and my therapist talked about this strip in our session last week!

that's a great one. the way charlie brown gradually reacts to the rain is wonderfully paced.

and schulz drew rain just beautifully, maybe better than any other cartoonist.

The other night, we happened to land on a series of strips from October 1964, timed for the run-up to that year's election. Linus is running for class president (with Charlie Brown as his VP) -- and he's crushing it in the polls, until...

A few of the strips dealing with Lucy as his pollster are particularly funny.

"The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy" by Brian Walker is a fantastic collection if you can find it.

I was bidding on a copy on eBay (“Also included is a copy of Nancy and Sluggo. Best of is in new new condition”)... someone swooped in at the last minute and outbid me :(

Good Lord @ Oct 12 - 14 in that election set

The more things change, huh?

Joe Cool is lame, and the strip had largely become half-baked gags and “hip” cultural references at this point — but this Sunday from September 1971 snaps into focus in the final few panels, and really captures something.

v Feiffer / Village Voice vibes

i get a really low res image at that link.

is this better?

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/f/f5/19710912.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/600?cb=20140217024403

link to page. it's the 12th

https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/September_1971_comic_strips

Was looking for another volume of Bushmiller’s Nancy strips—turns out Fantagraphics only published three volumes of dailies (and never any Sundays). We have the first and second volumes. Of the three, only the second is still in print; the other two are OOP and $$$. I guess interest was pretty low.

Circling back to this—my son is constantly rereading the two volumes we have, so I was poking around online for that old Brian Walker book or whatever else I can find. Turns out all three Fantagraphics books are now OOP, and going for $$$$. (Too bad ours aren’t in mint condition, or I’d sell ’em for his college fund.)

I don’t know anything about the economics of this stuff, but why doesn’t Fantagr. reprint when demand is (clearly) there? Have they lost the rights or something?

Well, filtering down to “Completed items” in eBay reveals that some of these listing prices on eBay/Amazon are grossly inflated/optimistic. The actual sale prices of the Fantagraphics volumes seem to average around $75 each. Still OOP, though!

Fanta are just kinda not super competent I think?

If the consumer demand is actually an order of magnitude greater than what they printed on those three volumes, hence it being worthwhile doing a second run on each AND committing to doing dozens more, wouldn’t that make either the retailers incompetent (for not getting them to customers), or the customers incompetent (for making their purchases online from third parties instead of Fanta)?

lol, knew sic would be bounding in to defend Fanta's reprint practices.

I won't challenge their competence because I love them but it's frustrating nonetheless. I'm glad I was able to get their complete Peanuts and Popeye collections but that was more a result of luck and timing than anything else (as my half-finished Krazy Kat collection looks at me sadly and urges me to drop mad bank on that OOP volume that brought my collecting to a dead halt). Never bothered with the Nancys at all although I'd love to have 'em.

not sure how supply exceeding demand for nine years (N I N E) (9) is any evidence of a drastic underprinting that requires defense, but happy to look at your spreadsheets to the contrary

PS:

https://i.imgur.com/LZ2ZZbx.gif

I gave up on trying to nab the Nancys before N I N E years had elapsed. It was probably H A L F that span of time.

I'd have to double check my spreadsheet to be sure, but I think the Don Rosa duck collections were the most recent thing I preemptively gave up on collecting after seeing volumes fall OOP super fast.

Also, tbf, Fanta is hardly alone on this front.

I was going to say, is that a long time for stuff like this to be in print? I have honestly no idea. (FWIW, the third volume was published seven years ago.) Those Complete Peanuts books seem to stay available, but Peanuts is Peanuts.

Guess I’m also comparing it to children’s books in general, which seem to stay in print forever (as there are new kids to read them every year). Of course, Nancy is no Corduroy.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I just assumed money is being left on the table:

https://i.imgur.com/1gaNbyd_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

(F#%* yr .43 cents!! lol)

Books that shouldn't be out of print

the market for fancy reprints of decades-old funny books just isn't very large. publishers the size of fantagraphics can't afford to keep books in print in perpetuity for a relatively tiny audience.

wtf, I meant to post James Redd's $900 books thread but it won't let me

Out Of Print Book Price Sticker Shock

weird, the title changed. thanks.

i had the same problem... something about the dollar sign maybe which stopped me from posting so I took it out.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I just assumed money is being left on the table:

that money is entirely imaginary! you yourself noted that nobody is paying those algorithmically-generated prices, to a seller that may not even have a copy of the book. what are the rest of Silver Ocean's listings like?.

even if someone was, and without knowing any of the actual numbers involved, from your and OL's account it looks like what happened is:

- the minimum profitable print run on a Nancy dailies book is (let's say) 3,000

- Fanta print 3,200 copies of Nancy Dailies 1, it sells strongly
- they print 3,600 copies of Nancy Dailies 2, it sells fine, maybe reorders at this point wipe out any leftovers from #1
- they wait two years because most of the overprint on #2 is still sitting in the warehouse
- they cautiously print 3,300 of Nancy Dailies 3 and sell them over a couple of years, but there's no retailer demand or customer feedback indicating that another 3,000 people want #1
- hundreds of copies of #2 continue to take up space in the warehouse, available at half cover price (twice a year) to online customers and 60% off to retailers
- five years after that the last of #2 get picked up, indicating the precise degree of thirst for Bushmiller that the market possesses.

Even if there's one rando out there willing to pay $970.43 for a copy, a publisher is still going to lose money by licensing, sourcing, restoring, editing, laying out, printing, shipping and storing the other two thousand and ninety nine copies.

Well, I said the completed eBay listings were obviously a better indication of the book’s actual market value… I just pasted that Amazon listing to show what gave rise to my initial “???” reaction (and there’s another new copy posted for $499 on eBay right now).

And yes, I don’t know how many copies they have to sell before they start profiting… Interesting to have that analysis, thanks

Another factor in the waning interest may be that the strips in that 1st/red volume (fortunately one of the ones we have) are great, while the ones in volume two (yellow book) are less great… I imagine the later ones in vol. three may further reflect that downward trend. Fanta should’ve gone backwards!

There are 11 copies of Vol. 3 on Amazon at the moment, ranging in price from $99 (“Like New”) to $300 (“Very Good”). No completed listings on eBay for that one; the active listings are $149.95 (“New”), $399 (“NM-“), and $399.99 (“Very nice condition, from my own personal collection. Purchased new and read once.”)

They did/do the Carl Barks books out of order (with volume numbers in small print inside) so that they could start with strong material, and not have the biggest sales on his earliest / weakest material. Naturally, a bunch of 60-year-old nerds got mad about this when the series started.

One suspects a big factor in a potential demand drop-off after Nancy volume 1 is simply that 344 pages of Bushmiller is more than plenty for many buyers.

the nancy books were done that way to. they had planned on a later volume collecting the strips that came before nancy is happy, partly because some of them were missing.

Nancy Is Marginal :(

Kitchen Sink had already fairly solidly tested the audience for Nancy collections in the '80s, thanks to the publisher's personal huge fandom. Fanta might have made it to a few more volumes if they'd launched during Jaimesmania, but even the book-expansion of How To Read Nancy came out while Gilchrist was still in the saddle.

It’s in an interesting position b/c it’s still an active strip, but I guess kids aren’t closing the Sunday funnies and demanding books of 80-year-old Nancy strips.

I had never heard of these: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/31/charles-schulz-hagemeyer/

FTR, I wasn't suggesting that Fanta or other like publishers were like doing something to us or whatevs. I appreciate that they're willing to put out such nice collections of this material. I wish there was a solution to the OOP problem for those who don't get in on the ground floor. Like, if I hadn't started buying the Peanuts slipcover collections when they first started coming out twenty years ago, a couple of them would be priced out of my reach now. But at least they seem to be reprinting everything as softcovers now in that particular instance.

it gets into really fundamentally thorny/sticky questions of archiving/publication/preservation in the form of consumer goods imo. not everything we'd like to see immortalized will bear the supply/demand equation of a comprehensive publication regime at any particular moment. very few things, today. and maybe some works are actually better served not by complete publications, but by, say having complete collections in library/archive contexts, and only very carefully curated "best of" volumes put together for publication and enabling people to discover them and understand why they matter(ed), and fall in love with them. of course, deciding what "deserves" that treatment is a problem that never goes away. but the absolute mountain of pop culture in the rearview only gets bigger with each passing year, and we can't count on it being solely the job of Fanta-esque publishers to handle it. and even if they did, eventually those volumes will become scarce and rare and the work would have to be done again in fifty or a hundred or five hundred years, if Nancy and Peanuts still matter to people then.

My son is committed to getting the entire run of Peanuts books (we’re currently up to ’78), despite the decline in humor in later years.

eventually those volumes will become scarce and rare and the work would have to be done again in fifty or a hundred or five hundred years, if Nancy and Peanuts still matter to people then

And the stuff will be public domain at some point, which will change the equation in certain ways (both good and bad).

I’m glad I encountered Krazy Kat as a kid in the form of the few best-of volumes, and not some voluminous complete library (which likely would’ve turned me off).

Berke Breathed made a joke at some point about not needing to reprint the Bloom County collections, because half the country has moldy copies of those books in their bathroom.

books going out of print has been a challenge to readers for approx 519 years now, one impecunious publisher of niche material, run out of a leaky house next to an interstate, is unlikely to innovate a solution

(getting fifteen deep into a single series of softcover-replacing-hardcover comics reprints might be a North American first though tbf? for that matter, Cochran's EC Library is the only NA complete hardcover series I can think of longer than Fanta's Peanuts.)

They managed to innovate a solution to the (non-)problem of me not normally getting uncomfortably aroused by the back half of a retail catalog in my teenage years.

circa 2003, I picked up three or four random volumes of the NBM/Bill Blackbeard reprints of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy at two or three bucks a pop. they were immensely fun to read through once, and gave me a good sense of that comic that's still vivid today. but to collect beyond that seemed insane --- there were 18 volumes of those things! i never saw a single other one at any store anywhere! and why bother tracking down just one or two? it was like, completism or nothing. so for my needs, a single fancy treasury that gathered only the greatest epic storylines, with a section in the back introducing the formative early gag-strip years, would have been perfect. and yet, massive kudos to them for accomplishing that project, true comics-historical heroism.

They managed to innovate a solution to the (non-)problem of me not normally getting uncomfortably aroused by the back half of a retail catalog in my teenage years.

the cover hadn't gotten you started?

https://i.imgur.com/xsPimTE.jpg