Tuesday, September 15, 2009

From NBM Books: BRINGING UP FATHER 1913-14


Allan Holtz talks about all of the effort that went into restoring the initial 2 years' worth of strips in NBM's new BRINGING UP FATHER book. Allan was on the restoration team.

Oh, heck, Allan WAS the restoration team!

I have the old 1970s BRINGING UP FATHER Hyperion book and, yes, McManus' great art is reduced to eentsy, badly reproduced tearsheets. Maybe not even first generation tearsheets.

Not only is McManus cartoon art reproduced large and cleaned up, but -- wowsers! -- read this great tidbit:

"Besides doing the restorations, NBM allowed me to do something that I think should be a standard feature in all classic strip reprint books. I wrote annotations for many of the strip episodes explaining the references which are likely to be opaque to today's readers."
Yes, Allan Holtz has the right idea: annotations should be standard.

And he admits that he

" ... wrote so many annotations that NBM couldn't fit them all into the book! You'll find a link to an expanded version of the annotations on NBM's website. The good news is that my annotations were cut back so that the book had room to print the BUF strips all the way to the end of 1914 (Hyperion's stops in July 1914) so you get in total over 100 strips never before reprinted."

2 comments:

John R. Platt said...

Terrible cover, but I need this book.

Mike Lynch said...

I just bought my copy, John. I have all of the NBM FOREVER NUTS series. Great books.