Chapter 3 - Reprinting

Summary

Reissuing old comics as books has become a chief process of transmission in the graphic novel. In the mid-2000s, alternative comics publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly released a series of extensive reprint projects, drafting “their” cartoonists to visually repackage past comics. This chapter provides an in-depth inquiry into the idea of the “archival reprint” that has become a mainstay of twenty-first-century graphic novel publishing through its various interconnected issues: preservation technologies, collecting culture, copyright, publishing economy, graphic style, book design, and reception all constitute a dense set of constraints that variously shape reprinting today. In this context, cartoonists have become a vital asset in reprinting strategies and their book designs confer new ways of reframing comics history, as clearly evidenced in the graphic contributions by Seth for Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts and Chris Ware for Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. These two case studies offer key insights into the challenges of reprinting long-length serials and the role played by book design in framing contemporary understandings of comics history.