the complete peanuts (or fantagraphics: S/D)

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