Frank King's innovations in art, layout and storytelling brought a new warmth and style to the medium at the dawn of the Golden Age of newspaper comic strips. If you are interested in the development of this unique American art form, or simply love beautiful comics, this sumptuous volume is a masterpiece in comic art, and a must for your collection. Like McCay, Feininger, Herriman, and others of that era, King was a graphic innovator. His panoramic layouts, themed styling, and whimsical cartoon conceits explored new artistic methods. But he also had a great knowledge of story and character, presented with a warmth and humanity never seen before in comics, and rarely done as well since. He went beyond the gags and slapstick of his contemporaries to create vignettes of genuinely human characters; showing them relating to each other and, particularly in his Sunday comics, to the world around them. One of the pioneering giants of American comic strips,  Frank King  was born in Cashton, Wisconsin, in 1883. He joined the staff of the  Chicago Tribune  in 1909. Almost from the start of his career, King's cartoons were frequently featured on the front page of the paper. He made his lasting mark in 1919 by creating  Gasoline Alley , which became one of the most widely syndicated and read strips in North America until King's death in 1969. Peter Maresca is the multiple Eisner and Harvey Award-winning publisher of high-quality, full-sized collections of classic American newspaper strips. His Sunday Press books represent a high-water mark in the reproduction and preservation of American comic strips. Maresca changed the concept of comic reprints in 2005 with his original-sized Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays , Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking strip. He continued with Sundays with Walt & Skeezix (Frank King’s Gasoline Alley ), George Herriman’s Krazy Kat , Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy , and a dozen others. Maresca lives a relatively non-virtual life in Palo Alto, CA. Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware  is an American cartoonist known for his  Acme Novelty Library  series (begun 1994) and the graphic novels  Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth  (2000),  Building Stories  (2012) and  Rusty Brown  (2019). His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style. Jeet Heer  is a Canadian author, comics critic, literary critic and journalist. He is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine and a former staff writer at  The New Republic . The publications he has written for include  The National Post ,  The New Yorker ,  The Paris Review , and  Virginia Quarterly Review . Heer was a member of the 2016 jury for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His anthology  A Comic Studies Reader , with Kent Worcester, won the 2010 Rollins Award. Used Book in Good Condition