IDW Publishing; $39.99

When Ted Adams and the other heroes at IDW Publishing decided to publish the various collections comprising The Library of American Comics, their contribution to preserving the history of comic characters was almost immediately significant enough that they should have had their tickets punched for The Overstreet Hall of Fame. As the first volume of Terry and the Pirates arrived, it was clear this was going to be a special set of projects.

Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell, who are the ones who put together The Library of American Comics, have poured themselves into these books. That’s how they ended up with the number three spot (and, if one includes IDW’s own Dick Tracy collection, the number six spot) on Scoop’s Best Collected Editions of 2008 and the top spot on Scoop’s Best Publication About Comics, Characters or Collectibles of 2008. The research, the articles providing insight and context, and most importantly the glorious reproduction of the material at hand have preserved these strips for those who knew them and offered a new gateway to adventure for those discovering them for the first time.

In no case is this truer than with The Complete Little Orphan Annie. This second volume continues where the first one left off, with seven complete story arcs including the daily strips and Sunday pages from 1927 to 1929. Mullaney and Canwell have an advantage on this they haven’t had on many of their projects and that’s being able to scan from the original art by Annie’s creator, Harold Gray.

The results are some of the most beautiful reproductions of early comic strip art we’ve ever seen. Combined with the first volume, this offers readers a chance to see Gray developing his craft, both in his art style and in the pacing of the stories he was telling. The Sunday pages are perhaps the truest color reproductions of this sort of early work, which makes sense since they were scanned from the original syndicate color proofs, another incredible find.

Reading this book is like diving into history, without the musty smell, and finding it to be alive and radiant rather than stiff and simply facts and figures of events long gone by.

Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates has long held sway with fans and other creators. Mullaney, Canwell, and IDW have certainly made the intellectual case for Noel Sickles place in the pantheon of greats, as well. There has, though, been some temptation to dismiss Little Orphan Annie as a historically important strip but one that is now somehow outdated. Between the work itself and historian Jeet Heer’s fantastic introductory essay in this edition, a clear argument for the timelessness of Annie has been boldly and convincingly made. This book, like its predecessor, is an instant classic and it has again raised the bar against which such compilations will be judged.