If the publisher has given us to read differently the classic comics of Winsor McCay and Georger Herriman, Sunday Press has also sketched a larger picture of the first years of the comic strip, by giving a second chance to long-forgotten comics in its anthologies Forgotten Fantasy and Society is Nix. Today with ten years of experience and ten books in his catalogue, Peter Maresca tells us all about the origins of Sunday Press, the reprint process, and his editorial decisions, describing an enterprise that is profoundly rooted in a network of human relationships.

Benoît Crucifix : Sunday Press celebrated last year its tenth anniversary. Since you’ve described yourself as an “accidental publisher,” I am wondering about how you imagined the future of Sunday Press ten years ago, after you launched your first reprint ? And how do you look back on these years now ?

Peter Maresca : After the publication of Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays there was no real future imagined for Sunday Press. I had accomplished what I could not get a “real” publisher to do — create a fully-restored, full-size edition of the Winsor McCay classic — and I planned to continue to work at my “regular job” in digital entertainment. But the success of the book was rapid and widespread and after a few months I started thinking about another project, and when Chris Ware approached me to work with him on a similar volume for Gasoline Alley Sunday pages, I could not turn down that opportunity. After Sundays with Walt and Skeezix and McCay’s Sammy Sneeze I apparently was an actual (albeit accidental) publisher and then kept going. Looking back, I wish, as would anyone, I knew then what I know now about the process. Over the years I’ve learned a great deal on restoration and color as well as what makes a good book, and I think the latest, Society is Nix and White Boy display that education. I also think about how fortunate I’ve been to have the support of numerous artists and historians in the comics world, and the invaluable contribution of an incredible designer, Philippe Ghielmetti.

Benoît Crucifix : Actually, I was wondering about this collaboration with Philippe Ghielmetti. It is very interesting to see him design for Sunday Press, as he also played an important role in the history of comics reprints, notably with the design of the “Copyright” series for Futuropolis, a pioneering work of patrimonial reprints. So how did you get to know him and what brought about his design work on the Sunday Press books ?

Peter Maresca : Well, I first got to know Philippe through Futuropolis founders Etienne Robial and Florence Cestac because of their “Copyright” editions reprint books. That was around 1979 when I would work with them in finding some of the American comic strip material for the books. Later Philippe moved to New York City where I introduced him to old friend of mine, Tibor Kalman, well-known designer and owner of M & Company. Tibor just loved Philippe : “Philippe does great work,” he said “and I give him a big pile of projects and a pack of Gitanes, and he sits and works all day.” Philippe and I spent a lot of time together in New York. When he moved back to Paris I would still see him regularly, and then our first collaboration came in 2005, I think I told you the story, back when I was looking for a publisher for Little Nemo.

Benoît Crucifix : I don’t think so, not in the details.

Peter Maresca : 2005 was the 100th anniversary of Little Nemo and I thought something really important should be done. And I asked around to people who had done Nemo work before – Fantagraphics, Rick Marshall and others – to find there were no plans to do something special for the centennial. Looking at my Little Nemo collection, I realized that after a hundred years you can barely touch it, the paper is starting to fall apart. In another hundred years, no one will able to see it unless you go to a special archive or museum. Most everyone knew that Little Nemo is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, comic strip, but at that time, very few people had seen it in the original size. I believed it really needs to be printed this way, so I took the idea to different publishers in the US and Europe and all they said : “Oh it’s very nice but we can’t do it, it’s too big,” or, “no we can’t distribute it, it wouldn’t sell.” I went to Fantagraphics and they said : “Oh we already did it and…” So I was getting really discouraged.

Benoît Crucifix : Publishers wouldn’t understand the novelty or necessity of reprinting it full size then ?

Peter Maresca : No one got it, and the thing is I had no experience in the book business. All my business was in the internet entertainment so I wasn’t prejudiced against something that was impossible. So for me it was : “Why is it impossible ? You find a printer and you make it.” I talked with artist and designer friends in New York who encouraged me to publish it myself. So that’s when I took it to Art Spiegelman and we tried to see how could we do something practical. He had just done his Twin Towers book (In the Shadow of No Towers), it was a regular over-sized book and you opened it up to full size. So we made up some mock-ups and tried different formats and then in the end decided : “No, it has to be a big book, that’s what it wants to be.” That’s the phrase that Art used, “it wants to be a big book.”

While at the 2005 Angoulême festival, I talked about this with my friend Fershid Bharucha, then of Éditions USA in Paris. He published over five hundred books and magazines, and certainly knew how to put a comic together. So he said : ” Get all the image files and come back to Paris, I’ll show you how to do it.” And Philippe joined in “I’ll take care of the design, we’ll do it in, you know, a week-end.” It took us about ten days and two cases of wine. A big problem was that we were dealing with files that were so huge and we working on older computers, slower computers – Quark (this was before InDesign) would always crash. So you get to create the PDF file and you get right to the edge and, boom, it crashes.

Benoît Crucifix : Yes because you were working with high resolution.

Peter Maresca : Yeah, we had high resolution and a full newspaper-sized page. So we’re talking about files where each one was about 160 megabytes. And normally for a comics page it’s 20 or 40.

Benoît Crucifix : So how did you manage it eventually ?

Peter Maresca : With difficulty. It took us a lot longer than anticipated. But the very fortunate thing is, and Art Spiegelman also talked about this, the same technology that people say is destroying books – the digital world – also made it possible for people like me to create a book because you don’t need the big staff. Because you can do everything on a computer, then go with the PDF right to the printing plates. No color separations, no physical paste-ups. So this was really right at the beginning of that revolution, when you could do that. Well, we were finally able to build all of the PDFs and were ready to go to the printer. And at that time we had to put it on seven CD-Roms. (Of course now you just upload it all). I remember when Philippe said, “okay, I’ve done all the credits page and all I have to do is add your ISBN” and I said “ISBN ? What’s a ISBN ?” and he was “Oh no… you cannot make a book without a ISBN, it’s going to take you two weeks to get one” but again fortunately we were right at the beginning of another new technology that where you could get your ISBN online. At that time it took maybe two days – now it’s instant.

Once the printer was lined up, my wife, who had some experience in technology books, told me that when you’re printing in Asia, you’d better go to the press checks if you want the color right. Of course, for restored Little Nemo pages, getting the color right was essential. I needed to go to Asia because no European or American printers could handle such a large book in their machines and they did not have the labor force to do it by hand. We wanted to have the books open flat, to replicate the experience of reading a full newspaper page, so the signatures had to be hand-sown. Now it’s more common, but again, at that time, it was practically unheard of for a hardbound comic. And that’s why it was good I had no idea what I was doing. I did not realize you didn’t normally make books this way.

Benoît Crucifix : How was the reprints sector in comics back then ? Because, I mean, Sunday Press has been quite pioneering in this respect, there were not that many comic strips reprints at that time.

Peter Maresca : We sort of created a revolution with expensive reprint books. Dean Mullaney had just started his high-quality smaller reprint books, but others before him were, with a few exceptions, inexpensive paperbacks. Today, nearly all the major comic strips have been reprinted, though with mixed results. Sometimes it’s disappointing when publishers just scan pages, send it to the printer, and take whatever they get.

Benoît Crucifix : With online archives, some people just take the PDFs and publish without taking care to properly restore the material. How do you see the role of Sunday Press in this development of comics ? Some people have tried to follow the full-size format. I’m thinking in particular of the Little Nemo collection by Taschen, where they do it nearly full-size, but also not exactly.

Peter Maresca : Yeah, it’s about three quarters.

Benoît Crucifix : And there’s nearly no restoration, they just reused previous material.

Peter Maresca : Yes, it was so disappointing and sometimes there’s a tear in the page and the quality of the pages are different. Frankly, it broke my heart when I saw that. Because I thought if I cannot do it then someone should do the complete Little Nemo but I was so disappointed. And it was not even complete because they were missing one famous page. There’s a page that appeared only in the Paris version of The New York World. On January 7, 1906, there were two pages : one appeared in New York and one appeared only in Paris. But they didn’t include that which was unfortunate because it is such a beautiful page and actually the page was reminiscent of the Luxembourg Gardens, a park with a metal fence with pointed gold tips. There was a horse-drawn carriage riding through the park and when the sun comes up, Nemo’s carriage becomes his bed. Very cinematic even before things were happening in cinema, something McCay did all the time. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful page. Anyway, it’s one of several disappointments in that Taschen edition. It’s a great book for reference, but it could have been better.

Benoît Crucifix : How do you think it hurt your own enterprise ? You know having it somewhat recuperated by a big publisher ?

Peter Maresca : It didn’t seem to matter very much. Even after that book came out, I went to fourth printing with the first Nemo volume, since some people still want to have that full-size experience. And the way I look at it is, I don’t need to have a book of the complete works of Picasso, but I would like to have a large perfectly printed book with a good collection of the finest Picassos. So that’s what the Sunday Press Little Nemo is, it’s a good collection of the finest pages. And frankly, some of the pages McCay did near the end – when he was busy with animation and other things – were not so interesting and were not done in full color. And it wasn’t even fantasy dreams, it was Little Nemo talking with animals and things like that. Less fantastical, still beautiful, but well…

Benoît Crucifix : It’s not a reprint, but there was also this Kramers Ergot #7, which used the large Sunday-page format for new creations.

Peter Maresca : It was nice, but some of the work that was done didn’t need that format. Whereas Little Nemo demanded it. And you can’t just be gratuitous about making a big book. The comics have to require it. But that Kramer’s is still a wonderful book.

Benoît Crucifix : Well, there was at least this contribution by Chris Ware, where the baby is represented on the page close to real-life scale, which makes the effect of opening the double page really strong.

Peter Maresca : Chris Ware has a consciousness of the large strips, being a fan of old Sunday pages like Gasoline Alley and Naughty Pete, and of course, Nemo, so he made good use of the format. He was very supportive of our Little Nemo after the first Splendid Sundays was published, then he contacted me to do Walt and Skeezix.

Benoît Crucifix : How was it like to work with cartoonists ? Because you’ve mentioned Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware…

Peter Maresca : I never worked directly with Spiegelman as an artist but as a historian and a consultant. He has a lot of information and he’s extremely articulate and very well read and understands how comics fit in with all of the culture of the period — not just, you know, in a cultural ghetto. Comics could be more than just things that you throw away with the Sunday newspaper.

Benoît Crucifix : So how did they participate in the project ? How did go your collaboration with Spiegelman and Ware ? How were they involved ?

Peter Maresca : I sat with Art several times in his studio, at least once before each project, talking about how the books should be put together and what we really needed, both in production and editorial. His wife, Françoise Mouly, was also instrumental in getting Sunday Press started. She set me up with the Asian printer and made sure I got credit with them. And working with Chris was wonderful because he would come up with fun ideas like including facsimile cut-out toys in the book. I only had one problem with Chris. I said : “I’m an old man with bad eyes, please can we do text larger than a five point type ?” And he said : “No, it has to fit in the design, we can’t do it.” He’s always very polite about it, but knows what he wants out of the design, and who am I to argue ? Some people complained about the tiny type, most didn’t care because the design of the book is just superb.

Benoît Crucifix : Was Philippe Ghielmetti also involved in the design of the Gasoline Alley book ? Or Chris Ware took it all on ?

Peter Maresca : Chris Ware did the complete design. But they both admire each other’s work very much. A good thing about Chris working on this book is that he created a design that fit in with the Walt & Skeezix dailies reprints he was doing with Drawn & Quarterly. Aside from having Chris’s stunning design work, it’s nice to be an adjunct to that terrific series by D&Q.

Benoît Crucifix : Since we’re kind of talking about the selection process : how did you pick up the material you wanted to publish ? Because you have done the main canonical comic strip artists (George Herriman, Winsor McCay, Frank King), but also works that are more forgotten such as Harry Grant Dart’s The Explorigator your latest collection of Garrett Price’s strips from The New Yorker.

Peter Maresca : Yes, Garrett Price’s White Boy was something I collected for many years and wanted to reproduce properly. Dean Mullaney, also a fan of the strip, helped me get this rolling. Then there was the older ” forgotten comics.” I wanted to make a large book of the first twenty years of newspaper comics. I worked a lot with Alfredo Castelli in Milan, writer of Martin Mystère. At that time, he knew more about the first twenty years of comics than just about anyone in the US did. He had done lots and lots of research using original material and microfilm and had seen most everything. I talked with him about this type of book and he was very excited and wanted to contribute and wrote two nice essays for us. Now as I started looking at the material, I thought, this is too much for one book ! So how to best present this material ? You see, there were essentially two types of comics in the very first years of the Sunday pages : there were the fantasy comics that came out of the illustrated children’s books from the Victorian age, and then there were the social satire comics which came out of newspaper editorials and Judge and Puck and similar magazines. So since I couldn’t fit everything into one book, I split them up into two books, one for each those groups. And I decided to do the fantasy book first because people were aware of Little Nemo so they knew of the fantasy comics and that made for a good connection. So I did Forgotten Fantasy first, even though most of that material was a little bit later. For this I was fortunate to have the assistance of Rick Marschall who, along with Alfredo, taught me a lot about the earliest comics. For the next volume, Society is Nix, we went back and started even before the Yellow Kid. which most had considered the “first” of the modern comics. For the first time in ANY book, we were able to tell all of the comics history that people didn’t know about or were misinformed about– for example, everybody thought that Pulitzer had the first color newspaper section but he didn’t, it was in the Chicago Inter Ocean and Pulitzer got it quickly after that. I was very fortunate to get six different people to write the essays to build the foundation for the book. For me, I think even if it’s not the best-seller, Society is Nix the most important book. And, again, I have to thank Art Spiegelman for the title because I was going to call it something like The Origins of the Comics or Founders of the Comics and he said : “You know, that’s not very sexy,” he says, “come up with a fun, sexy title and then put a subtitle explaining what it is.” His suggestion, Society is Nix, comes from a Katzenjammer Kids character, the Inspector, who said “Mit doze kids, society is nix !” In other words, with these crazy kids, civilized society doesn’t stand a chance. This was the attitude of anarchy found in many of the earliest comics.

Benoît Crucifix : I was wondering about these essays you include. How do they fit the role you see for Sunday Press in revising the history of comics. Because one thing is that comic strips are often presented as this typically American idiom, and I think, for instance, Smolderen’s essay nuances this a bit by focusing on the “international roots of the American comic strip.”

Peter Maresca : Yes, Thierry did a wonderful job detailing the story of “Comics before comics”, and how 19th century European and American illustrators formed the basis of modern cartoons and sequential art. Also, in Society is Nix, Richard Samuel West explained how much credit for the creation American Sunday comic strips goes to the French magazine Le Petit Journal… They implemented the first system of inexpensive color press. Chicago publisher H.H. Kohlsaat was visiting Paris on a vacation and went nuts when he saw the press and its results. “We need this, I need to get this printing press.” So he bought the press in Europe and had it shipped home for the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper. And then when Pulitzer saw this, he thought : “Well, he’s only using this for fashion and pictures of politicians. I can take these popular cartoons and artists that I have on staff and do great things with these colors.” So he did, creating a publishing revolution. Color Sunday comics became a major force in selling papers. And later, William Randolph Hearst came from San Francisco to New York, saw what The World was doing and said “I’ll get one of these presses and I’ll buy all the artists from Pulitzer.” It was just like the famous scene in Citizen Kane where he’s looking at the rival newspaper and he says “well if they have so much more circulation,” and he points to the picture of the staff and he says : “That’s why.” Next thing you see is a scene of picture being taken of the same staff working for him ! And so Hearst did exactly that, and that’s one reason he became the champion of the comics. But also, Hearst really expanded the idea of the regular characters in the comics, as Outcault (then working for Pulitzer) had with the Yellow Kid. But most of Pulitzer’s comics were characters that would only go on for a few weeks, and most titles were just a one-shot or appeared irregularly. Hearst had his regular team of Opper and Outcault and Swinnerton and Dirks, and each of them would have their own stars : Happy Hooligan, Buster Brown , Little Jimmy and the Kazenjammer Kids. And so readers would get to know and relate to the same characters every week.

Benoît Crucifix : Speaking of color, how do you go about the digital restoration ? Because that’s a thing you’ve even been doing for other publishers now, such as with the Flash Gordon reprints.

Peter Maresca : Yeah, the Flash Gordon came out pretty nice, I also did Tarzan. The problem with working for others is my colors are very specific to try and look old but at the same time look like a new newspaper, but a hundred years old new newspaper, so that’s a very delicate balance of the colors which is why I always go to Asia to do press checks to make sure to get it right. And usually I can work with the printers for the first dozen pages or so, and then they understand what I want. Sometimes if I’ll do the corrections but the publisher just sends the PDFs to the printer in China, you don’t know how it’s going to come out. To go to press checks costs and extra two or three thousand dollars and most publishers don’t want to spend that. For me, it’s most important. Although frankly, most readers don’t notice the difference, but those who do appreciate the extra effort.

Benoît Crucifix : And that makes such a big difference with other reprints, where they use garish colors to make it look like new and the paper is all white which really doesn’t feel right. So yes, it really seems this balance between restoration and a “retro” look is important.

Peter Maresca : That’s another case where I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew I wanted it to look like a newsprint but when I did the color correction to get the comics exact, all the backgrounds would be different. So what I had to do is create a new background and so I scanned blank newsprint and just to be crazy I scanned ten different pieces so if you look with a magnifying glass, you could see different imperfections in the newsprint. And then I lifted all the panels out and created a new layer of just blank newspaper and put the pages on that. So that’s why you get, a texture newspaper look and feel which is something I invented because I didn’t know what I was doing. I only knew how I wanted it to look and I tried to make it look like that.

Benoît Crucifix : So at least you had experience with Photoshop and all these things.

Peter Maresca : I had experience with Photoshop for online graphics, not for printing. And that’s why I learnt a lot from Fershid Bharucha, how to adapt it properly for printing. Oh, and that’s one thing that Taschen borrowed from me, and he did the same thing with his Little Nemo book which is he put a textured background instead of plain colored paper. Sometimes publishers use cream color paper, or an off-white paper but then it’s too flat. Again, just a personal preference.

Benoît Crucifix : There’s also this new book, Little Tommy Lost by Cole Closser at Koyama Press, which is a pastiche of all these comic strips and which, as an object, tries to recreate the same feeling. We can see that it’s something that has been influencing authors today as well.

Peter Maresca : Yes, well, and before I did the Little Nemo, I remember looking at the books of Chip Kidd : Batman and a few other things[ ]. And it was like they had just come off the collectors’ shelves : very yellow and brown and just like an old comic. It’s a fun style. But I wanted to do something in between Chip Kidd and the Fantagraphics reprints which had a very white paper. So I decided somewhere in between felt best for me.

Benoît Crucifix : Right, some degree of restoration is necessary of course.

Peter Maresca : Yes, but usually what they would do is scan the pages and then they would do auto color correct and push the blacks all the way up, and push the yellows all the way down.

Benoît Crucifix : But it’s not good for the drawings, nor the colors.

Peter Maresca : And I think the softer colors is how the artist would like it. Yes, well, we don’t know that, but what we do know is the way that people saw it a hundred years ago. So I wanted to not just reprint Little Nemo and Krazy Kat, I wanted to recreate the experience of seeing those newspapers. And that also means BIG. And when people say : “It’s too big, where do I put the book ?” I say : “Well, in the living room, you slide it under the sofa and on Sunday morning, you drag it out, open it on the floor, and read the comics,” because, I’m an old guy, that’s the way I used to read comics as a kid, on the floor, you open up those big newspapers and there were thirty-two pages of comics every Sunday.

Benoît Crucifix : Is it then an attempt to recreate this childhood experience ?

Peter Maresca : Yes, it was the experience I had as a child and many people agreed with that. They said that when they got the Little Nemo, they felt they were six years old and they could just, with very small eyes and very large mind, they could dive into the work.

Benoît Crucifix : Definitely, having to open the book and put it flat and gaze over it is a very different and child-like experience. But there might be one difference, though, in that newspaper comics used to be very ephemeral material, things you could throw away, the paper was really thin, while with Sunday Press, you use thicker paper. At the same time, it recreates the reading experience in terms of the colors and the size, but it’s a big, expensive book which kind of monumentalizes the material.

Peter Maresca : In the Forgotten Fantasy, I did an example of the 1905 insert that was in The Chicago Tribune, when they came out with a comic section by German artists. They had a four-page special insert announcement the week before, so as an insert for the book, I created a facsimile of that on a very thin newsprint paper, so you could get an idea what that was. But for an entire book, that paper is too thin. So, in a way, the books are a brand new experience, and a tactile experience. It’s very funny, so many people do exactly the same thing when they opened the Little Nemo book, they go like this with their hands, they move their palms across it. There was a TV series called The L Word, a series about lesbian life, and they used our Little Nemo book in a scene. A character brought the book into an architect’s office to show it to them, opened it up, and the first thing they did is slide their hands over the page.

Benoît Crucifix : Another thing I was wondering about is, would you be interested in publishing European material as well ?

Peter Maresca : I would, because there is so much European material that I love, especially a lot of the older titles, both French and the Italian. It’s very interesting, but Americans are cultural chauvinists and it’s difficult enough to sell something that’s a hundred years old, worse for something that’s not a brand name. Fortunately, some of the more recent European comics from the last 25 years are being reproduced by IDW, Fantagraphics, and D&Q, but it’s sometimes a hard sell.

Benoît Crucifix : That’s interesting because with Sunday Press there is this focus on big canonical artists, and then there are all these less-known creators, sometimes doing strips that are somewhat inspired from the bigger names, so that we really get a fuller, more nuanced picture of the production back then. And in contrast with the focus on individual authors, you also show how much crossovers and jam sessions there would be in the comics pages.

Peter Maresca : Yes, because what they would do is, these guys, particularly for Hearst, they would put on their jackets and ties and hats and go sit in the same studio and do the work there. So they would have the original artwork and then pass it around. And that’s why, a lot of times, they would get together and share ideas and swap jokes. And some of them were good friends, like Herriman and Bud Fisher. Sometimes they would even draw pieces in each other strips, help each other out and you would never know. Like a lot of the early Mutt and Jeff, you can see there’s Herriman in there, and even though they did pass their boards around, you don’t know if it was Herriman drawing it. Fisher would see something that Herriman did in Krazy Kat, and put it in Mutt and Jeff as a joke or a tribute. So it’s like here’s the Herriman style thing, you know like a little triangle tree on the horizon and so that Bud Fisher would do one of those. In modern comics you also have people like Patrick McDonnell who often use their characters in an homage to older artists, so you know introducing a little bit Polly and her Pals, a little bit of Little Nemo and so on.

Benoît Crucifix : Speaking of more contemporary material, I was wondering about the “Origins of the Sunday Comics” on the GoComics platform. How did that come about ?

Peter Maresca : In the late 1990s I was working for Macromedia, which owned Shockwave and Flash, and they wanted a way to showcase this technology. Working for my old partner from my Apple Computer days, we created a fun site called “shockwave.com” with small games and animations featuring characters like Garfield and South Park. But Macromedia decided they wanted to be like a big Hollywood studio and create large-scale online entertainment, and ultimately they failed. But because of the earlier work my partner and I did with simpler online projects, we had a very good relationship with Andrews McMeel Universal Syndicate, so we worked with them to put comic strips on mobile phones. It was very difficult, because at the time mobile phones had tiny monochromatic screens and it was crazy. So we were too early, but we got GoComics started, and eventually it was all taken over by AMU. This was around 2003, and after Sunday Press appeared, GoComics approached me to do something online with the classic comics. They really wanted Little Nemo, so I used files from the books to create the online feature for Nemo, along with “Origins of the Sunday Comics,” which came from my two books on the first 20 years of modern comics.

Benoît Crucifix : I think it is a nice project because, where the big books fit in the graphic novel scene with the attention to the materiality and so on, on the internet you have this experience of seriality.

Peter Maresca : And it’s great for reference. Because my books could only have one hundred and fifty pages each, but here I could have five hundred, six hundred pages.

Benoît Crucifix : So you included both material from the books and extra pages. One thing that was really nice was the entire runs, like The Explorigator, which you actually read day by day, close enough to the original daily or weekly reading experience.

Peter Maresca : And also with Naughty Pete and McManus’s Nibsby the Newsboy, which is the George McManus homage to McCay.

Benoît Crucifix : How do you think these pages fit with the new comic strips published on the same GoComics platform ?

Peter Maresca : I got a very good response from the online comics community. In fact, messaging through facebook and online comics groups drew lots of people to GoComics that didn’t know about the site. And it fit together quite well… so important to get a sense of history for the comics, see where it all came from.

[Interview conducted by Benoît Crucifix in Angoulême on January 28, 2016, based on questions prepared in collaboration with Pedro Moura]