Lost Art Books (Picture This Press)

01/10/2025

My press' Kreigh Collins volume collecting the Mitzi McCoy strip in its entirety was announced yesterday as the #1 seller in its category at Bud Plant Books in 2024. It was also gratifying that Bud Plant's Art Books also gave it their "Highest Recommendation" designation!

04/04/2023

In our most recent newsletter we shared some info on a couple of upcoming Lost Art Books projects in the offing, slated for release later this year. Here's one of them!

THE COMPLETE BETTY BROWN
We are excited to partner with comic strip historian Tom Heintjes of Hogan's Alley fame in presenting another first-ever collection of historical significance to the comic connoisseur, The Complete Betty Brown.

All Betty Brown wanted was to run her drugstore and maybe fall in love. What she got instead was murderers, drug counterfeiters, con men, ruthless retail competitors, and a string of broken romances. This latest volume in the Lost Art Books series will include her full, never-reprinted saga from 1934 to 1948, more than 350 strips by Zack Mosley ("Smilin' Jack") and Boody Rogers ("Sparky Watts") that tell the story of Betty Brown, the comics' first female professional!

Restored to our exacting standards, this volume will include an introduction by Heintjes detailing the strip's unusual background, its creators, and sample art from their other work as illustrators and cartoonists.

The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G.: The Lost Art Books Collection
Summer/Fall 2023 • Price to be determined • Paperback • approximately 370 pp. • Black & white • 11" x 8.5"

02/23/2023

Let's mix it up a little with this blast from Lost Art Books' past!

PRE-ORDER SPECIAL AT picturethispress.com/kremos-lost-art-of-niso-ramponi-volumes-1-2/KREMOS: The Lost Art of Niso Ramponi • Volume 1: Bodacious Black & Whit...

11/08/2021

Well, if you ever wanted to see a page-by-page flip through of the entire first volume of my LOST ART OF HEINRICH KLEY, this vlogger enthusiastically obliges.

In this video I go through another more obscure book. The Art of Heinrich Kley volume one. Wonder full ink drawings.

10/27/2021

Trying to get some of the 40-50 portfolios I’ve accumulated labeled and in some useful order instead of stacked away in less-accessible spots around the studio and house. Decided to film a flip-through of a random one on the off-chance somebody might enjoy a peek into these. If you like DAN SMITH or RUSSELL PATTERSON there are some hard-to-find treats in here. Almost all of this material has been accumulated over the decades either with an eye toward a Lost Art Books project (there’s a long queue of those in the works) or simply because the piece spoke to me and I wanted to have it in my life.

If folks enjoy this sort of thing, I can be persuaded to film something like this whenever I pull one of these portfolios out for Lost Art Books production. The Dan Smith book, long in gestation, is one of the things that has inspired this recent push toward better organization.

Lots of unusual Dan Smith and Russell Patterson pieces, among others.

12/06/2020

I completely missed this lovely review of one of the first two books I published under the Lost Art Books imprint. What a treat to see somebody loved the books as much as I did pulling it together. This one has been out of print for about eight years now, but I'm going to do a special reprint for our 10th anniversary this year.

5/5: If you are a fan of comics, prehistoric creatures, and the history of such in the media, then Lost Art Books has created the perfect (and important) collection for you. The word cartoon comes from an old Italian word karton, the hard paperboard artists once used to create sketches or a study (t...

11/26/2020

After a bit of a hiatus, I've started production on a new volume for my Lost Art Books imprint. I'll be spending my Thanksgiving scanning the brittle pages of perhaps the very first graphic novel ever published, RED EAGLE (1938) by the amazing Jimmy Thompson. Look for it from Lost Art Books in early 2021 with a newly penned introduction by Frank Young.

05/29/2020

Collection Highlights #7
Albert Guillaume (1873-1942)
cartoons (undated but probably 1910s / Dec. 1934)
11.75" x 9.5" / 9.5" x 12.5"

This time I've decided to include two pieces of original art by one of my favorite cartoonist/illustrators from the early 20th century, Albert Guillaume, because I posted one of them about a year ago.

There are seemingly few cartoonists that I know of who were as prolific as Albert Guillaume, who was contributing to multiple french periodicals at once throughout his entire career, in addition to creating posters, postcards, paintings, and humorous illustrated books. He was obviously quite popular in his day (or perhaps "days" is more apt given the length of his career) because I have come across several volumes of books dedicated to collecting just his work from about 1895 through the 1920s. He actually had an "annual" collection devoted to his work that lasted at least 15 years. Tangentially, I came across an Edward Hopper sketch at an exhibit at the Smithsonian a few years ago that he had signed "after Albert Guillaume," suggesting that Guillaume's work caught at least one American's eye back in the day.

But I'm guessing that today almost nobody in France--and even fewer in America--knows of Guillaume. In terms of subject matter and sheer prolificacy, he reminds me a bit of Charles Dana Gibson, perfectly capturing with wit the mores of his times, particularly when it comes to the interactions between the sexes, classes, and generations. He was a keen observer of the times in which he lived, and his attention to detail over the arc of his career provides an impressive chronicle of the evolution of french fashion and interior design over several decades.

I do not know what publication either of these cartoons apeared in, and I don't have a date for the first of the two (though the fashion suggests the 1910s, perhaps).The second of these two pieces is from 1934, relatively late in his career, and it is so assured, with just the exact perfect level of visual detail and interest. Guillaume is one of the few artists I admire whose quality of work didn't taper off with age.

It's starting to feel like a refrain, but Albert Guillaume is the exact type of artist for which my Lost Art Books imprint was created. There have long been in the works two volumes devoted to his life and art.

05/19/2020

Collection Highlights #5
Pencils: John Buscema (1927-2002) / Inks: Alfredo Alcala (1925-2000)
"Savage Sword of Conan" comic, No. 16, p. 15 (1976)
15" x 10.5"

I figure it is time to work in some comic book art from my collection, and this piece seemed an appropriate starting point for a number of reasons. The "Conan the Barbarian" color comic and "Savage Sword of Conan" b&w magazine were a couple of the first comics I actually collected as a kid, making it a point to peddle my bike down to the Stop-N-Go or Howard's Pharmacy in the Dayton suburb I grew up in with whatever change I could scrape up to browse the spinner rack for the latest issue. I'd certainly bought plenty of comics before and had a nice stack of them accumulated, but before Conan, my comic buying was more impulsive and might include buying an issue of "Sgt. Rock" one week, "Spider-Man" the next, and a Charlton "Space Wars" the week after that. I also like that this particular issue is an adaption of one of Robert E. Howard's original Conan yarns, "People of the Black Circle."

I preferred "Savage Sword" of the two because, as a b&w magazine, it escaped the censorious interventions of the Comics Code Authority, and thus was typically grittier, with more believable violence, sexual innuendo, and, for a short spell in the 1970s, nudity. And the covers were painted, making it feel like it was meant more for adults than kids. I actually couldn't find "Savage Sword" at the neighborhood convenience store, and had to wait until my family would drive across town for a family meal with my grandmother to a restaurant named Woody's, which had an old school newsstand attached to it. The cantankerous lady behind the counter seemed to relish slamming her date stamp on the front cover, leaving me cringing as Conan's horse or the damsel he was saving was left emblazoned with a smeary inked "May 20, 1978" or some such. I eventually worked up the courage to ask her to please not stamp the cover at the end of our transaction, and she seemed paralyzed with shock, leaving me to surmise nobody had ever had the temerity to make such a request.

John Buscema was the penciller for exceptionally long stretches on both Conan titles, and honestly, by the time I was picking up his Conan work, it was starting to feel slightly rote. It probably didn't help that he was often being inked by the chunky, personality-free lines of Ernie Chan. But before Chan became Buscema's de facto inker, there was a stretch on "Savage Sword" during which Filipino wunderkind Alfredo Alcala was lavishing inks on Busecma's pencils that set a high water mark for the medium then and now.

In this early issue of "Savage Sword" shown here, Buscema was still pouring his all into the storytelling and compositions, and Alcala, who worked at a speed and standard that genuinely shocked his incredulous American contemporaries, was inking those pages with a bravura of somebody with something to prove. Their collaboration over a string of issues produced some comic art for the ages.

I was lucky to pick up this page and the subsequent page 16 from this issue close to 20 years ago before the prices for Buscema's work skyrocketed beyond my meager means. But even then it might have been the most I ever payed for original art up to that point as a collector. I'm lucky I had the chance.

05/08/2020

Collection Highlights #6
René Bull (1872-1942)
single-page cartoon (publication and date unknown, perhaps ca. 1925)
14.5" x 10.5"

British artist René Bull is known today, if at all, for his illustrated edition of "The Arabian Nights" (1912), which has been reprinted at least a few times since it's initial publication. It is filled with wonderful color plates and pen-and-ink illustrations by Bull, and it's worth seeking out even one of the more modern reprints. His work in that book has aged remarkably well, and still retains a fresh almost modern quality.

Bull, however, didn't illustrate all the many books in his career, and instead was a frequent contributor of cartoons and illustrations to the day's periodicals. I'm most familiar with his work in the top British humor magazine "Punch" and the boy's adventure stories magazine, "Chums", but he contributed for years at a time to at least a dozen other British fiction and humor magazines.

I wish I knew the date and publication in which this particular cartoon appeared. It's a fun, upbeat "forecast" of a future filled with travel, leisure, and the technological revolution to enable it all. Pop culture was rightly enamored with the recent advent of airplanes, and the kind of fanciful musings about how flight was going to transform everybody's lives was regular fodder for cartoons of that time. I was lucky when I picked this piece up to be able to grab a couple of other one-page cartoons by Bull, likely for the same magazine.

I've included a scan of the agent's plate on the back of the art board as an interesting curiosity, something I don't believe I've seen on any other art in my collection.

It is artists like Bull that inspired me to start Picture This Press and the Lost Art Books imprint, and he's deserving of broader remembrance.