From Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to Patrick O’Donnell’s Mutts, comic strip reprints have been a healthy category for over half a century, with such comical perennials as Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side among the all-time bestsellers of any kind. Interest in handy collections of current newspaper strips remains strong; Andrews McMeel, long the home of Doonesbury and Cathy, continues its reign as the dominant player in the market with such current hits as Scott Adam’s Dilbert and Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy. But the current boom in graphic novels has created a “perfect storm” of both commercial and historical interest, where smaller publishers are taking advantage of an expanding market for legendary but long unavailable comic strips that had their heyday 40 or even 100 years ago.

The classic strip reprint trend probably started in 2004 with The Complete Peanuts from Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books, best known as a house for cutting-edge alternative cartoonists such as Dan Clowes. But today, 30%—40% of Fantagraphics’ publishing output consists of vintage comics material, most notably classic comic strips including Peanuts, Popeye and soon Pogo.

Fantagraphics has been publishing comic strip collections since the early 1980s, but current consumer interest in all kinds of comics have generated sales well above what would be expected from an audience of comics historians alone. “The first volume of The Complete Peanuts sold 120,000 copies, maybe more,” says marketing and publicity director Eric Reynolds, and has become Fantagraphics’ “bestselling book ever.” Other publishers are joining in the vintage strip revival. San Diego—based indie comics publisher IDW Publishing experimented with the initial two volumes of The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. The success of the lantern-jawed detective led to IDW’s new imprint, the Library of American Comics, which will publish multi-volume sets of Milton Caniff’s adventurous Terry and the Pirates, beginning in July, as well as Harold Gray’s Depression-era fable Little Orphan Annie. In addition, Montreal indie comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly is putting out Frank King’s bucolic Gasoline Alley. All of these strips were included in last year’s Masters of American Comics museum exhibit in Los Angeles and New York, and the book collections are high-quality hardcovers with an eye toward preserving this material in editions befitting their cultural status.

Reynolds thinks the growing mainstream interest in comics as an art form has benefited these classic strips. “Since the ’90s, a generation of cartoonists—Dan Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware—had major breakthroughs.” Together with acclaimed cartoonist Art Spiegelman, they served as “ambassadors to the form” who promoted their interests in great cartoonists of the past, for example, through the comics issue of McSweeney’s that was edited by Ware.

The attention from Peanuts has enabled Fantagraphics to pursue other high-profile reprint series. The first volume of its new Popeye series, collecting work by the character’s creator, E.C. Segar, sold 20,000 copies. Fantagraphics is inserting a promotional tip-in postcard in Warner Home Video’s first DVD volume of Popeye animated cartoons this summer; Fantagraphics’ Popeye Vol. 2 follows in the fall.

This fall Fantagraphics also launches its reprints of Walt Kelly’s Pogo in volumes designed by Bone creator (and Kelly admirer) Jeff Smith. Reynolds expects that the sales “will be right around Popeye level,” and the company plans to give it one of “our biggest pushes.”

The “biggest surprise” among Fantagraphics’ strip reprints is that George Herriman’s Krazy Kat has had “surprisingly large” sales of “over 10,000 copies” per volume, making it Fantagraphics’ third-best seller.

IDW President Ted Adams was pleasantly surprised by the sales of the first Dick Tracy collection, which has already sold out of its 7,500 print run: “We thought we would have a stock for a year or more, and the fact that we ran out after a few months took us by surprise.” The first Terry and the Pirates volume will have a similar print run.

Checker Books is another smaller publisher that has found success in yellowing newspaper archives, publishing seven volumes of Alex Raymond’s science fiction strip Flash Gordon, which sell upward of 10,000 per volume, according to publisher Mark Thompson. Checker also publishes collections of Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon and the works of early 20th-century comic strip pioneer Winsor McCay.

Checker’s success attracted the attention of the late cartoonist and B.C. creator Johnny Hart, resulting in Growing Old with B.C., a retrospective of his strip's 50-year history. (Hart completed his initial edit of the book before his death.) Thompson plans a major publicity push for the book, including donating copies to PBS stations for fund-raisers and even doing an infomercial.

Who is buying these vintage strips? Both Adams and Reynolds cite an audience of older folks who find a nostalgic appeal in reading comics from their childhood. But Thompson also says readers don’t “necessarily have to have lived through a period to feel nostalgia for it,” and believes that his customers include collectors who simply like the period. He also finds a promising new market in art students who are now studying comics, particularly early masters like McCay, and reports recent sales to a college art class in Virginia.

Meanwhile, “classic” strips of more recent vintage anchor the sales at Andrews McMeel, the publishing arm of strip syndicator Universal Press Syndicate, and the market for contemporary strip collections remains healthy even as newspaper comics pages shrink. Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes continues as its #1 seller, with some 30 million copies in print, according to v-p of sales and marketing Dan Boston. Gary Larson’s The Far Side is its #2 seller, with Dilbert and Get Fuzzy tied for third. Among newer strips, the fastest growing is Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine. The five-year-old strip has five collections out, with a sixth due this fall. “It’s been a slow ramp-up, but Pearls is really gaining ground each year. Now it’s one of our staples,” Boston says.

Boston also points to a curiosity of the strip collection category: most are shelved in the humor section as opposed to the graphic novel section. He thinks a union of the two may be in order. “We’d get more people to look if all the books were together. If readers are interested in graphic novels, I think they would be interested in cartoon strips, and vice versa. It’s just the natural thing.” He also says Web comics collections are clearly the future, citing Universal’s uclick Web site, which is actively developing Web comics.

Thompson speculates that reprinting older strips in book collections will remain the domain of small, dedicated comics companies rather than large mainstream publishers. “You have to be a Sherlock Holmes to do this,” he says, explaining that one has to go through “a hundred different sources” to find copies of the strips to shoot from. He says with a laugh: “It keeps me viable and the big guys out.” For readers, it’s a chance to acquire America’s “comics heritage” in permanent, attractive formats, says IDW’s Adams. “Now it’s more accessible for the average person to complete a comics heritage library.”