It's been a while since Dean Mullaney's name has been seen in comics circles. The former publisher of Eclipse Comics has spent the past 15 years or so outside of the industry, running graphic design and sign-making businesses. But recently IDW Publishing announced that Mullaney is editing and designing a new IDW imprint, the Library of American Comics, devoted to classic comic strip reprints. Its first project will fill a major gap in comics bookshelves: a comprehensive six-volume edition of legendary cartoonist Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, which began in 1934. PW Comics Week talked with Mullaney about how IDW's Terry series came about.

PW Comics Week: How did the Caniff project happen?

Dean Mullaney: Terry and the Pirates has always been my favorite strip, for more than half my life, and I'm 53. When I published comics, I always wanted to do Terry, but NBM had done it in the early '80s. They printed the Sundays in black and white with the dailies, and they split the Sundays up over two pages. We were all thankful to have a complete Terry at the time—it wasn't done the right way, but we all appreciated it. But time has passed, and those books are long out-of-print, and technology has changed so much that it's much easier to do better reproduction now. With the revival of interest in strip reprints, I felt the time was right to fulfill my dream and do Terry and the Pirates the right way, with the Sundays in color right alongside the dailies in black and white.

PWCW: How did you settle on the design for the books, and where are you getting the artwork?

DM: They'll be 11”x8 1/2” books. I've thought for 25 years about the best way to do Terry, and I decided on it a long time ago, so I didn't have to wring my hands over what the best format would be. My feeling was that when you're running Sunday and daily continuity together, the half-page format works much better. Personally, I don't like reading six dailies on a page—I just find it disconcerting. So it'll be Sundays on one page, three dailies on the next page, three dailies again on the next page. This way, all the lettering is the same size, and everything's in proportion to the other strips.

I've been collecting Terry Sundays for more years than I can remember, and I've got about 75% of them in my collection. What I'm missing, I'm getting from the Bill Blackbeard collection at Ohio State and the Caniff archives. We were still missing a few for the first book, but [comics collector] Peter Maresca, who [published] that fantastic Little Nemo book, is supplying me with some of the Sundays that were still missing from the first book. I'm working on all six books at the same time—I'm getting them all done, so that when it's time to send them to the printer, we can just send them off. I want to assure collectors that they'll get them all.

PWCW: What else will be in the Terry books?

DM: There'll be a continuing biographical essay, running through all six volumes, which will not just be about Caniff, but set the stage of world events at the time. Because Terry and the Pirates was so integrated with world events, there'll be historical information to help orient the reader to what was going on in the world at the time and how it relates to the strip. We'll also have an introduction in each volume. The first one is by [comics artist] Howard Chaykin, and [journalist and novelist] Pete Hamill is writing the second introduction. Hamill's a huge Caniff fan, and I'm a great fan of his—I grew up in New York reading his newspaper columns.

All the artwork for the introductions is being supplied by the Caniff archives at Ohio State. Today I got a great scan off the original art of the famous death scene of Raven Sherman, for the 1941 volume. There's actually a paste-over on her head—Caniff drew that twice. A collector sent that to me. And I just got a good scan of an original Scorchy Smith by Noel Sickles. [Scorchy Smith was an early 1930s adventure comics strip, and Sickles was a notable cartoonist, friend and collaborator of Caniff’s].

PWCW: What should people who've heard of Caniff but never seen Terry and the Pirates know?

DM: The important thing about Terry and the Pirates is—and Howard Chaykin says this—it's the first and also the best example of adventure comics. Caniff has such an immense influence on every other artist who followed. Eisner, Jack Kirby, all these guys were influenced by Caniff. Before then, almost everything was done with line work, just pen and ink. And Sickles and Caniff started using brush and created that chiaroscuro style, which influenced all the major adventure strip artists and comic book artists. I mean, you're still seeing the influence today. Even if current artists aren't aware of Caniff, they were influenced by somebody who was influenced by Caniff.

PWCW: When does the first book come out, and how will they be spaced after that?

DM: They'll be released quarterly. The first one's coming out September 4; there'll be six volumes in all, two years per volume. There were 12 years of Caniff—he left the strip at the end of 1946, and George Wunder took over and ran it all the way through, I think, '73. But the Caniff strips are what we're collecting.

PWCW: Any thoughts about reprinting the George Wunder strips afterward?

DM: No. What we're following it up with is Little Orphan Annie—we just got the license from Tribune Media to do the complete Little Orphan Annie next.

PWCW: Are there other strips you're planning to reprint?

DM: I just started plotting out the rest of 2008 and on to 2009. Sometime in 2008, we'll be releasing, probably not another long series, at least until Terry is over, but some shorter series. But the whole idea of creating the Library of American Comics was for it to be an ongoing, comprehensive series.