I have been aware of the Menomonee Falls Gazette for quite some time, but I had never seen a copy until recently. For most of my life I have had an idea for a "comic strip newspaper." Little did I know such a thing already exisdted. The Menomonee Falls Gazette is very close to what I had envisioned. I searched online for an index but couldn't find one, so I decided to created one myself. After looking into it, I decided to start my collection with #52, the first 24-page issues. After many 24-page issues in a single section, it goes to 48 pages in two sections for a while. Then it becomes 40 pages for a long time before dropping to 32, then back to 24. Issue #52 comprises...
- Garth (by Frank Bellamy, John Allard, and Jim Edgar)
- Johnny Hazard (by Frank Robbins)
- Rip Kirby (by John Prentice and Fred Dickenson)
- Buz Sawyer (by Roy Crane)
- Secret Agent Corrigan (by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson)
- Modesty Blaise (by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway)
- Flash Gordon (by Dan Barry and Bob Fujitani)
- Ambler (by Doug Wildey)
- Steve Canyon (by Milton Caniff)
- Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors (by John Dixon)
- On Stage (by Leonard Starr)
- Ben Casey (by Neal Adams)
- Terry and the Pirates (by George Wunder)
- Dateline: Danger! (by John Saunders and Alden McWilliams)
- The Phantom (by Lee Falk and Sy Barry)
- Brick Bradford (by Paul Norris)
- James Bond (by Horak)
- Jeff Cobb (by Pete Hoffman)
- Jeff Hawke (by Sydney Jordan)
- Mandrake the Magician (by Lee Falk and Fred Fredericks)
- Superman (by Wayne Boring)
- Tarzan (by Dan Barry and Burne Hogarth)
Plus...
- Air Hawk (one Sunday strip)
- Tarzan (one Sunday strip by by Russ Manning)
- Pauline McPeril (two strips by Jack Rickard)
Many of these (Johnny Hazard, Rip Kirby, Buz Sawyer, Secret Agent Corrigan, Flash Gordon, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, The Phantom, James Bond, Jeff Hawke, Mandrake the Magician, Superman, Tarzan ) I have in hardcover collections. Menomonee Falls Gazette will duplicate some of these, others not. But most of them I have not yet read, at least not enirely. Let's look at Steve Canyon for example.
I have a complete collection of Steve Canyon comic strips spanning 1976-1988 in Comics Review, but I have never read them. At first, collecting entirely via backissues, I was waiting until I had filled a complete set. Later, I decided to wait until I had read all 12 volumes of the IDW collection, which spans 1947-1970. So far I have read only the first two. Comics Review picked up where the Menomonee Falls Gazette left off, and I suspect that IDW left off where Menomonee Falls Gazette began.
But then I started to think about when I first started to collect Dick Tracy back in the '70s, before comic strip collections were as easy to come by as today, in the real "Golden Age." I had the DC treasury edition featuring Flattop, three paperbacks featuring Pruneface, Shaky and Mrs. Pruneface, some Dell comics, plus I was clipping the dailies. In later years I collected reprint series published by Blackthorne, Spec Productions and others. It wasn't so important to me back in those days that I read everything in order. I acquired them piecemeal and that's the way I read them as well.
Menomonee Falls Gazette collects adventure strips, but it had a sister publication, Menomonee Falls Guardian, which collected humoroius strips. I bought a few copies of that, too, hoping to fill some gaps in Gasoline Alley.
My goal is to read my copies of the Gazette and the Guardian cover-to-cover, moving from strip-to-strip as they appear, regardless of whether I have them duplicated in collections or not, regardless of whether or not I have read them.
Replies
Menomonee Falls Gazette featured then-current adventure strips, but it had a sister publication, the Menomonee Falls Guardian, which featured mostly-current humor strips, including Gasoline Alley, my current pasion. It's not so important to have consecutive issues of a publication which features gag-a-day strips, and I have been able to determine that the Guardian's Gasoline Alley strips were already ones I had in Comics Revue. Still, I did want some samples of this 16-page publication, so I bought all the ones I could find with Gasoline Alley covers. this issue I am currently reading includes...
...plus Sunday strips featuring Broom Hilda and Pogo.
I have finished reading the random copies of the Guardian I bought and moved on to the Gazette. The Guardian actually features more strips than those listed in the post above. The ones listed are those which feature an entire week's worth of dailies, but there are others as well, some of them I rememeber quite vividly from childhood, but haven't though about in years: strips such as Winthrop, Eek & Meek, and others. Of the featured strips, the one I have the strongest memories of is Tumbleweeds.
Every issue of the Gazette I have bought so far cost $3 or less. The first issue I read took me two hours to read. In the day of "$5 units" which never take me longer than 20 minutes, I find the Menomonee Falls Gazette to be an incredible bargain.