Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Inside the Trap Door

For those of you who don't always make it over to Whirled of Kelly to see Walt Kelly's magnificent art and stories, be aware that some exceedingly rare material is unfolding, right now.


4 comments:

Eric said...

Since I can't seem to leave comments over there, I'll make it here: Thom, thank you for your beautiful job of cleaning up the art, and thank you for giving me a place to share this material with others. Everybody else, enjoy!

Annie said...

Hi Thom and Eric,

Thank you for the link. I've just spent an enjoyable time reading most of the articles back to the beginning. I've read some of the Peter Wheat stories, and I'm looking forward to reading all of the rest.

With the interest in graphic novels and good story telling, and all of your efforts to find complete issues and to make clean digital scans, have you considered obtaining the rights to make a reprint series for early elementary school children; or to publish a single volume for adult collectors, including the history of the series?

More important than that, is what you are doing already, distributing it at your sites, for love of the work. The characters, the art, and the stories are all wonderful, and I'm sure reading them is making more people happy than you know.

Eric said...

The Peter Wheat material is in the public domain, so there is no copyright to clear. Trademark may be a separate issue, but I think the bread company is long defunct.

I would love to see the Peter Wheat material back in print, and would be more than happy to rescan issues or whatever was necessary to make it happen. The problem right now is what I have is semi-random. We're not posting stuff out of order because we want to show off one thing at any given point, we're just trying to get what we happen to have found out there. Still, I'm filling in holes, so we'll see what happens.

And thank you for your comments, I'm very glad you're enjoying the stories. Thom posted this piece first at my request, since it's so rare I was genuinely worried about something happening to my copy before it could be shared. But we've got something a lot more substantial coming up very soon.

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

Even if the intellectual property of Bakers Associates were not orphaned, the trademark for Peter Wheat has not been actively maintained. Even if it were maintained, given that the copyright ws not renewed or was orphaned, the only real restriction would be on the title of the collection; and I'd say that “Walt Kelly” is the selling point anyway. ;-)