Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times examines the current renaissance of reprint comics, featuring Drawn and Quarterly’s WALT & SKEEZIX, and Fantagraphics KRAZY & IGNATZ and PEANUTS collections.

As the NYT notes, the collections are “refreshed by today’s top graphic novelists, who design art-book quality presentations, often contribute historical essays and cleverly rework the art into endpapers. Chris Ware, the creator of ‘Jimmy Corrigan’, designs the ‘Krazy & Ignatz’ and ‘Walt & Skeezix’ series, while Adrian Tomine designs a series of work by the Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi… Jeet Heer, a historian who edits the Herriman and King sets, said: ‘They make them seem fresh and alive, not just something of antiquarian interest.’”

The NYT also looks at the role of obsessive collectors such as Joe Matt, a cartoonist in his own right (PEEPSHOW, FAIRWEATHER, POOR BASTARD and the forthcoming SPENT, available in May 2007), who are making these restored and reprinted collections of classic newspaper comic strips possible: “Their compulsion to own an artist’s every strip—sometimes 15,000 or more—and to clip, preserve and organize them all, has helped rescue a disappearing corner of American popular culture. After decades in which comic-strip syndicates and libraries have been purging themselves of paper archives for microfilm, their collections are often all that’s left.”

Read See You in the (Restored, Reprinted) Funny Papers in the NYT