Saving Sundays

Earth is playing host to some special visitors from the Land of Oz this summer. But they’re not in Kansas anymore — this time it’s Palo Alto.

Self-publisher and comic collector Peter Maresca brings back to life Sunday comic sections from early 20th-century newspapers, meticulously restoring them in large, colorful volumes. His latest reproduction, “Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz,” a newspaper comic series created by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Walt McDougall, came out earlier this month.

There’s no place like home for Maresca, who runs the company Sunday Press Books out of his Palo Alto residence. He’s already published two calendars and four other books — “Little Nemo in Slumberland” in two volumes, “Little Sammy Sneeze” and “Sundays with Walt and Skeezix.”

“Queer Visitors” brings the beloved “Oz” characters to Earth for a series that ran in the paper for 26 weeks. Baum, creator of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” wrote the strip in 1904 to promote his second “Oz” novel. Maresca’s book was officially launched July 10 at the Winkie Convention of the International Wizard of Oz Club.

Coming in September is “The Upside Down World of Gustave Verbeek,” which ran from 1903 to 1905. The book contains 64 strips that are meant to be read right-side-up and then flipped upside down as inverted characters become their upright costars.

In one frame, Old Man Muffaroo is moored on an island as a fish attacks his canoe. Flipped over, the island and the fish transform into a massive bird, the canoe into its beak and Muffaroo into Lady Lovekins, caught in the feathered giant’s grasp.

Maresca’s goal is to preserve these comics in their intended quality so that future generations of comic art fans can appreciate the work of the pioneers.

The original strips come primarily from his personal collection, tucked away in piles of boxes in the attic. He estimates he has about half a million individual sheets, which he’s been gathering for 40 years.

“To collect them now would be impossible,” he says. Libraries threw out many of the comics in the 1970s and ’80s, and the ones left are deteriorating — fast.

With that urgency in mind, Maresca wanted to publish a collection of “Little Nemo” comics to honor the series’ 100th anniversary, approaching in 2005. But no publishers would take on the venture. Then Pulitzer-prize-winning comic artist Art Spiegelman suggested that Maresca do it himself. Armed with time and a little money after losing his job in the dot-com industry crash, the “accidental publisher” founded Sunday Press Books.

Maresca reproduces newspaper comics in their original broadsheet size — 16 inches by 21 inches — with bright but appropriately muted colors. He also created his own off-white newsprint background by taking the text off of five newspaper scans and blending the blank pages.

“I’ve tried to make it the way it was meant to be seen,” he says.

In his home, Maresca gingerly scans the pages in the attic where most of the sheets are encased in protective plastic. Some rest in between the pages of large art books so that he can pull them out with minimal handling or view them without touching.

He then edits with Adobe Photoshop to reverse the effects of tears, stains and yellowing. Some parts need to be completely reconstructed. Depending on the condition of the original, a page could take up to five hours from scanning to final product.

Maresca sends the images and the accompanying text to Paris-based Philippe Ghielmetti, who has been designing books for more than 30 years and comics for 11. His work lies in creating a package that mixes old and new.

“When I do the covers I try to get a cinematic look,” Ghielmetti wrote in an e-mail to the Weekly. “It’s supposed to get the feel of that time period but look like now at the same time. As for the inside text pages, it is based on the newspaper design from that time period.”

The books are then printed in Malaysia on a press large enough to produce the size Maresca wants. He personally travels to Malaysia to check that the color is correct.

Technology has done wonders for his preservation work. “It shows this art off in ways the artist couldn’t have even dreamed of,” Spiegelman said in a phone interview.

Still, Maresca can’t include every strip in his books. He decides which comics make the cut based on personal preference “and what’s never been done before,” he says.

For example, his “Queer Visitors” publication also features “Scarecrow and the Tinman,” a relatively unknown series by “Oz” illustrator W.W. Denslow. Sunday Press Books usually includes other artwork from the authors and gifts such as postcards and cutout toys.

Maresca’s love for comics started young. Every Sunday morning, he’d spread out the comics section on the floor and dive in.

In college, he stumbled on one old man who kept a collection of Sunday comics — also in his attic — stacked in about 20 piles, each 5 feet high. The man ultimately sold his lifetime collection to Maresca, who developed a deep admiration for the work that was done decades ago.

“(Comics) can tell a story in a way you can’t in other forms,” he explains. “It’s something between prose and cinema with a little poetry mixed in.”

In his home, he opens his first “Little Nemo” volume to the strip from Oct. 29, 1905 in which Nemo dreams he’s navigating a rocky path on stilts. The panels lengthen to reflect the child’s mounting fear and shrink again as he falls. Nemo tumbles diagonally across the page until he wakes in the bottom-right corner, out of bed, his mother at his side.

The average comic section was 16 pages in the 1930s while some of today’s papers run only four pages, Maresca notes. Individual strips can be as small as one-twelfth of a page, he adds.

Even so, true appreciation for American comics has grown in the last 20 to 25 years as people have realized that the art can speak to adults with sophistication and relevant themes, he says.

The company has been a family business since 2007 with his wife, Linnea Wickstrom, editing articles and business managing while their son Per, 17, takes care of scanning, shipping and convention work. Although the recent economic recession has slowed book sales, Maresca says there will always be fans willing to buy.

The comic art world has responded well to Maresca’s efforts at preserving history. All of the books were nominated for Eisner awards, the Oscars of comics. The first “Little Nemo” volume won the 2006 Eisner award for best publication design and two Harvey Kurtzman awards for best reprint and special award for excellence in reproduction. For many fans, Maresca’s books uncover the lost stories of beloved characters.

“Comics have a past,” Spiegelman said. “They have a real heritage. He’s making that available in as beautiful a way as possible.”

Info: For more about Maresca’s books, go to sundaypressbooks.com.