Here are a couple of highlights from the selection that I’ll have on hand at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair next weekend, October 14-15, 2006. Both are comic strip collections by authors who are better known for their work in children’s books.

Crockett Johnson wrote and drew Barnaby between 1942 and 1946. Mr. O’Malley was young Barnaby’s Fairy Godfather, and while O’Malley paid Barnaby plenty of attention, it was often in pursuit of his own Quixotic agenda: ridding a condemned house of a gang of criminals (black marketeers skirting wartime rationing laws) so that O’Malley’s ghost friend, Gus, can haunt the house in peace, or getting himself elected to Congress without being seen by the public.

Johnson passed the strip on to other hands in 1946 and returned to draw the final episode in 1952. Barnaby was revived twice in the ’50s and ’60s. Johnson was, of course, the author of Harold and the Magic Crayon and many other books.

I’ll have copies of Ballantine’s first three Barnaby collections, which reprint roughly half of Johnson’s strips, and three issues of the nearly forgotten 1945-’46 Barnaby Quarterly magazine.

Daniel Pinkwater cites Terry and the Pirates, Li’l Abner, and Pogo as inspirations for Norb, the newspaper strip that he produced with illustrator Tony Auth in 1989-’90. Norb was a scientist and adventurer who battled cavemen, bad poets, and a now dated parody of Michael Jackson. The comic was an adventure strip with a continuing storyline. “This sort of thing is out of favor these days,” Pinkwater wrote, “but we figured it was due for a comeback.” It wasn’t. While the strip is said to have received fan mail from Jules Feiffer and Chaim Potok, it received little attention from the public and was quickly dropped by most of the papers that were running it. Pinkwater and Auth ended the strip quietly after it had run for a year. A few months after the strip’s demise, a cheaply produced collection of Norb dailies was printed in a small run by Mu Press. I’ll have a copy of this unappreciated classic at the Antiquarian Book Fair.

About half of the books in the Using Books booth will be comic-related. Tomorrow I’ll preview some of the non-comic books.