Huzzah! B.K. Taylor’s “Timberland Tales” and “The Appletons” strips from National Lampoon will be resurrected next spring – to wit: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Hes-Crazy-B-K-Taylor/dp/1683962877. Publication is set for March 2020, and the quality is bound to be excellent: Taylor told me in email a year ago that he was on a final quest for the original artwork for just a few remaining strips. I happened to think of that email this morning – strangely, it was one year ago Sunday – and just searched for “I Think He’s Crazy” in the last year…et voilà!
That years-ago post of mine in the first link here is consistently among the top ten visited pages on The Finley Quality Network (1,273 hits to date, with 277 so far this year), so I think sales ought to be pretty good.
I read a lot of books on Kindle, but this one’s too good for a puny screen – especially my monochrome e-ink one – so I’m going to buy the real 8½x11″ book. One assumes the “Lapoon” typo will be fixed by then (I pointed it out to him).
Edited 23 August 2019 to add: The corrected image is now on Amazon’s pre-order page for the book.
What great news, I always looked forward to the Appeltons and Timberland tales every month when my NL was delivered. I still have quite a collection my local comic shop is lusting after.
Do you know if any original artwork will be offered for sale?
I don’t know if Taylor will be selling any originals, but the fact that he’s retained nearly every one for all these years makes me doubt it.
I had a good collection of the magazines myself, all the early years in the original yellow binders NL sold, but they were badly damaged while in storage and I discarded them with a heavy heart the last time I moved.
It’s unfortunate that the page images in the complete set they released on DVD many years ago (sometimes seen on eBay) were of such low-to-middling quality. Still nice to have, but they remind me of the first postage stamp-sized videos in Windows.