A photograph of an early compilation of Shoe comic strips

I recently found, from a hospital library shelf, a copy of an early reprint edition of the late cartoonist Jeff MacNelly's famous newspaper comic strip, Shoe:

This copy was printed in 1978, at least a year after MacNelly launched the strip, starring anthropomorphic birds like Martin P. Shoemaker, who runs the Treetop Tattler newspaper in a fictional region of east Virginia. I was fairly familiar with it in my youth, and it still holds up as a very amusing pastime.

And this also makes a point I may have once made about newspaper strips have utilized the power of reprints in paperback/hardcover much sooner than comic books actually did. Monthly pamphlets may have seen some form of reprint in such a format in the 1960s, but it took at least 2 decades until Marvel/DC became more serious about employment of paperback/hardcover format, and the most important point in all that particular issue is, again: why don't they abandon the monthly format altogether and take up something like paperback/hardcover for a change? Come to think of it, the same could probably go for newpspaper strips too.

Anyway, amazing to find something like Shoe after so many years in a reprint format, this one which reprints both the black-and-white dailies and the full-color Sundays. I guess it's a good question whether today's reprint societies should also offer colorized editions of the daily strips as well? That could be worth considering.