LOAC Essentials Volume 2: The Gumps - The Saga of Mary Gold

In the late 1910s, Sidney Smith developed a formula of the daily strip thatwould make The Gumps one of the most popular comics of the1920s and himself one of the richest cartoonists of his day.

By the end ofthe decade Sidney Smith's The Gumps had secured a huge and loyalaudience with a decade of melodrama, adventure, mystery, and comedy.

So devotedwere his readers, in fact, that they regularly wrote in to offer advice for hischaracters' love lives and business decisions and they generally treated thecharacters as friends and family members.

In 1928-29, with the launching of whatwould be his most famous story, "The Saga of Mary Gold," Smith's relationship tohis readers would be tested as never before.

Its heartbreaking conclusion wouldchange comics forever.

Here for the first time since the story made headlinesacross America in the spring of 1929, IDW reprints the saga that Hogan'sAlley magazine called "One of the Ten Biggest Events in Comics History"- a tale that has lost none of its power to captivate readers in the 21stCentury. LOAC Essentials reprints, in yearly volumes, the rare early dailynewspaper strips that are essential to comics history, seminal strips that areunique creations in their own right, while also significantly contributing tothe advancement of the medium.