Following up on yesterday’s downthetubes post revealing Portland-based Ablaze Publishing is to release a collection of the ground-breaking 1970s US Sunday newspaper strip Friday Foster, co-created by James Bond newspaper strip writer Jim Lawrence and Spanish artist Jorge Longarón, with art also by Gray Morrow, comes the information that Barcelona-based Norma Editorial will be the first to publish the collection, in Spanish.

As we reported, Friday Foster, published between January 1970 until 1974, was the first mainstream syndicated comic strip in the US to feature a Black woman in the lead role.

The Friday Foster Collected book is a project edited by Javier Meson and David Moreu for Norma Editorial, the result of two years of work, created with input and supervision from Longarón before he died last year.

The collection includes the strip, plus exclusive interviews and previously unreleased material from Longarón’s archives.

The Spanish edition will be published first, later this year; the US edition, edited by Christopher Marlon, is an English translation of the Spanish edition. Javier Meson is has co-ordinated both.

“Hopefully they’ll find more publishers to take it on in other languages, as well,” artist Kurt Busiek told me via Twitter.

Norma Editorial is one of Spain’s leading publishers in the field of comics, graphic and illustrated books. With a catalogue that includes some of the world’s most prominent authors, the Barcelona-based company, which owns its own bookshops chain, operates in a multitude of fields, always related to the Ninth Art: publishing, distribution, representation of authors and graphic services.

• Read our article on the Ablaze Publishing Friday Foster collection

• Order Friday Foster from AmazonUK (available from 20th July 2021 (Affiliate Link)

• Norma Editorial is online at normaeditorial.com – newsletter available

With thanks to Christopher Marlon and Kurt Busiek

John Freeman

The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Star Trek Explorer (previously known as Star Trek Magazine) and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War and “Dan Dare”. He’s the writer of "Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies" for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.

Categories: downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, US Comics

Tags: Ablaze Publishing, Adventure Comics, David Moreu, downthetubes News, Friday Foster, Gray Morrow, Javier Meson, Jim Lawrence, Jorge Longarón, Norma Editorial