Thomas Andrae Joins Hermes Press as Special Projects Editor: his first book to be an archival reprint of Walt Kelly's Peter Wheat     

 Internationally recognized pop-culture historian, Dr. Thomas Andrae is joining Hermes Press as a Special Projects Editor.  Andrae has authored such books as Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book, Creators of the Superheroes, and is co-author of such titles as Walt Kelly: the Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo and Batman and Me (with Bob Kane).

    He will supervise the creation of a series of archival reprints of important Golden Age comics by some of the medium's greatest creators.  His first project will be an in-depth reprint of Walt Kelly's Peter Wheat comics.  Between 1948 and 1951, Kelly drew thirty-five issues of The Adventures of Peter Wheat, a sixteen page comic book given away to bakeries to promote Peter Wheat bread.  The stories were fairy tales starring Peter Wheat, an elf-sized boy who lived in a hollow tree on the edge of a wheat field where he and the Little Folk battle Dragonel, Queen of the Hornets.

    While created with kids in mind the mythology spun in these stories is timeless.  “Coupled with Kelly's incredible artwork, this series of stories, which run in arcs, are indispensable in Walt Kelly's canon of work,” commented Andrae.

Back in the era of bread and other baked goods delivered to homes, cartoonist Walt Kelly produced a comic book series titled The Adventures of Peter Wheat. The 16-page comic book premiums were a promotional tool for Bakers Associates, a bread company which distributed the books to their subsidiaries and printed the names of individual bakeries on the front, inside or rear covers. Free copies of the latest Peter Wheat comic book were included with home bread deliveries, and occasionally in the bakeries themselves.

The comic page above is from a one-shot special Walt Kelly's Christmas Classics published by Eclipse Comics in 1987. The story originally appeared in The Adventures of Peter Wheat #21, which was available around 1950 or 1951.

You can witness more Peter Wheat goodness at Thom Buchanan's very fine blog celebrating all things Walt Kelly: Whirled of Kelly