In recent years of my life I have gotten into old newspaper strips, as you’ve probably already seen me write about a time or two on my site. In the case of Superman’s comic strips, both the Sundays and the dailies have contained some of the most wonderful stories of the character’s history.

A common thread across all of the various editions of Superman strips that have been collected is the work of artist Pete Poplaski. I didn’t know too much about him before seeing his name on Library of American Comics hardcovers, but have come to appreciate his art a great deal.

Poplaski apparently was a featured name in underground comics (aka “Comix”) of the 1970s and 1980s. A majority of the comics he worked on were done for Kitchen Sink Press, owned and run by his frequent collaborator, Denis Kitchen. When Kitchen started expanding into reprints of old newspaper strips in the 80s and 90s, Poplaski went along for the ride too.

As I understand, Kitchen first published collections of the first Superman Sundays and dailies in 1998, and Poplaski did all the cover and box art for those publications. His style on this art is far different from his by then standard hipster, transgressive comix look, and was a loving homage to the Golden Age.

Joe Shuster certainly would have been proud.

After Kitchen Sink closed its doors, the Superman collections were republished by Sterling Press (whose beautiful hardcover I have done a review on here), and later by IDW’s Library of American Comics, which published further editions of the Superman newspaper strips and brought Poplaski to do all of the cover art for those as well.

Whether you’re talking about Golden Age or Silver Age, heroes or villains, Sundays or dailies, Pete knocked all of them out of the park. I may have picked up only the early and wartime strip collections, but I very much respect his work on all of it.

I recently purchased a metal sign of Poplaski art, one of two that Kitchen Sink put out to promote the release of the first Superman strip collections in the late 90s. It is beautiful! I don’t know what Pete Poplaski is up to these days, but if Clover or anyone else got around to doing future editions of the newspaper strips or any classic Superman stories, I hope he would be in the mix again!

Below are a complete set of Poplaski covers from all the Superman Sundays collections. Enjoy!