Ed Leffingwell’s Little Joe: The Sunday Comics by Harold Gray, by Peter Maresca and Sammy Harkham. Sunday Press Books/IDW Publishing, 160 pp., $65.

Little Joe was a comic strip that ran from 1933 to 1972. It’s one of several examples of a long-running Sunday-only strip, along with Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Alexander Raymond’s Jungle Jim, and, more recently, Bill Amend’s FoxTrot. Created by Edwin Leffingwell, who unexpectedly died in 1936 and was replaced by his brother, Robert, Little Joe struggled to find a loyal audience in the highly competitive world of newspaper funnies.