Above: Article from The Carroll County Independent, Friday, July 24, 1925 edition found at the Paper of Record website.

This seems like a good time to share this list of online historical newspaper resources for folks to dig for comics with if they are inclined. This list was obtained from a recent message thread from the fantastic Yahoo Platinum Age comics group. I’ve only looked at some of them, but they vary wildly in quality. The comics reproductions generally seem to be of very poor resolution… none of them would be really adequate for printing (the lowest resolution you generally want for printing is 300DPI… web resolution is generally 72DPI).

Paper of Record

archive.olivesoftware.com

fultonhistory.com

ourfuturepast.ca

digitize.gp.lib.mi.us

petermorrisbooks.com

gale.cengage.com

vpl.ca

Papers Past

collectionscanada.ca

lib.utah.edu/digital/unews

loc.gov/chroniclingamerica

winona.edu

news.nnyln.net

brooklynpubliclibrary.org

For wonderful old comics without all the other stuff, check out:

Barnacle Press

The Stripper’s Guide

Coconino Classics

platinumagecomics.org

My friend Donn Ha, made the following comment on today’s Katzenjammer post, which I thought was important to elaborate on:

The Katzenjammer Kids count as crumbling paper? I’d always ass-u-me-d their stuff was pretty well preserved and accessible.

Here is the response, which I felt was worth putting up more prominently here.

Thanks for commenting, Donn.

ALL old comics are disappearing… the vast majority (including most of the Katzenjammers) have not been reprinted in any form. Of the ones that have been reprinted, few have in their entirety, and generally the reprints are at a much smaller size than the original published size.

Besides the fact that newspapers and comic books were considered disposable media, newsprint crumbles with age.

Most libraries have gotten rid of their huge books of newspapers, considering microfiche a replacement. The books take a huge amount of space and shit crumbling paper everywhere, so they provide serious preservation challenges. Microfiche isn’t at all adequate; the initial images on microfiche are very low resolution (totally inadequate for preserving comics, and frequently inadequate for even preserving text), and microfiche deteriorates even faster than newsprint.

Very few books preserve the art at its original size (which is a logistical nightmare), and any reduction in size results in a loss of information.

It’s really a grim situation, unfortunately.

We are in a golden age of comics reprints, but we’re still barely scratching the surface of what needs to be preserved. Attempting digital preservation on a massive scale is the only hope for most comics… I hope someone with the resources realizes this sooner or later.

Beyond the comics, most of the newspaper news of the last century is getting lost (which is probably the best document you can find on historical daily life and attitudes)… you would think some folks would be concerned about that.

Comics preservation is an ongoing battle… no preservation is permanent. Fantagraphics has had trouble finding some dates of Peanuts strips for their reprint series, for Pete’s sake! Digital preservation (at high enough resolution for printing) is the best hope for long-term preservation of the comics.