Four Color Comics

The Indispensable Comic Strip Reprint Library is still a couple weeks away from debut. In the meantime, check out Digital Funnies, a brand-new site devoted to “preserving the history of this most neglected of art forms and reintroducing it to scholars and new readers alike”.

While several well-known titles such as Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, and Peanuts are being given their proper due in published form, there is still much of the rich history of comics and cartooning that will more than likely never see print again and worse, fade away with time.

Understandably, a publisher would be hesitant to take on the huge financial risk of publishing an obscure title or cartoonist, but digital reproduction offers no risk at all and allows for a terrific means of restoring, preserving, and making available again the vast amounts of material that have been unseen and unappreciated for far too long.

Digital Funnies is making high-quality scans of these strips available for purchase on CD-ROM. The titles are obscure, but they’re the precursors of the modern comics form. This is an archival project I plan to support.