Early Comic Strips 1898-1916

The comic strips in the exhibit were carefully reproduced from bound volumes of newspapers in the American Newspaper Repository. Most cartoons were copied from The World and the Chicago Tribune, which are well represented in the ANR. The process required a two-step capture, first photographing the cartoon page with a traditional, medium format camera and digitizing the subsequent color transparency. The digital file of the 17"x23" newspaper page was then reformatted in Adobe Photo Shop to 16"x20". The image quality of the exhibit prints varies dependent on the condition of the original page. Rippled, faded pages produce slightly fuzzy, out-of-focus prints.
Due to the fragility of these early newspapers, the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library encourages researchers to use microfilm copies of the newspapers whenever possible.