This finding aid is an inventory of SELECTED newspaper pages saved by the collector for their cartoon, comics or illustrative content.

It contains daily and Sunday newspaper pages, supplements and sections arranged alphabetically by NEWSPAPER TITLE.

Date ranges of holdings for each title and the names of artists and illustrators as we have found them, plus the names of any comic strips or features appearing on the pages, are recorded.

Whole Sunday comic sections are listed under the title of the newspaper in which they appeared. Sections were not clipped but were kept whole by the collector. He recognized that many of the early comic sections, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, were extremely rare, and should be kept intact as in addition to the comic art they contain, many feature elaborate headers, marginal illustrations, and illustrated advertisements, all forming part of the overall design of the publication.

For a complete view of comic strip holdings in the entire collection it is necessary to also search:

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Part 1, Clipped newspaper comic strips

and

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Part 3, Artists

A note on SELECTED PAGES and date spans: It is important to stress that this finding aid describes only SELECTED pages from the newspaper titles listed. Date spans given are for pages selected by the collector for their cartoon, comic art or illustrative content. The collection does not have every page for the given dates for the newspapers listed here. Without looking at a particular folder it is not possible to ascertain which exact pages the collection contains. Date spans are given as a guide to the range of dates within a folder.

The Newspaper Comics section of the SFACA Collection consists of 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets, and comic sections from American newspapers, dating from 1893 to 1996. Materials in the collection include clipped comic strips, single comic pages, complete Sunday comic sections, and entire newspapers. The focus of the first two years of work on this collection, supported by grants from the Getty Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Charles D. Farber Memorial Foundation, has been to establish a chronological run of each comic feature, either by amassing a group of clippings, or by identifying each feature's location in the collection of Sunday comic sections.

The distinction between comic clippings and comic sections is significant. The collector's original intent was to establish a complete run, from beginning to end, of every comic feature to have appeared in an American newspaper. In most cases, this meant clipping examples of each feature from various newspapers, for two reasons. First, no single newspaper could have run every comic feature. Second, any given newspaper might print a feature for a certain length of time, and then drop it, either temporarily or permanently. Newspaper strikes and mail strikes could also interfere with the continuous run of a feature in a given publication.

However, some features were never clipped from the original comic sections in which they appeared. The collector recognized that many of the early comic sections, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, were extremely rare, and should be kept intact. In addition to the comic art they contain, many feature elaborate headers, marginal illustrations, and illustrated advertisements, all forming part of the overall design of the publication. The archivist's division of the two formats into separate series is described below, under "Arrangement."

The goal of the SFACA project has been to present complete listings of comic strip holdings to interested researchers. To achieve an integrated presentation, a tabular format for Series I was designed in the form of spreadsheets, each representing one year and containing a month-and-date grid, created in Excel and presented on the Web in PDF. Researchers can use the spreadsheets, in PDF form, to ascertain whether the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum has holdings of a comic feature for particular dates. However, our collection is not comprehensive, but as time passes more material will be processed. In these spreadsheets, each cell value is a letter-and-number combination, which represent the item's physical location in the library, and is used by staff to retrieve materials.

Series 1, Comic Features, includes the comic features clipped from newspapers by the collector. Series 2, Comic Sections, includes the entire Sunday comic sections kept intact by the collector. Series 3, Individual Artists, includes boxes and files of tearsheets and clippings assembled by the collector, focusing on particular artists. The records in Series 1 will be most useful to researchers focusing on a particular comic feature. Those in Series 2 will be of use primarily to those who want to study a chronological run of Sunday sections from a particular newspaper or syndicate. Series 3 will be useful to those researching a particular artist; frequently there is early work that is difficult to find elsewhere.

This finding aid contains a listing of clipped newspaper COMIC STRIPS in the collection.

The collector set out to establish a complete run, from beginning to end, of every comic strip to have appeared in an American newspaper. Recorded here are the runs as we are discovering them. Links to spreadsheets are provided to help with identifying our holdings for particular dates.

The collector often used clippings from various newspapers to compile the runs of a particular strip title. This was for two reasons: Firstly no single newspaper could have run every comic feature; Secondly, any given newspaper might drop a feature they had previously printed, either temporarily or permanently. Newspaper strikes and mail strikes could have also interfered with the continuous run of a feature in a given publication.

Sunday comic sections and the strips they contain are not listed here. They were not clipped by the collector as he recognized that many of the early comic sections, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, were extremely rare and should be kept in tact. We list the Sunday comic sections under the newspaper title they appeared in.

The following finding aid lists the newspaper titles in the collection:

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Part 2, Newspaper ns2:titles

and

Also check for more comic strip ns2:titles where the collector gathered examples by artist in: San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Part 3, Artists

This finding aid is a list of early 20th century cartoon ARTISTS whose work was specifically selected and separated by the collector from the entire SFACA collection.

The finding aid contains selected examples of their work, including editorial cartoons, cartoon panels, daily black and white comic strips and full page color Sunday comic strip pages.

It is worth noting that it represents only a fraction of the work by these particular artists in the whole collection. It is necessary to check the THREE finding aids that describe the collection to successfully see what the entire collection contains of their work, or of the work of any given artist. This finding aid is not a complete list of the names of all of the artists whose work can be found in the collection.

Look for more examples of these and other artists work in:

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Part 1, Newspaper comic strips

and

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Part 2, Newspaper ns2:titles

The Skip Morrow Collection contains materials related to the 1982 best seller, The I Official I Hate Love book. Pencil and ink sketches, proofs, and handwritten notes used to create the book is included in the collection. In addition, there is a VHS cassette of animated video shorts by Morrow and pamphlet for his gallery, The Art of Humor in Wilmington, Vermont. Of particular interest, there is tear sheet for the advertisement for the Kurta company. Morrow was an early adopter of computer graphic systems and worked with Kurta to develop a computer tablet for artist.